Fingers crossed with good intentions,
We've got both the brawn and brains!
At long last, we're making Progress!
We see Caesar seize the reins.
Tom Graffagnino
* * *
“In seeking to bring about earthly salvation, we seek to attain the ends of love by the means of power. It is an empty dream. Or a nightmare: think of Orwell’s “Ministry of Love,” an inquisitorial prison and torture chamber. Yet we cannot shudder and wake from the nightmare. The best that earthly power can do, as C.S. Lewis puts it so beautifully in The Weight of Glory, is to clear a space wherein the sweet and ordinary things of human life can play:
As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the wind and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit.