Are People Really Fleeing Texas? “…this story needs spicing up. I’d suggest working in some details about millions of feral hogs on the rampage out west, while hunters strafe them with machine guns from their private helicopters flying overhead. ”
Avant Garde at the End of the American Empire: “Miami is itself a kind of symbol of the end of the American empire – an echo of the degeneracy that marked the end of Rome and could signal the end of the West. The city’s artists implicitly recognized that they were making their art during the End Times. Miami’s brief flourishing of avant-garde cultural production reveled in the Dionysian merriment of the end of the world. It was a joyous apocalypticism: drugs and fucking and noise drowning out the mourning of the end of the 20th Century, the West, if not civilization itself.”
Our Godless Era is Dead: “A faith wielded as a stick with which to beat the ‘cultural Marxists’ will end up being as empty as the consumer void it seeks to challenge, and potentially as toxic. C. S. Lewis had already spotted the trap more than 60 years ago: ‘Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation,’ do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.’ What Lewis is describing is Christ’s narrow way: the path of the Desert Fathers rather than that of Emperor Constantine. The divine irony is that it is only by walking away from the world that we have any chance of changing it.”
Suffering for the Holidays, with the Best of the Ancients: “The great Roman commander [Lucullus], who humbled Mithridates and Armenia, had a terrible family life. His father was prosecuted for extorting provincials in Sicily, and forced into exile when Lucullus was still young; his mother, a Metella, had a reputation for infidelity. Lucullus didn’t entirely succeed in breaking the cycle: while he was more successful in his career than his dad, his first wife, Clodia, was notoriously unfaithful to him. While he was conducting his glorious campaigns, Lucullus would get letters from friends back home telling of her exploits around the bedrooms of Rome – such as with the poet Catullus. You can imagine it took a lot of the pleasure out of his work.”
The Family Trust — Or, In Praise of Nepotism: “For the ancient Romans, the politics of the res publica relied on fides—faith, not in our sense of belief, rather in the terms we continue to use for the fidelity of a lover or the bona fides of a prospective employee. The Romans prided themselves on their rigorous fidelity, boasting that a Roman would keep his word under all circumstances. We have the famous example of Regulus. He, who had promised to return to his Carthaginian captors, did so despite the inevitable torture and subsequent death. Like today, Rome had strong law courts and contractual enforcement, but, unlike today, the ultimate basis for Roman justice rested in the trust Romans had in one another as well as in the law.”
You Can’t Take the Sky From Me: “I believe that not just America, but more or less all of worldly governance, is occupied by individuals under the dominion of Satan. Men and women who’ve sold their souls for worldly power and wealth and influence. I even think this is provable.”