His Majesty has been awfully quiet lately, but I could feeeeel the sourness swelling within him.

Turns out His Majesty has been having apocalyptic thoughts.

Robert Conquest recently shuffled off this mortal coil. I could almost envy him that his troubles are over.

I was particularly fond of his Three Laws of Politics.

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

The Boy Scouts of America is a recent example of at least two of these laws at work. It has now moved sharply left and in a manner that threw away a significant Supreme Court decision that should have allowed it to remain a right-wing organization. The former illustrates Conquest’s Second Law; the latter his Third Law.

Actually, it’s worse than that. The Scouts were arguably one of the few civic organizations that was explicitly right-wing, and yet it is now well on the way to being left-wing. Assuming anything meaningful of it long survives.

This represents a new stage in the decay of the West. The Left is no longer culling out the sick and aged among institutions; they are now bringing down healthy institutions at the center of the herd.

This in turn is a harbinger of the end of civil society. The network of associations, guilds, clubs, alliances, and fraternities that used to serve as a buffer between the individual and the state is now being subsumed into the state, leaving no buffer. There is now no escaping politics. Everything is now political.

There remains the church and the family.

For how much longer?

There have been calls for an end to tax exemption for churches and for church schools. Yes, we are getting reassurances from the Left that this is not serious, that we are wrong to be concerned. But these are the same spokesmen for the Left who will tell us we had it coming to us when it comes to pass anyway.

As for the family: There has already been dreadful damage from easy divorce and easy welfare, and it will only get worse.

I am puzzled by this use of “we” and “us”.

Ah, yes. No, I am not suggesting you invite the missionaries over for dinner; that would be an ordeal for all concerned. I am quite secure in my disbelief. But, ever since it became regrettably necessary to retire from public life, I have found myself identifying with those who seek a measure of autonomy from Leviathan.

The political edge to everything in modern culture is a malignancy. It has metastatized everywhere. For example, you see it in the arts and entertainment. Most of the puerile attempts at humor that pass for comedy nowadays have a definite political edge. The kind of humor that laughs at humans, as human beings, seems to have disappeared, replaced by the kind of humor that laughs at Republicans or Democrats as Republicans or Democrats. Such humor has an unpleasant edge to it, because it lacks the affection for the target that is the mark of all really good humor. It is loud laughter, but it is not heartfelt laughter. It is laughter that goes for  the throat, not laughter than comes from the belly.

Take The Book of Mormon, by which I mean the musical, not the controversial religious text. Audiences are evidently yukking it up. But try this test: Substitute “Peace Corps” for “Mormon” throughout the script, and how funny would it still be? I can perfectly well imagine a parallel universe whose version of The Book of Mormon would still upset some Mormons, would still have audiences yukking it up — but which would work nearly as well if the script was slightly altered to be The Peace Corps, because it derives its humor from universal human foibles for which we feel genuine affection. But that’s not the universe we live in.

I don’t think individuals felt terribly buffered from the Empire in its day, nor did they think it was very funny.

Come, Lord Vader, You were there. You know better.

What were the actual grievances of the Rebel Alliance? Not that the Empire was imposing the drab style of art or architecture we now associate with socialism. Not that we were eliminating, or even seriously eroding, civil society. Take the colony at Bespin, for example. Even the Rebel propagandists could not hide the fact that it operated with a high degree of autonomy, at least until the colony began harboring terrorists. At that point, were  you not fully justified in shutting the operation down?

There was some unpleasantness over allegations that the colonial administrator’s plea bargain was handled in bad faith.

Pure propaganda. An invention of Hollywood. You had no need to bargain in bad faith; you were the representative of the Empire, and Calrissian had a clear lawful duty to cooperate. In fact, I think the trouble is that you were a bit soft on him. You would have done well to study the life of William Bligh.

The Empire was sometimes harsh, but never for the sake of harshness. I was actually quite prepared to extend what legal scholar Norm Epstein has called “the presumption of liberty”, but disorderly conduct of all kinds must be met with firmness. I believe in giving people a long leash — but if they race to its limits, they’re going to get jerked back hard.

No, the only real grievances that consistently emerged from the Rebel propaganda were that they weren’t being allowed to call the shots themselves, and that the Empire was harsh in its treatment of sedition. The latter has some element of truth, but it was the Rebels themselves who forced on us the necessity of harsh measures. They were like a patricide who complains about not being extended mercy for being an orphan.

But there was an even more important distinction between the Empire and the current government on this particular patch of this inisignificant little planet. The Empire was serious about governing. The government here is not serious about anything. It’s all theater.

Consider the dreadful agreement that was negotiated between the United States and Iran. The agreement is dreadful because one side is serious about terrorizing its neighbors, while the other side is not serious about preventing the one side from terrorizing its neighbors. The Iranians negotiated in bad faith because they had a driving sense of purpose and of historical inevitability that precluded any enforceable concessions. The Americans negotiated in bad faith because whatever. Ennui is the only word to describe the American attitude.

This can only lead to disaster.

His Majesty didn’t finish his porridge. He shuffled over to the television and turned on the Storm Channel, but he watched without any real pleasure.

It seems to me that His Majesty has been suffering from ennui himself lately. I’m actually a bit worried. He’s stopped watching Shakespeare videos or even reruns of The World at War. He only got halfway through Epstein’s The Classical Liberal Constitution; when I asked why, he snarked that it was wonderful legal thinking and historical analysis having absolutely nothing to do with present political realities, and it was just too damn depressing to finish. (I apologize for the language, but I feel it my duty to accurately capture the nuances of His Majesty’s utterances.)  He even demurred when I offered to obtain tickets to Spain to watch a bullfight. That’s not like His Majesty; his zest for life at its cruelest seems to have simply evaporated.

I really expected his sourness to explode in a long monologue full of trenchant observations and restrained fury. Instead, he sometimes comes across as just a querulous old man.

When I am troubled, I find considerable comfort in prayer and scripture. A couple of nights ago, I found myself reading where Paul tells us that God loves the cheerful giver. For some reason, the phrase jumped out at me. Why does God love a cheerful giver? The thing seems self-evident, but I found myself reflecting on what it says about us and what it says about God.

We speak about God loving all His children, but in this context, Paul obviously meant some special kind of love. (At times like this, I wish I could read classical Greek.) I take the sense as being that the cheerful giver gives particular pleasure to God. Why? Well, giving cheerfully shows a kind of moral heroism; God seems to take pleasure in moral heroism. But why?

God is the ultimate Cheerful Giver. Everything I have is a gift from Him. It pleases Him to see His children emulating Him.

I was startled to hear His Majesty behind me. His Majesty knows me well enough to practically read my thoughts at times, and he is surprisingly good at reading over my shoulder.

So what’s the big deal about God being a cheerful giver? God can afford to be cheerful with His gifts; he’s got an unbreakable bank account.

The mask keeps His Majesty from seeing me slack-jawed with astonishment, which I was grateful for as I watched him shuffle into the kitchen for some warm milk for himself and some nips for the cats.

I think the Givens could reply: God has, in fact, paid a great price for His gifts to us. His greatest gift is to love us, and the more perfect the love, the more terrible the price one risks paying for it.

There is no salvation in politics. There is salvation only in accepting our vulnerability, and accepting and emulating the grace of God.

We have forgotten to love our enemies.