Stone of Remembrance

Music is not my life. I play no instruments, and though I do have a good ear I’ve never had the patience or the determination to pursue it. That all went to my brother, whose trumpet does the talking.

A recent visit by my nephew J. was a little déjà vu. Music is a huge part of his life; he’s a talented guitar player with a real feel for what he plays. Today, a few weeks afterward, I got a great e-mail from his dad saying in part

Last night we had the pleasure of seeing Buddy Guy perform at The Mountain Winery in Saratoga. Buddy turned 70 last month. Buddy did his customary walking down into the crowd playing his guitar.

When he walked past us I said, “Buddy: my son can play some blues guitar!” He just smiled. About a half hour later he introduced a young player he had met at the airport. He was about 10 years old. After that kid played Buddy said: “There’s a young man in the house whose father says he can play. Let’s get him up here on the band stand.”

My nephew jammin’ with Buddy Guy

[When he went up on stage] Buddy asked him: “Do you know your keys?” J. said yes. Buddy told J. to tell the band what he wanted to play.

J.: “Slow blues in the key of G”.

When the crowd (of about 1700) saw that he could really play, they were on their feet. When J. handed Buddy’s guitar back to him, J. told Buddy, “I love you, Man!”

Buddy’s response: “I love you too.”

How about that. My nephew J. has a lot of stuff ahead of him, but this has to be a terrific stepping stone to the life he’s going to have.

Congratulations, J. You’re a special young man. I look forward to seeing you up on stage.

The Kid Can Play

3 Quarks brings us a superb article on Jack T. Chick, the loosely-wrapped evangelist who has made his mark as the author of fundamentalist Christian tracts. They can be found wherever his minions plant them, and also online. They feature Satanists with Semitic features, mad scientists who can’t refute creationist babble, and highly-developed paranoia that you can share – if only you’re willing to join up.

Jennifer Ouellette gives us an excellent insight into the “Heart of Darkness” – the article is worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few excerpts:

Chick took the biblical exhortation to spread the Gospel very much to heart . . . he hit upon the idea of evangelical tracts, inspired by their use as mass-market propaganda by Chinese communists. He worked days as a technical illustrator at Astro Science Corporation, and drew his comics at night. His first, and most popular, tract, This Was Your Life, appeared in 1964, in which a drunken, lustful, godless protagonist dies suddenly and is forced by an angel to view scenes from his “wasted life” before being condemned to the fires of hell. It is still in print today.

. . .

Chick comics are nothing more than propaganda masquerading as harmless entertainment. Their only purpose – overtly stated by Chick himself – is to quite literally scare the hell out of us. It’s a tried-and-true method of manipulation, used to great effect by evangelical groups in their zeal to “win souls for Christ.”

. . .

So what? You might be thinking. People like a good scare now and then, and besides, it’s only fiction. But it’s far more subversive than one might realize, especially since the line between fact and fiction is so easily blurred when it comes to things like Bibical prophecies and religious beliefs . . . CNN interviewed two writers of fiction as if they were expert scholars on the Middle East . . . That’s right up there with Congress asking Michael Crichton to give expert testimony on climate change.

Great stuff. Tip o’ the hat to The Nonist.

In the Day, as we used to say, it was updated daily and worth reading every day: Suck – “a fish, a barrel and a smoking gun.” It was a blog of sorts before there really were blogs, a political humor magazine like no other that was incisively witty and very topical. And yes, it was updated daily. It’s all still there, but hasn’t been updated since they famously went on vacation on June 8, 2001 and never came back.

Suck also featured terrific cartoon art by Terry Colon. While the Suck era is over, Terry Colon is still on line and has his own eponymous site.

In addition to reprinting some stuff from Suck, however, there are some great articles, profusely illustrated. For an example, check out How Planes Fly, which is one of the most cogent and entertaining description of that subject I’ve ever read.

It’s good to see that one of Suck’s best contributors is still fighting the good fight of signal against noise on the Internet.

New Sisyphus has written an excellent article about the emerging truth of our enemy. It appears under the title The Cultural Tide Is Turning

I have long held that one of the benefits of having Islamic Fascists for enemies is that they are the kind of men who are so sure of themselves and their cause that they are largely unable to lie about what their goals are and how they intend to meet them.

. . .

On balance, however, most Islamists believe their cause to be so just, so obvious and so in line with the yearning of human beings that they see no real need to hide what they believe. That impulse, combined with the aggressive confidence on display across the Islamic Civilization right now, leads them to say what they mean and mean what they say.

Unfortunately, too many on the left don’t recognize it, even when it’s said in plain English.

For every “we can negotiate with these people” speech that comes from any governments’ spokesman, people are seeing claims from Islamists being reported that state quite clearly that there is nothing to negotiate about: convert or die . . . with the propaganda campaign in full swing, more and more people – not the true believers, not the conservatives, not us wingnuts – of average, everyday, non-jihadi obsessed natures are beginning to ask themselves: who are these people, what the hell do they want and why are they living here?

There was an interesting exchange on a talk radio program I was listening to a few weeks ago. A caller said that we should be negotiating with Hezbollah, not letting Israel kick the crap out of them.

“All right,” the host said, “you be the negotiator; I’ll be Hezbollah. We sit down at the table. What do you say?”

“What do you want?” the caller said.

“We want all the Jews dead and the rest of the world to convert to Islam,” the host answered. “You help us do that, and then we can talk to you.”

The caller didn’t have any response to that. But that’s the real problem, isn’t it? We can’t communicate with a culture that doesn’t want to coexist.

And more and more, as the CAIR spokesmen are given a free pass, as our media continues to gloss over the mania in the Islamic world, as our governments tell us there is nothing to worry about except failing in our duty to embrace diversity, as our law enforcement officials rush to tell us the latest massacre of Jewish women in the United States was not terrorism, people are going to start asking themselves:

Despite what I keep on hearing, when a people keep telling me they are going to kill me and desire my and my country’s destruction, shouldn’t I believe them?

Shouldn’t we stop them?

Yes. This has to stop. Sisyphus calls CAIR a fascist front group and he’s close to the mark, I think. While “condemning all acts of terrorism”, they waste bandwidth complaining about the use of the term Islamic Fascists to describe Islamic fascists. It’s a “hot button term”, they say. It “harms our nation’s image and interests worldwide.”

The only problem with that assertion is that it means nothing. Our nation’s image and interests are of no consequence to the Islamic fascists. They hated us when we were trying to “understand” them; they hated us when we tried to “make peace” with them. They have always hated us, and they will always hate us. And “us” means in particular the United States and Israel.

Oh, and by the way, this particular host ran afoul of CAIR a year ago, and a year ago it cost him his job with WMAL, a Disney/ABC affiliate. He refused to apologize.

There’s an old story about science fiction and Islam. “Why are there no Moslems in science fiction?” someone asks. “Because it takes place in the future,” the other guy answers. I’m developing the prequel to my science fiction series, and I’ve been trying to sort out the 21st-century background to my 22nd-century universe; more and more I think there will have to have been some sort of apocalypse that decimates the Islamic world. In my milieu, it doesn’t take the rest of humanity with it . . .