“What’s it like to take a human life?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve only ever killed communists.”
–Polish Mercenary, Rafał Gan-Ganowicz
If you want to make a hardened second amendment guy morph into a pearl-clutching Auntie Em, mix drinking and shooting. In the very odd 2014 film, Leviathan, a band of hard-drinking former Soviets throw a party with automatic weapons — riddling portraits of Stalin and Brezhnev with bullet holes–and hydrating themselves with straight Vodka.
There’s something beautiful in that kind of spiked ice cream, mixing metal, lead, spirits and dead Communists. Love and war. Friendship and execution. A deliriously happy dispatch of all those old totalitarian criminals. Don’t try this at home, but it feels very much like the “happy warrior” spirit. “Then the Lord awoke as if from sleep, Like a warrior overcome by wine.”
In my own battle, I find myself in odd agreement, at least on one point, with a sometimes insufferable pietist, John MacArthur, who recently spoke of losing friends for standing up against the church “woke” movement. (You know the one where, among other things, gross sexual sin suddenly becomes a “community” and the church is obliged to make special exceptions for a well organized sinner’s trade union.) John spoke of the happiness associated with being part of a small church fellowship, and feeling that support, while going out to battle against all the communist weirdos we find around town, and in the church, these days.
I get that. My guests love what we do here on the farm; we’re routinely praised for giving people a day of sanity and peace and affirmation of all the ancient truths. When, as part of our lawsuit, we track down our haters, they largely appear to be hardcore progressive activists — androgynous, green-haired types or “white messiah liberals,” who don’t think people of color can speak for themselves without the daily vegan virtue-signal of an anemic, post-Christian Pharisee, anxious to make sure no one is healed.
(Oddly enough, I’ve tried to understand what motivates people like this — what they take joy in, what thrills them, but it’s all a “reactive” life. They need to be recoiled by something. When they shop for broccoli, they aren’t really after taste or freshness. They need to figuratively eat a corporate GMO farmer in order to be truly satisfied. They need people like me, dead on the floor, to be completely fulfilled. Their interior life is a vermilion haze of “orange man bad” fears.)
So, it would be easy to ignore these unhappy souls, but they are something like the most needy, emotionally damaged member of your extended family. They exercise influence far beyond their numbers because people will do almost anything to get them to shut up. The fact that they never shut up doesn’t keep people from trying to appease them. Unfortunately, they vote, and they agitate and they resist–anxious to create a world they can’t really define, except, maybe that I won’t be there, and fatherhood won’t be there and patriotism won’t be there and proud heterosexuality won’t be there. A lot of things won’t be there. What will be there? Not sure. I don’t think they know.
My sense, folks, is that as much as you may not like it, you are going to have to get into the happy warrior spirit. You may not need a fifth of vodka and an automatic weapon, but you’re going to get very cheerful about opposing lies, and hatred. We live in the greatest country in the world. The folks who hate it need to be ridiculed, loudly — and happily.
