The Series could well be a “freeway series” this year — or, as we on the east coast would prefer to say, “interstate series.” If it is freeway-east, (technically, toll-road-east, but don’t let’s explain that to the rubes that might not yet know — let them find out for themselves), then the teams will be two hours’ drive apart: Philadelphia and New York. If it is freeway-west, similarly, it will be two-hours drive apart: Los Angeles and Anaheim.

Quick note to google-map surfers. It might look like Anaheim is much closer than two hours’ drive from Los Angeles, but that is pure illusion. Trust me, I lived there for eight years: if you have a meeting in Los Angeles and you must not be late, you must needs allow at least two hours if setting out from Anaheim. You have to be there to understand.

Either freeway-series would be interesting. Or, Dodgers-Yankees would be interesting — both of those teams having such great traditions.

The fourth possibility, Anaheim versus Philly, is too painful to contemplate. Let’s hope that does not happen. Anaheim is a team without tradition, without real fans, without anything — except money. The only thing that could justify their existence in the Series would be, being at the other end of a freeway to a real team.

And I say that as one that has seen more live MLB games in Anaheim than anywhere else!

Some of those games were interesting. I saw Phil Niekro (or was it Joe?) pitch a knuckle ball. Watching the warm-up before the first inning from the third-base line, it looked like a girl throwing: all elbow, like shot-putting a whiffle-ball. I was cocky-confident for our guys — until I saw them flailing at the air.

Another time, I saw a full-scale rumble at mid-field, emptying both dugouts and bull-pens, and Reggie Jackson (!) vainly trying to serve as peace-maker.

So much for the Anaheim Angels. The only thing about that team that could resonate with me, despite having seen them “live” more than any other team, is the syllable “heim.”

Baseball today is a commodity millionaires’ club. Millionaire, meaning the players are compensated all out of proportion to reality, and commodity, meaning that they are traded or freely move, as the case may be, based on ability weighed in the scale of gold shekels: nothing more or less. There is no loyalty, no sense of the home-boy.

I have written before about how this situation is almost unbearable.

When our Führer emerges, he will have his work cut out in every area, and baseball is very far down the list — but not utterly unimportant. Here are some thoughts to stimulate his imagination.

The salaries are out of line, but that is only a symptom. The real problem is that the teams are composed of players that have no relation to the alleged city the team is associated with.

The AL pennant is between the Angels and Yankees; the NL pennant is between Dodgers and Phillies. Now, suppose it were such that the Angels and Dodgers had exclusively players from So. Cal. (for the moment, forget that the Dodgers should be a NY team), the Yankees from the NY metro area, and the Phillies from Philadelphia. This would be interesting. This would be multi-culturalism in an honest sense of the word. Everything would be different.

The respective fans would be rooting for their home boys — in the true sense of the word.

When the east coast teams played in California, they would be struck by the mellowness of the players and fans there. They would be overwhelmed by niceness. The swaying palm trees would reflect something about the personalities of their antagonists. “Hey man, let’s go down to the beach afterward and do some surfing,” would be the watch-word.

When the Californians came east, they would be horrified at first by the gruff belligerence of the eastern fans.  The gritty brick factories would be an emblem. It would be a little frightening at first — until one of the shouting, painted fans passed a bottle and offered a friendly swig of whiskey.

After each game, the players would gather at mid-field to shake hands — not, fulsomely, with their own teammates, as is done now, but… with the other team. What a novel thought!

After the series was over, the winning team could treat the other team to a regional specialty — a night on the town in Manhattan or Philly, or a bonfire on the beach — as the case might be.

The fans would gloat over the prowess of their home boys — or, as the case may be, think about how “we” — yes, we — will come back next year.

Even baseball is a barometer of how far we have sunk; and of how great things could be. How easily it could be so. How easily!

NB: Some obscene language. No blasphemy, else I wouldn’t have posted it, but several f-bombs.

The subject is an analysis of the sociological constituting of our world, with a focus on the medium of communication. The world and our consciousness of it have changed by virtue of the technological changes making mass-communication possible. As an entry into thinking about this, consider the difference between watching a movie and “reading the book.” Even if the story conveyed is identical, reflection shows there are significant differences in what has taken place in having the story “communicated.” The movie presents images created by someone else; reading involves creation of images by the reader himself. In the movie, real time marches forward inexorably as the viewer sits passively; in reading, it is under the control of the reader — one pauses to reflect;  one sets the book down to be continued later. Likewise, the fictional time-pacing within the movie is determined by the editor; in the book, it is at least partly determined by the imagination of the reader, not the invisible editor.

This aspect of the analysis — the “media ecology” proper — fits in nicely with the agrarian critique of modernity. There are analogies, for example, with transportation. Acquiring a horse meant that a round trip to the county seat might could be done in a single day rather than requiring an overnight. But the car allows sons to leave for a job in a distant city, never to come back. Once-bustling towns are now ghost towns, the only jobs left being the strip of fast-food joints along the interstate exit. Technology has brought a qualitative, not merely quantitative change to our way of living. We need to rethink whether the Amish have a true and valid insight, and not always write them off as having “stopped technology” at a merely arbitrary point.

A second major aspect of the subject Reynolds discusses is the study of mass communication by academics on the one hand, and by manipulators on the other. In turn, the latter category includes mass-marketing on the one hand, and political manipulation on the other. More on this below.

With the stage set, Reynolds is able to use the insights obtained to launch a strong attack on the methods of the church-growth movement, showing the inadvertent evils attendant upon the very fact that modern multi-media is used, in contrast to the methods of worship described in Scripture.

The Regulative Principle of Worship as defined by the Westminster Confession specifies that certain elements of worship are required by Scripture, elements not specified are forbidden, and a third category, “circumstances,” is subject to wisdom.  Reynolds argues (303-305) that the result of his analysis is that modern multi-media cannot be put into that third, “neutral” category, and thus we should regard them as forbidden.

In evaluating the work, I proceed chiastically. The commitment to the Regulative Principle is encouraging coming from a bright star like Rev. Reynolds, who is a scintillating conversationalist and a preacher that is at once engaging and searching, combining the best of Francis Schaeffer’s broad cultural concerns with a stronger attachment to the vantillian critical method. I had the pleasure of “hanging out” with him a number of times during my sojourn in New Hampshire in 1996. Those of our readers that reside anywhere near Manchester, New Hampshire should visit Amoskeag church and become a member there if not already a member of a true church somewhere else.

Reynolds’ work on the Regulative Principle in connection with media ecology sheds new light on elements of our form of worship that at first glance may appear to be dusty relics of a bygone century. For example, though the focus of his study is the preaching of the word, a new insight is also gained into the “genius” if you will of the reading of the Word (381-3) as a distinct element of worship, the performance of which moreover is restricted by our standards to the pastor in his executive function as an agent of the holy catholic church manifested in presbytery. A naturalistic approach might suggest that an age of universal literacy and Bible dissemination might render that element superfluous, requiring instead that members read the word privately and dispense with the public reading. Not so, Reynolds’ research shows. There is a mode of receiving the word of God which is instantiated in that element indispensably. This book makes an important contribution in the area of worship theory.

Unfortunately, the evaluation of the secular role of mass-media falls a bit short due to the dots that are not connected. The threads are already confusing because the distinction between study of media as such must be combined with study of the deliberate use thereof to manipulate the masses toward an end hidden from those being manipulated. And this involves both the practitioner — the actual creator of propaganda — and the theoretician — who performs studies with human guinea pigs to determine the most effective methods. We need to take note of the fact that the names of the movers and shakers of the theory and practice of the manipulation of the masses using technologies both new and old look like an attendance list at the Convention of Hebrew Congregations.

We can begin the story with the massive, national full-court press that was put in place by the Chosen Tribe in 1913-15 to exonerate rapist-sodomite-murderer Leo Frank, just because he was a jew. Though newspapers – a medium invented in the 17th century — were at the heart of this campaign, their coordinated use for manipulating public opinion probably never reached such focused intensity before the Frank case.   The mass-media campaign was led by Adolph Jew Ochs, publisher of the New York Times (though the murder took place in Atlanta). In addition to carefully-orchestrated press releases let out simultaneously by all the jew-controlled newspapers across the country, the services of Albert Jew Lasker (son-in-law of Sears and Roebuck chairman Julius Jew Rosenwald) were put into service. Lasker was an expert at national media “campaigns” to establish brand name recognition such as Quaker Oats and Budweiser Beer. Lasker came up with the slogan “the truth is on the march” which became, as if by magic, the rallying cry by the national media to get Frank off the hook. Likewise, allegations of Atlanta mobs chanting phrases like “Kill the jew or we’ll kill you” were simply made up out of whole cloth, without any factual basis. Newspapers that stood with the legal system against Frank were boycotted. William Randolph Hearst succumbed to the pressure and became a shabbes goy for the campaign, along with others hired for the purpose. Financing came from a variety of sources, especially from Jacob Jew Schiff, notable later as a major financier of the Russian Revolution. The goy detective William Burns was paid a pretty penny to “get to the bottom of the case,” arriving in town with lots of media fanfare to that effect, while in reality, his job was to spread walking-around money to bribe witnesses to recant their testimony. In the end, the men of Atlanta prevailed, and such was the jewish rage at one of their own being executed, that the so-called Anti-Defamation League was founded.

Reynolds missed this story, but the strands involving armchair academics and wartime “social researchers” he does pick up on are also part of the story, albeit less dramatic. It is a story that starts before the Frank incident with Karl Jew Marx and Sigmund Jew Freud. In the decade leading up to WW2, the story continues with studies of the effectiveness of radio in influencing public opinion and elections. Paul Jew Lazarsfeld invented the “focus group” and questionnaires to evaluate audience responses. “The Kate Smith War Bond drive, promoted by CBS in 1943, demonstrated the power of feigned personal concern in identifying with and manipulating a mass audience” (91).  Kurt Jew Lewin was one of the founders of social psychology. “The one who controls the flow of information through a medium (‘channel’) dictates the shape and content of messages” (93). His disciple Leon Jew Festinger continued the social research. The story is peppered also with wry neo-con pop critics like Neil Jew Postman, Allan Jew Bloom and Joshua Jew Meyrowitz as well as explicitly destructive critics like Jacques Jew Derrida and Stanley Jew Fish. In between was the “Frankfurter School” consisting of men like Herbert Jew Marcuse who wrote arcane books making leftism appealing to young shickse and Theodore Jew Adorno who worked on rhetorically preempting Aryan push-back by creating and propagating the theory of the “authoritarian personality.”  I am passing over various rabbit-trails like Shannon’s channel measure of information, which is properly an electrical engineering concept.

The jewish exploitation — and to large extent creation — of mass-manipulation by psychological study and marketing practice evidently has two main goals: personal or tribal enrichment, and neutralization of Christian civilization as a way to reduce the chance of harmful reaction by the goyish masses. It involved, in addition to the takeover of university sociology departments and creation of new ones, tireless agitation in favor of massive third-world immigration and the elimination of every trace of Christianity from public schools and the public square, as one can read about by surfing around on the ADL’s own website (click the story decade by decade and marvel).

Of course, goyim also have their place in the story — some, that were in the wrong place at the wrong time (esp. WW2); some, of the “usual culprits” of the City of Man, that provided financing, most notably the Rockefeller empire (136); others, like Reynolds’ personal hero Marshall McLuhan, were properly critical.

But how did Reynolds miss the main thread of the story? Partly, it is because of his acceptance of the odious judeo-christian myth (77, 137) popularized by Francis Schaeffer. As a result, jews are repeatedly not distinguished from “Germans” (73, 79) or “Europeans” (69). Partly, it perhaps must be attributed to the very success of the mass-media manipulation that is the subject of the book!

In fairness, the “media ecology” and its relation to worship is the strength and the main purpose of the book: the rest could have been excised without loss to the thesis, and perhaps should be in a subsequent edition.

Nonetheless, the story of the manipulators is important in its own right, and I hope many of our people will get this book as an introductory survey, and then do further research to connect more of the dots. To know that one is being manipulated, and understand even a little about how, is already an antidote to its poisonous effect. Eliminating the parasites can follow when enough people wake up and get wise.

Greg Reynolds, The Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Preaching in the Electronic Age (Eugene: Wipf and Stock) 2001.

The custom on the continent is quite different. The server’s portion is built into the price, as is the tax. There are no little surprises at the end. If you wish to “round up” to add a little to the “tip,” you can, but it is by no means obligatory. I have not noticed that the service is lacking in any way because of this way of doing business. On the contrary, it is just as cheerful, more attentive to the business at hand, and less obtrusive than the American way. No pressure to “churn and burn” is exerted; if you wish to occupy your table for the evening, that is your prerogative.

Given that we are stuck with the American system, I propose supplementing it with the “tip-o-meter.”  This would allow both customer and server to “get to the point” in an objective, that is, publicly-ascertainable fashion, removing all the silly mincing and prancing and grinning and ungenuine small-talk.

The way it works is this. Picture one of those game clocks, which is an assembly with two clocks and two buttons used by chess players. When a player moves, he whacks his button, and instantly his clock stops ticking and the other player’s clock resumes counting down. If one clock runs out of time before a checkmate occurs, that player loses on time.

The difference with the tip-o-meter is that there is only one “clock,” though there will still be two buttons. The “game” begins by agreeing with the waitress what a reasonable tip would be if all is in order. This is certainly doable, as most people know approximately what they plan to spend for a meal and, if they are honest with themselves, what an appropriate “tip” should be. The agreed-upon sum is “set” into the clock. Thereafter, any time something is amiss — be it a water glass that needs refilling, a need for a missing condiment, a need to order something more, whatever — the customer pushes his button and the tip-o-meter begins to count down. The longer the delay, the lower the tip count goes. Then, when the need is met, the waitress presses her button, and the tip count starts to recover — until another need is not met; and so on.

A marketing variation would be to have the restaurants buy and install the tip-o-meters, with the understanding that the amount shown would automatically get added to the bill.

The tip-o-meter removes the manipulation on both parties’ part. For the waiter, it removes the uncertainty of dealing with those that don’t play ball with the system, cheapskates, and tricksters and flatterers who then “stiff” her at the end. For the customer, it facilitates counting the cost up front more accurately and removes the danger of exaggerating the tip due to the effect of alcohol, guilt, or flattery.  Since the customer controls the initial setting, the American feeling of independence and self-determination should still hold sway.

Everyone stands to benefit — except for the liars and manipulators on either side of the transaction. I hereby grant to any entrepreneur the right to develop this invention.

To understand what is at issue, consider this thought experiment inspired by Jamie Kelso of Stormfront.org. Imagine you enter a time machine that transports you forward 200 years in time, and you are hovering over territory you remember from your childhood, looking down. As you fly around, you begin to pick out buildings and people. Now which of the following scenes would make you happy, and which one would make you sad?

1. As people emerge, you notice they look like you and your kin — obviously including your descendants — yet you observe that the flag waving over the post office is not Old Glory; and come to find out, the borders are different than they were, and the name of the country is different, there is no Constitution, and the form of government is monarchy.

2. You notice the Stars and Stripes flying over the post office, a National Guard depot with “USA” emblazoned over its door, and the US Constitution is still the official document; but all the people, it gradually emerges, turn out to be Turks.

I love Kelso’s Gedankenexperiment. We have all been carefully brainwashed to favor (2), yet this is insanity. (1) is the only scenario that can be favored consistent with natural affections.

Understanding this continental divide is key to unraveling many of the absurdities of the modern American conservative movement. It took decades for me to throw the virus of (2) off. It is known by various names. I recommend studying this brief essay by Bob Whittaker, who coined the term “Wordism” for the malady we are discussing. (Caution: he is mistaken about the Catholic/Protestant struggle.)

We have been propagandized into thinking that we should be giddy with excitement at the thought that someone, somewhere, is “exercising his freedom,” voting, paying taxes, earning a high salary in a commodity economy, and presumably cheering on a war to spread that “freedom” to farther reaches of the world. And we should be comparatively indifferent to the fate of our offspring and clan, except and to the extent that they maintain this propositional system.

“False dilemma,” comes back a Wordist. “You can have both.” Yes but that’s not the point. Which one is the one that makes you catch your breath? which is truly close to the heart? That is the question.

Modern Christian Americans have been lured into the Wordist error because it bears a deceptive resemblance to the principle of the Word of God which is the mainspring of the Christian’s heart and mind. The notion of “word” (or proposition, or even principle) is easily exploitable through an equivocation. But it is an equivocation. The division of humanity into the nations reflects the richness of expressing the image of God in many ways; in turn, as we contemplate an individual, each individual has his situation in the unity/diversity that is represented by the folk/individual duality. It is a tree with many branches.

God likes trees.

Now overlaid over that is the covenant faithful/unfaithful category. This too works out in history. There is a Christian and non-Christian expression of each tribe/nation, each side of which retains certain characteristic qualities.

The attitude toward tribe, and the attitude toward Jehovah, are two orthogonal and overlapping ways of dividing humanity which we can represent in tabular form:

As Christians, we continue to be members of an earthly tribe while also, by regeneration and conversion, being transformed into citizens of the invisible City. That transformation does not expunge every other loyalty, either de jure or as to feeling — if anything, it deepens them, imbuing them with richer meaning. We should first strive to persuade our kinsmen to the Faith. We are with them, and belong. A true Christian politic will do proper justice to both loyalties — which for the Christian are not separate, but organically nested. The tribal loyalty is not something in tension with the Kingdom of God, though it may lead to tensions with certain persons. On the contrary, turning one’s back on his tribe is to reject the Word of God, I Tim 5:8. The Apostle said he would himself prefer be condemned for the sake of his kinsmen according to the flesh, Rom 9:3.

Wordism is in fact impossible for any man that has not utterly lost his humanity. We hope for better from our fellow Christians that are temporarily deluded on this.

It may be helpful first to review the notion of number bases in general. The base indicates the number that causes a “carry” to the next column. Software programmers sometimes use the “base-8″ or octal notation. Thus, eight is ’10′ in octal, but ’8′ in higher bases. Had we standardized to base-8, then the first digit after the point would have counted 1/8′s, the next 1/64′s, etc. — which would have been perfect as an exact way to represent the stock market prices before their recent decimalization.

Base-16 or hexadecimal is favored by digital hardware guys. Since the carry does not occur until 16, additional atomic digits have to be invented to extend our conventional base-10 digits through fifteen. These are chosen as a, b, c, d, e, f. Thus twelve is ‘c’ and thirty is ’1e.’

Base-2 or binary is used when analyzing computer operations at their most primitive level. Nine would be expressed as 1001 in base-2 (2 to the third power [=8] + 0 + 0 + 1). Thus, the correct answer to “adding seven and three” in several different bases would be:

• 10 (decimal)
• 12 (octal)
• a (hex)
• 1010 (binary)

Can you think of a base-60 system that we use? (answer shortly)

The first observation to make is that the multiplication table could have been taught in any base, and once learned, any base would have seemed just as intuitively “obvious” – unless counting fingers and toes gives a leg up to the decimal or base-10 system.

I am not saying that any base would have been equally convenient. Base-2 would have involved far too many “carries” and thus too many stringed digits to be easily held in the mind. Base-100 would err at the other extreme, requiring too many atomic digits stringed together to be useful. Perhaps God gave us ten fingers and toes to inspire the base-10, knowing that this was the “sweet spot” balance between too many and too few digits. But until this could be shown according to some quantifiable criterion, I am inclined to suggest that there is probably a range of bases that would have worked more or less equally well. Moreover, the discussion above already hints that indeed there are different bases that lend themselves optimally to certain specialized tasks.

When one says “the building is 183 feet long,” one is using the decimal or base-10 system by virtue of stating ’183′ with that standard interpretation. So at one obvious level, the Imperial System is in fact manipulated using 10’s. That 183 feet is also 61 yards, which is derived by division by three, is a different point. Stick with (for example) feet and that problem goes away.

The Imperial and Metric systems traditionally differ not so much at the point of integer counting so much as reckoning with fractions of the unit under use. It is interesting that the Imperial (better: Peasant) System built fractions around powers of 2 — just like fractional binary does in modern computers. Fractions are built up from 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16… Division by 2 is based on equality, which is a basic concept. With a beaker of known quantity (e.g. a cup) and vertical sides, you can measure 1/2 quite accurately by pouring until the “filled” level equals the “empty” area. Matching for equality is intuitive. Halving is the art of making two parts equal (where “half” is the amount equal to the other “half”). 3/4 is obtained by imagining 1/2, then adding 1/2 of the remainder. However, the mapping is not exhaustive, because of the common use of 1/3 in the cup-measure for example. Yet this too is derivable by halving: 1/3 is obtained by making the level equal to half the empty space. Thus, we could say that our fractions are the subset of all possible fractions obtained by bifurcations. Bifurcation bears a strong analogy to the fractional binary, even though not an exact correspondence.

(Metric advocates: try to come up with a similar algorithm for 0.3, 0.7, or 0.8.)

Of course, one doesn’t normally have to estimate in this manner. However, mothers can teach these principle to their children, so that the use of marked measurements reinforces a basic spatial intuition. In this way, continuity between ideation and tools is maintained.

Operating in our system can be summarized like this: (1) pick a base measuring unit appropriate for the task at hand (e.g. cup, teaspoon); (2) build units upward using decimal or base-10; (3) build units downward by bifurcative fractionalization. With respect to counting, ours is a hybrid decimal and augmented-binary.

Is it easier to do arithmetic with decimals or fractions? The propagandists at the U.S. Metric Association present a number of straw-man examples to show how much easier the Metric System is to use. However, more precisely they should have stated their thesis to be how much easier decimal notation is than fractional: for the choice of base units is something different.

The typical question posed by them is this: add 1 yard, 2 feet, 3-1/4 inches + 1 foot, 11-3/16 inches + 2 feet, 5-1/2 inches, etc.

But this is not honest for a couple reasons.

1. Normally, you don’t use the “yard” in conjunction with “feet.” The first entry should be 5 feet 3-1/4 inches.
2. The intelligent child should express the fractions uniformly in the resolution needed: e.g. not 1/4 but 4/16.

Follow that method consistently, and, with practice, often you will be able to do the English sum in your head, but still need paper for the Metric. The first three above become: 5’3-4/16″ + 1’11-3/16″ + 2’5-8/16″. 4 + 3 + 8 gives 15/16; 3 + 11 + 5 gives 19″ or 1’7″; carry the 1: Answer: 9′ 7-15/16″. It can be done in your head with a little practice. Now try to do the equivalent three metric numbers given in the propagandists’ page, 1.607 meters + 0.589 meters + 0.749 meters. Can you do that in your head?

Secondly, only in school books do problems like that ordinarily arise. A typical problem in a wood-working shop might be 5-3/4″ + 1/8″. Semi-literate men have known how to do that for centuries.

It is interesting that the people that wail the loudest about how difficult the English system is are from the educated, not the working class. It is the same with Bible translations: it is the hyper-educated that just can’t seem to understand Elizabethan English; the lower classes dealt with it just fine. But I digress.

Now the answer to my quiz above: base-60 is used for counting seconds and minutes, whether on the clock or angular geometry. Actually, strictly speaking this is not base-60, for decimal numbers are used to count up to the wrap value, and when the carry occurs, it creates the next unit, not a second digit-place of the same unit. Thus, 60 seconds -> 1 minute; 60 minutes -> 1 hour/1 degree.

Nevertheless, the method bears a resemblance to base-60: You hear, “Pregame show starts at 6:55, game is 25 minutes later” but you want to skip the pregame show. Algorithm: add 25 to 55 (in decimal notation); this is 80; modulus-60 gives one, remainder 20; add the 1 to 6; the game starts at 7:20. (Probably one actually says “25=20+5″ to get rid of the 5 and 55 in one step, leaving the 20 without the intermediate 80; but this is still applying the molulo-60 principle.)

The adult does this whole calculation without self-consciousness. It is really not very difficult.

Speaking of time and our base-60 hour, ask yourself: why do we still say “quarter of” and “half past”?

The metric propagandists for some reason fail to advocate decimalization of all measures. The clock, for example, is spared. In fairness, perhaps this is motivated by the realism of divide and conquer. But there are applications that are almost only used by trained technicians and specialists, rarely by the man in the street. The compass, for example. The compass is divided into 360 degrees. Why not start by decimalizing that unit? That they never propose this makes me suspicious that there is an agenda running deeper than helping people calculate more easily.

My second thesis can be stated much more succinctly: when factors-of-ten going smaller are more useful, then pick your unit and do so. This is in fact done. There are rulers etched in 1/10 division. The “mil” in US industry is 1/1000 of an inch. The point is, the unit that is divided is arbitrary; after that, you can divide by whatever is convenient.

In conclusion, (1) factors of ten are only useful part of the time; part of the time they are less desirable than other factors; (2) possibly, some base other than 10 would have been better to standardize to; (3) even granting our “fingers and toes” decimal standard: when factors of ten are needed, it can be done with the inch just as well as the meter.

If the best deal on batteries is to be found at K-mart (including all factors such as the cost to the soul of the aesthetic insult of such surroundings, and the time to get there), then by all means buy your batteries at K-mart. We certainly don’t need every village to have a little hand-made battery-making shop. Give me mass-production and mass-distribution on something like this.

What about something where mass-production is not obviously desirable, and localism might seem better in the abstract? Should you go to Mimi’s Tavern to get a lovingly-prepared hamburger, even though you are in the mood for McDonald’s? I think not. There might be times when you would prefer the McDonald’s even if Mimi’s only cost the same as McDonald’s. So, let’s not turn agrarianism into yet another form of wearing a long face and doing things we don’t want to do.

My hypothesis is that cultivating and nurturing a taste for the richness of creation will gradually only be satisfied by production that is in the direction of individual creativity and local diversity, which is at least half of the agrarian vision. So, by metonymy, I freely interchange the term as referring to the inner motive and the external vision.

Never spend more than you need to, provided “need” is defined richly. On a special occasion, buy the best bottle of wine that matches your palate, but spend not a penny more. Pay more for stereo equipment as long as you can hear an improvement; the minute that point is reached, spend not a penny more.

Secular progress is not rejected by agrarianism: we distinguish the good from the bad. The point should never be imposition of a rule — “buy local” — but rather cultivation of an aesthetically rich life. Usually, then, dwelling over Mimi’s hamburger will be a satisfaction that McDonald’s would not be able to compete against.

That this will lead to greater creativity, diversity, and localism is a prediction not a rule.

Trick-or-treating

Children and young people dress up in costumes and go door-to-door to get a sweet, the password for obtaining this favor being to call out, “trick or treat.” The grammar of this expression is a command coupled with a threat: “give me a treat, or I’ll play a trick on you.” Today, the threat is mostly an idle one. Clearly the statement has become a linguistic formula deracinated from its original meaning.

It wasn’t always so. In my mother’s childhood, in 1920s North Dakota at least, boys did play tricks. The one that seemed to be etched most vividly in her memory was tipping over the outhouse. My mother was sweet and gentle, and she told of the boys’ escapades without any rancor or resentment; even, with a bit of a twinkle in her eye. It was narrative without moralizing. It reminds a bit of the hobo in That Hideous Strength, with his bemused descriptions of the connivances of wicked men: “a rum thing” he would say, with a slap on the knee.

I confess, that my instinctive reaction would probably be quite different. I’m inclined to think I would resent my outhouse being tipped over. But that German community took it in stride. “Boys will be boys,” I suppose. I assume it was understood that the boys would not burn the outhouses down. There was a tacit understanding of the limit on all sides. And within that limit, it was all in good fun.

The outhouse-tipping was not done, I think, in retaliation for failure to obtain a treat. Rather, the “tricks” were a kind of parallel activity that provided sense and meaning for the expression “trick or treat” called out by the more harmless children.

By the time of my childhood, the tricks were gone. We were interested in one thing only: maximizing the haul of candy. It continued well into teenage. We didn’t waste time. We hustled. We saturated a good mile radius, and filled more than one pillowcase with goodies. It was a serious, entrepreneurial business.

Today, it seems that the entrepreneurial spirit has also gone by the wayside. Now, timid little groups of very small and cute children, jealously looked over by mothers, visit a few houses, get some candy and maybe their pictures taken, and that is that.

Costumes

The second axis is the costumes, along with the costume parties, emphasizing faux-scary props.

The costumes, in turn, can be divided into two basic classes: the scary and the romantic. The scary ones have to do with witches and goblins, demons, Dracula, skeletons, and other dark harbingers of death. The romantic have to do with fairies, princesses, Robin Hood, cowboys, Spiderman, and so forth.

Clearly, the scary costuming is the more primal and authentic to the Halloween tradition; just as clearly, the romantic costuming has nothing to do with the scary, and is simply a benign expansion of the abstract idea of putting on a costume into a region having nothing to do with the originary idea.

If there is a problem with Halloween, the focus of analysis must of course be the scary side. Then, if there is to be criticism of the romantic costuming, it must be in virtue of its opportunistic association with the other.

Analysis

Criticism of the trick-or-treating tradition seems to come chiefly from libertarians that complain that it is a form of extortion.

I was once impressed by that line of critique. However, I no longer think that that is really what is going on. One participates as the giver only if one really wants to have an opportunity to give candy to neighborhood children. We did not waste time fretting at houses that did not answer the doorbell. We did not mark them as scrooges, to be held as eternal objects of resentment. We moved on, and were happy that so many were delighted to give.

Christian criticism seems to dwell on the scary costuming, and what that seems to imply. As a Puritan, for many years I concluded that even a light-hearted playing with dark symbolism was dangerous if not positively evil.

And indeed, if “playing with dark symbolism” is really what is going on, if it really were a dalliance with the Devil, then it is surely wrong. Hopefully, there is no need to rehearse the unequivocal Scripture forbidding such practice.

I am still a Puritan, but I am also getting more in touch with my intuitive German roots. It seems like Halloween, at least in its German-American manifestation, is a primal celebration of Christ’s defeat of the demonic realm. The silly masking is actually a raucous unmasking of the Devil and his pretensions. “One little word shall fell him,” as the Lutheran hymn taunts.

Coming to this conclusion should not be to deliver a blank check to the wicked that really do serve the Devil. Just as my mother took Halloween in stride as harmless and fun, she would have been horrified to learn of the doings at the Bohemian Grove and Skull and Bones. We are ruled by men that are truly wicked; a child giggling behind a witch’s mask and hoping for a candy bar is something else again.

(And does not the mask teach: witchery is ugly.)

If then the scary costuming is not evil, a miniori the romantic.

A third Halloween theme is seeking out a scary thrill. It seems to be in human nature to take delight in a good scare. At this time of year, it manifests itself in funhouses, skeletons with recorded sound effects, and so forth. I would tend to put these things as a sub-class of general thrill-seeking, which would include riding roller coasters, advanced skiing, and watching balloon rides in an IMAX theatre.

This class of desired experience calls for a more extended treatment. Briefly, however: the thrill-seeking seems to be a desire for standing-outside-oneself — literally, ecstasy — which is perhaps a symbolic acting out of simulated death, and overcoming death. The thrilling experience is a pretend near-death experience, by which we sublimate the fear of death. This too can be put into theological context.

In a word, I’m closer now to my childhood view. Sometimes it takes many years to ratiocinate a perspective that our mothers grasped in a single intuition.

Daniel is a trained architect at a large firm. He is pushing 40, yet has never gotten the big, important assignment. Finally the firm tosses him a bone — he is to head a team composed of young architects to design a complete mini-community, including dwellings and commerce. He builds his team, and they pour forth their youthful creativity; but their proposal is resisted by the Party functionaries that have their eyes on cost and efficiency.

Daniel (Kurt Naumann) has a lovely wife who has supportively borne with his mediocre career. But as his career finally appears to be taking off, she becomes irritated at the boredom and mediocrity of her own life. She wants them to move to a more exciting neighborhood, where there would be things to do. Gradually, her affection becomes alienated.

Thus the tragic tension. Finally able to pour out his creative heart in trying to build a real community, Daniel loses the foundational unit of every true community. The mordant humor is that the bureaucrats are able to stomp on even his flickering outward opportunity.

A latent theme that is only hinted at is the problem of tribal solidarity. Daniel’s vaguely incongruous physical appearance turns out to be rooted in the fact that he is a Vietnamese-German. (Yes, it sounds funny to say it. Only Americans are supposed to be hyphenated. But just as America opened its doors to Mexican laborers, and West Germany to Turks, so Communist Germany had its Vietnamese.) That this aspect is intentional is indicated by the suggestion by someone that the new community should by all means include a Vietnamese restaurant.

The wife (Rita Feldmeier) is clearly Aryan. Yet the ethnic theme is only hinted at. It could have become the main theme, but it is left dangling.

The overt question of whether a living and working community should be the creation of the budget-minded bureaucrat or the artistic-minded architect is itself indicative of how the modernist knows something is wrong, but cannot even ask the question properly. Where did the idea come from that a team of architects, however enthusiastic and well-intended they might be, are the proper generative locus for building communities? The notion of providing a Vietnamese restaurant is precious to the team, and it never occurs to them that the residents might prefer something else and ought to be the ones to make that decision.

It is just at this nexus that something like a von Misean discussion of entrepreneur and consumer has its place, and which provides the needed criticism of both alternatives represented in this movie. But not as a metaphysical end in itself like the libertarians propose. It is, rather, one aspect — and only an aspect — of the solution. It needs to be nested within and subordinate to the life of the community, which must have a purpose that is higher than merely “free market” — as if free market even were a “purpose” — even if the solution must also be completely different than the socialist planner’s pretension.

For sixty years, communist and capitalist has each with his own genius stamped his land with the faceless high-rises and warehouses that mark both sides of the “wall.” In contrast, we can look at picture-books of the beautiful German villages and towns created before Bomber Harris did his work of destruction. How did they do it? Did they even have architects? That is the study we need to see. How a folk, seemingly without forethought or effort, was able to create such a land should be the starting point of our reflection on how to proceed when the glorious day comes that the poisonous regimes we suffer under, both east and west, are finally destroyed.

German Die Architekten, with English subtitles.

As I pointed out last year, the players and coaches involved in professional baseball have become commodity items. There is little loyalty or continuity. The final step to completely dispel the illusion of the “home team” would be to auction off each collection of players known as a “team” to that city willing to outbid the competitor cities that year. In anticipation of that logical eventuality, I call the Phils “team #9 playing in city #5.”

Jimmy Rollins and Ryan Howard are back from last year. There might be a half-dozen others as well, if you count bench-warmers. Maybe. I’ll have to check.

It is not just city-swapping going on. It is also nation-swapping. There are more and more Latin Americans in the MLB rosters. I have nothing against Latin Americans per se. That is not the point. But push the logic: suppose the entire team were made up of imported Latin Americans. Would we still feel like they were the “home team”? Or would the absurdity of commodity sports finally be evident to everyone in a palpable way?

It is partly a national question, but it is also partly racial. Few will admit it openly, but it is there nonetheless. For example, the 2002 NBA Western Conference playoff featured LA versus Sacramento. The starting lineup for Sacramento was — mirabile dictu — mostly White. At the company I was working for in SE Pennsylvania, where there was no geographical stake for either contender, my informal poll revealed, without exception, that the Negroes were all rooting for LA, and the Whites all for Sacramento. There is a principle of tribal solidarity in fanship that is primal, and one does not have to scratch very deep to find it, even after twenty years of political correctness.

The fakiness is more than the national and racial confusion. Even tradition is becoming something manufactured by the PR firm. For example, management has been handing out “rally towels” to the Philadelphia fans the last few games, so they can swing them around, creating a shimmering effect that the announcers can claim is “rooting for a rally.”

But isn’t there something sick about that? Suppose there was a real tradition in Philly: suppose people rounded up old tee-shirts, handkerchiefs, napkins, or whatever else was at hand to wave and rally their team. That would be authentic. Management passing out towels smacks more of romper room. “Okay children, when I raise my hand, everyone wave and say ‘yippee’. Isn’t this fun?”

It’s a love-hate relationship. I have been a faithful fan the whole year, enduring the jeers of the cynics in the lab, and I’ll be cheering the Phils on in the upcoming playoffs (at the bar, not the stadium, however). But I also recognize that the whole fan-of-the-home-team is more pretend than real. It is a metaphor for a big aspect of what is wrong with the wider society.

Nevertheless, life is good. It kinda reminds me of the gag Woody Allen tells in Annie Hall. A guy goes to the headshrinker and says, “doc, I have a problem; my brother thinks he’s a chicken.” The shrink asks, “then why don’t you turn him in?” The man without guile answers: “I would… but I need the eggs.”

Go Phillies!