Certain animals, horse, cattle, sheep, etc., are subject to what is commonly called “hoof-and-mouth” disease, which produces a (usually) non-lethal ulceration of both hooves and mouths.

Public speakers are subject to “hoof-IN-mouth” disease. They put their feet in their mouth, metaphorically speaking.

I assume no human is capable, physically, of performing such a bodily contortion, but speech contortion is common. Too common. We are watching some pundits making a career out of attempting to prove our current president is all-world at it. Perhaps so. That is for another time. My focus here is on another politician, Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, who recently put both feet in his fulsome mouth. Up to his knees.

Jesus used a magnificent metaphor about some religionists of his day when he said they were like some apothecaries (i.e., druggists) who, while compounding their medicines, would be careful to strain out a gnat but allow a camel—head, hide, hump, hooves and all—to remain in the mix. In that cautionary tale, he was saying, among other things, that such inconsistency is not a new species of disease in man’s moral pharmacopeia. It is constant. Was, is, and will be.

But back to Mr. Cuomo. Responding to the current president’s motto of “Make America Great Again,” he averred that “America was never that great.” One wonders: did he really mean to say what he said? If he believes America should not be classified as a “great” nation, which modern nation (how about “any nation ever”) would he suggest did, or does, deserve the label?” And anyway, how would such a status be proven? And who are the judges?

Cuomo’s statement calls into question exactly how much the man knows about his nation’s history. With all her problems—many of which are admittedly intransigent, what nation sent its best a hundred years ago to Europe to prevent our cousins there from succumbing to the Axis powers? Or what nation has ever done anything comparable to what America did in WWII to prevent all Europeans from speaking German? As a first language. What about fifty years of protecting them from the communists? What about the horrific price America paid in what is now South Korea and South Viet Nam, investments which allowed for the creation of two of the most powerful economies, managed by free peoples (!), in all of Asia?

What about almost 400,000 white (!) Americans—Union soldiers—giving their lives to liberate black slaves in our own country? Has anything remotely resembling that ever occurred in the long and tortuous history of humankind?

When is the last time anyone heard of France liberating another country? Or England? Or Russia? Or China? How about a South American country? Or any one of the more-than-fifty African nations? Or anybody else? For the New York governor, do those facts not distinguish America as an exceptional country, as possessing, at least to some degree, serious national greatness?

What other country in human history ever put many hundreds of thousands of her military personnel in countries around the world, as we do today, at astronomic financial costs, to guarantee safety for their free societies?

What other country in human history has received as many legal immigrants (maybe illegal as well!) as America? America is the world leader, in all human history, in that regard. 

To add to his oratorical feat, the governor said something else which, at best, is just as puerile: he said America can be called great only when all Americans are “fully engaged.” No one under the sun, including himself, knows what he might have meant. (I hear you shouting, “Duh! He means when everybody votes for his party!”) If he was referring to every American being involved in the political process, I say well and good! We revere our ancient forebears, especially the “enlightened” Greeks and Romans, for encouraging that.

As lamentable as political non-participation is, it is one of our treasured constitutional rights. Every Founding Father bewailed such lassitude, as we do, but they would have, one and all, said no law should countermand it.

That thing about everything important being taught in kindergarten is right. Rule 7 suggests, “Keep your feet off the furniture.” It might prove salutary to add, “and out of your mouth.”

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas

Chuck Todd, the NBC reporter, stated, during Easter week and on national American television, that Good Friday was actually a “Hokey” deal and saw nothing especially significant about it.

One supposes that before commenting about Jews one would need to know a bit about Torah, or if on Islam, something of the significance of Ramadan, and if on Christianity, perhaps a whiff of information about the significance of a day which memorializes, arguably, the most important event since the creation of the cosmos. If Todd doesn’t know the importance of the day, he’s hopelessly ignorant, and if he does know, insufferably bigoted. Which is probably the case.

Reporters are famous for occasionally assuming that well-known pontifical pose (they must practice it in journalism classes) and, with eyes flashing and nostrils flared, telling the great unwashed that their chief business is to “speak truth to power.” But are famous, literally, for never doing so, unless the power is held (or presumed to be held) by conservatives. Neither you nor I have ever heard a modern liberal reporter (the massive majority of American reporters) speak power to the abortion-crime syndicate. And don’t hold your breath until one labels Ramadan “hokey!”

Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychotherapist who has taken the western world by storm with his recently-published “12 Rules for Life” (which has become, in a matter of weeks, the most-published non-fiction book in all Canadian history) writes: “The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization (of Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil.)” (p. 104)

All Christians have known that for a long time now, and the “Bible event” makes it clear—as does common reason—that Christ’s final week on earth, the Passion Week, centering on Christ’s death on “Good Friday” and resurrection on Easter Sunday, is the linchpin of the entire story. See St Paul’s “If Christ be not risen…” passage in I Corinthians 15:12-19. The whole of biblical revelation hangs on that oft-stated fact.

Of course, we should not hate Todd. Or seek revenge on him. Or castigate him. Or maybe even reply to him. It is important, however—in view of the significance of Good Friday—that we feel hopeful for him. I recently saw a television special featuring the basketball phenom Pete Maravich; some say the best that ever played the game. One day he, along with another pro-basketballer, walked into the office at the church I was then pastoring. Several of us heard his story first hand: throughout his adult life, he was terribly gifted but terribly sad. He came to the point, late in his career, where he was deeply troubled—wrung out spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically. He thought, at times, of ending it all by suicide. He was not a Christ-follower, but he knew about it first-hand, from his wife and others. He told of the shocking event one morning when he woke up, immediately rolled out of bed, fell on his knees and heard himself begging God to save him. He said nothing that day about basketball (which was to culminate in his being elected to the NBA Hall of Fame and being chosen as one of the fifty best players in basketball history), but much about his new-found faith in Christ. He was stunned and stable, saved and sane. “Sitting, clothed and in his right mind…” like the man in the Bible. And he remained that way, vibrant with joy, until the end of his all-too-short life of forty years.

Something like that could happen to Chuck Todd. And he could spend the remainder of his short time here and his long eternity, like many of us, ashamed for missing for so long the true significance of human history and our own history, but now singing with Pete and all his spiritual clan on Easter Sunday morning—and on every other morning:

Up from the grave He arose,
With a mighty triumph over His foes;
He arose a victor from the dark domain,
And He lives forever with His saints to reign,
He arose! He Arose!
Hallelujah, Christ arose!

He says hokey. I say Hallelujah.

Three facts. That’s all you need to know to explain the current sexual landscape in America. It’s really not that complex. Three simple facts alone will explain it all.

FACT ONE: Generally speaking, males are aggressive. And they are aggressive sexually. Your eyes tell you that, your logic tells you that, nature tells you that, all of history tells you that. If you don’t believe anybody else, including the Bible, read Freud. He was a nut-job about a lot of things, but not about man’s aggressiveness. See his “Civilization and Its Discontents.” He said it was a human universal for males and that there was/is no cure for it, including the “illusion” of religion, and, specifically, Christianity. Expect it. Bet on it. Deal with it.

In the non-human animal kingdom, lions fight viciously to be “king of the hill,” not to gain acreage, but access, access, that is, to sexual privileges with all local lionesses. That is not totally unnatural to many male animals. None of that is to comment on masculine morality, however; it is to state a demonstrable fact. Expect it. Bet on it. Deal with it.

FACT TWO: Generally, speaking, all females of the animal kingdom, both human and non-human, have a powerful sexual effect on males. No normal female of the human species could possibly fail to realize that. It is written all over the human landscape. Want proof? Here is one of fifty obvious examples: whether a capitalist wants to sell cars, cabbages, or candidates, he will do so, about 97.3% of the time, by associating his product with skimpily-dressed well-formed young females. (Note the adjectives.) That is not by accident. The formula is magic. It’s market. It’s money. That is not a judgment on female morality. It is to state a demonstrable fact. Expect it. Bet on it. Deal with it.

FACT THREE: Who knows when the dam broke—in the 18th century “enlightenment,” the “flapper” twenties, or—most obviously and explosively—in the 1960’s in America—when “casual sex” (a societal blasphemic oxymoron) swept over the nation. “If it feels good, go for it!” “Have fun and let the devil take the hindermost.” “If she gets pregnant, run.” “If you become pregnant, kill the baby.” “This ain’t your father’s Oldsmobile.” The mantra became something like, “Who cares that the history of the race has proven that the nuclear family provides the best chance for personal and societal good, my body and my choices belong to me and to me only. And don’t talk to me about ‘being responsible.’ Butt outa my life!”

And thus, in our time and place, in such a nuclear atmosphere, the nuclear family has been replaced by the nuclearized non-family, lethal for individuals and society as well. No thoughtful person could possibly be surprised. It was all as inevitable as the sun-rise. Only myopic morons, out-IQd by turnips, thought differently.

The solution? Slowly. Seriously. Quietly. Patiently. Personally. Commitedly. Walk toward the light of the lessons of history. And the message of Him who created all three—males, females, and morals, and told us—repeatedly—how the three, in proper relationship, will, inevitably as sun-rise, create health in private and public life. In truth, that is the only hope for our survival in any meaningful sense. Maybe it’s not too late.

Will and Ariel Durant are helpful here. After completing their monumental eleven-volume “Story of Civilization,” they had this final word: “The greatest challenge for modern man is whether or not civilization can survive without the constraints and consolations of religion.” A personal assignment: ponder, studiously, the significance of those two words, “constraints” and “consolations.” America is in short supply and serious need of both. In any meaningful sense.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas

I am impelled to disgorge stuff that can only properly be labeled as absurd, but you will remember the ancient argument in logic, reductio ad absurdum, that is, reducing the position of your opponent to the point of absurdity. The subject here is “The Statues.”

You’ve heard, in purple outrage, seventy-eight dust-ups about our need to rename or destroy various statues, many relating to Founding Fathers and Civil War generals. Some might have escaped your notice:

(1)  A kerfuffle has arisen here in Texas calling for the re-naming of Ft. Hood (but one of tens of thousands of potential re-naming efforts in Texas alone) because John Bell Hood was a Confederate general in the Civil War.

(2)  And surely the Jefferson Memorial in D. C. has to go. Or be re-named, since Jefferson famously owned slaved. 

(3)  If one US memorial must be demolished (re-naming not being sufficient to erase the degradation of its honoree), it is the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. Re-naming it wouldn’t be severe enough because of his miscreant life of white supremacy. But didn’t he say plainly a thousand times that slavery was an evil thing which must finally die, and that the only reason he didn’t seek immediate abolition where it already existed was that to do so would destroy the union, i.e., the United States, and didn’t he send a nation to war, costing over 500 thousand lives, in behalf of blacks (the one time in human history when any nation went to war for the deliverance of blacks), and didn’t he actually pen, and fight for the adoption of the Emancipation Proclamation? Well, yes, he did all that and much more for blacks, but remember: many say he shouldn’t have cared a fig for saving a slave-honoring union. Further, we can’t be sure, we are told, that he was severe enough with his wife’s slavery connection. Her family, the Todds, owned slaves, which puts her too close to slavery to give her, and thus him, a pass. (Lincoln does confess to the Todd family pride; said God needed only one “d” and they needed two. Yes, of course, the war was about other matters, but had there been no slavery there would have been no civil war in America.)

(4)  Naturally, and logically, Mount Rushmore has to be demolished as well. Or have the faces re-done. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln simply cannot be allowed to remain. And Teddy Roosevelt could easily, upon closer scrutiny, be classed as a “white supremacist.” He was assuredly a supremacist something! And could have, should have (as with millions of others of us) “done more for blacks.”

5)  And how can we allow Big Tex to continue standing over Texas State Fair multitudes when he represents a cowboy and cowboys killed Indians? Or allow the Dallas Cowboys to retain their now-besmirched name?

(6)  Allow me to bypass a massive number of other changes required—hundreds of thousands of institutions of every sort: parks, streets, rivers, rivulets, mud-holes, cats, dogs, autos, horses, songs, movies; because, dear reader, you can bore yourself as easily as I can.

(7)  Another as-yet-unmentioned (!) mother lode of worthy investigation of racial toxicity? There is the matter of finding and punishing the posterity of the black slave-traders in Africa who rounded up their cousins and sold them off to the white slavers. And black slavers. And what about the ship-builders, ship-owners, food and tackle suppliers? Add those who created the astrolabes, sextants, and such, enabling safe passage across the Atlantic. Must be dealt with. 

How long will it go on? Only God knows. No good man argues that the blacks were not mistreated in every nation of any size on earth, among all classes, and, alas, are still mistreated in many places and ways, even in America. Sometimes. By some.  And what that good man knows as well, is that, despite tectonic progress made in behalf of all minorities in America, legitimate arguments can be made, and should be, that changes must still be made. What no good man knows, however, is when we’ll ever get paid up. Is there any single good, or assortment of goods, for whatever length of time, at whatever cost, to however many, which will suffice to atone for our national sin against the first black slave who arrived on our shores. 

There is something else no good man, or bad man, knows: how much will future Americans lose in the abolition of much of our history, bad as a lot of it was. There is no easy answer. And we are not close to one, easy or not. 

While we’re on the subject: for years a 7-ton statue of Lenin has stood in Seattle. It is owned by an individual who will sell it to you for a reputed $250,000. Most people, we are told, are rather blase about it. A statue of Lenin doesn’t spark as much interest as does that of an American Founding Father because—for all his astounding moral latitudinarianism—Lenin never truly debased himself by being a white American.  

How does one go about putting out the fire in one’s hair while listening to some idiot defend a “no border wall” rule for one’s country?

I kindly repeat a line from our rustic friends: “It oughta be a law ‘gin stupid.”

The story of walls is intriguing: the “Great Wall” of China, Hadrian’s wall, the Berlin Wall, the modern Israeli wall, but THE WALL which currently produces the ocean of vitriol is the one proposed on America’s southern border.

We are told by the left that we shouldn’t cringe behind walls, living in isolation and fear; we should fearlessly, and lovingly, move out from behind our walls and embrace, well, whatever walks in.

In fact, your life and mine are, in every way, literally defined by walls of one sort or another, even if we are the freest human on the planet. There are the walls of your own living space—your house. If the no-wallers are right, do we really need them? And “walls” called doors? If you’re serious, take them off tonight and lie down to pleasant dreams, free and unrestricted and unafraid, embracing your freedom. Have you a fence about your property? What a waste of time, effort and money and what a frank declaration of your fear-stricken pathetic little life.

You are a young mom and you have three caterwauling (i.e., normal) sprouts running through your house, and you don’t want bathroom walls?

Most operating rooms I have ever seen are seriously walled spaces. Hotel walls? Sports walls? Driving “walls?” Movie walls? Study walls? Zoo walls? Ranch “walls?” Prison walls? Et cetera, ad infinitum.

None of that speaks of the unseen walls inside of which our treasured liberties are found: the wall of police protection, the wall of our military, the endless walls of our national Constitution (what is it, at bottom, but a compendium of walls within which we are privileged to live out our lives?), the walls of our innermost thoughts, our psychical and spiritual life. (“Oh, no problem; I open all the doors of my soul to everyone; feel free to walk in wherever and whenever you wish in your hob-nailed boots!) Your cranium? A tough and necessary wall, I should think.

You and I don’t possess a single solitary liberty of any kind which does not, by definition, involve a wall of one sort or another.

Our ex-president’s calm and assuring, almost pastoral, words pleading with us to abandon our walls was speaking, specifically, about that aforementioned literal wall on our southern border, a wall designed to prevent uncounted hordes from entering, and a wall which he and his leftist friends demonstrably detest.

None of what I have written here represents a plea for a national anti-immigration policy. The historic fact is that America has allowed more immigrants into our country than any nation in human history. We allow more than a million new legal immigrants in every single year. Perhaps we could and should allow several more millions into the country annually. That would be an interesting conversation. What I am arguing here is that to say that 7.4 billion people should feel free to walk in at any time they wish, and that we should welcome them, feed, clothe and house them is provable idiocy. It is, in fact, expressive of a deep hatred for America, and a wish for its demise. Will someone please name a nation which does not—for all the obvious reasons—have borders? If you ask why Europe’s nation-killing non-wall policy doesn’t bother the left, the answer is: Europe is what they want here. They lust for Europe on American soil. Belgium writ large!

Robert Frost has that hauntingly beautiful line which opens his “Mending Walls:” “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Well, yes and no! Walls may, at times, be painful to our kinder sensibilities, but the brutal fact is: to be fenceless is to be defenseless. Frost’s sentiment touches something essentially human in our psyche, but so does the sentence his pragmatic neighbor continues to say in response to him: “Fences make good neighbors.” Maybe both are right. While pondering that issue, I say build the wall.

Oh, and, for the record: the place of greatest freedom ever imagined is heaven, with its impenetrable wall, a wall that does what all walls do—keep bad things out and good things in.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas

How does one go about finding out how sick he is? Medical technicians study a drop or two of his blood and immediately, almost magically, the wellness/illness factor becomes clear.

How does one discern if his car is ill? He does not put one end of a screwdriver on the top of the running motor and his ear to the other end of the screwdriver so he can hear what the problem is. Yes, they did it that way! After all, not many things can go wrong with a Model T Ford! Not today: a computer is plugged into a receptacle under the dash, and a tell-tale read-out is printed. (A mechanic told me recently that a well-known, mid-priced SUV has forty-seven computer systems on it.)

What about a health-check on a civilization? We all know they have life-cycles and, inevitably, at least so far as we can gather from the history of civilizations, they cease to exist. The arc from birth to death is often slow, but it is inevitable.

Here are some evidences of the state of the health of western civilization which is now, roughly, two thousand years old, and centered in Europe and North America.

1. You know things are not good when you hear the chant—as early as the late 1950s—on university campuses all over the country, “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ’s Gotta Go!”
2. You know things are not good for a civilization when it stands aside while uncounted millions of people from alien (yes, that’s the word) cultures swarm into it unimpeded. The death-gurgle has set in when such a fact is not immediately seen, identified, and responded to, as an act of war.
3. One aspect of that pathology, perhaps the basal cause of it, is the almost absolute lack of resolution to defend your civilization, screaming one’s lack of will to save it. The west’s response to such things is the boy who was threatened and knew he had a serious problem: he was afraid to fight and too fat to run.
4. You know something’s wrong at the heart of things when the national media are desperate for you to hear what is wrong with your country instead of what is right, or ever has been right, with it. No people anywhere, ever, built a perfect society, but we are told incessantly only about the inevitable pathologies of our country.
5. You know things are problematic when your cultural elites tell you that all societies are morally equal, and yours is no better than any other, including the prison known as North Korea or Somalia where 97% of all females are genitally mutilated, or any one of a dozen countries where slavery openly exists, or where women have only a modicum of personal rights, if any.
6. You know that is emergency-room time for your country when your president stands close to the place where your civilization was born and, after vigorously defending its very existence, hears his speech labeled as “dark” and “white-supremacist” and “alt-right” and is called out for having a sufficiently poor taste to mention God. Honestly!
7. When the front-line protectors of the general citizenry—the military and the officers of the law—are derided by the national media with impunity, the deadly societal disease of anarchy approaches a lethal level in the body politic.
8. You know things are problematic when many of your cultural elites call for the abandonment of your articles of incorporation, the United States Constitution, which your forebearers were willing to die for, and for which hundreds of thousands actually did die.
9. Things are serious when no citizen can remember the last fraudulent government official—there have been many—who has served a single day in prison for his or her fraud.

At the risk of sounding hopelessly naïve, I must see that, even in such societal distress, although I am but one cell in my civilization, I can choose to be either a healthy or a cancerous one, and my choice will affect my entire country for illness or wellness. My choice. And yours.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas

If you have the sensation of riding the old rickety wooden roller-coaster at Six Flags Over Texas and descending to the landing strip at what feels like 83 miles per hour, welcome to modern America!

All cultures, like all individual lives, experience constant permutations. That’s half the fun and three-fourths of the excitement, but it is also dangerous. Civilizations don’t live automatically. They can die, and do so, as history amply demonstrates.

Think of it: our founding fathers were positive that the country they were creating was a truly remarkable thing, something that the world had never seen. Never! Franklin labeled the adoption of the constitution as “the miracle at Philadelphia.” America was born “exceptional.”

In recent years, however, the philosophical and political left has mocked such an assessment. Pure American hubris, and nothing more, they said. Time now to face the facts and realize America was no more exceptional than, say, Norway, and we should come down off our high horses.

The same crowd is now promoting, by every means possible, from grammar school running through university levels, including national media, the idea that, actually, America is rotten to the core, and has been from the start. We subjugated native peoples when we arrived here, trashed their “advanced” civilizations, raped their women, enslaved their men and remain slavers whether we know it or not, holding millions of fellow Americans hostage to some “ism” or other. We have caused trouble for the entire globe by engaging in unnecessary wars, bullying the world while busily ruining the earth. Because of such sins against humanity, statues of our national heroes must now come down, accompanied with deep humiliation and repentance for erecting them in the first place. Some are even clamoring (anarchists never “suggest”) for a new constitution “more amenable to a civilized people.”

Within a single lifetime, we have moved, in the view of the liberal left, from admiration to apology to ashamed. Honored to ho-hum to horrible. One wonders about the next permutation, given that shocking descent.

My counsel?
1. Hang on for the ride!
2. Roller-coasters are always loud; expect even angrier vitriol suggesting evermore idiotic “solutions.”
3. Understand that our challenges are more lethal than ever. Western civilization has never seen anything remotely comparable to the nuclear factor. All comparisons are off the table.
4. STICK TO YOUR OWN KNITTING! That’s what my Mom often told me as a teenager.

It was an entire philosophy, and wise as well, in a sound-byte: do your best to live an orderly life no matter what is happening around you. I was to read much later, “Every life is equidistant to eternity.” Among other things, that means your single life bears eternal significance and because your culture turns rotten is no reason why you should.

That is not a plea for non-engagement in the culture. Shout back at the huns. Outlive and outlove and out-think them. Even if they own your body, don’t give them your soul. In the meantime, take care of your own little civilization—your own life, your family, your church, your neighbors, your town.

Before you go, ponder this, for all of our admitted cultural fatuities, faults, and failings, does it not occur puzzling to you that most of the world’s people want, desperately, to live here? What do they know that we don’t? If you have traveled the world, you know the answer to that question.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas