Our Maine visit is over, and a good time was had by all. We met our friends in Portland and drove up to Mount Desert Island, and spent four days running around Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park, and the surrounding small towns.
That’s a beautiful part of the country, and our hosts arranged for several trips into the park. We watched a sunset from the top of Cadillac Mountain on Wednesday, spent most of Thursday on e-bikes riding the carriage trails helpfully laid out by Mr. Rockefeller a while back, and took a 5-mile hike with gorgeous views all around on Friday.
Between those excursions, we ate a lot of lobster, saw a serene Japanese garden, and wandered around Bar Harbor. We spent our last half-day walking around Bangor, before our afternoon flight home. We made an obligatory stop at Stephen King’s house, outside of his famous wrought-iron gate with bats and spiders worked into the design.
I’ve enjoyed many of his books over the years, but I’ve had to separate the writer from the writing, since he’s shared his vitriolic political views. (Spoiler alert: he really hates us!) Still, he has kept a place and still lives part of the year in gritty little Bangor, so I like that about him, at least.
The natural beauty of Maine can really take your breath away. Watching the sunset from Cadillac Mountain was especially gorgeous, and as the sun finally dipped below the horizon, a round of spontaneous applause rippled through the small crowd with whom we’d been watching.
That struck me as both poignant and surprising. As a Christian, applauding the sunset felt both appropriate and comic: “Nice job with the lakes, mountain ridges and sunset, God!”
But I wondered about – and felt a lot of affection for – the large number of atheists and agnostics I assume were in that appreciative crowd. It seems so odd to applaud for a performance without a Performer. “Nice job with that sunset, unreasoning and random Nature!”
Even as that gesture makes no intellectual sense to me, I find it heartening that most people instinctively intuit that there is Someone beyond that beauty, and tribute should naturally be paid.
One of the blessings of a vacation is being only intermittently aware of world events, politics and the media. We caught only bits of tv, and I spent a few minutes checking email and surfing through the news. But the juxtaposition of what our Maker has done with the Maine coastline and what our political class is doing with our society is disorienting, to say the least.
Here are the random bits of news I saw:
1. Some anonymous Democrat staffers are leaking a story that is apparently well known in Washington: Jerry Nadler frequently falls asleep during meetings, and when legislation is being created and discussed.
The tone of the story was critical, but I found myself wishing that more of those boneheads would follow his example. How much misery would our country have been spared over the last interminable 18 months if all of our congress had just pulled a Rip Van Winkle in January of 2021?
Can you imagine if, the day before the Inauguration That Will Live in Infamy, Imhotep Pelosi would have pulled that sarcophagus lid over her head for a little shut-eye; Schumer would have noticed that there were no cameras around, and thus there was no reason for him to remain conscious; and Grandma Squanto Warren would have snuggled under her deerskin blanket and pulled her headdress down over her eyes so that she could rest them? (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
When they came stumbling out into the light this Labor Day, they would have woken to a country with still-functioning borders, $4 trillion less in national debt, and inflation at a Trumpy 2.5%. Plus we’d be down two Cuomos and a Brian Stelter, and CNN+ would just be a terrible, hilarious dream.
And a Joe Biden deep into REM sleep would be just as effective as he is now — If he were talking in his sleep, could he possible make less sense than he does when he’s awake? – and without all of the angry yelling.
A fella can dream, can’t he?
2. Speaking of the late President, I saw a few minutes of him giving a speech, and his mood has apparently not improved since his fire-and-brimstone Reichstag speech. At one point he was literally shaking, and hollered at the top of his voice, “We beat big pharma! We beat big pharma!”
I immediately thought that this means one of two things: Either there will soon be no more medications in the pipeline to help me deal with the PTSD I expect to have if I manage to survive this administration, or Corn Pop had a big brother named Pharma Pop.
Fortunately, the Big Guy beat Big Pharma.
Probably with a bicycle chain.
3. Another day, I saw Brandon speaking in front of a blue backdrop that said, “Cancer Moonshot.”
And I thought Good Lord! Is Joe Biden going to give the moon cancer now?!
I know that it sounds unlikely, but look at his previous work.
At the end of his presidency – or of the world, whichever comes first – we’ll have Weimar-level inflation, a nuclear-armed Iran, more illegals than citizens, more female males than male males, and sanctuary cities machine-gunning any approaching person who is darker than Liz Warren (#don’tstopmocking)
In light of all of that, does a carcinogenic moon sound that outrageous?
4. Queen Elizabeth died at the age of 96, and like most people, when I first heard the news I thought, that’s too bad. It’s not my country, and I don’t really get royalty, and she wasn’t exactly cut down in the flower of her youth.
But she seemed like a nice lady, with the adorableness that many old ladies achieve, with the cute hats and the good manners and the diminutive stature and the posture of a jumbo shrimp.
Plus she had a British band play The Star Spangled Banner after 9/11, and she’s had to put up with a lot of lunkheads in her family. And I can’t think of anything offensive that she’s done, not least because she’s a traditional figurehead with no actual political power.
So imagine my surprise when I dipped into some media the next day and found out from many leftist commentators that I was wrong about the queen, and that she was actually an evil, racist, colonizing genocidal maniac!
One of the raving loons who got the most attention is a Carnegie Mellon professor named Uju Anya, a ray of sunshine who was born in Nigeria, but inexplicably chooses to live in terrible, racist America.
When news came out that Elizabeth was deathly ill, Uju tweeted that the queen ruled over “a thieving, raping, genocidal empire,” and hoped her death would be “excruciating.” Then she doubled down after the death with more hateful celebration.
This dunce then professed to be “surprised” that so many Brits were offended by her obviously offensive statements. She condescendingly explained that her tweets were meant to educate people, saying, “I am fundamentally a teacher.”
I guess she’s correct, in the sense that teaching people how NOT to behave is still “teaching.” In that sense, she’s like AOC (who taught how NOT to make drinks correctly), or Andrew Cuomo (who taught how NOT to protect nursing home residents during a pandemic), or CAW CAW (who taught now NOT to break a glass ceiling).
How did so many leftists get to the point where they’d pour such bile on an inoffensive character like the queen in the hours before and after her death? Even if you dislike somebody, would you not be able to restrain yourself and be civil, at least until after the burial?
I mean, all of us had a pretty low opinion of Joe Biden when he passed away – sometime during the Dem primaries in 2020 – but you didn’t see any of us running for the nearest camera and frothing at the mouth about how he should die an agonizing death.
But let me end on a happier note coming out of the UK. One of Queen Elizabeth’s last acts was to greet the new British Prime Minister, Liz Truss.
I don’t know much about her, but Truss is supposed to be at least quasi-conservative. One of her first official acts was to acknowledge that energy costs for British citizens are needlessly high, and that the UK will oversee “a new round of oil and gas licensing.”
Responding to public opinion, she said that, “A moratorium on fracking will be lifted and planning permission can be sought where there is local support.”
Meanwhile, two days ago, Joe Biden got in bed with “environmental activist groups” – sorry for the repulsive, necrophilia imagery! – and agreed to stop oil and gas drilling on more than 58,000 acres of federal land.
Thanks, Brandon. Couldn’t you just focus more on giving cancer to the moon, instead of making Putin richer and Americans poorer?
I didn’t think I’d ever entertain this idea, but maybe it’s time we consider reaching out to the Brits, apologizing for that 18th century unpleasantness, and asking if we could be a colony again.
Avenatti/ King Charles III, 2024!
Martin Simpson 