Repentance, Redemption, and other R things

“You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe—when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble.”

-Prince Charles, regarding the modern London skyline

Not much to see out there on this frozen, foggy Corning morning.

That ice fog hung around yesterday morning as well, causing me a little concern as I flew across Virginia in a Columbia frosted over with ice like a beer mug fresh out of the freezer.

The cats are taking the weather in stride, Slane sleeping off his nightly galavant while Dean plaintively expresses his need for more cat treats.

The weather over the Shenandoah Valley was glorious on the flight down to Florida on Sunday, with visibility well over fifty miles. Just south of Waynesboro and east of Staunton I spied a beautiful resort community, a cluster of condo buildings and winding streets of single family homes, clustered on a ridge with a golf course and ski slopes nearby. Peg and I have an affection for that part of Virginia, and I decided this morning to look up the place using Mr. Google.

Turns out this is the Wintergreen resort community, and it appears every bit as pretty from the ground. So as is our wont, I started looking at real estate, and found homes nestled on large, leafy lots, many looking down into the valley below. Maybe Peg and I might decide to retire there, where the weather is a little warmer and the accents more those of our people?

But no. "Our people" have gone quite mad, and I can't bear the thought of living among them.

The very worst of it seems clustered in the states that touch the Gulf of Mexico. It sort of makes one wonder what was in that Deepwater Horizon sludge fifteen years ago.

The Texas Supreme Court just ruled that a judge need not marry a same-sex couple if the refusal is based on a sincerely held religious belief. Apparently the stuff in the same children's book about remarriage after divorce was merely precatory. In the same week, that state's fatuous attorney general sued whoever's making Tylenol these days for causing autism.

In Louisiana, the governor proposes that LSU erect a Charlie Kirk memorial to promote his vision of free speech, which expressly did not extend to the libtard professors his odious organization doxed and harassed. Not to be outdone, the Wee Guv in the Sunshine State proposed Turning Point USA chapters in the state's high schools, because a fourteen-year-old neo-Nazi needs a place he can feel safe.

Alabama's senior senator, a failed football coach who's never sponsored a bill during his tenure, seems in the lead among candidates for that state's governorship, despite the fact that he actually lives in Santa Rosa Beach. The lieutenant governorship's leading candidate carries as his main qualification his two years as the starting quarterback of the Crimson Tide. Because, well, Alabama.

In Mississippi, my ancestral home, the search continues for a truckload of dangerous, escaped research monkeys. Well, they weren't actually dangerous, but the driver told the state troopers they were, and so commence the shooting!

Okay, that last one wasn't really political, but it's hard to picture something like that happening in Vermont.

So, yeah, the South is no place for a thinking, feeling human being to live. I don't want to breathe the same air as the people who voted for this. I don't want them in the next pew in church, or the next booth when we go out to supper. I don't want to hear that they're really nice people, because they're not. What little Christianity accreted its way into my worldview teaches that there can't be redemption without repentance, metanoia, and these folks are utterly unrepentant as they wreck this grand, 250 year political project we inherited. If somehow the center holds and another party sweeps into power, we'll be told we need to move on, that these were good Americans trying to do the right thing, misguided as it might have been.

But we shouldn't let them off that easily. It's the mistake of 1865, when we needed but didn't have a South African style truth and reconciliation commission, only with more executions. By turning our back on the fundamental sin that led to that war, a moral failure for which the entire country bore some measure of responsibility, we paved the way for the Lost Cause myth and left the unfinished business that again has metastasized into this MAGA moment. We need to call out bad behavior, and hold those responsible to account.

Time for an 8:15 eastern hearing, at which I will try to explain to a south Florida judge that it is unreasonable to expect a lawyer to conclude a hearing at 6 pm eastern in Bay County, drive over seven hours down there, and appear fresh-faced and ready to go to trial at 8:30 the next morning. That we need a hearing for this request is galling. Another reason to get out of litigation.