At the Battle of Camlann, King Arthur fought his bastard son, Mordred. In the end both were dead: Arthur pierced with Mordred’s lance and Mordred by a thrust of Arthur’s sword. Mordred was the spawn of incest between Arthur and his sister. In the telling of the Arthurian legend in the movie Excalibur, this liaison was a result of a spell, not unnatural lust on the part of Arthur. Even so, Arthur’s punishment for incest is his own death at the hands of his bastard. At least that is what is prophesied. Arthur seeks to avoid this fate by banishing his baby son. But Mordred returns years later to foment rebellion and take Arthur’s crown. The ensuing battle only ends in death at the hands of each other.

Keener minds than my own might fashion this into a metaphor of the American experience. A foundation of liberty, but not for all. A conflict inherent in the dynamic tension that exists between the power of the individual and the power of the collective. A complex modernity that relies on technocrats whose moral fiber is tested not to take advantage of and control the masses for the benefit of the elite.

When we meditate on Service, we should pause and say a quiet “thank you” to the people that fought the Cold War.

My father was a Cold War-era CIA guy. Not a debonair, tuxedo-wearing, sneak-upstairs-to-crack-the-safe-for-the-super-secret-codes-during-the-Ambassador’s-cocktail-party CIA guy. He was a communicator. As my father told me countless times growing up, and then I heard about a bajillion times after I joined the Army, it doesn’t matter how awesome the intel is if you can’t push it up and out to the people that can use it. He and his cohort were hard-working, hard-drinking, knuckle-scarred hard cases, and they would–by God–get the intel out.

Those not enrolled Ambassador Marie’s booster club may be baffled by the rather selective integrity on display. She speaks for her group (deep state/ interagency consensus/ career policy staff/ whatever) when she says that she disapproved of Rudy Giuliani wandering in and identifying which investigation targets the US government should instruct the Ukrainian government to investigate or not investigate. But the same group had no problem with a do-not-investigate list from “regular channels” nor any reservations about working closely with DNC operatives looking for dirt on anyone connected with Trump. And, of course, her testimony was totally unaffected by Trump firing her for overt partisan allegiances and actions. (How dare he!)

Leaving aside the issue of Mr. Giuliani’s spectacularly poor judgment in this entire matter, we need to get a clearer understanding of “regular channels.” One might think that “channel” implies a passive conduit through which information and directives flow. One would be wrong. These “regular channels” get to decide what flows through them, like a cable box that can veto your viewing choices. It means deference to sensibilities if not the specific preferences of The Experts.

President Trump scheduled a rally in Monroe, LA, and son #2 (Socrimedes) asked me to take him. Monroe is a two-hour drive, plus waiting in line, and actually a bridge too far. But the rumor was that Trump would be coming near my home, so I begged off.

When it was announced he was coming to Bossier City, I knew I was going. I took off work at 1400 to get Socrimedes after school. Although people had been lining up since the morning and vendors had been outside the venue for days, I was pretty confident we would get in. We parked at a buddy’s business (other parking was full) and walked the mile to the CenturyLink Center. We ended up on our feet for about an hour and a half.

Until we moved to our current home in 1996, my wife and I had always lived in cities or on military bases. Small town life was a revelation for us. We live in a rural area and I worked in a small-town high school for 16 years after leaving my corporate job. Going to town is always an experience, as everyplace we go is staffed by former students and their parents.

Waitresses know your name and usually have an idea what you will order. When we respond to medical or other calls for our fire department, we typically know the family, which is a big relief for people under stress. When I visit the schools in town (I’m on the school board), I see the children of my former students, and other former students work in the schools now.

The left, it seems, tends to choose its examples poorly. They want to highlight police brutality against innocent black men, and they choose Michael Brown, a known criminal who died while trying to kill a police officer after robbing a convenience store. They want to highlight the corruption of Donald Trump, and they choose Ukraine, where Vice President Biden’s son earned millions of dollars selling influence in the Obama administration. They want to highlight global warming climate change, and they choose an autistic high school sophomore who struggles to demonstrate any emotions beyond contempt and anger. Who comes up with this stuff?

Greta Thunberg must live in a strange world right now. She went from a teenage girl who struggled socially and had no particular gift for math or science, to a worldwide authority on meteorology, oceanography, thermodynamics, solar nuclear physics, botany, geology, agriculture, petroleum engineering, international transportation systems, and lots of other stuff she’d never heard of until the day before yesterday. Her handlers arrange her public appearances and write her speeches. Powerful people from corporations and agencies she’s never heard of beg for her endorsement. She becomes a slave to her own celebrity, which must seem to her to have appeared suddenly, like a genie from a bottle. I would struggle with all the pressures on her, and I’m 50 years old. She’s 16.

One of Ricochet’s finest has encouraged us to be more concise. No problemo. My title is my article. Almost. I just can’t conform myself instantly to these new disciplines. I need some time to adjust. I’ll try to keep it short, though:

1. Mark Steyn said, on Tucker’s show tonight, that Kellyanne Conway shoved Wolf Blitzer’s ploy down his throat.
2. She said that Blitzer had embarrassed himself (about five seconds earlier…I wish I, and other American liberals, were that quick on our feet) by asserting on national TV that she, Kellyanne and her husband had marital problems, but that he didn’t want to talk about these presumed problems on national TV.
3. Kellyanne brought the obvious contradiction to Blitzer’s attention, leaving him desperately dodging and trying to change the subject. (Wolf’s script presumably read, “Kellyanne is flustered by your personal attack, and starts weeping like any fragile woman would who is attacked by a famous, powerful Man like you, Wolf…”

Like Mark Steyn, I remarked–to the Boat Wife–on what Kellyanne did in real time to Blitzer, and by association to CNN and the establishment propaganda machine, in anatomical terms.