Journal BlackHat's Journal: They made the world a fucking disgrace 8
The more mainstream 'sending of the clowns' might be more correct for John McCain. None the less, it was interesting to see him flame out [the fat man sung it, heh]. I doubt the Bush's and the other minor lights awaiting in the wings have much to worry about from that quarter any more. John will now drift into obscurity. I'll be sure to wave, and, of course, neglect to mention the doorknob. Penultimate quote for Notions on Nations theme. Where I return us to the start of this adventure-- Jolly olde England c. 1650.
Quote:
Of those who had been active in bringing back the King, many were zealous for Synods and for the Directory, and many were desirous to terminate by a compromise the religious dissensions which had long agitated England. Between the bigoted followers of Laud and the bigoted followers of Knox there could be neither peace nor truce: but it did not seem impossible to effect an accommodation between the moderate Episcopalians of the school of Usher and the moderate Presbyterians of the school of Baxter.
The moderate Episcopalians would admit that a Bishop might lawfully be assisted by a council. The moderate Presbyterians would not deny that each provincial assembly might lawfully have a permanent president, and that this president might lawfully be called a Bishop. There might be a revised Liturgy which should not exclude extemporaneous prayer, a baptismal service in which the sign of the cross might be used or omitted at discretion, a communion service at which the faithful might sit if their conscience forbade them to kneel. But to no such plan could the great bodies of the Cavaliers listen with patience.
The religious members of that party were conscientiously attached to the whole system of their Church. She had been dear to their murdered King. She had consoled them in defeat and penury. Her service, so often whispered in an inner chamber during the season of trial, had such a charm for them that they were unwilling to part with a single response. Other Royalists, who made little presence to piety, yet loved the episcopal church because she was the foe of their foes. They valued a prayer or a ceremony, not on account of the comfort which it conveyed to themselves, but on account of the vexation which it gave to the Roundheads, and were so far from being disposed to purchase union by concession that they objected to concession chiefly because it tended to produce union.
Such feelings, though blamable, were natural, and not wholly inexcusable. The Puritans had undoubtedly, in the day of their power, given cruel provocation. They ought to have learned, if from nothing else, yet from their own discontents, from their own struggles, from their own victory, from the fall of that proud hierarchy by which they had been so heavily oppressed, that, in England, and in the seventeenth century, it was not in the power of the civil magistrate to drill the minds of men into conformity with his own system of theology. They proved, however, as intolerant and as meddling as ever Laud had been. They interdicted under heavy penalties the use of the Book of Common Prayer, not only in churches, but even in private houses.
It was a crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those beautiful collects which had soothed the griefs of forty generations of Christians. Severe punishments were denounced against such as should presume to blame the Calvinistic mode of worship. Clergymen of respectable character were not only ejected from their benefices by thousands, but were frequently exposed to the outrages of a fanatical rabble.
Churches and sepulchres, fine works of art and curious remains of antiquity, were brutally defaced. The Parliament resolved that all pictures in the royal collection which contained representations of Jesus or of the Virgin Mother should be burned. Sculpture fared as ill as painting. Nymphs and Graces, the work of Ionian chisels, were delivered over to Puritan stonemasons to be made decent. Against the lighter vices the ruling faction waged war with a zeal little tempered by humanity or by common sense.
Sharp laws were passed against betting. It was enacted that adultery should be punished with death. The illicit intercourse of the sexes, even where neither violence nor seduction was imputed, where no public scandal was given, where no conjugal right was violated, was made a misdemeanour. Public amusements, from the masques which were exhibited at the mansions of the great down to the wrestling matches and grinning matches on village greens, were vigorously attacked. One ordinance directed that all the Maypoles in England should forthwith be hewn down. Another proscribed all theatrical diversions. The playhouses were to be dismantled, the spectators fined, the actors whipped at the cart's tail. Rope-dancing, puppet-shows, bowls, horse-racing, were regarded with no friendly eye. But bearbaiting, then a favourite diversion of high and low, was the abomination which most strongly stirred the wrath of the austere sectaries.
It is to be remarked that their antipathy to this sport had nothing in common with the feeling which has, in our own time, induced the legislature to interfere for the purpose of protecting beasts against the wanton cruelty of men. The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Indeed, he generally contrived to enjoy the double pleasure of tormenting both spectators and bear.
Perhaps no single circumstance more strongly illustrates the temper of the precisians than their conduct respecting Christmas day. Christmas had been, from time immemorial, the season of joy and domestic affection, the season when families assembled, when children came home from school, when quarrels were made up, when carols were heard in every street, when every house was decorated with evergreens, and every table was loaded with good cheer. At that season all hearts not utterly destitute of kindness were enlarged and softened. At that season the poor were admitted to partake largely of the overflowings of the wealth of the rich, whose bounty was peculiarly acceptable on account of the shortness of the days and of the severity of the weather. At that season, the interval between landlord and tenant, master and servant, was less marked than through the rest of the year.
Where there is much enjoyment there will be some excess: yet, on the whole, the spirit in which the holiday was kept was not unworthy of a Christian festival. The long Parliament gave orders, in 1644, that the twenty-fifth of December should be strictly observed as a fast, and that all men should pass it in humbly bemoaning the great national sin which they and their fathers had so often committed on that day by romping under the mistletoe, eating boar's head, and drinking ale flavored with roasted apples. No public act of that time seems to have irritated the common people more.
On the next anniversary of the festival formidable riots broke out in many places. The constables were resisted, the magistrates insulted, the houses of noted zealots attacked, and the prescribed service of the day openly read in the churches.
Such was the spirit of the extreme Puritans, both Presbyterian and Independent. Oliver, indeed, was little disposed to be either a persecutor or a meddler. But Oliver, the head of a party, and consequently, to a great extent, the slave of a party, could not govern altogether according to his own inclinations. Even under his administration many magistrates, within their own jurisdiction, made themselves as odious as Sir Hudibras, interfered with all the pleasures of the neighbourhood, dispersed festive meetings, and put fiddlers in the stocks.
Still more formidable was the zeal of the soldiers. In every village where they appeared there was an end of dancing, bellringing, and hockey. In London they several times interrupted theatrical performances at which the Protector had the judgment and good nature to connive.
With the fear and hatred inspired by such a tyranny contempt was largely mingled. The peculiarities of the Puritan, his look, his dress, his dialect, his strange scruples, had been, ever since the time of Elizabeth, favourite subjects with mockers. But these peculiarities appeared far more grotesque in a faction which ruled a great empire than in obscure and persecuted congregations. The cant, which had moved laughter when it was heard on the stage from Tribulation Wholesome and Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, was still more laughable when it proceeded from the lips of Generals and Councillors of State.
It is also to be noticed that during the civil troubles several sects had sprung into existence, whose eccentricities surpassed anything that had before been seen in England. A mad tailor, named Lodowick Muggleton, wandered from pothouse to pothouse, tippling ale, and denouncing eternal torments against those who refused to believe, on his testimony, that the Supreme Being was only six feet high, and that the sun was just four miles from the earth. George Fox had raised a tempest of derision by proclaiming that it was a violation of Christian sincerity to designate a single person by a plural pronoun, and that it was an idolatrous homage to Janus and Woden to talk about January and Wednesday. His doctrine, a few years later, was embraced by some eminent men, and rose greatly in the public estimation. But at the time of the Restoration the Quakers were popularly regarded as the most despicable of fanatics. By the Puritans they were treated with severity here, and were persecuted to the death in New England.
Nevertheless the public, which seldom makes nice distinctions, often confounded the Puritan with the Quaker. Both were schismatics. Both hated episcopacy and the Liturgy. Both had what seemed extravagant whimsies about dress, diversions and postures. Widely as the two differed in opinion, they were popularly classed together as canting schismatics; and whatever was ridiculous or odious in either increased the scorn and aversion which the multitude felt for both.
Before the civil wars, even those who most disliked the opinions and manners of the Puritan were forced to admit that his moral conduct was generally, in essentials, blameless; but this praise was now no longer bestowed, and, unfortunately, was no longer deserved. The general fate of sects is to obtain a high reputation for sanctity while they are oppressed, and to lose it as soon as they become powerful: and the reason is obvious. It is seldom that a man enrolls himself in a proscribed body from any but conscientious motives. Such a body, therefore, is composed, with scarcely an exception, of sincere persons.
The most rigid discipline that can be enforced within a religious society is a very feeble instrument of purification, when compared with a little sharp persecution from without.
We may be certain that very few persons, not seriously impressed by religious convictions, applied for baptism while Diocletian was vexing the Church, or joined themselves to Protestant congregations at the risk of being burned by Bonner. But, when a sect becomes powerful, when its favour is the road to riches and dignities, worldly and ambitious men crowd into it, talk its language, conform strictly to its ritual, mimic its peculiarities, and frequently go beyond its honest members in all the outward indications of zeal. No discernment, no watchfulness, on the part of ecclesiastical rulers, can prevent the intrusion of such false brethren. The tares and wheat must grow together. Soon the world begins to find out that the godly are not better than other men, and argues, with some justice, that, if not better, they must be much worse. In no long time all those signs which were formerly regarded as characteristic of a saint are regarded as characteristic of a knave.
Thus it was with the English Nonconformists. They had been oppressed; and oppression had kept them a pure body. They then became supreme in the state. No man could hope to rise to eminence and command but by their favour. Their favour was to be gained only by exchanging with them the signs and passwords of spiritual fraternity. One of the first resolutions adopted by Barebone's Parliament, the most intensely Puritanical of all our political assemblies, was that no person should be admitted into the public service till the House should be satisfied of his real godliness. What were then considered as the signs of real godliness, the sadcoloured dress, the sour look, the straight hair, the nasal whine, the speech interspersed with quaint texts, the Sunday, gloomy as a Pharisaical Sabbath, were easily imitated by men to whom all religions were the same.
The sincere Puritans soon found themselves lost in a multitude, not merely of men of the world, but of the very worst sort of men of the world. For the most notorious libertine who had fought under the royal standard might justly be thought virtuous when compared with some of those who, while they talked about sweet experiences and comfortable scriptures, lived in the constant practice of fraud, rapacity, and secret debauchery.
The people, with a rashness which we may justly lament, but at which we cannot wonder, formed their estimate of the whole body from these hypocrites. The theology, the manners, the dialect of the Puritan were thus associated in the public mind with the darkest and meanest vices. As soon as the Restoration had made it safe to avow enmity to the party which had so long been predominant, a general outcry against Puritanism rose from every corner of the kingdom, and was often swollen by the voices of those very dissemblers whose villany had brought disgrace on the Puritan name.
Thus the two great parties, which, after a long contest, had for a moment concurred in restoring monarchy, were, both in politics and in religion, again opposed to each other. The great body of the nation leaned to the Royalists. The crimes of Strafford and Laud, the excesses of the Star Chamber and of the High Commission, the great services which the Long Parliament had, during the first year of its existence, rendered to the state, had faded from the minds of men. The execution of Charles the First, the sullen tyranny of the Rump, the violence of the army, were remembered with loathing; and the multitude was inclined to hold all who had withstood the late King responsible for his death and for the subsequent disasters.
The House of Commons, having been elected while the Presbyterians were dominant, by no means represented the general sense of the people. Most of the members, while execrating Cromwell and Bradshaw, reverenced the memory of Essex and of Pym. One sturdy Cavalier, who ventured to declare that all who had drawn the sword against Charles the First were as much traitors as those who kind cut off his head, was called to order, placed at the bar, and reprimanded by the Speaker. The general wish of the House undoubtedly was to settle the ecclesiastical disputes in a manner satisfactory to the moderate Puritans. But to such a settlement both the court and the nation were averse. --Thomas Babington Macaulay
A Wrap-Up of this theme in the next JE featuring Abbott Payson Usher. Until then.
News hurled quickly before running:
Wedding bells? US warplanes have bombed a remote village in eastern Afghanistan killing at least six people and wounding several others, local officials say. Police in Konar province say civilians and militants are among the dead. Militants aka unidentifiable body parts (likely) male. Later reports from the US [Usual Suspects]-- Local police and aid workers said earlier that between six and eight villagers were killed by US bombing, nine were wounded and several houses destroyed in Weradesh, in Kunar province's Manogi district. But Major Scott Nelson at the US military press centre in Kabul said: "We didn't fire on these people." The US-led forces had "eyes on the ground" that saw their "precision-guided bomb" strike its target, a militant's vehicle with a weapons system, probably a mortar, mounted on it, he said. Nelson said more than 20 militants were killed.
BJP not adapting well to the new power politics. Critics say the party has lost direction, lacks ideas and is struggling with internal contradictions. In June the party agreed to re-adopt the ideology of Hindutva (Hinduness) often used to promote Hindu nationalism. But two months later, a closed-door gathering of the leaders dumped Hindutva for the more friendly slogan of development. "There's tension within the BJP on what their broad political strategy should be at the national level," commentator and senior editor of The Telegraph newspaper Bharat Bhushan told BBC News Online. He says the party is trying out various approaches, one of which is to keep silent on Hindutva at the national level while trying to consolidate its appeal to traditional Hindu voters at the local level. Also known as the 'Sell the cake and eat it too' plan.
I'll run out of Eno lyrics for this one soon. I can ignore the significance of these changes/ But you can't treat it lightly/ And you'll have to face the consequences/ All my worst fears are grounded/
Cookie Jar Lane closed for repairs to Lard Tubby's Home for Wayard Neckrolls until further notice. Unveiling the findings of an internal investigation, Hollinger said the sum accounted for 95.2% of its adjusted net income between 1997 and 2003. It said Lord Black and others "made it their business to line their pockets in almost every way they could devise". Lord Black's office described the allegations as "exaggerated claims laced with outright lies". It is very likely that Tubby's mouth piece is correct here. ie. It was more than that.
Schwarzenegger puts seal on Bush Was he crushed? Seals can get quite large. It must have been a baby seal... or only a little girlie seal.
WFLTWNE Dept. John Kerry supporters in America have been told by Peter Hain that Downing Street is hoping the Democratic candidate wins the US presidential election in November.
Sidney Blumenthal on the RNC. On the first day of the Republican convention not one speaker mentioned a domestic issue - not education, healthcare or the economy. Delegates were summoned back to another country, a past that began on 9/11.
Un-winning the impossible certainties of a confusilated time we have demonstrivelidly over arched. 911(x24 rpm).
OYAITJ:
44361 : Dim Script Kiddie --Neighbours and friends of Jeffrey Lee Parson - charged with spreading an internet virus - have described him as a quiet and lonely youth who may not have known what he was getting into. , Can't wait for Labor Day... -- Fire up the old grill, do a few twelve-ounce elbow bends to stay limber and just kick back. That's what Labor Day's all about, isn't it? No, Labor Day has gone all soft on us, and it's time to harden up on its true meaning. This holiday is not some vague tribute to men and women who labor. Rather, it's a radically democratic declaration of the intent to build and sustain a middle class in America -- as bold a statement (and as fraught with peril) as Jefferson's Declaration. Far from being about taking a day off, Labor Day is about people taking democratic power. From the start, Labor Day was a bottom-up holiday, our only national celebration to be put on the calendar by the working class. It started when feisty Matt McGuire of the Carpenters Union and dauntless William McCabe of the Typographers called for a massive march in New York City to show the strength of laboring people. Nor can you stop the work week for it [6th here in Kunukistan], and many broken links [grrr].
Texttoon:
Ink on ruled paper/scan/png : A drawing of an adhesive bandage over the open stump of a dark skinned child's leg. Caption at the bottom; "All better!"
All better! (Score:2)
Makes me wanna puke.
Prognostications... (Score:2)
Are you keeping track of these prophecies? Gotta admire your lack of hedging, but such certainty pegs my skepticism meter.
On the contrary, I think MCCain has become more savvy in playing the GOP game. He's positioning himself well for 2008, as is Guiliani. The pseudo-republicans who jammed through the Bush nomination in 2000 won't have a candidate, even if Bush wins this year.
Re:Prognostications... (Score:2)
Re:Prognostications... (Score:2)
Sort of, with this Journal.
So, we shall have to watch and see. McCain/Guiliani in 2008 for you. I'll take Guiliani 5-10, and McCain as an Avis spokesman on TV both by 2008. See you there/then. [/;-)
Calvinist, Presbyterian (Score:2)
You can hear every sanctimonious echo in the rhetoric gurgling forth from the mouths of the RNC speakers this week.
Re:Calvinist, Presbyterian (Score:2)
About this time... (Score:2)
I can't tell you what of/
Except that it rhymes with "disollute".
I'm afraid in my pedestrian thoughts, I always assumed that this implied "prostitute".
I wouldn't slander prostitutes, by comparing them to Mercs...
:-)
Re:About this time... (Score:2)
No actual Eno was harmed in the making of this post.