Silflay Hraka

42

I found an Easter Egg over at Silent Running today. Not a real one, of course, an Easter egg for the mind, after the term for the small surprises hidden in computer programs by their creators. Every now and then I’ll be banging a post out on the keyboard, when suddenly I realize that an obscure pop culture or science fiction reference will fit in with the flow of the post, yet have a secret, second meaning instantly recognizable to anyone with a frame of reference similar to my own. It’s a very, very geeky way of trolling for the same emotional connection that occurs when teenyboppers talk about music.

“Omigod, You like that song? I love that song! Justin is soooooooo hot!”

I embed these tiny references fairly often, enough to know that I do it, but not enough to remember the last one I did. I’m always inordinately proud of them, often making the sainted wife sit through a description of how clever they are.

In case you’re wondering, she’s of the opinion that very little is more boring than being forced to listen to a recitation of my obscure genius. This from a woman who can have conversations for upwards of an hour with her sister and cousins, conversations that consist entirely of shorthand references.

“Hey, Moleboy?”
“With the Ice cream?”
“Yes. Married with Children!”
“Siamese?”
“No, Gypsy Rose Lee!”
“You’re kidding! What about the Pants?”

This happens most often at Thanksgiving, when her entire tribe of related women (In three generations of multi child families, the wife’s family has managed to produce exactly one boy, and he’s only 20 months old.) gathers together at one house or another and has a great big shorthand party. They never understand why the husbands are all looped on jug wine by the time dinner rolls around.

Not that anyone has noticed my Easter eggs, that I know of, and that’s ok. The more obscure they are the prouder I am of them, to the point where I’ve sometimes decided that the only person on the planet that would get the joke is me, and possibly not then.

I liked finding the one at Silent Running, though. It’s the next best thing to someone finding one of my own.

The French Veto

The radio wing of the BBC World News Service is reporting that France will use its Security Council veto to block any U.S. resolution on Iraq containing the threat of military force. I’m looking for a link on the Net that says the same thing, but haven’t found one yet.

Update: Here’s one that implies the same thing. I’ll keep looking.

What I hope is that something like this has been prepared for in advance by George. There’s an argument to be made that the Bush administration is a master of diplomatic jiu jitsu; Andrew Sullivan makes it everyday, practically. That particular argument not only flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but spits on said face and gives it a good slapping on the way in, but this doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, just that it’s out there on the fringe of current political thought. I hope, strangely enough, that it is correct, and that Condi and Dick and Colin have laid out a course steering for a goal that for years has been the fevered dream of the John Birch Society and its allies; the withdrawal of the U.S. from the U.N. Not because I happen to agree with the JBS’s worries about World Government. Hell, I’m a fan of World Government, as long as it’s run by America and those like us. Perhaps I’d better just say I’m a big fan of the coming Hegemony of the Anglosphere. I’m pulling for the dissolution of the United Nations because not only is it a money pit, it promotes the rights of nations over those of individuals.

Iraq, despite being run by a despot and his murderous clique of relations, is given the same rights as Costa Rica, Liechtenstein and New Zealand; countries whose governments would likely fall for the least of Saddam’s actions. Myanmar is no better, nor is the Sudan. If the United Nations truly wanted to promote a better world, it would have embraced the principle that “if you mistreat your people, we will do whatever necessary to bring you down.” The U.N. didn’t because it was formed at the onset of the Cold War, and Russia wasn’t going to accept that, which brings me to my final reason.

I only keep old things around if they work, or if I have an emotional attachment to them. I think most Americans are like this, it’s why we’re running out of space in the landfills. In point of fact, 99% of the things we have that are 60 years or older are still in our possession because of the emotional attachment thing, not because they still perform their function better than anything that has been developed since. How many people do you think watch Friends on their 1948 Admiral?

That’s why the JBS doesn’t have to worry about the U.N. and its black helicopters. It’s the functional equivalent of the Admiral.

Killing the U.N. will not take place without the requisite wailing and tearing of shirts on the Left. It’s odd really, that a movement so enamored of opposing globalization would be among the loudest of the voices condemning a U.S. withdrawal from a global organization. It’s not really the same to them, though. The anti-globo movement at its heart is about restricting U.S. power through the restraint of trade. The current* Left sees the United Nations as an avenue for the same kind of restriction on a political and diplomatic scale.

That’s too bad, because there is a perfectly good leftist argument to be made for dissolving the U.N. The problem in restricting the use of power, like the U.N. is currently attempting to do to the U.S., is that in cases where said power can be used as a force for improving the lot of the miserable and oppressed, it is slow and unwieldy. People die every day because the U.N. cannot act, and its continued existence acts as an automatic ass covering device for every nation on the planet. It gives them the implicit excuse not to act in the face of disease, poverty and oppression.

“We’d like to, but that’s the U.N.’s job.”

The eradication of the United Nations removes this rationalization. It also frees up the 2.5 billion dollars a year that the U.N. spends to little effect. Restricting the use of power was useful to the U.S. during the Cold War because it helped to control the Soviet Union. The current dinosaur Left wants the U.S. to accede to the wishes of the UN, now and in all things, because they see it as the best restraint on the power of the U.S. They decided long ago that the U.S. was the moral equivalent of the Soviet Union, and as such the exercise of its power can only be in the service of corruption. They had to embrace this equivalency in order to reconcile the romantic view of Communism that infected the Left in the 1930’s with the oppression that form of government engendered. The only way to do so was to make the rationalization that the U.S. was as bad, if not worse, than the Soviet Union. It’s bullshit, and the Soviet Union is gone, but the rationalization remains, as it will until the last of the die-hard Soviet romantics are dead.

I’m not going to pretend that parts of the Shining City on the Hill aren’t built on the bones of people who were mistreated or killed. America isn’t perfect, we don’t pretend to be. In fact, we worry more about what we should be than any other culture on the planet. We’re not perfect, but we damn sure would like to be. We want to be perfect, and we want to be loved. That more that anything else is what will prevent us from doing the evil that the current Left seems to fear from America so much. You can scream “Vietnam” all you want to, but the fact is that the U.S. ended its involvement there because its citizens forced it too, because they realized that what we were doing there was foreign to the American character.

The fact is that the U.N., due to its insistence on the sovereignty of the nation state, is doing a better job restricting the flow of American ideals than in restricting American power. That’s why the Left should hope that France not only vetoes the current U.S. resolution on Iraq, but that we give the Security Council the finger and proceed anyway. Hold your nose, close your ears, do whatever you need to, but support the war on Iraq for the possibility that one of the things it destabilizes is the United Nations, that it comes crashing down, and we can raise something better in its place.

*I say “current Left” because I think that the Left as it is configured now is in its death throes. In 10 years there’ll be a Left that few now would even recognize.

Talking to Trey

Fred First has posted part of Mark Twain’s war prayer over at Fragments.
It reminded me that surprisingly, I’ve had to develop a prayer philosophy. It wasn’t my choice; I was forced into it by the wife. Proper southern girl that she is, she decided that there are certain forms that must be followed, whether or not you agree with or even believe in them.

“I am not going to raise a child that doesn’t say grace at the dinner table,” she decreed.

So we say grace at the dinner table, usually more than once. Ngnat has learned “God is great” from her Baptist daycare, which she mumbles while she sneaks glances around the table, hands pressed together under her chin. I’d link to a copy of it, but all the sites I can find it on are distasteful to me.* After all, I’m a Darwin fish man.

Therein lies my conundrum. Grace before meals is nice, but it holds about as much religious significance for me as the 7th inning stretch. I figure that there is or there isn’t a God, and if there is then he doesn’t sweat the small stuff. If he does sweat the small stuff…….well, if there there is a God and he concerns himself with the things that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson say he concerns himself with, then the hell with him. I’ll spit in his face and give him the finger come Judgement Day. Better to burn in hell than serve in heaven, to misquote Milton, if he turns out to be the petty little god they worship. That goes for your god too, Timothy LaHaye.

Hmm, got a little sidetracked there. We do more than “God is Great.” There’s also the extemporary, everyone hold hands in a big circle that Dad the minister does so well. He’s had years of practice, at a rate of what appears to have been 4 or 5 meals a day, so it has a pitch and timbre that I cannot hope to approach, even if all the words have been mostly the same all my life. Ngnat likes to do at least a couple of those as well, if not at the beginning of dinner then scattered throughout it.

“Amen?” She says brightly, holding out her hands to her mother and I. “Amen?”

This despite the fact that she always refuses Amen when offered the possibility of it at the beginning of the meal. She determines the prayer time. I just have to pray it.

So, when this practice first started, I had to decide what to say. I’m a PK, I know the forms; Thanks for the food, God, thanks for the company and the privilege of another day with them, yadda yadda yadda. Guide and protect us in our path through life blah blah blah, bless the food and the people and in thy name, amen. I suppose I should write down one particular pray that covers all the bases and repeat it. Enough repetition, and it can provide a memory anchor for Ngnat when she is grown.

Aside: All three of us, Kehaar, Woundwort and I, are PK’s. Odd, when I come to think about it. Perhaps that’s why we mention religion so little and boobies so often.

Since I am a PK, I’ve heard millions of frigging prayers. One thing that struck me when I had to start doing this myself was how narrow the request for blessings normally is. It’s always something like “Bless us, and Bob, and Norma Jean who’s in hospital with the cancer.” Sometimes the President gets mentioned, and in church it normally expands to include the members of the congregation.

I mean, if it turns out that you actually do have the ear of God, is he going to be impressed with you restricting your desire for his blessings to only the people you know? Kinda selfish, don’t you think? So when I end up the family dinner chat with old Trey**, I make sure to cover as wide a range as possible.

“Please bless and protect…everybody. Amen.”

What else am I going to do? It’s not like I know everyone by name, even if I did have the time. It’s quick, it’s got a lot of coverage and if you’re going to bother praying, you might as well pray for everyone.

*So I’ll utilize the asterisks and type it here. I don’t know how ubiquitous it is, though I certainly don’t recall ever meeting a person who didn’t know it. The Internet is a big place, so presumably there are those out there to whom this will be somewhat foreign in flavor. Also, it would be nice to have a site that lists it without all the heavy-handed preaching about Jeebus and his 12 popsicles.

God is great.
God is good.
Let us thank him for our food.
By his hands we all are fed.
Give us Lord our daily bread.
Amen.

**What else are you going to call the Triune God in informal conversation? You can’t call him Jesus, he’ll be distracted all night long every time someone curses.

Elohim sounds too much like a command to greet somebody. “Hey, you see the fat guy over at the bar? Wander over there and hello him for me.”

YHVH has no vowels, sounds like a dog clearing its throat. It’s completely unutterable. Probably a formal usage anyway.

El Shaddai. Also too prone to confusion. “What’s his name? El Shaddai know?”