Why Government And Religion Are So Popular - Promises, Hope, And No Accountability Whatsoever

'If only Aunt Tilly had spilled the beans before she died', said her sister Margaret, hoping that the old lady might have had a glimpse of the hereafter - something, anything to suggest that there was life after death.  But nothing.  She spluttered something about peppers, sighed, and died just like that 

'She is at peace now', said Father Brophy, making the sign of the cross.  'She is with Jesus'.  Extreme Unction at least secured her place in the queue.  She had been too ga-ga to make a good act of contrition, so whether absolution was given by the Almighty or not, only Tilly would know. 

For those who knew her, ascension was doubtful.  The had been a thorough bitch her whole life, a nasty, backbiting old crone who never left well enough alone, never married, and took revenge for her spinsterhood on all men.  'Better off dead', thought Father Murphy who had known her since she had graduated from St. Aloysius of Loyola, the Catholic high school affiliated with his church, St. Maurice's, had to put with nuns complaining about the hostility and godlessness of the girl, threatening to go to the Archbishop is something were not done, and going off in a huff, rosary beads clacking away as they strode out of the sacristy and back to the convent. 

'What would a heaven with her in it be like?', thought Father Brophy in a moment of secular irony.  There certainly would be no peace unless God had a special place for the likes of Tilly Briganti. 

He shook his head, blessed himself, and asked for forgiveness.  God forbid that a man of the cloth should have such uncharitable thoughts. 

Meanwhile, Aunt Tilly's sister, Margaret, looked at the now lifeless body sharing the same diffidence as Father. Tilly had not been an easy woman, and perhaps she had indeed gone to a better place; but still Margaret had hoped for some sign of recognition of what the future held for her sister and all of us - an empty void, a smiling, welcoming Jesus, or some other unimaginable place. 

The Muslims believe that martyrs will find a paradise of vestal virgins, babbling brooks, gardens, flowering meadows, and cool breezes - enough of an incentive to kill the infidel and make way for the coming Caliphate.  Catholics were told that heaven is but the sight of God - that celestial vision more than enough for eternal happiness.  Not much to hold on to after a life of Sunday mass, confession, communion and right behavior; but at least it would not be nothingness. 

Margaret shivered at the thought of taking her dying breath and seeing nothing but a black emptiness ahead; but unless Tilly said something different, she would have to live with that possibility. 

All of which is a long preamble to the point of the story - the popularity of religion.  How is it that a belief system with no proof whatsoever, an institution built only on presumption, promise, and providence could have such staying power?  Billions and billions of dollars have been made by countless priests, pastors, ministers, and preachers over the centuries since St. Paul went on his evangelizing mission and set up churches from Palestine to Rome.  

He offered nothing but promises, repeating Jesus' own words, 'Man cannot live by bread alone' opening the door to the establishment of the Vatican, the Holy Roman Catholic Church with billions in gold bullion stored beneath St. Peter's square and countless billions more secured in offshore accounts in the Caribbean. 

 

The Church, knowing how fragile unproven faith can be, concocted both Visions and Miracles to satisfy the longing of the faithful for some sign.  The Virgin Mary was said to have appeared in Portugal and France (Fatima and Lourdes), and thousands of pilgrims go there every year in the hopes that she will appear once again, this time to them. 

The desire for immortality - or at least the certainty that a spiritual afterlife exists - is viral.  Everyone has it, no one wants his short, nasty, and brutish life to end with only an eternity of nothingness thereafter.  Schizophrenics, natural visionaries and seers, so unhinged are they from the here and now, are often looked to for spiritual guidance.  Forensic psychologists have long contended that religious prophets saw nothing but the twisted, fantastical djinns of their own minds, and that religion has been confected from nothing but febrile dreams. 

 

Every Sunday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Aberdeen, a congregation near the Alabama border of Mississippi, someone finds Jesus, stands up, points to the rafters, raises her arms and shouts, 'He has come'. 

'Hallelujah', respond the hundred or more souls in the church all with their eyes skyward hoping to see Him. 

This episode is repeated every Sunday morning throughout the South and in store-front churches in Northern inner cities.  Belief in the impossible has become standard issue.  He must be real, congregants say, otherwise there is no hope. 

'But hope is what there is, Brother', said Pastor Isaiah Jones from the pulpit of his own church, filled to the gills with families who have come from far-away cotton fields to hear him preach.  'There is no cause for despair', and the families go back to their tarpaper shacks feeling anointed and blessed.  Maybe next Sunday He will be revealed. 

 

Not one scintilla of evidence.  Not one proof, not one vetted, peer-reviewed incident of divine intervention in the world; and yet billions of people get down on their knees every Sunday or Friday and shed tears for the mystery and magic of God. 

Brilliant, ingenious, a fabulous idea!  To build a multi-trillion dollar industry on nothing but promise? Credit must be given. Religion is the most successful scam the world has ever seen.  Every Sunday the basket is passed, every year checks are written to the Annual Fund, every one of the millions of viewers tuning in to tearful, beseeching televangelists give from their little widow's mite to support God's work and make their elision to heaven easier. 

Thomas Sowell, conservative economist and political observer has noted that religion and government are the only two institutions built on nothing but promise.  Accountability is unnecessary and non-existent.  When a government announces the allocation of billions of dollars for the poor, that, ipso facto, is enough.  The idea is so resonant, so unmistakably right and good, so reflective of Christian, moral principles, it has to be right - checking up to see if it is, is irrelevant, supernumerary. Of course it is right, good, and proper. 

Trillions have gone out the door for welfare programs which have been miserable failures, entitlement programs which do little more than train people for dependence.  Treasuries have been emptied for pre-school programs which teach how to color within the lines but which have no lasting impact on future academic performance. Countless more programs designed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion have managed just the opposite and created division, suspicion, accusation, and false promises across the board. 

  

The government interventionist agenda is based on faith and presumed authority. If something sounds good - compassion, inclusion, sharing, confidence - it must be good.  There is no need to set objectifiable indicators of success, quantifiable measures which indicate cost-benefit.  Only government, says economist Sowell, has no accountability, no bottom-line, no feet held to the fire.  If private sector investments turn no profit, they are cancelled.  If a new design, new logo, new operating procedures does not increase sales, they are scrapped. 

In the unlikely event that a government program is called out for non-performance, all that is necessary is to say, 'We have learned from our mistakes', followed up by a new tranche of money just as airily conceived and and unlikely of impact as its predecessor. 

The World Bank under the leadership of former Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a man desperate to make amends to the world's poor after the murderous debacle under his watch, instituted a program of Poverty Reduction and thanks to it billions of dollars in soft loans and grants went out the door with nothing more than assumption.  The idea was moral, right, and good, so success would follow. 

 

When it didn't, McNamara and his minions said, 'We have learned our lesson', and millions more of airy unaccountable millions went down the rathole. 

Government whether directly or indirectly, whether nationally or internationally has been the most marvelous, most creative, most impressively vaporous invention since the first human settlements.  It follows in the footsteps of religion, step by step. 

'A sucker is born every minute', said circus impresario P.T. Barnum, or it takes two to tango; and religion and government would not be so influential and universal if it weren't for credulous patrons. 

So, sign up for the Greatest Shows On Earth and make millions. 

Europe Wakes Up While America Dithers - The Nastiness Of The Unwanted Comes Home To Roost

Ellie Frampton was not only happy that President Biden opened the southern border to let in thousands of desperate asylees, she even voted for a property tax increase to cover the cost of sheltering them while they became accustomed to life in their adopted country. 

Her city, thanks to a progressive mayor and city council, became a sanctuary city.  The old Roosevelt Hotel, once the watering hole of the glitterati of the 20's, and the Biltmore, a hotel made famous by both Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, the gathering place of the well-placed and their aspirants now housed immigrants from El Salvador and Nicaragua. 

How could a compassionate, integrationist society like hers ever turn away the poor, the alienated, the disadvantaged, and the hungry?  It was only right and just that America should open its arms in welcome of the needy just as it did at the turn of the Twentieth Century when European immigrants flooded our shores. 

As important as offering a home to the disenfranchised and despondent, an open door policy signaled the end to white supremacy and  privilege.  The wave of new immigrants from the south would change the demographics of America forever, and would hasten the diversity of the country. 

Now, the city in which Ellie lived had been for its long and storied history, one of the most adherent to American values - a working class, socially ambitious, but patriotic place of traditional principles. Europe might be far distant in terms of parentage and national origin, but was still respectful of the motherlode of religion, culture, and society.  Now, however, firmly in progressive, secular administration, the city had done its best to dismiss and demean this storied heritage.  Any devotee of the old colonial, racist, exploitative Europe was a traitor to modern, inclusive, diversity. 

The city had become a morass, and despite every attempt to gloss over its soaring crime rate, Fentanyl abuse, homelessness, and garbage-strewn neighborhoods, the municipality declared victory.  'We are the future', proclaimed the Mayor, standing proudly with a panoply of racial, gender, and ethnic diversity. The white, middle- and upper-class residents who remembered what the city was and how disreputable and sickening it had become, disagreed; but their votes were in the minority, and the municipality became proudly Democratic Socialist. 

Ellie watched where she walked.  Thanks to her own advocacy to defund the police and to create non-    ICE zones of 'cultural relevance', the streets of her city were unsafe; but this was part of the calculus of equality.  The black people of the city, so long oppressed and put upon by their white Simon Legrees, needed room to grow, to multiply, and to express their native culture. 

The city soon ran out of funds and imposed supplementary taxation on every resident - their fiscal duty to right the ship, to provide a welcoming, accommodating haven for new refugees and for the emerging black population. 

Yet Ellie persisted.  She resisted call from cousins in Florida and Texas to relocate and enjoy an atmosphere of civil liberty, opportunity, and freedom.  No, she was in for a penny, in for a pound. Black people and asylees from Latin American needed her love, attention, and support. 

Ellie's town was not unique - the pandemic was universal throughout metropolitan America.  Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington were no different.  They were not only sanctuary cities, giving shelter and welcome to undocumented immigrants, but were avowedly and passionately determined to usher in the new multicultural majority of black and brown peoples.  Whiteness and European civilization from which the grandees had come, was history. 

Now Europe was having none of this integrationist nonsense. Conservative politicians in Italy, France, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Hungary were demanding the repatriation of unwanted Muslim socio-political invaders and a return to Christian, European, nationalistic values.  Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy famously announced before a chanting crowd of supporters: 'I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian, I am a European and an Italian, and God willing so will I remain'. 

Le Pen in France, Weidel in Germany, Farage in the UK, and Wilders in the Netherlands have been as outspoken about the existential importance of ridding the continent of hateful, divisive, medieval Islam.  The borders are closed to intolerance, exclusivity, and barbarity. 

Ellie read these pronouncements and declaimed and disparaged them.  What else to conclude from a white supremacist cabal of right wing bigots?  The world was changing in favor of universal cultural diversity, and these women (most of the European leaders were women) represented the worst of recidivist racism. 

Surprising that the world could be so convincingly divided, but divided it is. It was not at all surprising that the continent that fought against Muslim (Saracen) invasion in 778 and saved Europe from Islamic barbarism honored Roncesvalles, Charlemagne and Roland. France has always proudly proclaimed that it is 'La fille Ainee de l'Eglise, the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, and rightly so. 

The new battle between Christianity and Islam has already begun; and Europe is just realizing it has let the fox into the henhouse. Marine LePen, Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, and Geert Wilders are the avant garde against Islamization and far more importantly the progressive-socialist agenda which has facilitated its rise. 

Emmanuel de Miramon-Fargues was a French aristocrat who anticipated the flagrant permissiveness of French governments.  He said that the aristocracy and the royalty were not supernumeraries in European history but its heroes.  'We are the guardians of the legacy of kings, courtiers, and theologians', he said, 'the only remaining link to our glorious past.'

A bit inbred and self-serving to be sure, but not far from the truth. The peasantry might have tilled the soil and tended the sheep, but it was the well-born, the titled, the legatees of history, culture, and tradition who made the world what it is. 

Ellie of course wanted nothing of these self-serving aristocratic apologia.  The aristocrats of Europe were nothing more than colonialist oppressors, despicable tyrants and international thieves. 

Nonsense of course. European kings instigated and oversaw the civilization of Europe, Africa, and beyond.  European colonies brought culture, learning, and jurisprudence to societies still breaking rocks.  Africa was nothing but a continent unmoved and undeveloped since its Paleolithic origins and had it not been for European colonization, it would still be living in caves. 

Who wants Africans in Europe other than Africans? And who want Islamized Africans, devout and determined to extend a Third World Muslim caliphate? Mosques, Sharia law, head scarves and burqas, female circumcision, and absolute patriarchy?

'Diversity', said Ellie, angered at the European rightist uprising, fascism in the cloak of conservative politics, and determined to assure that American borders be uncrossed by anti-democratic, racist Europeans. 

Ellie's city, once known for its New Age accommodation, its tolerance, and sweet Pacific inclusiveness, had become a Lagos slum - blocks of nodding Fentanyl addicts, back alleys of heroine junkies, lanes of schizophrenic homeless - a derivative inner circle of Hell, a mess, a socially fetid corner of a once respectable urban environment. 

'What's different here?', asks the tourist promotional ad for Poland.  No black people, no inchoate street protests, no rapes, assaults, and robberies.  A peaceful place, a Christian place, a white place. 

Racist? Hardly. The inconvenient truth - the megalomaniacal diversity and the radical progressivism of open borders and socialist idealism - has been destructive, damaging, and unwanted - is now for everyone to see.  Poland is the European future, not France. 

 The cultural tide usually swings from west to east; but nowadays the counterrevolution in Europe will soon claim American lowlands.  There is no way that American progressives, heirs to the early 20th century socialism of Brandeis, Gompers, and Lafollette but adrift in racial and identity politics, can survive.  Americans are not that stupid; but perhaps they are. 

America has always looked to Europe for culture, history, social organization and structure and  la dolce vita ; but now it is grasping an existential lifeline. Go back to Roncesvalles and the defeat of the Muslim invaders, reclaim the legitimacy of 'The eldest daughter of the Church', and return to the aristocratic, courtly fold. 

Youth Springs Eternal - It's Not Wanting To Be Young Again, But To Be With Someone Young Again

 Herman, Abe, and Art were lamenting their lost youth – not the days of their youth gone by but the fact that the young women who had loved them in their later years had long gone.

“She was wonderful”, said Abe, “a real gem.  An early Christmas present.  An unforgettable charm”. 

Laura had been thirty-two when they met, Abe sixty-four, stretching the May-December relationship to its outer limits.  Abe was reaching the end of his sexual shelf life, and she was in full bloom.  He had been surprised that such a woman had any interest in him at all.  Yes, he still had much of his hair, was in good health and good physical condition, but as his doctor had advised him, ‘Numbers don’t lie’.  In other words it was about time that he began to look more seriously at his end-of-life priorities.  Even the best actuarial estimates gave him only relatively few more years, so he had better turn his attention to more important matters.

“Why bother”, Dr. Kaplan had said when he first heard the news. “What will she give you that God won’t?”

It was obvious that Kaplan had never strayed from his marriage of forty years, let alone with a younger woman.  Those who had been more adventurous or fortunate knew that they had been extremely lucky.  No one wanted to relive their youth – who would want to repeat the adolescent bumbling, the adult mistakes, missed opportunities, and downright shameful episodes of the past? Better done, gone, and forgotten than sifting through the discards to see if there was anything worth retrieving, anything worth  a second look.

In Abe’s case, his life had been satisfactory enough – a successful career on K Street, a good marriage, well-placed and respectful children.  He never saw cause to wish the genetic cards his son and daughter had been dealt had come from a different deck, or to have chosen a more beautiful wife; or even to have had more affairs.  At 70 he was sitting pretty, atop a considerable retirement fund and investment properties, a home in Boca Raton, and good friends. 

Yet everything in his life seemed predictable, tired, and worn.  A life of no regrets did not mean a life with a happy ending.  Encroaching old age was ugly, dispiriting, and frightening.  He did not envy the young people around him.  He had had his day and it was their time.  Nor did he wish that there were some wormhole through which he could be sucked into the past.  Youth was overrated, especially when one saw the depressing consequences of disappointments, un-achieved success, illness, bad choices, and bad luck.  The years took their toll, and since one could neither go back and fix them, what was the inherent, innate value of youth anyway?  Little more than a stop along the way. 

Konstantin Levin, a major character in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina saw great irony in God’s having created man - an intelligent, creative, insightful, intuitive, and enterprising being – allowed him to live for a scant few decades, then consign him for all eternity in the cold hard ground of the steppes.  If there was no point to life, reasoned Abe, then there was certainly no point to youth.  Other than reproduction and carrying capacity of course.  On an existential plane, youth was wasted on everyone.



Laura Peterson came into Abe’s life unexpectedly, a work meeting, drinks, a conference in Cairo; dinners, and finally sex.  The scenario was not new to Abe.  He had always had affairs, but because of circumstances, they were all ‘commensurate’.  The women were like him all professionals, travelers, within a few years of age, happily loosed from the fetters of marriage or partnership.  There was nothing remarkable or particularly interesting in these short-term relationships.  They were almost de rigueur, part of the business traveler’s benefit package, a no-strings-attached rider to one’s contract.

Abe’s love affair with Laura, however, defied the actuarial odds and the lottery.  An old man was not supposed win big.  He was designed to lie down and take it easy or die in his traces, not get back in the saddle.  He knew that eventually she would give up on him for a more expected life; and more importantly would no longer be able to overlook his stoop, his ailing hip, his older children, and his futurelessness.  Since Abe had as little enthusiasm for the future as the past, and since consequently the present was the only tasty morsel in the buffet, he gorged himself.  His affair with Laura Petersen was right out of a ladies’ library romantic novel.

"Shh," he said, pulling her up so they were face-to-face again. He slid his hands between her legs, positioning fingers and thumb the way she'd taught him. Except that wasn't right. She hadn't taught him. They'd figured it out together, how to make her come. He nuzzled against her, his lips on her neck, nibbling and kissing his way up to her earlobe, where she'd always been ticklish. "Ooh," she whispered. "Ooh! Oh, oh, oh," she sighed, as he worked his fingers against the slick seam . . . and then she forgot to pose, forgot about trying to look good, and lost herself inside her own pleasure. Andy watched her squeeze her eyes shut as she clamped her thighs against his wrist and snapped her hips up, once, twice, three times before she froze, all the muscles in her thighs and belly and bottom tense and quivering, and he felt her contract against his fingers (Jennifer Weiner, Who Do You Love?)

He wished he could have felt instead like Cormac McCarthy:

Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different (The Road)

The problem is that with Abe, like all older men in an affair with a younger woman, it was the pulp fiction that said it all.   There were no existential thoughts, no God, no kindness and compassion, just adolescent wet dreams.  The rotten prose captured the pure physical responsiveness of the sex act; and that was all that mattered.  It was the only reliving of the past that made any sense.  It wasn’t reliving a particular event or recreating a circumstance – staying in a familiar hotel, eating in our restaurant – it was playing the part of a youth as an old man, and voila la difference.

Phillip Roth’s character, Coleman Silk, says in The Human Stain, describing his affair with a woman half his age,  “Granted, she's not my first love. Granted, she's not my great love. But she is sure as hell my last love. Doesn't that count for something?” Abe was Coleman Silk.  “It’s all about the sex, isn’t it?”, asks Silk’s friend; but although Silk denies it and criticizes his much younger friend of his own romantic notions and unfilled sexual demands, it is indeed about the sex.  The book has a happy ending only in that Coleman Silk dies without ever having to give up his woman.  His last memories are of her body.



“Too soon old, too late schmart”, said Herman after hearing Abe’s story.  “You’ll never learn.  The putz is not the way to figure things out.”