…to all my Tribe Readers for tomorrow.
Gmar Chatimah Tova, y’all.
Category: Deep Thoughts
9/11
And in memoriam: Pavane
For those who want to spend a half-hour or so in quiet contemplation, here’s Fauré’s Requiem.
Serious Stuff
This is the best socio-political essay of the past 50 years, because it describes irrefutably what has happened to our so-called leaders (he calls them the Permanent Managerial Class, or PMC) as Afghanistan has reverted to a Muslim emirate.
It’s not too long — and even if it is, it will be the best time you’ve spent all day, perhaps all year. It’s impossible to summarize (like all good essays), but here’s my favorite part:
How long it will take for their institutions to disappear, or before they end up toppled by popular discontent and revolution, no one can know. But at this point, I think most people on some level now understand that it really is only a matter of time.
Go there now, and read all of it. I’ve read it three times. (Thankee, Insty)
Oldie But Goodie
From Longtime Buddy Mervyn*, and especially for my Tribe Readers:
ZEN JUDAISM
If there is no self,
Whose arthritis is this?
Be here now.
Be someplace later.
Is that so complicated?
Wherever you go, there you are.
Your luggage, that’s another story.
Drink tea and nourish life.
With the first sip…joy.
With the second…satisfaction.
With the third, peace.
With the fourth, a danish.
Accept misfortune as a blessing.
Do not wish for perfect health
Or a life without problems.
What would you talk about?
The journey of a thousand miles
Begins with a single “Oy.”
There is no escaping karma.
In a previous life, you never called,
You never wrote, you never visited,
And whose fault was that?
Zen is not easy
It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have?
Bupkes.
Let your mind be as a floating cloud.
Let your stillness be as the wooded glen.
And sit up straight. You’ll never meet
God with such rounded shoulders.
*My buddy Mervyn looks so Jewish that even at bar mitzvahs, people ask: “Who’s that Jewish-looking guy?” 
That said, he’s the worst Jew since Genghis Khan. Frum, he is not.
Juxtaposition
Very interesting piece by Max Morton at American Greatness. One passage caught my attention in particular:
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what country you come from, what god you worship, or what political ideology you believe in. When a man has no options, when no hope remains, when for him there is no tomorrow . . . he will fight with ferocity and fury not of this world. It is worth considering this fact—written in history from Thermopylae to the Alamo and to the Warsaw ghetto—when attempting to impose one’s will on another.
He’s talking about Afghanistan and the timeless futility of trying to achieve anything in that shithole. But read on through to the end, when he brings it home:
If we listen to the words of the politicians and their bureaucrat handlers in Washington, we can hear the language of the imperative, “Submit,” with no post-capture options. And, if we look at the current zero-sum game of political warfare, cancel culture, and the weaponization of the Justice Department, federal law enforcement, and intelligence agencies, we can see deliberate preparations to answer traditional Americans’ “or what?” response.
But:
In reality, [our current ruling elites] are not strong enough—or smart enough—to wield the command “Submit.” So, having picked up the sword, they will watch it be taken from their hands and then used against them by their very enemy—traditional Americans, who understand there will be no tomorrow, and in whose eyes there is a fierceness, a fury, that is beyond their world. It will be a fatal miscalculation that will bring about the downfall of a cursed and failed American ruling elite.
We can only hope.
Perils Of Age
The other day I was skimming Teh Intarwebz, idly looking at smut pics of pretty women, and saw this creature:
I had (and still have) no idea who she is, but my lecherous gaze was somewhat tempered by my feeling of guilt for ogling a teenage girl. (Of course, it turns out that she’s actually 30, so my guilt was misplaced.)
Which brings me to my point.
As we get older — I’m fairly sure I’m not alone in this — everyone not looking like the late Prince Philip looks about twelve years old, and I often wonder when we started promoting adolescents to positions of power and authority.
I’m not even talking about celebrity women, who with the aid of surgery can look decades younger than their actual age. I’m talking about everyday people we see on television, who are supposedly in charge of some important function, but who seem to still need adolescent acne cream.
Then again, who cares? As long as we can ogle the likes of Carol Vorderman, Annabella Sciorra or Jennifer Grey (all aged 60):
…I don’t really care that foreign policy is being run by someone who looks like Doogie Howser, or that Steve Urkel somehow became President of the United States.