RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

Belvedere posted about Winny’s famous quip regarding liberals and conservatives relative to age and maturity.  I commented:

One day at supper with my sister and parents, when I was under twelve years, making it mid-1950s, the radio station my father made us listen to – so he wouldn’t have to hear us chewing – signed off. Usually we ate earlier and did not run into the sign off. In those days, it was common for radio stations to broadcast day time but not night time, and many started and ended the day by playing our National Anthem. When it came on I stood right up at attention and covered my heart with my right hand, as I did proudly in school every day. My father glared at me and hissed, “Sit down, you look ridiculous.” I regret to say, I sat down, utterly broken.

During junior year at high school, making it 1959-60, I danced with Rand but we never kissed. I read Hegel from the sixth grade and so Rand was not a foreign feel.

During the first year of graduate school – a deep blue one in NYC – making it 1965-66, I wrote a paper, for our course in Christian Ethics, supporting US military and commercial engagement around the globe, and in particular Vietnam, as a stabilizing influence in geopolitical ethics. The professor, who came to like and support me, remarked dryly that there are other points of view on the US in Vietnam.

During the final year of graduate school and for a year following it, I worked with and wrote for a semi-prominent British-born Fabian socio-economist and his British-born wife, who was the intellectual power of their partnership. Had I been turned? I’ve never thought so. (Theology then was frozen by, on the one hand, fear of evil and, on the other hand, insouciance regarding it. I was looking for cheerful ways to transcend that closed loop, and this Brit had one.) But when he ripped up (literally) the guts of the book manuscript I produced for him – under contract to a toney publisher – saying no one would believe it – namely the extent of pollution measured just by reported accidents around the world – I informed him he was on his own and my name would not be on whatever book he published – and he did publish one, which went nowhere because it lacked punch.

In the late 60s, when my circle of clerical associates were burning their draft cards in public, I did not join them in that act. When my graduate school classmates returned from the 1968 Democratic Party Convention with bandaged heads and arms, I gave them the stink eye and to this day have only contempt for them. I am an American Patriot, always have been, and that is obligation to the Mother Country, to protect and nourish her.

My theological mentor – and personal blesser – described himself as a “religious socialist,” a term he and other theologians coined during their struggles – intellectual and otherwise – in Weimar Germany. By that they meant nothing like what we describe as socialism and very much what we could describe as intelligent conservatism, or what Bill Safire called “libertarian conservatism,” but religion-based with political effects rather than politics-based with religious effects. (Bonhoeffer: we do not say God is *love*, we say *God* is love. Stressing *love* subordinates God to man, religion to politics. Stressing *God* subordinates no one and no thing because God is the origin of all.) Freedom, liberty, is the the source, the substance and the goal of religion. A truly religious person is the only truly free one, and such is also a terrible rebuke and threat to subordinators.

So, I don’t know. I can’t say I’ve been always right. I can say I’ve been never left in the sense of disloyal to my Mother Country. I did not fulfill my father’s wishes for me. My mother died without my presence or blessing. I had to earn a living other than in the field in which I trained and was most comfortable because it was polluted. I regret things I have done, mostly from weakness or unhappiness, but I have never felt that I should not have done them. And I have never been disloyal. So, I don’t know the answer to the question with respect to my life and career. Someone else would be better qualified to answer it. But it’s a good question and I have enjoyed responding to it. Thanks, as always!

Update 1: Honoring COL Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and the others.

Update 2: Belfast Pastor Faces Prison For Grossly Offending Islam.

Update 3: David Horowitz: Is The Left Even On America’s Side Anymore?

Update 4: The Daily Signal, house organ of The Heritage Foundation, writes Caliphists’ lulling propaganda for them.

Update 5: John Hawkins: Why Liberals Support Muslims Who Hate Everything They Stand For

Update 6: Paul Wright & Matt DeLisi: What Criminologists Don’t Say, and Why

AMDG – VICTORY