The Rusted Musket

Of course Muslims can build a mosque at ground zero if it tickles their fancy, but in lieu of what happened just down the block doesn’t it kinda feel like a bad joke? Like in the same way a Japanese water park a ship or two over from the remains of the USS Arizona would be?

I don’t believe this is me spewing some sort of anti Muslim cyber bigotry, I’m more inclined to think it’s just some form of common sense pointing out some nonsensical-ness, like calling out a friend who accidentally walks out the door wearing two different patterns of plaid.

For instance, would it be cool if a fringe Christian group flew a plane into, and totally destroyed the Mosque of the Prophet, and then built a church by its remains a few years later? That would seem kinda tasteless, or lacking in style, wouldn’t it? Oh well…

I was laying on my belly under the shady tree by the volleyball pits; it was Bible camp week. Spread out in front of me, at the edge of my trusty Mexico blanket, sat two items. A folded up Anglican version of the Apostles’ Creed and GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. The Apostles’ Creed was necessary in order that I might understand Orthodoxy, for, as Chesterton put it, “When the word “orthodoxy” is used here it means the Apostle’s Creed, as understood by all who call themselves Christians… until a very short time ago.” ¹

So, a book called Orthodoxy, an Apostles’ Creed, blue sky’s in front, and volleyball pits behind. This is how I entered chapter one…

According to Chesterton, the Maniac is the type who needs all the answers, who puts fairy tales in there proper place, who, instead of floating easily “on the infinite sea” seeks to cross it and make it finite. ² This is the man who sees an unreasonable universe and tries to make it wholly reasonable, which of course it never is. The Maniac tries to fit the heavens into their head and can’t. The land of the maniac is not Narnia, Hogwarts, Middle Earth or Dagobah.

This isn’t to say that reason is bad, it isn’t, Chesterton merely warns against reason divorced from its dancing partner; mystery. For when “you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.” ³ A normal life demands the abnormalities of imagination, of this I try my best to indulge. For instance, I trend towards these fantastical images as my computers desktop background, stuff like orange hued skies with bending trees or little Gorp’s investigating flowers; I love these things, they speak the language of mystery and can be trusted to lead the way to truth and sanity.

Why after all, the universal imagination, the vivid dreams of other lands if we’re just “leaves inevitably folding on an utterly unconscious tree,” if we’re just following the “blind destiny of matter.” ⁴

Image Credit: daewoniii

Lets pretend you’ve gone out to dinner, enjoyed a fantastic meal with service to match, paid the bill, and now its time to leave a tip. Here’s my thought on this hypothetical situation.

What’s a couple extra bucks in the grand scheme of an evening? Probably not much, maybe a soda or two, but to a waitress or waiter, it’s much more. So go on, add a couple extra bucks above normal for those that serve you, the amount is meaningless, but very meaningful to them…

I like how the Germans do the drunk driving thing, a serious punishment for a serious crime. You get caught once, just once, in a totally blitzed state of being while operating an automobile and your driving days are done until court appearance, license revoked, say goodbye to that privilege you inconsiderate shmuck. It boggles my mind how a person can get inebriated, drive away, maybe cause a life ending accident or not (11,700 alcohol related driving deaths in 2008) and think “as long as I didn‘t hurt anyone” it’s okay. In Wisconsin, it isn’t until you’ve been caught drunk driving for the fourth time that you get served with a felony. I ask, why not the first?!

Look at it this way, driving drunk kills almost as many people as gun related homicides. Its just common sense to bust drunks who don’t kill anyone the same way we’d bust a guy shooting into a crowd that doesn’t kill anyone. A guy shooting into a crowd doesn’t get another chance, why should the drunks…

As a student of the Western Empire there’s a natural infinity I have for individualism, especially the rugged kind; and Indiana Jones fedora’s. A problem occurs however when I try to combine this individualism with my life in Christ. For they are in fact, incompatible. As much as I love rugged individualism I have to admit, Christ doesn’t talk about it, rather, he talks about membership.

Did you know that membership is a uniquely Christian word, one that Christian’s made up to best explain what was going on? Member, in the Greek, means organ, and this membership is what the Christian is called to, not solitary individualism, or collectivism I might add. We are not just another “specimen of some kind of things as X and Y and Z,” we are a body, where the parts are not interchangeable and also dependent on the other. Lewis explains it as if each person is almost a species in himself. He continues by using a metaphor of family, “The mother is not simply a different person from the daughter; she is a different kind of person. The grownup brother is not simply one unit in the class of children; he is a separate estate of the realm. The father and grandfather are almost as different as the cat and the dog. If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure. It’s unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables.” ¹ (incommensurable means almost impossible to measure or compare)

Unity compels us, and is compelling to us. As a boy I had my mom read the Wind in the Willows again and again, not because the pictures were awesome, which of course they were, rather, the Rat, Mole, and Badger working together “in harmonious union, which we know intuitively to be our true refuge both from solitude and from the collective” ² made me feel good. Of course, as a boy I couldn’t have articulated myself like Lewis did, but the seemingly incompatible group that conquers insurmountable odds in Wind in the Willows resonated within my little chest. Just like the Star Wars crew, or the Lord of the Rings party would as I grew older. All of these seemingly incompatible groups that conquer insurmountable odds pointing to what could only be fully fleshed out in Christian membership.

It simply won’t work any other way, a christian Achilles, or replacing name with number…

My John Marston’s awesome. He wears the Legend of the West outfit, uses dead eye to shoot dudes off horses, and once killed a grizzly with nothing but his bowie knife. His long arm of the law is the double action revolver.

Red Dead Redemption’s redeeming features are sweeping vistas, a good cowboy storyline, dialog that’s never a bore (at least when Marston’s doing the talking), and assorted moments of pure cowboy bliss, such as storming the mansion in Tumbleweed. Also, I just can’t tell you how much fun riding a virtual horse is, that is, until you accidentally shoot it in the back of the head while riding during multiplayer. Honorable mention goes to the audio, I once was playing during a thunderstorm with my surround sound on and couldn’t tell the difference between the thunderclaps in my living room and those outside.

Still, let it be known, in my opinion the games not worth paying full retail. But I suppose if you haven’t much going on this summer it’s not a bad one to pick up.

The things I didn’t like about the game are as follows.

There was a stiffness, a general clunkiness of 3rd person movement that annoyed. All I want to do is walk up the stairs, in between the railings, to the front door, before the rancher’s daughter gets shot darn it. Then there was the default snails pace walk speed which guarantees you’ll never want to walk. And the multiplayer, I just don’t think it’s great. The open roam will see you recycling the same six gang hideouts again and again. I mean, I can only do Pike’s Basin or Fort Mercer so many times. I suppose there is a lot to do if you get a posse going on, like taking on other posse units that are sharing your free roam session, maybe I lack the creativity to exploit that which is actually awesome. The team based games are great, okay, and terrible all at the same time. Some guys rock your socks off and usually have their friends with them, which makes for backing out of games to find a different server an often occurrence because the skill level match maker is on vacation (yes, I had some very rough rounds last night, hence my vitriol).

In conclusion I foresee myself playing Red Dead Redemption for another week or so, enjoying it, and reselling it on Ebay for something respectable before the price starts nosediving towards the thirty dollar mark, which, by the time of this article, hasn’t happened yet. Which goes to show there might still be room in this semi auto world for a six gun man, at least, for a little while longer…

Freedom of speech isn’t for the faint of heart, nor the timid. It is reserved for those who think for themselves, who depend not on the crafting of thought by others. Some say the Supreme court did, and did not, help the freedom of speech’s cause by giving corporations and special interest groups a free hand concerning the amount of commercials they may make during election cycles. On the surface, yes, the amount of media sway that could potentially be bought by people with ideas I vehemently oppose, does indeed make me uncomfortable. But, the bottom line is that those faceless companies and interest groups aren’t faceless. They are made up of people, real citizens, who have banded together their time, money, and resources in order to get an opinion across.

Just as an individual has the right to say something, so does a group of individuals, my comfort be damned. For freedom of speech isn’t about making making people comfortable, and still less about restricting the flow of commercials during prime time…

People like Dugout Dick fascinate me. After coming home from WW2’s Pacific theater this gentleman basically lived on his own, with only the occasional guest, in spartan-like living arrangements carved out of Idaho’s Salmon River bank for sixty years. This past week I returned from a week long backpacking trip to Tennessee’s Smokey Mountains in which I too lived in reduced living conditions, a two man tent. One week was enough, Nature +1, Ben 0. The reason for this post is that I admire Dugout Dick as a robust life from a different time, almost mythic, like Paul Bunyan, for Dugout D figured out how to make yogurt from within his cave; this, in my book, qualifies as a semi mythic feat. I also appreciate how he enjoyed his simple existence of endlessly quoting the Bible from his little hole in the wall, and how, despite these simple ways ended up in a National Geographic, a book or two, and a couple words dedicated on TRM…

A fantastic and wholly TRM endorsed article, written by Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal; speaks of Debt, Greece, Europa, and Us. Short read, worth checking out…

Cinco de Mayo usually means I’ll go to lunch for taco’s, a burrito, maybe even an enchilada. But if you’re a kid attending a predominately Hispanic public school whilst donning your favorite American flag tshirt, hi-top shoes, or bandanna on Cinco de Mayo, you’ll be sent home. The message, it’s okay to wear patriotic gear, just not on Cinco de Mayo.

Ponder this with me.

By law, every public school must have an American flag flying outside the building. I wonder, did they also take down that flag as the flag wearing students walked to their parents cars?