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Magrat looked down at the brown river and the suspicious logs on its sandbanks.
"What I want to know is," she said, "was Mrs. Gogol really good or bad? I mean, dead people and alligators and everything..."
Granny looked at the rising sun, poking through the mists.
"Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face."
Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
With parents like Ford and Bill, how did Steve even reach adulthood?
Triangles are nature's strongest shape!
Having Stan around didn't hurt though.
...Stan, are you stirring your whiskey with a cigarillo?
Fight.
I was thinking about my favorite book in the Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, and the part where the Un-Man (a human body possessed by a demon, trying to recreate the evil of the first sin while a modern man from Earth tries to somehow stop him by arguing with him) sits up with the main character all night. And when he;s alone with It, the main character thinks it might attack him or start debating him cunningly. But instead it just starts repeating his name, over and over and over, just to annoy him.
And then I was thinking about the bullets used to murder Charlie Kirk. Everyone’s talking about who murdered him and whether they got the right guy and what his motives might be, whatever. I don’t know if you read about the inscriptions somewhere: I almost wish I hadn’t. The bullets were inscribed with some internet memes.
Just crass, crude memes that online gamers use. They’re definitely not the kind of jokes one side or the other in politics would claim. They’re too stupid for that. To someone outside the group that tells those kinds of jokes over Discord voice-chat, you wouldn’t be able to explain why the memes were even funny. They’re nonsensical.
That’s what was on the bullets in the gun used to kill Charlie Kirk.
Nonsense. And I don’t need to know which conspiracy theory or plain explanation of motives is closest to the truth—I think about how C.S. Lewis understood the psychology of reality and the Enemy, and I think about how the first thing God did was create order from chaos, and I know what was out to kill Charlie Kirk. It’s not ridiculous to say “our battle is not against flesh and blood.”
The bullets had nonsense nastiness on them. Because evil’s not that deep. Its consequences are so profound that evil appears deep. But it’s not. It’s just chaos. It’s just disorder, dada, nonsense. What was out to get Charlie Kirk was the Enemy, the demons, the fallen elohim, whatever you want to call the “principalities and powers of the air.”
And that’s why I buckle down and insist on pinning a post to this blog that says “here’s what I believe about stories.” Because you should believe something.
You have to make distinctions. You have to tell jokes that make some semblance of sense—“funny because it’s true.” You have to write songs that have an intended meaning. You have to speak words that mean something. You have to tell stories that have a point.
There’s a reason it’s important not to give in to the slurry-footing of “well that’s what it means to you” or “it can mean all those things” or “meaning is subjective.” There’s a reason it’s important to say, “no, there is such a thing as an objectively GOOD or objectively BAD movie and story. There is such a thing as good and evil, such a thing as right and wrong, such a thing as true or false. There is such a thing as a good choice or a bad choice, the right choice or the wrong choice, the best effort versus anything less.”
The reason it’s important is because our GOD made distinctions. That’s what He did, first. When He created this world, He separated things into categories, categories that can be measured, standards that can be understood, communication that can be transmitted and received. We do not live in a dada performance piece. Life has meaning, there are things that are black and white, even though there may be shades inbetween, that doesn’t do away with the black and white.
And Charlie Kirk isn’t here anymore and I just want to kick and shake and urge all of you, FIGHT. Fight it! Fight the nonsense. Fight the gibberish. Fight the bland, blank, “what it is to you, what it is to me,” pbbppbbbppttt of the Enemy. The nasty vague nothingness, the chaos, the blurring of distinctions. Make the distinctions. Define the terms. Separate the categories. Clearly divide the good away from the bad. Fight to make consistent sense whenever you can and insist that everybody who engages with you do the same.
Do it in the way you live your life, in the way you have conversations, yes, but please, please, for the love of truth, do it when you talk about art. Do it when you talk about stories. Do it when you talk about movies and songs and books. Fight, fight it. It’s meticulous and tedious and thorough and all scholarly and it’s not what they teach you when you go to school to study any of this stuff but fight for it anyway.
Fight! Fight! Kick and struggle! The Enemy killed him because he wouldn’t quit drawing the lines and separating truth from blah blah blah, then standing up for truth. Fight! Fight it in this stupid online sphere, too.
”For thus says Yahweh, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it; He established it and did not create it a formless place, but formed it to be inhabited),
“I am Yahweh, and there is none else. I have not spoken in secret, In some dark land; I did not say to the seed of Jacob, ‘Seek Me in a formless place’; I, Yahweh, speak righteousness, Declaring things that are upright.” - Isaiah 45:18-19
“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
@subjensophie wanted to send her boyfriend a message...and then went for a walk in a different neighborhood.
It’s so odd to me that my creative writing professor gives us a lecture on what he calls “bad poems,” but I didn’t think most of them were bad. Some were even quite good, in my opinion.
I don’t understand how he thinks writing and art are so objective. However, that does explain why he grades you so harshly unless you cater to his specific writing style. I have a feeling he would label my poems as “bad poems” if he could.
Jeremiah Shipley
