morality – The Knight Shift

Law, we are told even in fifth grade, is something that applies to all without respect to wealth or status. And then a few years later the same notion gets drilled into our mushy skulls during civics class as high school freshmen. It’s a noble ideal, and we like to think that the world follows America’s example as a model of how under the rule of law, there are none deemed greater than others. Rich or poor, celebrity or obscure, politically affluent or peanut gallery… it doesn’t matter. Here we are all equally accounted and equally accountable.

And it is all a damnable fantasy and we all know it. Even if we don’t talk about it.

I suppose the current situation with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is in my mind tonight. As of this writing some former classmate during the early Eighties is alleging that Kavanaugh did something, or

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Lovecraft the prophet

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“That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.”

— from The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft

It was 1928 when Howard Phillips Lovecraft published The Call ...

Wars have consequences. Don’t we know that?

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My great-uncle Rob was a G.I. who served in the Pacific during World War II. But unless you were family you likely would have never known that. It was something that, like many others who served during that conflict, he never liked to talk about.

Mom told me when I was a child that Uncle Rob had to kill an enemy soldier. I didn’t know until years later that it was during the American invasion of Okinawa. Uncle Rob dived into a foxhole for cover. At almost the same moment a Japanese soldier jumped inside the same foxhole.

The Japanese man said something that Uncle Rob could not understand. My great-uncle killed him without thinking. He beheaded the Japanese soldier with the bayonet of his rifle.

Uncle Rob was one of the kindest, gentlest men that you could ever meet in this world. But from a young age I sensed ...