Librarians eaten.

I hate this stuff.

What they think they're doing: Showing that "different" things aren't scary.

What they're actually doing: Showing that heroic men are idiots.

Here's the deal: Dragons are mythical creatures intended to be scary, even if they are good, as in Chinese mythology. A cuddly dragon is a non-dragon creature of some other kind. That's the point of dragons. 

I'm sick to death of dragons being the good guys. Dragons want to eat us. Dragons are no good for human companionship. Dragons suck. Boo dragons. Leave them alone.

Where did it start? Ogden Nash's "The Tale of Custard the Dragon," about a cowardly dragon (who does in fact eat a human)? Anne McCafferty's Dragonriders of Pern series? Wherever it did, we find now that the world is on its head, that the dragons are always (surprise!) good and the guys who want to take them out bad. Whether it's Dragonslayer, Dragonheart, How to Train Your Dragon, it's hard to find a dragon in fiction that's not the good guy. It's like finding a police office or priest in fiction who is the good guy, especially if he's white and male -- like finding hen's teeth.

It's all part of the crap that gave us Wicked and all the new Disney pictures that root for the bad guy. (As long as the bad guy is, you know, a girl -- Captain Hook and Gaston remain bad.) The ladies are just misunderstood, you know. Men were mean to them, probably. That's why they're bad. 

Or maybe they're just power-hungry crapweasels. I don't care what made the green babe mad in Oz; if she sends a pack of wolves to rip up a little kid, kidnaps her with terrifying flying monkeys, and threatens to slaughter the little girl when the sand runs out of the hourglass, to hell with her. Drop a freaking house on her. SHE'S THE BADDIE. How she got that way is irrelevant; she chose her path. 

As Germán Saucedo wrote recently in First Things:

The clear images of true evil present in the best fairy tales, ballads, myths, and legends offer both a vision of what is to be avoided at all costs, as well as a vision of virtue. As such, the “sympathetic villain” genre is a symptom of a society that disagrees on what is good and what is evil, or that tries to explain evil away as trauma, psychopathy, or pathology. But to identify and avoid evil, we must first learn to recognize the good. The insistence on subverting villains is a sign we have lost confidence in our belief that we can know what heroism looks like, a heroism that displays the good that would oppose their unrighteousness. In a world without any moral certitude or any agreed upon system to define true virtue, what is wickedness anyhow? It would be just a matter of perspective.

In this light, we see that stories like this tell us a lot more about the storyteller than they actually do about good or evil. 

One dragon story that takes a more serious approach to the topic was based on Fred Saberhagen's Swords books, which I discussed here last year. An Armory of Swords features stories by other writers about what happened to various normal people whose lives were touched by the mighty god-forged Swords that were circulating the world. In "Dragon Debt" by Robert E. Vardeman, my favorite story in the collection, a young man comes into possession of Dragonslicer, the Sword of Heroes... and also a small, helpless baby dragon. A moral dilemma ensues in which the stakes are not small. 

The point of dragons is that they're dangerous, and dealing with them requires valor, not tea and cookies. Pretending they are all nice and lovely is just pretending that there is nothing really dangerous in the world, which we know is false. As C.S. Lewis wrote in the essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children," "Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker."

Meanwhile, the librarian type in the meme above are the sort who expect their native goodness to make everyone but the genuinely evil side with them -- and when people don't, they go on TikTok demanding the ruin of their lives. 

I've had it with dragons, but when the one pictured above turns on his bookworm buddies and eats them, I will offer him a mild nod. Not that I want the wicked dragon to win, but smugness and stupidity must be punished if we're to understand why these are bad things. 

The hungry I.

"AI development could be slowed by a huge demand for electricity," reports WSHU in Connecticut, and it's an interesting development in this weird new world of artificial intelligence. 

Connecticut and other states would have to significantly improve their energy infrastructure to keep up with the electricity needed for AI computing, said Chetan Jaiswal, a computer science professor at Quinnipiac University and an AI researcher.

“For example, a single chip running for nine days uses more than 27,000 kilowatt hours. An average household uses approximately 10,000 kilowatt hours annually,” Jaiswal said.

And that's a report from tiny Connecticut, far from the fantasy land that is California, where so many high-tech companies dwell, and where the government thinks that medieval tech like sun and wind will somehow cough up enough power for all of this. 

I have done some work in the last year looking at business startups, and many of them are pasting AI on their business plans the way Dot Com was bandied about in the nineties. It was the special sauce necessary to bring in the investor lettuce; then on to the IPO; then on to the giant bubble. Will that happen again? Yeah, probably. 

I don't even know that most of us are that impressed with artificial intelligence to date -- it seems to be a little crazy and even stupid. Is it worth all the hullabaloo? It's already helping lazy students get by, but worse, it's literally destroying science publishing. Science publisher Wiley is closing nineteen journals in its Hindawi subsidiary because of manuscript fabrication by so-called paper mills using AI. This is a terrifying development in the field. 

At least in the Dot Com revolution, when things shook out we had the Internet -- not an unmixed blessing, no, but for most people something of value. What will the AI revolution yield? Garbage research and a bottomless hunger for energy seem to be the whole of its useful product to date. 

What first popped to my mind with that energy-hungry-AI story was this unnerving quote from the third book of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, which takes place in England: 

"It is the beginning of what is really a new species--the Chosen Heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforward, all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species or else its slaves--perhaps its food."

--The Director, That Hideous Strength 

In Lewis's 1945 novel, the monsters are organic; in our time, the "new species" is electronic. But what are we to be, but its slaves? Either by maintaining it technically where it can't maintain itself, or by providing its energy. It won't eat us, but it doesn't have to -- it will eat our energy, which we also need for food and homes and transportation. The more idiot humans cut back on our means of generating power by fossil fuels and nuclear energy, the less there is all around, and AI will need a bigger cut every year. Our energy costs will skyrocket yet more, because the wealthy investors will demand that AI get all the power it needs. 

It's a sneaky path to Doomsday that I wouldn't have expected, although in a way C.S. Lewis did. He was well aware of the kind of scientists who revile humanity and see it as an impediment to a better world. He knew that these were the very modern geniuses who could lead to our destruction, congratulating themselves as they too were fed to the fire. 

The five tools.

A visiting priest gave an interesting homily in our church a few weeks ago. In addition to a hair-raising story of possession, he told us the five tools the Devil uses against us. I was all ears—with my history, it’s not surprising that I believed in the existence of the Devil before I believed in the existence of God.

The tools are:

Apathy: It doesn't matter, nothing matters, or at least nothing has to be done today.

Temptation: What will one [dangerous thing] hurt? YOLO! Sure, you said [promise] but aren't there extenuating circumstances? Just this once. You're worth it!

Accusation: You're a piece of garbage, just give up, nothing you do is right, might as well go all in. (Satan is known as the accuser, and loves this one.)

Deception: Just flat-out lies to make the bad look good and the good look bad. Betrayal is good, selfishness is the highest virtue, truth is what you make of it, there is no devil, and so on. The father of lies indeed. 

Discouragement: After this, you should just give up all hope.

As you can imagine, the road to perdition involves these five in countless combinations and shadings. Anyone who has read Lewis's The Screwtape Letters has had a good education in how these tools can be used to attack, twist, blind, and mangle a human soul. 

Catholics, among others, are bound to believe that humanity is faced with this enemy who seeks our destruction. We can't outsmart him, we can't overpower him. With all due respect to the late Charlie Daniels, it is exceptionally unlikely one can beat him. And yet, we have no choice but to do battle or lose without a whimper.

Fortunately, we do not go into battle alone. And that, as you know, is a much better story with a much happier ending. 

Midvale's world.

One of the most famous -- maybe the most famous -- of Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons is the Midvale School for the Gifted. 

I must have seen this a thousand times and it's still funny. 

What's not funny is that we now live in Midvale's world. We live in an era in which our elites are stuffed with self-confidence but are demonstrably incompetent. They seem to think that all their problems can be solved if they just believe in themselves, and when they fail anyway, it was all the fault of those bastards on the other side, just as the Soviet Union blamed masses of saboteurs and hoarders when their miserable plans came to nothing. The idea that our elites know nothing but charge in like blundering clowns anyway never occurs to them. How could they fail? They always did so well in school!

As Nathanael Blake wrote in January: 

The American ruling class thus faces an ancient problem: how do political, cultural, and economic winners convince everyone else to accept the system; how do elites secure the consent of non-elites? Members of our ruling class cannot appeal to religion or immemorial custom to justify their place. Indeed, they cannot appeal to much of anything beyond their own supposed merits, both personal (they earned their place) and as a class (they believe themselves to be wise and leading us well).

But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us.

You can say that again, brother. Also: 

This combination of arrogance, incompetence, and malice undermines the legitimacy of elite power. A prudent ruling class would be self-aware enough to realize this vulnerability. It would be wise for them to be less culturally aggressive, economically greedy, and politically domineering, but our elites lack the coherence and self-restraint to do so.

There's that word: Incompetence. Since the Kennedy Administration's "best and brightest" led us into a war in Vietnam that by structure and fear of World War III we could not win, our country has been led by dumbbells who have the utmost confidence in their mental superiority. It was bad enough in the sixties; later, the institutionalization of these morons in permanent government agencies made them completely unaccountable. They can perform like idiots, completely screw up their assignments, lie, lash out at the little people, break the law, deny everything when their policies ruin and kill people, and pay no price -- even be hailed as heroes by their companions in the inner circle. Nothing matters to them as long as they remain in the inner circle. 

C.S. Lewis learned about what he called the "inner ring" at boarding school and beyond. He knew how hard it was to be an outsider, but also the horrible and perilous temptation to be an insider. As he wrote: "Of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things." He considered it one of the most deadly temptations: 

I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.

But this is Midvale's world, where it's even worse, because not only are those in the inner circle flirting with damnation, but also their stupidity and entirely unearned confidence is killing the rest of us. 

We shouldn't send these dummies to the Pull door. We should send them to the Exit door, and fast. 

Old snobs and new.

On the whole, I think I prefer the old-fashioned snobs, the kind one hardly sees anywhere anymore. I think they were a better class than our newfangled snobs. 

Stay back, hoi polloi.

They certainly share things in common, mainly the unbridled joy of being able to look down upon the mass of humanity. And that can be maddening to us in the rank-and-file. And yet the old snobs had it all over the current crop in multiple ways. For example:

1) They were cultured. They supported opera and other classical music, artists whose ardent devotion to their work showed in every stroke of paint, great books of historical importance, and they did it with their own money, not by making the government pay for it. They supported the Western culture that supports everything else. They did not think you could cut the legs under the table of civilization and it would float in air. They preserved Bach and Brahms; they didn't write articles celebrating the social importance of Cardi B.

2) They never tried to pretend to be "commoners." One might point out stories of little jaunts as "normal people" by Victoria and Albert, or rich women posing as shepherdesses, but that's just what those things were -- poses. They didn't try to be "street" when the "street" they came from was a "cul de sac." A snob in those days dressed in ragged clothing was not trying to be an oik any more than a guy dressed up as Green Lantern at ComicCon thinks he can fly. But slovenly hipsters with trust fund money on bikes in Brooklyn think they have cred.

3) They had noblesse oblige. Charity may have been and still be a haphazard thing, but it was considered a social obligation. When a war broke out, rich people were involved, and for real. When a rich person bought his way out, like Teddy Roosevelt's father in the Civil War, it was shameful, whether known publicly or not. They were expected to have skin in the game. Second and third sons were sent off to fight, not "raise awareness" for things. God, I am sick of rich people trying to raise my awareness.

4) They believed in tradition and heritage and God. See #1 above. Were they hypocrites? Sure, many of them, but like François de La Rochefoucauld they believed that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, so the social benefits were enforced even if the sinner was lost. Now we have believers in the Year Zero, who think that the world and its people can be remade if everything is co-opted into the great project, everything up to and including faith in God, which tells us that the so-called Liberation Theology is not dead -- worse, it now has precious little theology. As C.S. Lewis famously concluded, "Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  It may be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies.  The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

5) They tried to help in ways that sometimes helped. See #3 above. Also see the work of William Gladstone, a British PM best remembered here for being skewered constantly by rival Disraeli, but a reformer who for whatever his other faults went out to help get poor women off the streets in genuine acts of charity. He also got rid of peacetime flogging in the navy, so that was nice. Modern snobs are more concerned with making themselves feel good about themselves, and if everything goes to hell, at least they tried. 

6) They were not everywhere you looked. The old snobs kept to themselves. One of the worst things about modern snobs is that you can't get away from them. There are more of them and they are all entitled to wonderful careers. Most have parents to support them in unpaid positions that pad the résumé, and the connections to get the good jobs before the talented climbers can even apply. They may have lots of money from the folks or they may not, but they're always turning up in workplaces, especially in media and government, where they want to make change. The only change these modern snobs should be making is four quarters for a dollar, and why? Because in the old days...

7) They thought they were better for better reasons. Personally, I don't mind being accused of ignorance; everyone is ignorant about some things. And I know I have little appreciation for the most high-minded offerings of culture. But I will not stand to be called evil because I don't subscribe to the modern shibboleths of Critical Social Justice, or that I know recycling is a money-wasting joke, or that I despise abortion and I love my church. Yet our modern snobs must not just look down on me, but call me all kinds of synonyms for evil. 

I'm not saying that it would be better to be poor in, say, Victorian London than in modern Detroit. The fact is that all kinds of advancements have made life better for people of every class in the last 150 years. I am saying that we now have what Glenn Reynolds calls the worst ruling class in the history of this great nation, all of which can be traced back to bad ideas from European Communists. 

Why are the bulk of our Communists people who grew up with money, rather than the unwashed poor? Answer that and it explains everything.

Tally me votes.

 Welcome to the Third World, America. Would you like some bananas with this republic?

The last thing I wanted to write about today was this horrible election, with all the allegations of fraud (more votes than voters in areas of Wisconsin [with an unbelievable 88% state turnout], GOP districts in Arizona being given the wrong pens on purpose, Michigan back-dating ballots illegally, and so on and so on). The stalling of the vote count on election night was the strangest and most suspicious thing I could find -- what better way to assess the number of fake votes needed and make time to find them? 

It all seems so blatant that I have to wonder if the perpetrators just don't care -- that they think even if Trump sues and wins, the violence that would follow and the allegations that he has stolen the election would make what we have seen before, with unchecked violence in our streets and a House determined to trample all norms to get the president, seem like a cloudless spring sky. Go ahead, Mr. Winning -- Win this and see how you like it. And would the American people back Trump in a prolonged fight? I doubt it. The reason the markets don't like uncertainty is that the markets are people, and people don't like uncertainty. A legal battle that stretches past Christmas would be a horrific spectacle. Even Al Gore finally threw in the towel on December 13.

The worst part is that the playbook has been set. Any Republican presidential candidate has been put on notice that he had better obey the players in his own intelligence agencies and do exactly what a Democrat-run House wants or he will face:

😈 Massive protests before he has a chance to do a single thing

😈 Fake intelligence dossiers that will be used as grounds for impeachment 

 

😈 Illegally leaked intelligence that will be used as grounds for impeachment

😈 Impeachment (and if the Democrats also control the Senate, conviction)

😈 Riots that burn American cities and kill police officers with the complicity of the local politicians

😈 When he runs for reelection (if he survives that far), he will be up against a massive media and technology edifice that can be counted on to lie about him and bury information about his opponent

😈 And if all else fails, voter fraud will be enacted to steal crucial close races.

This is what destroying our peaceful forms of political action has done. 

Of course, Democrats may say that this door swings both ways, and the Republicans could do the same to them if it's such a big deal. Which would be true except that the Republicans will never have the cooperation of that huge entrenched bureaucracy or that massive media and technology edifice. 

The Democrat president will instead have big thumbs-up for anything that drags the country toward Leftism and works to ensure permanent rich and poor classes that will deliver reliable votes. If his Senate wants to introduce a spending bill (which it cannot per Article I, Section 7, Clause 1 of that Constitution thingie), it will take an unrelated bill passed by the House, change the text, change the title, pass it, and send it to the president. Say, for example, the House passes something popular sounding like, say, the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009 to "amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes." Sounds pretty bland and probably a nice idea. Suddenly in the Senate it becomes the gigantic Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and presto!  No one outside Washington will hear a thing about it, or realize that the government is breaking the nation's laws at the highest level. Then we have government of men, not laws, which is government by fiat. 

How do you like them apples with your bananas?

How we got here is easy to trace -- how do we get out of this?

I don't know. 

I'm going to get some work done and try to make some money and hope that every weasel involved in this travesty gets smitten by a guilty conscience and confesses his crimes before it's too late for his soul. Of course, if my assumption is correct, it's safe to say many crimes were committed because people involved thought it was more important to save the nation from Trump than perform their duties faithfully. It was for our own good. 

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” -- C.S. Lewis

Fred's Book Club: Ghosts.

Welcome to our Halloween edition of the Humpback Writers book feature! Even now there are no humpbacks or hunchbacks or anything of the kind, and it is a mean thing to call people who deal with the condition. But it is Hump Day, and the one before Halloween, so we have a spooky book for you. Probably the only spooky book that was published with an introduction by T.S. Eliot.

Charles Williams was one of the three most famous members of the Oxford Christian group known as the Inklings, the other two being J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Like those celebrated dons, Williams wrote fantastic fiction, fantastic in the sense of being otherworldly. While Tolkien created the most detailed fantasy world in history, and Lewis dabbled in fantasy for children and science fantasy for adults (among other things), Williams's stories were set in his current day England. He was also a poet, a playwright, a theologian, a biographer, a critic -- he did everything literate that a man may do with paper and pen. It is not surprising, then, that he was friends for twenty years with Eliot, a convert to Williams's Anglican church.

All Hallows' Eve was Williams's last novel before his untimely death in 1945. It is a ghost story, and unlike any other I have read. Here's the opener: 

She was standing on Westminster Bridge. It was twilight, but the City was no longer dark. The street lamps along the Embankment were still dimmed, but in the buildings shutters and blinds and curtains had been removed or left undrawn, and the lights were coming out there like the first faint stars above. Those lights were the peace. It was true that formal peace was not yet in being; all that had happened was that fighting had ceased. The enemy, as enemy, no longer existed and one more crisis of agony was done. Labor, intelligence, patience -- much need for these; and much certainty of boredom and suffering and misery, but no longer the sick vigils and daily despair. 

We're right at the end of the war, and she's is considering what will happen next, and where her husband Richard is. But what she (and we) will soon discover is that she is dead; the last thing she remembers is going down into the Tube. And that's only the beginning of her problems. The woman's name is Lester (I guess that was a woman's name in wartime London), and in the ghostly streets she soon encounters two other deceased women whom she knew in life, the chatty and annoying Evelyn and the woeful Betty, whom Lester and Evelyn had treated badly in school. And even this is still just the beginning of Lester's problems. 

Only a few people can be made aware, through brief contact, of the presence of the spectral women, including Lester's husband, and much more unsettling, a man named Simon Leclerc. Leclerc is a very bad man, and indeed Williams's books have no shortage of bad people engaged in bad acts. He is a necromancer, who uses Betty's ghost as a conduit to the spirit world, by which means he intends to amass power. It will be up to the ones who choose good to try to oppose Leclerc, if they can. 

Eliot's introduction discusses the book's central battle:

The conflict which is the theme of every one of Williams's novels, is not merely the conflict between good and bad men, in the usual sense. No one was less confined to conventional morality, in judging good and bad behavior, than Williams: his mortality is that of the Gospels. He sees the struggle between Good and Evil as carried on, more or less blindly, by men and women who are often only the instruments of higher or lower powers, but who always have the freedom to choose to which powers they will submit themselves. Simon, in this story, is a most austere ascetic, but he is evil; Evelyn is a woman who appears too insignificant, too petty in her faults, to be really "bad," but yet, just because she is no more than pettiness, she delivers herself willingly into the hand of evil.

Furthermore, Williams's writing on the experience of the supernatural is truly unique, as Eliot explains:

I have already tried to indicate the unity between the man and the work; and it follows that there is a unity between his works of very different kinds. Much of his work may appear to realize its form only imperfectly; but it is also true in a measure to say that Williams invented his own forms -- or to say that no form, if he had obeyed all its conventional laws, could have been satisfactory for what he wanted to say. What it is, essentially, that he had to say, comes near to defying definition. It was not simply a philosophy, a theology, or a set of ideas: it was primarily something imaginative.

This is true, and something I have seen time and again in Williams's work. Take this simple passage from All Hallows' Eve:

 

She made a third effort and again she heard from her own mouth only the flat voice of the dead. She was possessed by it. Death, it seemed, was not over; it had only just begun. She was dying further. She could not call; presently she would not be able to speak; then not to see -- neither the high stars nor the meaningless lights -- yet still, though meaningless, faintly metropolitan. But she would find even this pale light too much, and presently would creep away from it towards one of those great open entrances that loomed here and there, for inside she could hide from the light.

He writes as if he has experienced these things personally, like a man desperately trying to communicate this in all his books to those of us tied down with the mundane work of living -- a Lazarus "come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all." His novels are characterized with these passages, some nearly impenetrable because they can be so hard to grasp -- because they grasp what to us is the ungraspable.

So I have to say I've never enjoyed Williams's books the way I've enjoyed others, because they are a lot of work, and even then I feel like I've never quite been able to tune him in. And yet it is rewarding. All Hallows' Eve has a remarkable spiritual struggle, unlike any I've seen in any other ghost story, even the (to me overpraised) Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw.

A Reader's Guide to Fantasy (by Searles, Meacham, and Franklin) sums Charles Williams up very well thus: "In his books he demonstrates a deep knowledge and understanding of traditional magical theories and implements, and invests them all with power as symbols of an absolute reality which underlies the manifest reality of the visible world."

Of Williams's books, I think War in Heaven is my favorite, mainly because it centers around the Holy Grail. The Greater Trumps is one of the more readable, and in spots terrifying. There is a scene in Many Dimensions regarding the Seal of Solomon that made me almost jump up in shock. And Descent into Hell is not only one of the scariest books I've ever read, but one of the most aptly titled books as well.

If you are prepared to work for your ghost story, All Hallows' Eve is as good as it gets. But Charles Williams is never light reading, although he can be enlightening reading.

In which I rebut myself.

Yesterday I not only proclaimed that everything in life is a pain in the hinder, I wrote the lyrics for a song about it. Friend Stiiv has threatened to put it to music, so watch those Billboard charts!

Meanwhile, I heed the advice of BG Bear in cheering the %^*# up. And this is where we get to the spiritual side of complaining, as I mentioned yesterday, courtesy of everyone's favorite Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis.

The professor at work, rejecting my arguments
before I am even born

One of the things that made a deep impression on me when I started reading Lewis's nonfiction was his evidence for the doctrine of the Fall. Whether there was an Adam and Eve and serpent and Garden of Eden or something else or nothing, human beings of all stripes live and think as if the doctrine of the Fall of Man is an unshakable truth. That there was some Golden Age from which we have descended. Here is Lewis, writing in Mere Christianity, which I think is the only bit of the book I did not quote when I featured it in the book club last April:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?

There's more, of course, but it argues, in his typical clear manner, if we were creatures made for a fallen world, we would have no sense that things ought to be better than they are. They would just be part of the existence and we would expect nothing else. But we do expect better things, even in novel experiences for which we have no expectation of perfection, and even in repeated experiences when we should know better.

So you see? All my complaining yesterday, while it shows an unfortunate lack of gratitude -- my favorite and not-always-employed virtue -- yet it shows that we are creatures made for a better world, but through some flaw of our own have landed in this worse one. My complaining demonstrates a theological principle. You're welcome!

Lewis has some odd moments in his writing where he tries to square the circle, reconciling the Genesis story of the Fall with the fossil record. Better is his Space trilogy, a work of fiction where the other planets in our solar system are not fallen. It's a very interesting take on what such creatures would be like in worlds that still have entropy, pain, and death, but no sin.

Anyway, I complained yesterday; I shall try to be grateful today. But I doubt it will inspire a song. Sarcasm is more my creative type.

Fred's Book Club: A Turning Point.

Hello, book lovers! Welcome to our Wednesday Humpback Writers feature, where writers without humps (or maybe with; we're not ableist) are celebrated on Hump Day.

This being Holy Week, I wanted to make a brief mention of a brief book that was crucially important to me.

Mere Christianity was not the first C.S. Lewis book I ever read. Like so many other people, I came to meet him through the Chronicles of Narnia, when I was in high school and reading my way through every classic science fiction and fantasy series I could find. Then, in college, I read his Space Trilogy, which is a series written for adults and also follows Christian themes in a compelling way. Then I borrowed his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, from the library, and that was a body-blow to my muddled mess of neo-paganistic pseudo-Christianish soul. That led me to Mere Christianity.

As Anthony Burgess wrote, "Lewis is the ideal persuader for the half-convinced, for the good man who would like to be a Christian but finds his intellect getting in the way." I think that's true, but I also think in cases like mine that it was not all intellect but also mental glitches and half-baked notions -- and maybe most of all the fear that I was going to have to give up things I liked if I followed this path. How did he bring me around? It is a logical progression from first principles, like showing that people believe in Right and Wrong even though that would not possible in a world without transcendent meaning, and from there leading up to where our instincts should lead us, to the Source of happiness and all good things.

Mere Christianity (titled mere as in basic, or what all Christians believe regardless of denomination or sect) is just 173 pages in my Collier edition, but every page has a powerful thought put in a plain and dynamic way. Let's look at some bits from this immensely quotable book:

"Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right or Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson."

"Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all of the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two plus two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to  be unselfish to -- whether it was only your own family, or your countrymen, or everybody else. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired."

“This is the fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion.”

“There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.”

“Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with ever fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

"Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world -- that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God ‘made up out of His Head’ as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again."

“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.”

"He chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at every turn --poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed—killed every day in a sense—the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God."

It is powerful writing with the concision that any poet ought to envy. It is amazing that a book built on a reasonable argument could have so many quotes that are clear and potent when standing alone, as if every brick in a lovely home could be a work of art by itself.

Lewis was about as educated in the liberal arts as a man could get; also a combat veteran of the First World War. He was a hardened atheist brought to his knees by faith. He brings myth (as the echoes of reality) and stone cold fact together to reveal the truth that is beyond nature itself.

This book contains a somewhat simplified version of his philosophy and apologetics; classics like The Abolition of Man and Miracles are more sophisticated. But his goal here in these essays was to lay out his case plainly, and he did, and it hit me like a thunderbolt. I'll tell you one thing: He's the best modern writer you'll find at Hobby Lobby.

Hubby Lobby.

What will an average husband take pictures of while his wife is shopping in Hobby Lobby? Let's find out!

🎨🧶🎎🕈📚👗

"These places all look the same. What's the difference between Hobby Lobby and Micheal's?"

"Oh!"

"Here's looking at you, kid."

"A place like this could give a guy ideas."

"Did you just assume my gender?"

"Holy crap! The secret's been here all along! Hey, everybody!"

"Crazy Knitty Ladies appear to have as much paraphernalia available as Crazy Kitty Ladies. Is there a lot of overlap? Don't cats ruin yarnwork? Just askin' -- not trying to start a rumble or anything."

"Painting by numbers: Craft or art? Hobby Lobby says craft. Let's poll Aisle 8."

"Hey, they do have a men's department in this place."

(Sorry for the bad picture, but among the books on sale are C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity; you won't find that at Blick.)

"Come on, everyone! Na na na na na na na na, Na na na na na na na na, BATMAAAAN!"

(At this point hubby is sent to wait in the car.)

Dogs and dudes: Opposites?

It occurred to me the other day that dogs take about as much time deciding where to poop as people do deciding what to eat. At least the dogs don't let all the cool air out of the refrigerator while they're thinking.

We think of dogs as our natural pals, whether we just chose to be that way or whether God provided them as our helper and companion, however you want to see it. Three legs in the animal kingdom and one leg in ours, as C. S. Lewis described them. But that one leg has made all the difference; unlike cats, which we all know tolerate captivity rather than crave humanity, dogs as we have come to know them do not do well in the wild. Most dumb house cats will live perfectly well as feral cats, although they will be a menace to everyone else; our dogs need us for survival. I suppose it's because cats are useful to us at the one thing that comes naturally -- killing vermin -- while dogs have been bred to do all kinds of wacky and specialized things that may not be useful in nature.

But my thought about the food/poop conundrum made me wonder if there are other things they do in an opposite way -- making dogs sort of Bizarro humans.

Here are some I thought of, starting with the one that sparked this idea:

🐶Dogs eat whatever is put before them; people take a ton of time to decide on dinner

🐶Dogs take a ton of time to decide where to poop; people use the nearest toilet

🐶Dogs nap all day; people are lucky to get one nap, and young people fight the idea like crazy

🐶Dogs are covered in hair and pay it no mind; people have relatively little hair and pay all kinds of attention to it

🐶Dogs love to run; most people do everything possible to avoid running

🐶Dogs object to baths; people generally enjoy them

🐶Dogs love powerful odors; people usually rear back from them

🐶Dogs hate fireworks; people like them

🐶Dogs love to pull on ropes; people try to avoid jobs that require this

You could easily make the argument based on these important facts that dogs and humans are opposites and thus incompatible -- or that opposites attract, and so dogs and humans complete each other. Or you could look at our mutual love of cheese and bacon, our dislike of going to doctors, and our interest in sports (hunting, Frisbee, tennis balls) and decide we're indistinguishable.

As with so many things in life, our lives and our collective life, sometimes it's hard to understand how we got here, wherever here is, except in the most general way. However we did, I'm glad we have our canine pals along for the ride.

What are these things called dogs?

"We must not--and incidentally we can't--become beasts. But we can be with a beast. It is personal enough to give with a real meaning; yet it remains very largely an unconscious little bundle of biological impulses. It has three legs in nature's world and one in ours.... Man with dog closes a gap in the universe."                      --C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Sometimes I look at my dogs and wonder, what is going on inside their crazy heads? And sometimes they look at me the same way. Or so it seems.

Recently I was working on a project about the great animal behaviorist and autism spokeswoman Temple Grandin, and got some interesting insights from her book Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals. I find her work very refreshing; she loves and cares deeply for all animals, but maintains no squishy, silly sentiment about them that would turn affection into bad research. Note that she made her name by designing better and more humane slaughterhouses. Very interesting person.

The book I mention -- among several I consulted for this project -- has a chapter specifically about dogs, and I thought, Aha! Here's where I finally find out what's going on. I didn't want any nonsense about raising dogs as children, because while dogs are surprisingly human, they aren't actually human, and what makes people happy may not make them happy.

The first thing her chapter blew up for me was the myth about dog ancestors, the wolves. We pretty much all have the vision of the ferocious wolf pack, the males fighting one another for dominance, but it turns out that's only how wolves behave in captivity. In the wild, outside of what she calls the enforced pack, wolves tend to run in family units -- mom and dad, maybe a maiden aunt (yes, really), and the pups, who go out on their own after a couple of years. Wolves are predators, so they don't need to be in a herd; the pack or extended family is not their usual state. In this regard wolves are actually more human than we thought, or at least they were before we started attacking our own families as a society. But that's another story.

This raises the question -- are dogs really kids? No, but they may consider themselves to be, sort of. Research she cites shows that dogs exhibit different levels of wolf behaviors, in some ways indicating that dogs are behaviorally immature wolves. And if immature, they need parents. "Practically every dog-training book you look at tells owners that the single most important thing they need to do is establish themselves as the pack alpha," Grandin writes, "But if dogs are wolves, and wolves don't have pack leaders, why do dogs need a pack leader?"

Not that this means we can let Fluffy rule the roost. "Dog owners do need to be the leader, but not because a dog will become the alpha if they don't. Dog owners need to be the leader the same way parents do. Good parents set limits and teach their kids how to behave nicely, and that's exactly what dogs need, too." So while there's no goo-goo stuff about dog babies and "pet parents" in Grandin's book, the similarities of child- and dog-rearing are shown to have some basis in fact. Take THAT, Gaffigan!

The main difficulties I note about the "pet parent" nomenclature are that A) people who would make fine parents to actual children wind up spending their love, time, and energy on animals, which are not built for the kind of doting and investment that humans need, and B) people who consider themselves "pet parents" are more likely to spoil the pet rotten or to infantilize it and prevent it from being a happy, healthy animal. Or both.

But let's get one thing straight about animals, as Grandin does -- wolves may not be the insane man-eaters we tend to imagine, but they have not spent millennia of breeding learning to be our friends, and they do NOT make good pets. Neither do bears, crocodiles, rattlesnakes, chimpanzees, mountain lions, moose... unlike the TV Tropes, not everything is a dog! Not all animals are domesticated! This isn't something Grandin dwells on in this chapter of the book, but it's always worth a mention.

There's a lot more of interest to me in her section on dogs, and I want to address another concern on this tomorrow. What surprises me is that, though this 2009 book is a best-seller, so many of the ideas she argues against are still dominant in the dog- and wolf-behaviorist worlds.

In a way I think Grandin is a victim of her own success. She (with the help of her mother and some wonderful teachers) was able to overcome the limitations of pretty severe autism, a condition that gave her deep insight into animal behavior, and she gives a lot of talks on autism. But that's made her the "celebrity autism person," someone to be admired but not someone whose professional work commands attention (outside a limited field). And that's not her fault, but it's too bad. It's our fault for the way we tag celebrities. I wonder if it's frustrating for her.

Anyway, we'll revisit this book tomorrow. It's dog week! Until Friday.

President Hubby.

Will all the silly talk of impeachment in the air -- the new Congress wanting to impeach the president first, then come up with the charges later, I suppose -- I must say I am disgusted. Things have reached a pretty pass in Washington, I must say, a pretty pass.

It's a different outlook here. I've been honored to be the president now for quite some time, and I want to thank Congress for not impeaching me. At least not yet.

What I mean by this is probably not what you think. Years ago I read an essay on the topic of marriage by my spiritual guide, the great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, who wrote:

If there must be a head, why the man? ... The relations of the family to the outer world—what might be called its foreign policy—must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests.
     The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or, if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?

All of this is very interesting, and almost as likely to cause fights in the time he wrote it as now. But I have come over the years to see that he was right in some key respects.

My wife always expects me to deal with the idiots in the outside world, something I hate to do. She has her own (excellent) career, where she deals with all kinds of people, but when it comes to things related to us and the house and all, I have to be the Executive Branch. (Get your mind out of the gutter, Stiiv.) I have to lead the diplomatic corps with repairmen, landscapers, plow guy, the guy who checks the meters, you name it. When it's takeout night, I get the takeout. If we get lost, or when we did before Google Maps, I was the one who had to ask the nice man in the gas station where the hell we were and how the hell to get where we were going.

On the other hand, my wife is the coequal power of Congress, holding the purse strings, making the laws, setting the legislative agenda. I can sign on to her laws, or I can veto them, but if she is two-thirds committed to a law, it gets passed over my veto. (She's not always that sold on it.) On the other hand, I may have grand ideas, but she can derail them pretty quickly. We forget in this country that Congress and the presidency are supposed to be equal powers, but we haven't forgotten it in this house.

It seems to work for us, anyway.

Oh, you're wondering about that third branch, the judiciary? Well, my mother-in-law passed away some years ago, but sometimes I think she still weighs in on cases....

Big production number.

Yesterday I jokingly joshed in a jocular way about the useless of dogs. But there was something to the topic. A friend of ours does not understand the idea of pets, and asked why we would even have one. That was before we got the second one, so I guess we're twice as confusing now.

Weeks like this make me wonder, too.

Not that the dogs were getting into trouble. For the most part they have been very good. Little dog has been his usual fun-loving self. The problem was that the big dog, Tralfaz, hurt himself by accident last week and had to be rushed to the vet. (Pro tip: Call the vet's office and tell them you're coming. I had read that tip just the week before and it was a lifesaver.) He was bleeding like crazy. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, on the path to the car, in the car, on a trail to the office and into the exam room and all over the exam room floor. I was surprised he hadn't passed out.

It reminded me of the scene in Twenty Years After, Alexandre Dumas's sequel to The Three Musketeers, in which Mordaunt executes Charles I while Athos is concealed under the scaffold. When the royal head is severed, Athos is deluged by a "crimson cataract" (some translations are more vivid). There was a lot of blood.

Fazzy will recover, I trust, but our return visit had the vet go "Ick!" when looking at the wound -- never a good sign -- and prescribe a huge bottle of big-capsuled antibiotics for him. Three pills, twice a day with food. It is very hard to give a dog a medication that he can't chew. Fazzy behaved poorly at the vet on this follow-up, and even worse with his first dose of pills. This is going to be another long week.

So the question emerged: Why the dogs? They offer protection, sure, but we have an alarm system for that, plus we don't have a whole lot of valuables anyway. And the dogs really have no other purpose.

What it comes down to are the things I heard so often growing up. "I can't be bothered" was a common one from the older members of my tribe, when asked why they didn't do something, or why we didn't do things other families did. "I can't be bothered." "Too much trouble." "You know how much work that is?" "Everything with that is a big production number."

Do people still know what that phrase means? Members of my family who grew up during Hollywood's golden age knew a big production number as a large set piece in musical films where a cast of thousands danced and sung their hearts out on elaborate sets. A big production number was a lot of trouble to film and cost a huge amount of money.

Dogs are not a big production number, but they are a continual source of duty. Are they worth the trouble? For that matter, are children? Some will grow up to support their parents, but will most of them do that these days? It seems the goal of children now is to run as far and fast from home as they can, spurning their folks' beliefs and values, or, on the opposite end, to stay in the cellar like a mushroom and continue to be a drain on the family forever.

Everything is a pain in the ass. Fish? Gotta clean the tank. Pool? Gotta clean the pool. Car? Don't get me started. House? Kill me now. What isn't a load of trouble in life? Is the only path to happiness that of a monk? Or of Diogenes, who was thrilled when he threw away his cup because he realized he could cup his hands, and so didn't even need that sole possession?

This is one of those thread questions, a little thing that you tug on and next thing you know everything starts to unravel. But I think I can snip it, at least to my own satisfaction.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is popular because it makes sense to us, as many things in psychology don't. When we get above the bottom two categories, for basic necessities and security, we enter into those needs that have to do with love. And that's the answer. 

I don't mean "love" in the two senses that it's often bandied about these days -- political love, which is a flag meant to express hate for others, or love solely related to the disposition of one's genitalia. I mean love from the highest (agape) to the lowest (sub-human), as C. S. Lewis discusses at length in his brief and wonderful book The Four Loves. Note that the sub-human love here doesn't refer to Cro-Magnon man love, but love for that which is not itself human -- which would include trivial things like model trains or movies, or great things like one's country. He addresses this love in his book but it is not one of the four, those being affection, friendship, romantic love, and love of God. But for the sake of my point today, it's all love, and it all takes us out of our purely selfish state.

Love is worth a big production number. Love is worth going through trouble that you don't have to go through. Even in my family, which seemed dedicated to the idea of not being bothered with stuff, you'd hear plenty of things like "It's different when it's blood" and "Charity begins at home" and "You do things for your children." Not the noblest, most Christian sentiments, but they express the point that when you love, you do. You accept the responsibility. You go to the trouble.

And that means even on days when it's no fun, and they do nothing that makes me happy, the dogs are worth the trouble. If I threw them out when they stopped being cute, or started costing me more money that I'd expected, then it was never love. And that's one of two dangers that pop out right away, that I may misjudge my motives, and that I may be led captive by my possessions. I may think I love fish until I get so tired of cleaning the tank that I let it stay until the little punks are floating upside down. I may love my big house but spend all my time slaving to pay for it and keep it up, ignoring more important things.

I like to say that if it can't drive you nuts, it isn't love. But not everything that makes me nuts is love. I must know what I love and not abandon it. Then I might be happy.

Out where the suburbs end.

Recently I had to drive alone out of state, and on the way back I took the side roads instead of the highway. It was hot, but a beautiful day for driving. Everything was green. The crops were coming along fine in the farms I passed. Small town schools were closed, hibernating in the hot sun. Cows were just hanging around, doing their thing. Not too many other cars about. Once in a while I would come to a stop sign or traffic light, and we might have a total jam -- two cars in front of me. They would go their way, I mine, and happy travels to you.

I love it.

Sometimes when I'm tooling along, looking at the high-numbered houses on the low-numbered roads, I can almost touch that sense of longing that C.S. Lewis talked about, mostly in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, and also in The Weight of Glory:

the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

In my case this longing could easily be mistaken for nostalgia, for there are elements of nostalgia present in these trips. You see houses that time has forgotten -- neat and in good repair, for if time had remembered them they would have been ravaged -- but no one has ever said, "This is so 1960s. Tear it down and put up something modern." You can see houses in rows that each reflect the different decade in which it was built, going back up to a hundred years, each one in fine shape. Some look like the houses of my childhood, some of styles that came later. So I do get a twinge for those houses of my youth, it's true.

But nostalgia alone can't strike me this way. There is no Golden Age for me, as I have never had a period of my life that was not full of fear or loss or disappointment, and I'm too honest to think there ever had been. I miss the eighties, but I was young then, and everyone misses youth -- but I thought for sure we were going to have World War III (all the smart people said so).

Nostalgia can be sweet, but is not enough to cause the feeling I describe. And for the record, I hated long country drives when I was a kid. BOOORRR....RING. So I'm not harking back to a fondness for those.

It's not a time, but timelessness, that opens me up to Lewisian feelings on these trips. As in the Lewis quote above, it's extraordinarily hard to convey this feeling to others, but you know it if you feel it. To Lewis, who had experienced it in childhood and then walked a long road through paganism and atheism, it came to mean that desire for a home we have never really known, the place we really belong that is no place in this lesser world. It was a scent from a feast of things better than you could ever eat, a scent that was itself better than anything you could consume on earth. For him it was a sign that we are not in our real homes in this world, but that we have hope we will get there someday.

Go to hell, boys.

We saw Cars 3 over the weekend. The last two animated movies we saw were Leap! and Despicable Me 3, and I wanted to see one that didn't end with a dance fight.

Cars 3 was fine. There's always something to enjoy in a Pixar film, if nothing else the art. Cars 2 had wonderful ocean animation (notoriously hard to do) and breathtaking city scapes. Cars 3 had racetracks, including an old abandoned one, that looked so completely real it was almost a shock when talking cars with eyes rolled onto them.

I have some gripes that were shared by others. For one thing, the gang from Radiator Springs has virtually nothing to do in this movie, just enough to ensure sales of the toys continue. I don't think poor old Lizzie had a single line of dialogue.

Suffice it to say it's the story of an aging star athlete who has to face the end of his career; not usually the stuff of kids' movies. Then again, the end of a loving relationship was the heart of Toy Story 3, and I don't even want to talk about Up. Is Pixar making movies for old people or children?

There is a serious plot point I want to address here, though, but to do so I will first have to issue a

Okay, here we go.

Disney can be proud of itself, I suppose, that like other great organizations such as the Boy Scouts, they're able to tell boys, go cram it, kids, no one needs you.

The plot of the movie has Lightning McQueen being outraced by a new breed of racecar; to get back in shape following an accident and get in racing trim he gets trained by Cruz Ramirez, a female sports car who -- surprise! -- wanted to be a racer but lacked the confidence.

Because if there's one thing all personal trainers who work for billion-dollar training facilities have in common, it's lack of confidence.

In the end, Lightning pulls out of a big race in the middle and, with the most bizarre use of rules you will ever see in a movie, gets Cruz into the race wearing his number 95 to finish. She had not even run a time trial, had never been entered as a contender in this race or a competitor on the circuit.  Lightning hadn't even crashed at that point, he just gave up.

The precedent this sets is ridiculous. As this is allowed, it will mean that every race team from that point will have four or five spare cars ready to go with the same number, cars with secret technological edges. If a squad starts a guy and he's having a bad day, they can freely substitute other cars as desired under this rule. It was stone-cold stupid.

But, okay, fine. By sharing the win with Cruz, Lightning gets to keep racing if he wants to. He is also going to mentor her the way Doc Hudson mentored him (although he was already a star by the time he met Doc Hudson in the first picture). And now Cruz Ramirez is the star if the Cars world.

And what's your problem with that, you big sexist bastard? you may ask.

My problem isn't really about the setup. Auto racing is one of few sports where women and men are able to compete against one another. I think it's safe to say that Danica Patrick, going by her record, wouldn't be a big star if she looked like a horse's patootie instead of the assistant DA on a Dick Wolf show. Never mind; we can certainly suppose that a woman can and eventually will win the biggest races.

My problem is just that the Cars world had been particularly special to boys. Ten years ago or so when Disney had princesses out the bazooty but was unable to make a successful film for boys (Meet the Robinsons: too creepy, Mars Needs Moms: don't ask), they had Cars. Whenever you saw Princess-themed Disney stuff, you saw Cars-themed Disney stuff too. They might as well have written "For Boys" on the Cars toothpaste, sheets, PJs, and so on. And now they've turned the wheel over to a female character.

It doesn't stop there, of course. They bought the Star Wars universe so that they'd have something boys would want to see -- and turned that over to a female character, too.

If they'd gotten involved with Marvel ten years later than they did, the first joint picture wouldn't have been Iron Man, it would have been Black Widow or Girl Thor or something.

And there's no reciprocity on this. In the girls' movies Disney has been making, men are shrinking to insignificance. Let's put 2010's Tangled and its Flynn Rider aside as an outlier (Disney was desperate to get boys to like the movie, which is why the title was changed from Rapunzel). In The Princess and the Frog, the prince is a numbskull; Ray the firefly is more useful and he's a comic-relief bug. All the men in Brave are total idiots. The two young dudes in Frozen are a two-faced usurper and a ludicrous nonentity. And in Mary Sue -- sorry, Moana -- the male lead is a god and still plays second fiddle to the spunky kid who is always right.

Non-Disney properties like Harry Potter and sort-of Disney property Percy Jackson do star boys, but make it painfully clear that their female friends (Hermoine, Annabeth) are the real brains of the operation. Annabeth insults Percy regularly in a way that would get a boy thrown out of school if he did that to a girl -- and the school would be right to do so.

The point is, by wanting to be progressive, Disney is stomping on the audience they were targeting in the first place. It's exactly what's been happening in Marvel comics: as Instapundit says, Get Woke, Go Broke. But Disney's properties have a lot of ruin in them; they can insult and ignore boys for decades without seeing a direct line to loss of revenue, and even then they'd probably still keep at it. Toxic masculinity is the crisis of the day to the intelligentsia. A woman I used to respect reposted this last week:

Now that's inclusivity -- she includes her beloved dad, the man she married, her male friends; all of us think a man who rapes is better than a woman who has sex. Every goddamn one of us. Because now it's fine to stereotype and stuff.

And this is why it's okay when boys are informed that they are nothing special, that girls are really better, just as they are being told in schools. When they let girls into the Boy Scouts last fall, I said that boys had nothing left they could call their own; everything had been taken from them. Now I see that Cars has been taken too.

I suggest rather that boys need good, manly role models; the Harvey Weinsteins of the world are not men of honor and dignity. But our broken families and our sick culture are incapable of doing this. It's a mystery to many why boys are failing to launch, not marrying, not becoming fathers, and adapting to life as losers -- except to Dr. Helen Smith, who explained in Men on Strike that this is a logical response to being shamed, overlooked, neglected.

The more militant may say Good, it's time the men got a taste of their own medicine. Well, these are their own sons, boys who came into the world not having subjugated anything, the boys who are supposed to be role models for the generation after them. Do they really think this is going to work out for society in the long run?

As Lewis wrote, "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." Get ready for more.