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Ricochet Tuesday Essay Assignment
Recently tweeted by novelist Stephen King:
Your assignment? Simple. Compose a tweet in reply.
Published in General
All posing and no thinking makes Stephen a very dull boy. All posing and no thinking makes Stephen a very dull boy. All posing and no thinking makes Stephen a very dull boy. All posing and no thinking makes Stephen a very dull boy.
All posing and no thinking makes Stephen a very dull boy. All posing and no thinking makes Stephen a very dull boy. All posing and no thinking makes Stephen a very dull boy.
All posing and no thinking makes Stephen a very dull boy. All posing and no thinking makes Stephen a very dull boy.
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!
I don’t think that verse means what King thinks it means. Five minutes of Googling will produce a number of interpretations, but I doubt that any of them include the encouragement of sending children off to an unknown land in the hands of some very shady characters to fend for themselves and with a high likelihood of ending up as wards of the state or members of a gang. If Christians were encouraging that (for purposes of proselytizing, let’s say) King would be among the first to condemn it. Can you imagine the outcry if throngs of evangelicals did go down and take these children home to be raised in their homes and churches?
But then again, it’s common for people like King, ensconced in their gated homes in near-zero-diversity states like Maine and Vermont (look up the number of minorities in these states – it’s vanishingly low) to lecture us about being accepting.
I guess my tweet would be:
Opening your gated back yard and giving your millions to the poor would make that needle eye a bit easier to pass through.
I find this behavior to be relatively common in internet world. Reveal yourself a Christian, and all manner of non-Christians will judge you by what they believe Christians should do in any given situation. At the same time, because they don’t profess any faith, they are free to do as they please, and remain absolved from charges of hypocrisy.
New Novel by Stephen King: DreamCatcher Two. Twenty-Thousand alien immigrant children joyously travel to the woods of western Maine for their permanent migration to Stephen King’s backyard. #Dreamcatcher. #Thanks4TheTentCity.
Suffer the 9 years-olds hired by 15-year-olds to murder 30-year-olds to come and stay at Stephen King’s house as long as they want.
Revised Liberal dogma: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and I will exploit them as I see fit.
Thus Candour’s maxims flow from Rancour’s throat, As devils, to serve their purpose, Scripture quote.
Much easier to insult poor Christian children on Twitter than to insult them in their own Christian nations. #kingshamesbible
Nice private fence, Steve. Shame if anything happened to it. #apartheidinmaine
Yeap, this is a tactic right out of the Alinsky playbook…very effective:
This illustrates the type of evil that we’re up against. We’re doomed.
I wonder, when Leftists say that these “pequenito ninos” are only escaping the violence in Guatemala etc., do they ever stop and think “hey, so why aren’t they going to Costa Rica or Belize or Panama instead?” Why come all the way to America to escape “violence”, when all you have to do is walk 30 feet across the border into a country with no violence?
Ideals as he mis-interprets them.
My local Tea Party has no gospel, but follows a doc that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”
@stephenking seems to think establishment religion is fine but Congress should make no law respecting borders
Revised Liberal Gospel: Suffer the little children come unto me……..unless they are black ones in Chicago, Detroit.
Much harder to be a Liberal when the children are in your backyard.
For a literary giant, his biblical comprehension is low. Christ was talking about bringing children to belief, not physically to him to take care of. That is what liberals want, indoctrinated voters. They don’t want to physically take care of them or personally care about them. They just want political power they represent.
Because Chicago and Detroit are Heaven on Earth.
Want to save children from gang violence? Open up your home!
Stephen King erects tent city with tunnels into the gated woods of Maine.
#Kids.R.Pawns
Charity is one thing, and adoption is another. I can be generous without letting someone move into my house.
Aaron perfectly stated
Sorry – not a tweet, but…. Australia has been down this exact road (on a smaller scale) over the last 10 years. Examining that experience may be instructive.
Along the way, real refugees and asylum seekers are devalued and excluded by the bastardization and prostitution of the definitions and categories, and what had been general public support for helping the less fortunate turns to disgust at being “taken for fools”.
To do the right thing, you just have to live with the abuse.
Exactly. He should stick to domes raining blood; that he understands.
“Under the Dome” was unreadable, for me – a great premise that turned into a lugubrious parade of archetypes. That said, King gets Evil – be it individual, collective, unworldly, organized, spontaneous, feral, intelligent, he has an intuitive grasp on its psychology. His post-accident work has been mixed, and for every book that’s slipped out of my hands and never been picked up again, there’s been one I rode to the end.
He doesn’t need to write; he has to write, and I admire that, and still marvel at some of the elegant Mach-3 pulp he tossed off seemingly from muscle memory of fingers-over-keys.
I know his politics, and don’t find them particularly interesting or sophisticated, and no more care what he thinks about politics than I care what Ted Cruz thinks about inexplicably malevolent classic cars. When the occasional swipe at the right pops up in a book, well, MEGO, yeah yeah whatever. If it colors the entire text, well, next.
What he doesn’t seem to get is God; the goodness of his characters comes from an intuitive Humanist Decency that arises in response to evil. There’s a roaring amoral vacancy howling on the other side, and nothing to counteract it – a sense that the cosmos is populated only by appetite, with human bonds of love and friendship and duty as the straw walls we build as a bulwark.
Which makes this forthcoming book an interesting proposition. I think he’s capable of describing faith as it’s held by good people. “Desperation,” if I recall, had an explicitly Christian protagonist; I got the feeling King was surprised by the character, and treated him with growing respect. We’ll see.
As for the tweet, well, whatever.
My first reaction I will share in the PIT. After careful consideration I would give this carefully worded response:
Steven King is an idiot. I remember commenting online about these tweets several days ago. This is old news.
I prefer extending charity by free will rather than by diktat of Obama’s federal government.
No, he’s not an idiot (a “useful idiot”, maybe). These tweets have nothing to do with biblical comprehension or truth—they are part of a deliberate tactic (see Rules for Radicals) designed to discredit “the right”. I’ll tell you who are the real idiots—that’s us. When is our side going to stop giving these evil people the benefit of the doubt by saying that they’re stupid and/or misinformed? By not giving them the credit that they deserve and acting accordingly, we’re dooming our side to failure.
Thanks @StephenKing when we want your opinion, we’ll ask for it. Don’t you have another novel about a murderous car you should be writing?
Yes!!!!
To borrow from Instapundit–
They told me if I voted for Romney, the president’s supporters would try to replace the Constitution with a theocracy… and they were right!
Proposed tweet:
King has confused the Tea Party with Jesus. Trust me, everybody in the Tea Party knows the difference.