Under threat of assassination by a the Blood Tubs, disguised as a woman and guarded by armed Pinkerton agents, Abraham Lincoln stole into Washington DC in March of 1861 amid chaos and rebellion. One month later, April 12, 1861, in Charleston, South Carolina, Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard gave the honor of firing the first shot of the war to a civilian, a small man named Edmund Ruffin. There has been, as yet, no firing on Fort Sumter moment, but it will come, though we do not yet know who or what will play the role of Edmund Ruffin. We are in a civil war, even though at the moment only one side is fighting. The problem for the side that is fighting, the Radical Left, is that the other side is bigger, stronger and better armed. It is commonly believed that half the country is radical Leftist, but it is not. Not everyone who voted Democrat wants to tear the country apart. That fraction of the Democrat Party we call the Radical Left is just that, a fraction, and it is they who are driving the country toward a Fort Sumter moment. And when it comes, the radical Left will be utterly destroyed, the few survivors curled up in a foetal position and crying for their mommas. It will not be the military or the police that will take them out, they are too disciplined to completely eradicate the scum. No, the job will be done by ordinary guys who have had enough. Cop killing Black Lives Matter, you are warned. Black clothed masked rioters paid by George Soros, you are warned. Political enablers of anarchy, you are warned. A man named Edmund Ruffin thought it would be fun to pull the lanyard and send an iron ball hurtling toward a big, brick fort sitting in the middle of Charleston harbor. Just having some fun. There are a lot of Edmund Ruffins running around, egged on by the press, their professors, the Democrat Party. You are warned. Beware the enraged white man, for none of you, not the radicals, not the press, not the professors, not the Democrat Party, will like Reconstruction.

While you’re chanting death to Whitey you demand we bend the knee
And confess our sins and cower but you will not hear our plea
To be left alone to lead our lives without your screaming fits
As you trash our Constitution and you tear our laws to bits
A hard working man is privileged because his skin is white
While elitist college snowflakes burn down buildings as their right
You are lucky little children that so far no Sumter act
Just the steady drip harassment till the boiling becomes fact
It is then that you will find that you have seen your final sun
And your dying eyes discover pulling lanyards is no fun

In his epic poem on the mighty oak, the great Roman poet Quercus Deciduous, wrote:

A giant oak, his branches spread
Beholds the scene with quiet pride
The young man to be shortly bled
That man’s great love be shone
The Druid in his cloak of white
So loving of the mistletoe
Of which the gods take all delight
Prepares the altar stone
The sacrifice stands quiet, near
Hands bound, the mistletoe is blessed
The Druid’s chant rings in his ear
The blade all sins atone
The mistletoe accepts the blood
The sacrifice is placed with joy
Into the bog, deep in the mud
To sleep in peace, alone
The gods are satisfied, they share
Their joy with countless forest oaks
Who tend the mistletoe they bear
Through which the gods make known
Their love for mankind and to show
Their keeping whole the people who
Revere the oak and mistletoe
And sacrifice condone
For only sacrifice reveals
The hunger of the human soul
For that which only loving heals
And born in mind and bone

The Left knows what we need, The Donald knows what we want.

The Senator will pass a bill
A man whose organs bleed
That takes what’s mine against my will
For things I do not need
The tax man says here are the forms
Pay on the dotted line
A portion goes to safe space dorms
The rest of it is mine
My doctor says Obamacare
Is almost dead, long due
And then he looks, a steady stare
And says and so are you
The government takes all my stuff
I’m almost skin and bone
The Donald says enough’s enough
We’ll just leave you alone

In which the Universe resonates with the sound of strings, unheard by all but the very young and the very old.

A summer night, a dreaming child
The stars alight, the evening mild
The song is heard, though not a sound
No spoken word, yet all around
The velvet strings, the golden chords
That tell of kings, and great rewards
The childhood dreams, the secret smile
The music streams, as all the while
Among the stars, the planets play
The deep voiced Mars, who bids thee stay
And listen to, the tones so bright
That glisten too, and spreads the night
With dreams of elves, and faery queens
Of book filled shelves, and magic beans
Of knights of old, and ladies fair
With hearts of gold, and flowing hair
And so to sleep, my darling one
Your soul to keep, my darling son

Reality has no purpose; its only function is to be. What we see, what we feel, what we think we understand is but the weaving of supposed reality into the daily fabric of our lives. Every living creature throughout the universe has its own reality, never duplicated, never shared. That is the eternal reality.

The moving world as dimly seen, the quickly fleeting thought
Is but the shadowed woven fabric being falsely wrought
On looms of fired neurons planting fertile, phantom seeds
That quickly stream like stardust on bright strings of shining beads
Of purest light of dancing photons, flamed of changing hues
Of changing vistas, changing shadows, swiftly changing views
The weaving fabric tells of future and its golden gleams
The woven fabric shows the past is torn and shattered dreams
Till loom and weaver wrap the fabric of reality
Around the prism of the truth and its finality
That shows reality is woven shadows dimly clear
And not at all what is or was as it seems to appear

Time is an illusion, but the past is not, for the calendar doesn’t lie. For me, the remembered past will always be neither better nor worse, but simply the timeless present.

As children do, I once beheld the distant stars
Aflame on moonless nights like glinting shields
Converting the black sky to massed and shining fields
Of stern and gilded warriors on guard
Much later I discovered that this was not so
That stars were simply fires lit by God
To show the way to mariners who slowly plod
The vast and empty sea of my back yard

I navigated ageing just by being there
And soon I found that I had finished school
I found her working in a small firm steno pool
But soon enough reality took hold
A family depended on my working hard
And so I did, as so did all of you
The stars of moonless nights a dark and faded view
The warriors on guard now dim and cold

For time is an illusion, but the stars can wait
They wait till we are home, our journey paid
When once again we see the star-bright fire laid
Upon the deep black distant marbled sky
More brilliant than a thousand fiercely burning suns
That shines upon the sea of my backyard
Where now it’s I who stands at ease on solemn guard
Where mariners and gilded soldiers lie

So silent and so peaceful that they seem asleep
In serried ranks beneath the dreaming past
Where present aimless dreaming flights must be recast
Into the fresh dreamed dreams of yesterday
To be remembered far into the distant time
Where mariners and gilded soldiers take
The wonders hardly wondered till they rise and wake
Remembered pasts where gilded soldiers play

For those who have not already read it, I heartily recommend Dreadnought, by Robert K. Massie. A truly magnificent account of Jackie Fisher and the building of HMS Dreadnought in the face of fierce opposition from most of the higher echelons of the Royal Navy. (The equally magnificent sequel, Castles Of Steel, takes the dreadnoughts through WW1 and the clash with Germany.) The pre-dreadnought Royal Navy had some 68 battleships, some three times the number of her nearest competitor, and Dreadnought made all 68 obsolete, removing Royal Navy superiority and taking everyone down to zero. But Fisher saw that if he didn’t build a heavily armored all big gun battleship, someone else, probably Germany, would. In the United States, Teddy Roosevelt had just built The Great White Fleet, and overnight it too was obsolete, leading the US Navy to join Great Britain and Germany and embark on a dreadnought building program of its own in a departure from a long national policy of isolation that has held to this day. So the building of HMS Dreadnought had consequences far beyond being the first next generation battleship.

All big guns and speed to boot
Her 15” big guns could shoot
At ships hull down, near out of sight
To obsolete foes overnight
Remarkably, a Donald tweet
Like Dreadnought, makes quite obsolete
The politics that went before
And drove a dagger to the core
Of politics that wowed the crowd
By doing something not allowed
He’s keeping promises he’s made
The dagger deep, the twisted blade
Undoing the Obama mess
We pray that God the Trump man bless

Sigmund Freud famously said “What does woman want?” Today we must ask What does progressivism want? They will tell you they want peace on earth, equality, prosperity, security and happiness. They will cheerfully agree that La Dolce Vita is the ultimate goal. Do not believe them.

Progressivism has one goal
Progressivism wants your soul
They want to put you on the dole
Thus binding you to them
They want to tell you how to live
And as a further additive
Decide how much that you must give
To show your love for them
Progressives want to keep their sheep
In shuttered spaces made to keep
Them safe from shadows that may creep
And grateful thus to them
The Left believes a tiny slice
Of leftist thought at little price
Will cause the sheep to sacrifice
Their lives and souls for them
Forever in a magic haze
Of silver nights and golden days
So wonderful it will amaze
And all because of them

A stumped and puzzled Sigmund Freud once cried in exasperation, “What does woman want?” I believe I have the answer.

The women’s movement shorn of lust
Dawned as the Pill became a must
And turned our little daughters into tramps
By telling them that sex is fine
As long as the man buys the wine
And there was nothing wrong with being vamps
The female body was a shrine
Belonged to no one, but was thine
To do with as a lady damn well pleased
No longer shrinking, sad and shy
Just walk right up to any guy
And smile to watch him squirm at being teased
Blunt language, the four letter word
That in the past was seldom heard
From dainty female lips was on display
As women swore like lumberjacks
And posed seductive on their backs
While smiling in an ingénue-ish way
Oh it was fun some little while
But soon the ladies changed their style
And politics took hold of female bods
They marched for causes they were told
Would show that women too were bold
And Steinem, Bella Abzug were their gods
So here we are, the women’s game
Where men will always get the blame
For everything that happened since the Flood
They claim they only want what’s fair
They claim they only want their share
But we all know that what they want is blood

Everything has a half-life, and the half-life of socialism is only slightly greater than that of the fruit fly. The pendulum, when it starts to swing, never stops at the vertical, but always continues until it reaches the opposite extreme. The Common Market was a good idea, but not enough for the socialists, and so they gave the people of Europe the European Union, run from Brussels by unelected bureaucrats. If almost half of Europeans under the age of thirty are unemployed and have no prospect of employment, how long does anyone believe this condition will continue? The answer is clear. It will not be long before the young look about for political alternatives, as they are now doing. Nationalism is not so quietly gaining ground, and the EU has no power to prevent the collapse of the socialist model. The only question is, Will the swing from the soft Left ultimately lead back to the hard Left, back to totalitarianism, or will it lead to free market democracy? Given the history of Europe, at the moment it’s a flip of the coin.

And so it ends, a man, a horse
With cheering crowds and joy of course
The motorcades, the throbbing drums
The doling out of misers crumbs
The strong in charge, the weak on knees
With bird pecked bodies hung from trees
The rule of law a notion scorned
No memory, the past unmourned
But all was calm, the old way gone
The continent the strong man’s pawn
But then, by chance, the coin may light
On heads and all may be all right
But socialism, when it dies
Has always led to whimpered cries