“And at the Feast of Pentecost all manner of men assayed for to pull out the sword that would assay: but none might prevail. But Arthur pulled it out before all the Lords and Commons that were there: wherefore all the Commons cried at once, ‘We will have Arthur unto our King; we will put him no more in delay. For we all see that it is God’s will that he should be our King’”

Thomas Mallory, La Morte d’Arthur (15^th c.)*

“There is nothing directly to show at what moment the thought of displacing the shadow of a king who sat on the Frankish throne came, as an immediate practical question, into the mind of the man who could be called to fill it the moment it should be declared vacant.”

Edward A. Freeman, Western Europe in the Eighth Century and Onward (1904)

History abounds in stories of the failure of regal lines, of their degeneration to a pantomime of poltroons and popinjays who brandish scepter and sport crown, but of kingliness are devoid.  And royal houses have of course been founded by means in which kingliness played no part, royal houses that were mere conspiracies of terror or fabrications of a hidden hand.  True kingliness, which is absent in such cases, is a charisma that a loyal subject perceives as proof that his monarch is anointed by God.   

Thus, where true kingliness prevails, might is sustained by right and not the other way round.
 
This is the meaning of the famous story of how Arthur became King.  Arthur did not rise to power by thrusting a thirsty sword into the weltering bodies of his rivals, or even by dint of his hidden pedigree; Arthur rose to power by the miracle of drawing a mystical sword from a mystical anvil and stone. 

“The fight is cruel, bloody, long,
Yelp, curs, and take your toll.
The loser wins, who keeps through all
An undefiled soul”.  

Frederic Arnold Kummer, “The Loser Wins”(1907)*

“Was there ever a loser content with the loss of the game.”  

Rudyard Kipling, “Certain Maxims of Hafiz” (1890)

Nietzsche famously scored Christianity as a slave morality that exalts life’s losers with a perverse inversion of value.   He called the rotten fruit of this “reversal of the order of rank” ressentiment values, and he explained that such values serve to protect the pride, and to engross the power, of the “bungled and the botched” whom resentment has twisted into “vindictive enemies of Life.”***

Life values strength, health, beauty, intelligence, and material wealth.  Ressentiment values degrade these manifest marks of success, and perhaps of divine favor, while at the same time awarding spiritual trophies to the weak, the sickly, the homely, the dull, and the poor.  Resentment values are the ploughshares of the Sermon on the Mount beaten into swords of envy and spite.

“No race or people ever accomplished much who pursued tactics of an adhesive and centrifugal nature, but all great races and peoples have been given to cohesive and centripetal practices.

Houston Informer (July 23, 1927)*

The Houston Informer was a black newspaper and the editorial containing the line quoted above was its excoriation of the decision by black voters to dissolve the city of Independence Heights.  Independence Heights was located fifteen miles north of downtown Houston and had been incorporated, twelve years earlier, as a self-governing “colored municipality.” Located at the end of a streetcar line, Independence Heights was exclusively black and had been incorporated by the almost unanimous choice of its resident black voters.**  The “independence” its name declared was their independence from wily white businessmen and negligent white politicians.  No matter the color of its residents, the word “heights” in the name of a Houston neighborhood is entirely aspirational.

It seems there are churches in which the staff spends much of Monday cutting the video of Sunday’s sermon into “clips.”  These clips are then spliced into one of those staccato sensations that the sportsworld calls “highlights,” the movieworld calls a “trailer,” and the churchworld calls—I don’t know—perhaps a “super sermon sampler.”  In any case, Gloocontent studio is now marketing an AI to clip and splice the weekly super sermon sampler, thereby freeing church staff to spend Mondays—I don’t know—perhaps cleaning the popcorn machine.

“When the spring sun has gained so much power that the snow-fields of the mountains begin to send rivulets into the valley, destruction threatens from every cliff and crag. The report of a gun, a loud call, are said to be sufficient to push over the ridge a small mass of snow, which as it falls grows to an avalanche, and may cover up whole villages. In the same way it happens sometimes in the life of nations that things have been slowly growing ripe for a catastrophe, which is finally brought about by a deed whose significance, considered in itself, stands in ridiculous contrast to its world-wide effects.”

Hermann Von Holst, John Brown (1888)*

When a small deed triggers an avalanche, we call it the catalyst of the great disaster.  To catalyze is to break down or dissolve (cata [down] + lyein [to loosen, divide, cut into pieces]).  It is of course closely related to the word catastrophe, which is a sudden downturn, and more strictly speaking a reversal of fortune by which everyone is greatly surprised (cata [down] + strephein[turn]).  

The unexpected dissolution and destruction of a world is a catastrophe and the spark that ignites the holocaust is the catalyst of that change.

Herman von Holst was a German professor and the catalyst of which he speaks was John Brown’s plot to seize the Harper’s Ferry arsenal, arm neighboring slaves, and commence a slaughter that would catalyze a catastrophe that would, Brown hoped, change the world.  After the war, Yankee mythologists said Brown’s design in arming Virginia slaves was to “lead them quickly along the Appalachian chain to Canada,”** but today even Wikipedia concedes that Brown’s design was to “move rapidly southward, sending out armed bands along the way that would free more slaves, obtain food, horses, and hostages, and destroy slaveholders’ morale.”

The morale of the slaveholders was not all that Brown would have had those armed bands of ex-slaves destroy.  His aim, which many Yankees subsequently stricken with amnesia very well knew at the time, was to catalyze a slave revolt by which the Southern world would be dissolved in a holocaust of blood and fire.  His aim was to trigger what historians of old called a bellum servile or a servile war.

Very little output, apart from our workhorse JMSmith, so show him some love! (I’m channeling my best American rah-rah manner). Unlike me, he repeats himself very little, which is quite an achievement, often finding some obscure 19^th century pamphlet and the like, of true antiquarian provenance, to comment on. One can picture him rifling through the discard box of some neglected library in Texas somewhere or some forgotten archive.

Its writers share what Thomas Sowell calls the tragic vision of life, which distinguishes the conservative disposition from the utopian. The utopian travels on a sea of blood and never reaches his destination someone wrote.

JMSmith has called us glum sourpusses, or something like that. Curmudgeonly malcontents ripe for satire might work, too.

None of us have any solutions to the problems that face us, but sit on the sidelines heckling. Continue reading →