A Bit Of College Doggerel

Here’s a tongue-in-cheek sonnet I wrote in college. Thanks Mikey for showing me how to do the stress thingy over the ‘e’. It didn’t work, but I was able to cut and past yours, ha. Improvise, adapt, and overcome!

To Elizabeth, (Upon the Gift of a Box of Matches)

Elizabeth, bright light of my life and my pipe,
A fairer match nare have I spied.
You’ve kindled a flame that’s brought to ashes the tripe
That, for a time, I let be and abide.
For your sweet self I do feverishly yearn
And for your blessèd sake I do fervently burn.
For your radiant hair and complexion so fair,
My heart is aflame and lights my world like a flare.
Oh, what’s in a flame? Myself, seared and blinded;
Wounded by love, though I haven’t much minded.
Pierced by arrows of Eros like a pincushion on fire
I stand a martyr for loves blazèd sake.
‘Pon the grill and the embers of glowing desire
I lie and for you learn to bake.

A Revolutionary Anthem

The logic of the revolutionary is based upon two imperatives. First, there must be masses. Then, they must be liberated. While the latter of these is obvious, not much thought is given to the former. However, it is this first step which is the most important, for without the discontented crowd at his back the revolutionary is nothing more than an irritable lonesome crank. Unfortunately, the progressive revolutionaries have done a smash-up job of creating a seething disaffected sea of individuals cut loose from tradition, doing their diluvial damnedest to sweep away the courtesies and institutions that have formed the West.

Jean Rohe’s song “National Anthem: Arise! Arise!” is typical of the propaganda of the Left in its inordinate fixation with the darkest corners of America’s past. To hear Miss Rohe sing it, our nation’s history is nothing more than one long litany of slavery, genocide, labor exploitation, and botched back-alley coat hanger abortions. Class struggle is the name of the game as the protagonists of her anthem come to America “with hungry hearts and hands” to be exploited, “at the auction block or the darkened mill.” They came to our land only to struggle and die in the factories and fields, in rooms with a coat hanger, on the trail of tears or in the electric chair. They came here to die under the oppressive hand of the United States of America.

But, lest we lose all heart and faith in our home land, bright-eyed Miss Rohe lets us know that all of this will be set right on that glorious day when the oppressed peoples and classes of our great nation arise to form the “more perfect union” and the “tyrants bow to the peoples dream, and justice flows like a mighty stream.” All this after the completion of the revolution, I suppose. Miss Rohe presents us with the harsh dichotomy of the revolution, either stand for justice with the oppressed masses or be counted among the petty tyrants to be brought to heel.

The genius of the revolution is in its formation. It does not have a positive identity except for the image it projects of itself as a champion of the oppressed. Because of this, the revolution is incredibly malleable in the forms it assumes as it forges a common cause with just about any group that claims it has been treated unjustly. In this manner the revolution creates a coalition which is constantly in a state of flux but is consistent in its political and cultural struggle against the perceived oppressor. Over the years this coalition has shifted and grown from workers struggling against their employers, to blacks rising up against unjust and discriminatory laws, to women fighting for equal opportunities in education and employment. In recent years the revolution has gathered homosexuals and gender confused individuals unto its bosom to fight for their right to be socially accepted as homosexual and gender confused individuals.

Some of the causes championed by the revolution have arisen out of truly unjust conditions. Many other causes are mere fronts and fabrications. Whether the injustice is real or perceived is not important. All that matters is that the cause disrupts the institutions and traditions that are set against the revolution. In Miss Rohe’s anthem, it does not matter who the disparate disenfranchised individuals are as long as they can be coalesced into the masses that march under the revolutionary banner. All are summoned to join in the struggle, African Americans and Native Americans, factory workers, the mothers of unwanted children and the convicted felons on death row. All are called to take to the streets as guardians of liberty marching to loose the waters of the river Justice that it may flow forth and baptize with a spirit of freedom the unwashed and undefined masses of the modern state.

For reference purposes only, here are the words to Miss Rohe’s song,

National Anthem: Arise! Arise!

Atlantic and Pacific floor,
The Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico,
The land between sustains us all,
To cherish it our tireless call.

Chorus: Arise, arise! I see the future in your eyes.
To one more perfect union we aspire,
And lift our voices from the fire.

We reached these shores from many lands,
We came with hungry hearts and hands.
Some came by force and some by will,
At the auction block or the darkened mill.

Chorus

We died in your fields and your factories,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,
With an old coat hanger in a room somewhere,
A trail of tears, an electric chair.

Chorus

And our great responsibility;
To be guardians of our liberty,
Till tyrants bow to the peoples dream,
And justice flows like a mighty stream.

Vive La Famille!

You probably won’t have heard a thing about this in the news, but over the past couple of years there have been massive demonstrations in France by devout Catholics protesting the states decision to legally dissolve the traditional understanding of the family. Mark Richardson has an excellent piece at his blog about the protests and the latest machinations of the cultural termites gnawing at the heartwood of the West. While you’re over there, be sure to read his E-book on liberalism, it is an invaluable resource in understanding liberalism and learning how it can be defeated. Liberalisma Delenda Est! Vive la Famille!

The Children Belong to All of Us

A few days ago I wrote about Joe Wethington, a father who was infuriated that neither the state nor a privately owned company had had the sense to put their foot down and tell his daughter that she was just too young and immature to go skydiving. He had tried to stop her himself of course but she just wouldn’t take no for an answer and so daddy decided that if you can’t control ‘em, might as well join ‘em. Mr. Wethington jumped first without incident; his daughter had a parachute malfunction and, in her panic, failed to deploy the back up chute. By some miracle she survived the three thousand foot plummet back to earth. To say she was lucky would be an understatement. Not everyone survives the impact of colliding with the cold hard world.

Emma Neiderbrock wasn’t so lucky. Miss Neiderbrock was a sixteen year old from Farmville, Virginia, who lived with her mother Debra Kelley, a professor of criminal justice at Longwood University and a published expert on sexual and domestic violence. While she did not approve of her daughters infatuation with the brutally violent horrorcore rap scene, neither Ms. Kelley nor her estranged husband, the Rev. Mark Neiderbrock, felt that they could simply just tell their daughter no. So it happened one day they all drove more than seven hundred miles so Emma and a friend of hers could attend the “Strictly for the Wicked” horrorcore festival in Michigan. After the concert the family returned to Farmville, bringing with them another friend of Emma’s named Samuel McCroskey, a twenty year old Californian who went by the moniker “sykosam” on the horrorcore fan sites where he and Emma had first started corresponding the year before. The plan had been for them to finally meet in person at the concert and then he’d stay and visit for a couple of weeks with Emma at her mother’s before he flew back home to California. Unfortunately the plan went awry when McCroskey discovered Emma had been texting another guy she had met at the concert. Enraged, he murdered her, her friend, and both of her parents.

Generally a parent’s inability to say no to their child doesn’t leads to such brutal and immediate consequences as this. Most times all it really leads to is bratty kids and burnt out parents doing their damnedest to avoid each other. Walk by the toy section of your local Walmart or the candy rack by the grocery store checkout-line and you will see the intense conflict of intergenerational warfare waged a dozen times in a day as parents sacrifice the high ground and sue for an end to the screaming, placating their offspring with candy and trinkets. Of course the brief reprieve that this abdication of authority has purchased is never a lasting peace. Hostilities inevitably recommence, usually within the hour.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and there are many who have noticed the growing power vacuum within American households. For decades television and popular culture have been gnawing at the underpinnings of the traditional family, specifically, the authority of the father as head of his household. Correspondent to this loss of parental authority is a rise in the authority and influence exercised by the state. The number of families dependent on welfare has risen dramatically in recent years, an increase that mirrors the rising number of single mothers raising multiple children. Given the inherent stress and burdens of raising a family alone, it is little wonder that the increase of extra-curricular programs at government schools have been widely applauded and supported, especially in the urban areas hit hardest by the disintegration of the traditional family structure.

It is not uncommon nowadays for a child to eat two meals a day within the government schools, courtesy of the state (taxpayer). Recently, Governor Christie (NJ) suggested that the schools should just go all in and serve dinner too. Given these developments, one begins to wonder if another decade will bring dormitories for the students, perhaps letting them go home on Sunday afternoons to visit their families.

More immediately, the Obama administration has been working to increase the number of children held in government schools during any given day by expanding the pre-k programs. Naturally, they’ve trotted out a bunch of “education experts,” to tell the public how fundamental early education is for a child to succeed, but the truth of it is the state really just wants to increase the number of young minds directly under its influence. Parents who are just scraping by working two part-time jobs trying to pay the bills are more than happy at the offer of free childcare, and given the economy its hard to blame them.

The state has steadily filled the power vacuum that was left when parents abdicated their own authority. The federal government has grown increasingly confident of its hegemony over the hearts and minds of our children. Most recently it has begun bullying and bribing every state in our nation to begin implementing the Common Core curriculum. Through the implementation of this curriculum the federal government has obliterated the numerous educational options previously available to parents and made it incredibly difficult for local and state governments to have any say in how the children of their communities are educated. While supporters of Common Core talk about the importance of implementing national standards in education, the real effect of this initiative will be the creation of a cookie cutter populace, uniformly shaped and opinionated, indistinguishable from one state to the next, and formed solely by the banality of the mass media and the inflexible educational standards of the federal Leviathan.

There are those among our citizenry who won’t terribly mind this particular development; it’s one less thing they’re responsible for, one more thing the government’s taking care of. Certainly, the Joe Wethingtons and Debra Kelleys of our nation will breather a sigh of relief, and say, “Finally, at last, maybe the feds will be able to put their foot down and tell those children no.” Because, remember, they’re not your responsibility. They’re not even yours. As the Common Core advocates over at John Podesta’s Center for American Progress like to say, “The children belong to all of us.”