January 23, 2016

Viva Trump!

Some 6 centuries ago the Roman Catholic Church, my Church, began to sell
indulgences. Indulgences were “Get out of jail free” cards. Sins, whether venial or mortal could have their punishment - Time in Purgatory or forever in Hell as described by Dante – lessened or forgiven

Like most Renaissance Italianate – Did I just repeat myself? – things, it quickly led to wretched excess. Alas, the practice caught the eye of a pain in the ass inquisitive Augustinian monk in Germany, Martin Luther by name.

The rest is, as is oft-times said, History.

I intend to bring back indulgences.

At my daughter Courtenay’s wedding I gave gifts to 3 dear friends of mine, 2 of whom are now dead. One of the gifts was an autographed first edition of National Review. If you don’t know William F. Buckley, Jr. stop reading. Now.

Let me add that I have 17 years of bound copies of National Review. For 10 years I was an annual contributor to their foundation.

Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Burke, Madison, Bastiat, Weaver, Hayek, Maritain, Burnham, Chambers, Cicero, Kipling, Johnson, Eliot, Hart, Solzhenitsyn, Brownson, Nock, Meyer, de Tocqueville, Friedman, Percy, Belloc, Nisbet, Chesterton, Lewis for starters. An “A” team for sure. Feel free to add other names featured in NR.

When the roll is called for any other magazine of ideas it is a short thing. The Nation? The New Republic? America? The New Yorker? Of course they were well written but it was like eating a bowl of whipped cream and meringue. There was, is, no “there” there.  Rawls? Chomsky? Odets? Hellman? Half the Democratic Senators being racist? The sale of their souls from August 22, 1939 to June 21, 1941? “The triumph of hope over experience”?  Results? Who needs them! It’s expectations that count.

Modern American Liberals are like a nest of vipers being let loose in a crowded church. Conservatism, however it is defined, is the truth serum, the sting of holy water to the vampire that allows escape from the offenses to Logic that mALs revel in. It would be bad enough if it were limited to magazines and the sere groves of academe. I suggest the evidence of your own eyes would be the realization that the only promise that the man in the White House has kept is the one where he said he would fundamentally change this country. Give him credit, however perverse, that he said what he was going to do before he did it.

As an Irish-Catholic born and raised in Bayonne, NJ, and thus a genetically designated Democrat, I confess to two things, one of which the consequences preclude any relief by indulgences be they plenary or partial. It was the only vote I ever regretted casting. 

LBJ – 1964

My betters told me that if Goldwater won we would have 2,000,000 men in Vietnam and we would have race riots. How could I vote for that?

History has a way of intruding.

“How sad of all the things that men endure

how few laws or kings can cause or cure.”

Sitting on the sidelines, keeping a careful chronicle, was the National Review. It was a contemporary version of “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”.

NR was my Damascus moment.

I, by virtue of being a true Conservative, one steeped in both the 25 century old tradition and the practical application of today’s politics, hereby grant any number of indulgences sufficient to get Conservatives to help elect Donald Trump as the next President of the United States. 

We must summon him like the citizens of Rome summoned Cincinnatus to save the Republic. I promise to spend the first 100 days of his term trying to convert him to the pure, sacred form of Conservatism. I shall start by reading William F Buckley’s columns to him. I will summon his ghost to read “Up From Liberalism” to him at meals. 

Since all my capital is tied up in debt the only legacy I can leave for the benefit of my Texas ladies is Western Civilization. We are in a time of limitless peril. We “are being watched by large and awful faces from beyond and on those faces there is no smile”.

Who will be our Horatius at the bridge? 

Hillary Clinton? Curly Biden? Bernie, the Bombastic Bolshie?

As to National Review, Buckley would respond to an irate subscriber who wrote demanding that the cancel his subscription. “Cancel your own Goddamn subscription” he would say.

Cancel, don’t cancel.

Come to me with your doubts. It is time for Trump. 

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET