A group of Mexican women calling themselves “wetback wives” have launched a website asking the US government to deport their husbands and reunite their families. Apparently, not all male immigrants are merely seeking a better life, but just looking for an excuse to walk out on the hard part of family responsibilities. Multiculturalism is bad for everyone involved…
As a counterbalance to my anti-feminist post of last week, I thought it appropriate to feature one of my favorite Kipling poems, “The Female of the Species”. The tragedy of feminism is that it actually disenfranchises women of their natural role, of their much more important work in the home, in the church and the community. How can the Proverbs 31 woman “consider a field” and buy it if she’s stuck in a cubicle grinding out corporate spreadsheets?
The particular theme of this poem is the natural willingness of a woman to kill for her children- the crowning beauty and grace of all creation, the epitome of love and gentleness, turned instantly into a cold-blooded killer when her babies are threatened. A beautiful paradox illustrated by the master pen of Kipling. This, folks, is real female empowerment.
The Female of the Species
1911
When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
‘Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Man’s timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husband, each confirms the other’s tale –
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Man, a bear in most relations-worm and savage otherwise, –
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.
Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger — Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue — to the scandal of The Sex!
But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.
She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity — must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions — not in these her honour dwells.
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.
She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.
She is wedded to convictions — in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies! –
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.
Unprovoked and awful charges — even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons — even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish — like the Jesuit with the squaw!
So it cames that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice — which no woman understands.
And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern — shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.
One of the greatest embarrassments for Marxists of all varieties these days is the post-Apartheid experience of South Africa. Since the fall of that system, South Africa has gone from being the economic powerhouse of Africa (with a GDP exceeding the rest of the continent combined) to a basketcase whose distinction these days is as the rape capital of the world- a London firm actually sells “rape insurance” to South African women to cover the cost of AIDS treatments. Their esteemed President, Mr. Mbeki, believes that AIDS is actually not caused by a virus, but rather is a plot of the white man to hold down African achievement, and has funded “alternative medicine” studies to test the prescriptions of native witch doctors- the most popular of which, tragically, is the belief by many Africans that sex with a virgin cures AIDS- this obviously exacerbates the rape situation.
What should be most embarrassing for the Marxists is the racial record of the new government. Whereas apartheid was physical separation and political disenfranchisement in an otherwise free society, the new government has mandated all sorts of racial preference laws. Among these are regulations that all businesses must be at least 50% black-owned, extensive affirmative action programs, gun confiscations from law-abiding citizens, and seizing land and property- not to mention the predictable lack of crime prosecution. So garden-variety oppression, mild by African standards, has been replaced by Communist anarcho-tyranny.
In the middle of all of this is a little-discussed group of Christian people called the Afrikaners, or Boers, Dutch-descended Protestants who have formed the backbone of the productive part of the country for 200 years. Very few people realize that South Africa was mostly uninhabited when the Boers arrived, save for a few primitive nomadic Stone Age tribes. Only later did Zulus and other tribes now claiming oppression move in and try and claim the land. In fact, much of the racial problem in South Africa stems from the fact that so many blacks from other parts of Africa moved there for a better life- to get a job and make a living beyond subsistence farming- and to escape the much more onerous oppression (usually of the machete-wielding limb-chopping variety) of their fellow black tribes in their native lands. A curfew and an assigned neighborhood sounded pretty good compared to getting your arm chopped off, and so the apartheid government actually had a huge problem with illegal immigration, esp. since the relatively small British and Dutch population was hungy for cheap labor. Is this beginning to sound familar?
The Boers have a rich history as a Christian people, their adventures in many situations reading like something out of the Old Testament. Consider the Afrikaner holiday called “The Day of the Vow”:
The day is observed as a religious holiday by some Afrikaners in memory of The Battle of Blood River between a group of about 470 Voortrekkers and a much larger Zulu force on 16 December 1838.
Before the battle, the Voortrekkers had received word that a force of 10 to 20 thousand Zulu was approaching. Certain of being overwhelmed, the Voortrekkers assumed a prime defensive location at what is now known as Blood River. As the Zulus approached, the Voortrekkers prayed that they would not be killed. The name Day of the Vow stems from this prayer, in which they made a covenant to God that, if they were delivered, they would build a church there and keep the day as a holy Sabbath for them and all that followed in their lineage. At the end of the battle, only three Afrikaners were wounded, although over 3,000 Zulu warriors had lost their lives. The Voortrekkers built a church at the location, and passed the vow to their descendants.
Unfortunately, and as I will cover similarly in a subsequent post on the War Between the States, such a Christian people could not be tolerated by the coming age. In 1899, the British initiated a war with the Boers over gold deposits in their lands- in short, the British wanted them and the Boers weren’t keen on letting them have them. Playing out much like our own conflict, the Boers proved hard to conquer, inflicting mass casualties on the British at little cost to themselves. The British, like the Union, could only win by breaking Christian law and declaring war on women and children- in this case, coining the word “concentration camps” for where Boer women and children were taken after having their farms and houses burned, often starving to death (despite British food surpluses, much like how Lincoln starved Confederate POW’s in a land of plenty) or dying of disease in unsanitary conditions.
One of the leaders of the war was a general named Koos De La Rey:
He married Jacoba Elizabeth Greeff and the couple settled on the farm Elandsfontein. They had ten children. De la Rey was deeply religious and a small pocket Bible was rarely out of his hand. He had formidable looks – a long neatly trimmed brown beard and a high forehead with deep-set eyes that gave him a prematurely patriarchal appearance.
He is generally regarded as the most powerful and unyielding of the Boer generals during the Second Boer War and as one of the leading figures of Afrikaner nationalism. As a guerrilla, his tactics proved extremely successful. De la Rey opposed the war until the last, but when he was once accused of cowardice during a Volksraad session, he replied that if the time for war came, he would be fighting long after all those clamoring for war had given up. This proved to be the case.
In South Africa today, the Boers are pretty much prohibited from any expression of national pride. In fact, celebration of the Day of the Vow can be considered a “hate crime”, while of course African tribal groups are encouraged to celebrate their history and holidays. Again, does this sound familiar?
So you can imagine the stir when a young Afrikaner folk singer named Bok van Blerk releases a rock anthem called “De La Rey” that becomes a cultural sensation:
The question goes out, and the response is always the same.
“I’m proud of my language and culture. Are you?” Bok van Blerk demands of the emotionally charged crowd.
Up goes the cheer, and then comes the song – an Afrikaans folk number about a Boer war general that has become a sensation in South Africa as an anthem for young whites who say they are tired of being made to feel guilty about the apartheid past.
The song, De La Rey, has swept into rugby matches and pubs where Afrikaners belt out its plea for the old Boer general to come back and lead. Many stand with a hand over their heart as they sing the lyrics about a “nation that will rise up again” as if it were a national anthem.
But while the song is a best seller among South Africa’s 2.5 million Afrikaners, it is also generating a heated debate about what its success means.
Bok van Blerk characterises De La Rey as a stand against historic guilt.
“Young Afrikaners are tired of having the apartheid guilt trip shoved down their throats. This song makes them proud of their heritage,” he said.
The song is about an Afrikaner Boer war general, Koos de la Rey, who opposed war with the British because he did not believe the Afrikaner republics could win. But once war began de la Rey threw himself into the fight, playing a heroic role in the British defeat at Magersfontein.
The government, obviously, is not very keen about this young man, as South Africans do not enjoy free speech, esp. when spoken in a Dutch tongue:
The Department of Arts and Culture responded … warning that “those who incite treason, whatever methods they employ, might well find themselves in difficulties with the law.” The Democratic Alliance opposition party responded by saying that the song was not nearly as potentially subversive as ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma’s song Umshini wami (Zulu for “bring me my machine gun”).
Youtube music video and translated lyrics below:
On a mountain in the night
we lie in the darkness and wait
In the mud and blood I lie cold, grain bag and rain cling to meAnd my house and my farm
burned to ashes,
so that they could catch us
But those flames and that fire
burn now deep, deep within meChorus:
De la Rey, De la Rey
Will you come to lead the Boers?
De la Rey, De la Rey
General, General, as one man we’ll fall in around you
General De la ReyAnd the Khakis that laugh, a handful of us against their whole great might,
with the cliffs to our backs, they think it’s all overBut the heart of the Boer lies deeper and wider,
that they’ll still discover
At a gallop he comes, the Lion of the West TransvaalBecause my wife and my child are perishing in a concentration camp,
and the Khakis’ reprisal is poured over a nation that will rise up againGeneral De la Rey
De la Rey, De la Rey
Will you come for the Boers?
We are ready
In my criticisms of the megachurch/seeker-friendly movement, I try hard to avoid reactionary thinking. There are some people who, seeing the problems associated with the sort of growth a megachurch brings, find themselves opposed to growth itself in reaction. My opinion is that a healthy church is a growing church- and by “growing” I mean in numerical numbers over a long period of time, not short-term trends. I also do not mean “growing” in the postmodern sense of constantly seeking new vanities, fads, programs, etc. I’m talking about numbers, people, here. We have this on Biblical authority:
Isaiah 9:7: Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.
I have bolded the word increase. In calculus terms, the first derivitive of church numbers will always be positive. We have it on Scriptural authority that the Church will always grow.
What is the engine of this growth historically? It’s not evangelism and it’s not missions, in the programmatic sense of those words. It’s Christian families having Christian children. God has clearly ordained the family, the seed of believers, as His preferred method of growing the church. Missions, evangelism and revivals are secondary historically. The most efficient way to grow the church is to simply encourage Christians to have more children; of course, infants don’t pay tithes that support purchasing basketball arenas for your “church”.
Baptists, sometime early in American history, drifted into a sort of hyper-individualism, where one’s faith was not based so much on the objective truth of Scripture and the dispensation of Grace through the ordinances of God’s Church, but rather on a subjective emotional experience and “journey”.
In Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, it is the Scots-Irish “heart religion”, of camp meetings, invitations, and dramatic emotional turning points; this Baptist faith was tailor-made for the Celtic soul, and it turned a country of Scottish Presbyterians into Baptists in a generation. It was no longer enough to be simply born into the faith like most Christians historically, Protestant or Catholic, but rather each individual had to decide for himself which path to follow. Concepts that are rather loose Biblically (”a personal relationship with Jesus Christ”), and the attendent emotional dramatics associated with a heart-centered faith, began to replace the primacy of Scripture- if not formally (as Baptists have always been doctrinally studious), then at least practically by the retail evangelist.
This had some good effects. In the short-term, it tended to correct gross errors made by some who believed the faith of their parents was automatically valid for them (though, it must be stated that this was their error, as they would receive no sanction from any church, Baptist or not, for this position) . In the long run, however, this focus on individualism would lead to a focus on “hell avoidance” as a priority over everything else.
The logic runs something like this: people are dying without Christ, and we are dooming them to eternal loss if we do not do everything possible to turn them back. That means we need to distill the Gospel down to its bare minimum to maximize its appeal, and everything else beyond this minimum is negotiable. Now, for a while the Church coasted on centuries of tradition, and as the health of society generally improved between the 1700’s and the 1800’s (the 1800’s of the Victorians was a much more conservative and healthy society than the effete Enlightenment idealism of the 1700’s), this change in priorities had no effect. However, as the great cultural decline of the 1900’s began to take place, this change would have its effect.
The 1900’s saw the mass-commidization of everything: banking, retail, restaurants, even churches. There’s nothing particularly ground-breaking about the megachurch- it’s just the least common denominator in taste scaled up, no more significant than McDonald’s. Like McDonald’s, it’s mediocre, consistent and predictable. It’s an ok place to eat if there’s not a better choice available, and you know what you’re going to get. But nobody expects McDonald’s to become an authority on good food or release a recipe book.
In the same way, Rick Warren and Bill Hybels have appealed to the least common denominator of church leadership: the appeal of raw numbers, bigger facilities, bigger budgets and the human vanity of catching the bandwagon and pursuing the latest fad. And just like McDonald’s, their success is based on appealing to man’s weaknesses instead of his real needs. We don’t need a greasy hamburger, but it sure tastes better than steamed brocolli. And we don’t need a self-help sermon, but it makes us feel better than the offense of Christ crucified for sinners.
McDonald’s has a legitimate excuse: the market. Its purpose is to make money, and the shortest way to that destination is to appeal to our gluttony, not meet our nutritional needs. The Church, however, is supposed to be about the business of what we need, not what we want (the seeker-friendly word for this is “felt needs”).
In brief, here are the factors leading to the megachurch ascendancy:
1. Dissatisfaction with God’s provision of growth through the children of believers and supplemental evangelism/missions, switching a balanced approach with individual-centered “heart religion” entirely focused on numbers.
2. The reductionist approach of 1) sufficiently simplifies the operation of the church to allow for an industrial scaleup by the megachurch pastors.
Rick Warren is merely taking heart religion to its natural end with ruthless efficiency.
I’m not necessarily opposed to industrial scale-up. Standardization and mass economy can lead to improvements in quality with a reduction in cost. It is not unthinkable that a technological breakthrough of some sort could happen for the Church- if you’re a postmillenialist (as I am starting to lean), then it seems downright necessary.
But are Rick Warren and the seeker-friendlies leading this “Second Reformation” as they claim? Let us focus on results, not rhetoric.
We are now starting to see the first complete generation coming out of the Church who were entirely raised on the megachurch methodology of self-focused worship, self-help sermons and infotainment religion. And statistically, the Church has failed them.
Josh McDowell, the author of Evidence That Demands a Verdict, has recently written a book called The Last Christian Generation. This book is based mostly on a study conducted by the Barna Group (a Christian pollster) of teens in youth groups at “born again” churches. Remember, these are kids who attend church. Here are the findings:
Conclusions:
1. I think we must question the whole “seeker sensitive”, megachurch genre of authors. In my opinion, they have lost all credibility (I hear Rick Warren is worried about discipleship now in his church- which is great, except where’s the “sorry guys, guess I was wrong about watering down the message” memo?). For twenty-odd years, the church has been marketing itself to felt needs and pushing hard doctrine and Bible study under the rug. And now we see the fruit: we have a generation coming out of the church who have no idea what being a Christian even means. If the church can be compared to a tree, it is as if we have been sold a fertilizer that grew the branches (as toning down the offense of the cross will certainly draw greater numbers) but killed the fruit. And now, instead of admitting the mistake, we are just doing more of the same, expecting a different result. That’s a popular and useful definition of insanity!
2. Dave Ramsey talks about how the “me generation” attitude towards debt and consumption leads to the bondage of debt slavery today- and Ramsey’s prescription is not a quick fix, just hard work and no easy way out: as Dave says, “My advice comes from God and grandma.” We need to be looking to our grandparents and great-grandparents, the oldest in the church, for the wisdom and Biblical instruction of the old-time-religion that has sustained a Christian people for 400 years in the American South. That’s the only way to recover our priceless inheritance, before it’s too late, from the fruit in our young people that the megachurch, seeker-sensitive methodologies have wrought.
I think, in general, as we look at what has happened over the last 50 years, we have to give our grandparents and great-grandparents a lot of credit; they were right about nearly everything and the Baby Boomers, who thought they would change the world, were mistaken.
In other words, the doctrinal crisis in the church right now demands a big, fat “undo” button. It’s as if we had this beautifully formatted document in Microsoft Office, and then some chubby guy in a Hawiian shirt walks up and offers to “improve” it. He adds lots of clip art, logos and cutesy fonts, but deletes the text, which was the whole point of the document anyway. Our first reaction shouldn’t be to try and “work with” or “manage” his innovations- we need to find the undo button, and fast.
We need to dig out the worship music of the 1930’s, the children’s Sunday school curriculum of the 1930’s, and everything else we can find to undo this damage before it’s too late. Only once we’ve undone the damage by starting over can we begin to move forward with real, instead of false, progress.
“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” – C. S. Lewis
Just when you thought that Pakistani doctor and his family in your neighborhood are such nice people, Vanishing American blog exposes a tendency of even normal-appearing Muslims to snap randomly….
I will probably start doing the quotes of poetry and prose on Mondays, as that’s easier for starting the week than writing something of my own.
The following is a short little poem of Kipling’s relevant to our multi-culti immigration practices. Particularly salient is his line about “when the Gods of his far-off land shall repossess his blood”.
In the 1950’s, many Europeans thought Muslims were the perfect immigrants- moral to a fault, with a silly little faith no one took seriously, hard workers who didn’t drink and didn’t ask for much. Then resurgent Islam took hold in the latter half of the twentieth century, and now Europe is held by the neck by high-fertility Muslims amidst dying native populations. For Europe to recover her birthright, it will take a ruthlessness of leadership that will make Putin look like George Washington. Much evil could have been avoided by simply preventing the immigration in the first place. After all, simply refusing someone entry to your country is not immoral, because they have no right to it and they’re not any worse off as a result.
Similarly, the elites in our country think people from Mexico and Central American are the perfect docile workers, just like Europeans thought of Muslims. But history teaches us that no group of people wants to do dirty work for another group of people in the long term. And in a universal suffrage democracy, a large poor ethnic group of people will demand socialism to assuage their egos from the inevitable inequalities of a meritocratic society.
Democracy, Liberty, Multiculturalism.
Choose two.
The Stranger by Rudyard Kipling
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk–
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.
The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control–
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.
The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.
This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf–
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
Since I’ve become a parent, one of my favorite stores to visit is Pottery Barn Kids. While the merchandise is largely Chinese-made (but so is Ethan Allen these days!), the aesthetic of the children’s rooms, toys and furniture reminds me of a more innocent time for children, made all the more relevant when you consider the prevalence of slutty clothes for 3rd graders in every Wal-mart and JC Penney’s.
Now, PBK is NOT cheap, esp. when you consider you’re buying for kids. When visiting their store in Houston, you can’t help but notice all of the pretty moms with pretty kids looking around the store. What interests me the most are the toys they have for little girls: of course, the standard dollhouses and stuffed animals, but most interesting are the little pink ironing boards, pink play irons, pink dishwashers, pink kitchen appliances and pink refrigerators. Not only are they pink, they are done in a 1950’s aesthetic, harkening back to the days before feminism:
These toys are pretty much exclusively on the “little girl” side of the fully sex-segregated store. The “little boy” side has toys like airplanes, antique cars, fighting dinosaurs, and huge castles with working catapults.
Think of how enraging this must be to the ardent feminist. For fifty years, they have worked to deconstruct gender rules, to rebel against the order of nature, and convince women that their natural roles in the home are inherently oppressive and exploitive.
And now, in 2007, upper crust mommies are buying their little girls toys that demonstrate gender roles to them that are entirely inconsistent with the feminist worldview, in an aesthetic (retro 1950’s style) that is patently offensive to the feminist narrative.
The feminists said that the 1950’s housewife, largely liberated from the labor of her mother by labor saving devices like the dishwasher, confident in her status as the heart of the home, was actually being exploited by her husband and society at large. What the housewife really needed, according to the feminists, was to go to work in a cubicle somewhere in Corporate America, where she could find true fulfillment in a spreadsheet instead of in the lives of her children.
And this is why feminism is dead: it is a lie. Most corporate jobs are not glamorous, they are tedious, boring, and dehumanizing; they cannot compare to motherhood. It took women a generation to figure out the lie (I think they figured it out pretty quick myself, but were guilted into staying in the workforce longer by the relatively few hardcore feminist enforcers).
But now the damage has been done. The increase in the labor pool lowered wages for male breadwinners, and globalism and outsourcing has further weakened the ability of most families to survive on one income. Women were convinced by a lie to join the workforce, and now many, even if they realize the lie, cannot now escape, thus doubling the guilt of the feminists in their deception. Having harmed women by convincing them of the non-existent “fulfillment” of a career, they closed the exits and women cannot go back.
Thus, in a roundabout twist, the “stay at home” mom is now a status symbol, an indication (except in cases of uncommon frugality) that the male breadwinner has sufficient income to provide a middle class lifestyle on one salary; this is especially true in cities where the cost of living is higher. And the mommies are as uniformly pretty as their husbands are in earning power.
And why do these mommies buy their little girls gender-specific anti-feminist toys at Pottery Barn Kids? Simple: they are training them for their future role as a middle class stay at home mommy, and inoculating them against the downward social mobility associated with the feminist outlook on life.
Just another lesson in the undeniability of God and Nature in human affairs. Everything will eventually seek its own level- and as a wise man once said, a woman’s primary role ever was and ever will be as mothers and “keepers of home”.
After all, they’re only musicians and even though they criticized Bush for the wrong reasons, we can’t expect them to get the details right in their pretty little heads. This column says that to defend Bush these days, you have to be willing to defend throw ing border agents in jail for shooting smugglers, blowing CIA agents’ cover for political gain and getting thousands of GIs killed to create an Islamic republic.
Brilliant realpolitik from a promising young state legislator, Stacey Campfield, in Tennessee- he proposes death certificates for aborted babies, creating a public record of who gets an abortion. This would reduce abortions among yuppie women and their teenage daughters who would (and should) instead choose adoption if they wanted to maintain their anonymity. He also attempted to join the black caucus. Read his blog here.
Ding, Dong, the (Feminist) Witch is Dead:
Obama Sends a Shout-Out to His Homeboy Pastor Rick:
Huckabee Is Finished:
Nightline Report on the "Quiver Full" Movement:
This Warms My Heart: