1. I’m up in Maine visiting relatives this week. It’s very nice to be surrounded by forests again. I’ve definitely missed them living in Phoenix.

2. New England has a character unlike any other part of the nation, simply because it is older. Men have lived here, farmed here, praised God here, and made their homes and families here longer than almost any other part of the country. New England has a long memory, and those with long memories have seen many a strange thing.

3. New England is also unique for its environment. It occupies a strip of rocky soil between the cold sea on one hand and endless primeval forest on the other. There is a good reason why much of the best American horror fiction comes from New England. The woods, the sea, and age all contain great secrets, and it is secrecy that creates unease, mystery, and dread.

4. The only other place that has the same age as New England is the South, which also has its share of mystery and is also a ripe setting for horror. But the character of the Southerner is different. His is at once haughtier and more relaxed. He was raised under the blazing, damp heat of the South, on wide expanses of fields bordered by swamp and wood and the warm sea. The Southerner is more aristocratic: his arrogance lies in pride of place, not self-righteousness (two different things), and it is the sharp, defensive pride of one conscious of his own guilt and leaps either to justify his sins or to keep them in his own home.

5. It is often said the the Puritan is haunted by guilt, but that is not so. The New Englander knows nothing of guilt. He may speak loudly of his own sins, but the truth is that his own rectitude is the one fixed doctrine of his religion. The divinity of Christ, the sacrifice of Calvary, the Holy Trinity, God Himself may all be doubted, but that the New Englander is a man of righteousness may never admit of doubt. Guilt is something observed in others and lamented over, not a thing felt and wrestled with. This is why the great moral crusades of America are never matters of self-correction, but correction of our neighbour: our neighbour who keeps slaves, drinks, harbours racist thoughts, does drugs, damages the environment, and so on.

Those who truly know guilt hate nothing so much as having others officiously trying to interfere with their sins, while those who ignore the beams in their own eyes think of sin primarily in terms of what other people do.

6. The terrible (and oft-ignored) thing about ‘social justice’ is that it must always create a villain. If there is a ‘social’ injustice, that means someone is doing it. This ‘someone’ becomes the reprobate, the rejected, the one whom it is permitted to hate. The more ‘social justice’ or ‘reform’ we push, the more people we condemn and cast out.

7. To end on a lighter note, here is a fun tidbit:

George Washington did not play baseball as a boy.

George III, however, did.

Which raises the question: who is the real American here?