1. My latest addiction has been police body cam videos. Partly this is to study what real violent incidents look like for safety and awareness purposes, though there also something perversely fascinating of watching just how stupid some people can be.
What I find most impressive is when the cops remain calm and unflappable when psychopaths are screaming abuse at them.
2. Thought from watching numerous pursuit videos:
When someone runs from the law, they place themselves outside of the law’s protection, which is to say, outside the community. The duty of the police is to protect the community. Therefore, the safety of the fugitive ceases to be a priority for the police, compared to the safety of those still within the community.
In short, I’m in favor of the police using any means necessary to stop car chases as quickly as possible, even if that potentially endangers the fugitive.
3. I read a summary of John Gardner’s Grendel. It sounds to me like the story of what would happen if the brain of a 20th century post-modern intellectual were transplanted into the body of a 6th century troll. I also read a summary of Robert Zemeckis’s film version, which sounds equally awful (e.g. Grendel’s mother seduces Beowulf, Hrothgar is Grendel’s real father, etc.).
In general, moderns do not understand Beowulf. Beowulf is about man’s duty to defend the community against the forces of disorder, which is glorious, but will ultimately cost him his life. But we moderns, the Boomers and beyond, infected with Marxist thought, in which “monsters are not outcasts because they are evil; they are evil because they are outcasts.” Which is to say, Grendel’s evil is primarily the fault of Hrothgar and the corrupt society he represents and has nothing to do with Grendel’s own nature or choices.
This is presented as ‘nuanced’ and realistic, when it fact it is only the blind, mindless parroting of the unquestioned ethos of modernity, stubbornly repeated in the face of all contradictory evidence.
4. The said ethos may in part be expressed thusly:
“Do not fight your enemies; it is your own fault they hate you. Do not defend your home or community; it is not worth saving. Prove yourself good by surrendering to your foes and admitting they are in the right; prove yourself worthy by hating your ancestors and rejecting everything they gave to you.”
5. Actually, the modern version of Beowulf is Jaws; the story of a monster that threatens the order of a community and the man tasked with overcoming it. In this case, the said man is not a hero of legend, but a middle-class small-town cop who is blatantly unsure of his ability to deal with the monster until he rises to the occasion with the support of two more traditional male archetypes.
6. I feel like John Adams’s soul is well expressed by the fact that he called the site of the Battle of Worcester holier ground than that of any church.
Though he said that America is meant only for a religious people, I have the impression that he thought the latter was more for the sake of the former than vice-versa. Which, indeed, is a thread that runs through much of classical American thought: that political liberty is a higher good than the salvation offered by the Church.
This is one element of the American character that desperately needs to be corrected.
7. I also learned about the Staircase of the Loretto Chapel in New Mexico; a community of nuns in the 1870s had a chapel built, only to discover too late that there was no way up to the choir loft. After a novena to St. Joseph, a mysterious man appeared, asked for a few weeks to work in secrecy, and then left, having produced a gorgeous wooden spiral staircase that works on engineering principles that builders still don’t fully understand.
Make of that what you will.
Serpent's Den 