Victim Mentality

"The Victim Mentality Kills" was the headline from a National Review Jim Geraghty email.

I thought it hyperbole.  Victim mentality can have some pluses, namely as a way to combat legitimate injustices, such as the way blacks are often treated by police (although BLM is a long way from MLK). But the downside is devastating: it ruthlessly kills gratitude and nourishes a passivity and blaming others for everything.

And now it seems positively dangerous, especially in at-risk populations like young Muslim immigrants. This WaPo piece reads like parody:

Artan spoke calmly but seriously about his acute awareness of what he saw as major American misconceptions about Islam, his religion. From memory, he ticked off examples of Islamophobia that garnered media attention, such as the police being summoned because a man in Avon, Ohio, was speaking Arabic in a parking lot or when a college student was removed from a plane after he said “Inshallah” in a phone conversation with his uncle.

Wow.  An incident in Avon, Ohio and a college student removed from a plane.  That's it?  Proving that if you want to nurse a sense of grievance, you'll sure find something.  Short of abolishing sin, there's gonna be no way to placate.  There needs to be a shaming of the victim mentality. A grievance industry set up against the grievance industry.

Geraghty writes:

What comes through most is this whining sense of victimhood, that he’s forced to commit these atrocious, barbaric attacks on innocent people out of a righteous sense of self-defense to protect his feelings.

“I am sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim brothers and sisters being killed and tortured EVERYWHERE..."

See, Muslims aren’t being killed and tortured everywhere. It would be nice if someone close to him had told him that, and if fewer people helped fuel that rage-inducing falsehood. If he ever bothered to read a book or the news about places like Syria and Iraq, he would have learned that Muslims are mostly being killed and tortured by fellow Muslims. Who does he think are the majority of ISIS victims? Who does he think are blowing up mosques from Iraq to Yemen? Who does he think blew up those Muslims in the hospital in Quetta, Pakistan, or the Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, or set off the car bombs in downtown Kabul, Afghanistan, or the minivan filled with explosives in central Baghdad? It’s not Westerners! You don’t see American communities churning out waves and waves of gleeful suicide bombers!

Burma? Burma? If you’re so mad about that, buy a plane ticket and go on a rampage over there. What, you think the students at OSU secretly control the levers of power in Naypyidaw? (That’s the Myanmar capital, and don’t feel bad, I had to look it up, too.)

He’s convinced he and his fellow members of his faith are victims of an aggressive, malevolent West.

He believes this while attending class at Ohio State University. Nobody’s oppressing him. No one’s imprisoning him without charges, trial, or appeal. Nobody’s trying to kill him. No one’s closing his mosque, or banning his faith. He’s got a better life with more opportunities, freedom, and material abundance than probably 90-some percent of his fellow Muslims around the world. And he still thinks he’s a victim of a malevolent America, and that everyone around him is a legitimate target for retribution.

Is this guy a jihadist? Sure. Even worse, he’s a whiny Millennial jihadist, who thinks that everything in life is so uniquely unfair to him, and that he’s unjustly victimized everywhere he goes. In an interview with the campus newspaper this summer, he said, “If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But I don’t blame them, it’s the media that put the picture in their heads.”

What, the unfair picture that any pious Muslim could be sympathetic to terrorists, a ticking time bomb, and full of murderous rage against everyone around him? Yeah, you sure showed us, pal! Allow me to float the theory that some people around this guy warily treated him like he was a nascent jihadist because he acted like a nascent jihadist.

Update: Oh great:  http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/01/osu-terrorist-was-enrolled-in-class-on-diversity-microaggressions/

Revoking My Right to Vote

I voted for arguably one of the worst presidents in the last 40 years (George W. Bush).  I also did not vote for Trump, and although it's absurdly early to speculate he may end up doing well based on the Jim Geraghty piece below.  If Trump turns out decent I probably should never vote for president again!

We may quibble with a few [of Trump's cabinet choices] here and there, but overall it’s a really good group, particularly considering the perceived limited circle of connections and talent around Trump during the campaign. By and large, this is a pretty darn conservative cabinet, and one that’s sufficiently experienced, professional, knowledgeable, and prepared for the massive tasks before them. In fact, if any of the other 16 Republican presidential candidates had won, it’s easy to picture some of these same names appearing in those alternative Republican cabinets.

What’s more, there’s still quite a bit of experienced managerial and legislative talent walking through the lobby of Trump Tower these days: Mitt Romney, David Petraeus, Rick Perry, retired general James Mattis, Representative Marsha Blackburn, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin.

Perhaps most surprising is that some of the figures most loyal and visible during the campaign haven’t been named to any cabinet positions yet: Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and Chris Christie. (There’s the rumor, not yet officially announced, that Ben Carson will run the Department of Housing and Urban Development.)

During the campaign, quite a few conservatives uncomfortable with Trump noted that they would feel better if Mike Pence was the guy really handling the details. We might be getting something akin to that scenario:

Trump’s choices so far have reflected Pence’s politics -- potentially proving helpful on Capitol Hill, where the Indiana governor and former House Republican leader has long been expected to help Trump most. Pence’s devotion to conservative principles -- and his relationships with powerful groups, including the Heritage Foundation -- have allowed him to help Trump navigate a Washington terrain that is unfamiliar to the billionaire business mogul who just ran his first campaign for any office.

A top Pence aide said Tuesday that Trump and Pence consult on all Cabinet picks -- Pence even got a close friend, Representative Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) into the mix for Treasury secretary, though that nod ultimately went to Steven Mnuchin -- and that they communicate throughout the transition.

As for the relationship, the aide said they can look like something of an “odd couple” -- but the balancing works. Pence, the aide said, was the only person who would have had the discipline to make it through a gauntlet like that campaign and not lose faith.

Do you recall the Obama administration’s “stray voltage” theory? The gist was, “the president purposefully overstates his case knowing that it will create controversy… Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation, and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness.” Part of it was a cynical calculation to let an argument about a presidential statement ensure a topic stayed front and center in the public’s mind; there’s also the side effect of ensuring that a brouhaha about a presidential statement overshadowed actual policy decisions – decisions that may be more consequential, but are less dramatic and interesting to the news media.

Almost like, say, a president-elect declaring he wants to strip away the citizenship of those burning the flag.

If the incoming Trump administration really is using a variation of the “stray voltage” approach, and Democrats really have an uncontrollable impulse to focus on the controversial statement du jour, the Trump administration could end up being stunningly effective in policymaking. A lot of seemingly dry and boring regulations can be repealed, executive orders withdrawn, rewritten, and issued, legislation passed by GOP majorities in Congress and signed, all while the political world froths at the mouth about the president’s latest Tweet or denunciation of the media, or theater performers, or anything else that comes to mind.

You can enact sweeping, dramatic changes to Americans’ lives under the radar. As our friends at the Weekly Standard noted, the charter school movement grew enormously over the past 25 years, in large part because it wasn’t a big, Washington-focused political battle. Today, “43 states have charter-school laws, and approximately 3 million kids attend almost 7,000 charters across the country.” This happened without any giant federal legislation or heated governmental clashes in the national spotlight.

Could this really happen? Could the next four (eight?) years really turn out to be a golden era for conservative policy?

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Maybe I can't be too hard on myself. Maureen Dowd wrote this summer about how impossible it is to cast an informed vote:

No Good Deed...

I recall it being a big surprise when at our workplace there was a big effort towards forcing employee engagement scores up via a lot of torturous activities and meetings. I thought: this is simple, we got this. Just give all perfect scores on engagement and we'll be free of the nonsense. Only that didn't completely turn out that way, at least verbally. (In practice, since our engagement scores soared, we haven't been punished as much.) But verbally we were told that high scores would not obviate the need for constant attention to engagement. There was always room to improve.

I thought of that while reading Pope Benedict remark that a Pope must not always be applauded or there is something amiss. He must be martyred, if not physically then in reputation or whatnot. The world, by definition, can't be in sync with the Pope much as we employees can't, by definition, be fully engaged.

The Bible teaches that goodness is always persecuted, so the adage "no good deed goes unpunished" seems biblical enough, and for Central Ohio to take in so many Somali refugees (second only to Minneapolis area), we were due to get hit.  And so we did, at the OSU campus.

Feels miraculous he didn't kill anybody. It sure hits close enough to home. Last year the guy was a student at Columbus State, which is in a downtown neighborhood I walk through at least twice a week at lunchtime on my way to St. Pat's.

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One of the more puzzling anecdotes about the life of Christ was where Jesus was found in the temple by Mary and Joseph after three days. And yet one could see the teaching potential and the greater good in it. Mary feels anxiety and distress and finally finds Him and is reassured. Could that not be a lesson for her to trust God, a trust she would need exponentially multiplied during the Crucifixion? And perhaps she exhibited and telegraphed that trust in Him as he was going along the way of the Cross, and perhaps that was the difference-maker for him as far as avoiding the temptation of giving in to despair or the exhaustion, fully human as He was and subject to the same temptations we are.

A recent reading from Revelation (ironically meaning "unveiling") serves to remind me we're not owed the immediate gratification of "seeing" God or understanding everything:

The direct vision of God is the great hope of biblical spirituality (Ps 11:7; 42:2) and the preeminent blessing of heaven (Mt 5:8; 1 Cor 13:12). Seeing the face of God points to a profound personal intimacy with him; it is an experience of knowing God that is the fulfillment of human existence. Tradition calls this the Beatific Vision (CCC 1023–28).

As a kid, I thought that God should condescend to us to the point of appearing to each of us personally, via a mystical experience, and thus show proof of His existence. There's definitely a sense of entitlement in that, but also an ignorance that it may not even be in our best interests to have a personal experience of God like St. Paul, given that the cost is awfully high. More is expected when you receive those sorts of visions, and Paul was expected to give his life, his reputation, and health, to the point where he "gloried" in the cross of Christ.

God's wouldn't ask of us faith unless it was good for us, but I guess that takes faith.  That's one of the pure beauties of the Catholic Church for me: the Church teaches that faith is a gift given to us in Baptism whether we are conscious of it or not, while for most Protestant denominations faith is an emotion at best, or something you've developed on your own at worst. Unless faith comes to us in an unconscious manner, it doesn't feel as much a gift, and it doesn't come to us more unconsciously than it does with infant Baptism.

Wine Quiz

I've never had any of these, but I took a quiz here to determine wines I'd supposedly like:

BURRASCA SANGIOVESE 2015
HARENA MARIS CHENIN BLANC 2013
ZINSANE ZINFANDEL 2014

The Importance of Little Truths

The mainstream media's pious eulogy for Fidel and Trump's counterpunch statement (in which he called a spade a space) reminds me how deeply satisfying the truth can be even when coming from such a flawed instrument.

Hearing the truth in many instances is a sort of a luxury item inasmuch as not seeming necessary. Part of the art of diplomacy is allowing people to have their small fictions for peace-of-mind purposes. But currently the rage is authenticity uber alles, even when coming from a phony like Trump. Because, he's so phony he comes out the other side, like how if you're so rightwing you almost left-wing. (See here)

The thirst from plain-spoken Middle Americans to hear Islamic terrorism named *Islamic* terrorism struck me as somewhat self-indulgent. Yes terrorism is primarily Islamic, but there's no reason to rub their noses in it especially seeing how it seems to serve no strategic interest.

Similarly with Castro, I'm not sure how much difference it really makes to opine other than for the cathartic effect for those "on your side" (in my case, with people who have read history and aren't Communists, reasonably minimal standards).

But I think with Trump I misunderestimated how important it is for many people to hear their view expressed; my father-in-law is a case-in-point. He was a very early Trump supporter based largely on Trump's political incorrectness. Like what baseball guru Bill James said.

There is admittedly a tonic in hearing the sacred cows of the Left gored. My tendency can be too Spock-like; people are animated by emotion and are not robots and Lord knows I'm certainly animated by emotion enough, in particular after reading how Shelby Steele ascribed white guilt as the reason we voted for Obama. I became infinitely annoyed that Obama was thrust on me because ancestors of some Americans in a hundred and fifty years ago held slaves. Steele's views look significantly less true now, given how it seems we just have a fetish for outsiders, with Obama looking like the ultimate outsider until we doubled-down on the Trumpster.

If there's a hierarchy of truths to defend, then the time spent debating those lower on the list (like Islamic terrorism or Fidel Castro's saintliness) seem distractions -- except when they aren't, that is when people are so fed up they vote in a "trump l'oeil".

I recall it was the great Tom of Disputations who said that if something is very important to someone else, even if you think it shouldn't be that important to them, it should therefore be taken seriously because they are human and highly prized children of God.

And even for the secular types, in a democracy, how can you ignore what is important to the mass of men?

I'm Semi-Famous Once Removed!

Words that I coined will now live for eternity:

By the way, you can hear Hambone (aka "Rene") plug his book here on a local radio station.

My Memoir*

There was a break in the weather on June 20th. The city of Hamilton's Water Works station recorded a high of 75 that day after a week in the 80s and 90s. It'd been a hot June with the promise of more to come.

On Friday the 21st the temperature inched up to 79; the next day would hit 91 and the day after 93. Like animals that can tell a coming hurricane, my mom could feel the heat coming back and told me, in no uncertain terms, that the rent was due and I had to come out. She wouldn't be carrying a nine pound baby in the heat of summer, so labor began on the 21st and ended conveniently before the heat of the 22nd's afternoon.

I was born with certain expectations and predilections but failed to enunciate them adequately to my mother.  I became a writer due to that early lesson: crying nonsense just doesn't get the job done. You have to be articulate, to plead your case, to explain what's wrong. And I didn't, not at all. All I did was cry, cry, cry. Endlessly but with impressive repetition, like how foreigners keep saying the same foreign word as if you could understand them the tenth time better. I couldn't use English to describe my dislike of the bottled milk, but I think it was causing me gas pains, best I can tell. I can't recall.

It was months before relief came when a doctor who spoke tears understood and translated. I went on some sort of different formula, the details unspecific but perhaps not earth-shattering. Calm was restored. The wisdom at Woodstock, six years later, was "stay away from the brown acid", but my wisdom acquired earlier was "stay away from the bottled milk."

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The birth itself occurred at 9:12:47 Eastern Standard Time, which is when I accomplished my first (the haters say "only") courageous deed, that of forsaking the amniotic fluid (and thus being, essentially, a aquatic animal) and breathing that rich combination of oxygen and nitrogen and fossil fuel pollution we call air.  And thus I became a land animal overnight, or technically, over morning.

I spent my first day resting comfortably when I obviously should've been learning to read so that I could say words like, "I think I'm allergic to that damn milk." At the very least I could've gotten a jump start on a savings plan since I wasn't getting any younger.

But a certain laziness gripped me, perhaps not unique to my sex, and I slept a lot, dreaming of those prelapsarian days in my mom's womb where I was essentially a "professional student", discovering my immediate surroundings, experiencing different types of food, and learning out how to pick my nose.  My payment was free food and room and board.  A sinecure.

I was surprisingly gifted in the womb, but this was not widely known. They don't give scholarships, six-figure jobs, or multi-year football contracts to those, like me, who show exceptional promise pre-birth. I'm not bitter, really, but I am a victim of societal prejudice against those still on the amniotic fluid. You'd think I wasn't a person or something then!

Fortunately nowadays they have soccer camp for pre-borns, which involves mothers hiking to distant athletic fields and yelling words of encouragement to their little ones along with words of discouragement to the refs. "Offsides, no way! Just because I'm a little more pregnant than she is shouldn't count..."

Again I leap way ahead. I have about 100,000 more words to write concerning my initial day of life, but we got this.

Here I am playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 while still in the womb!
It's not bragging if it's true!

Here is a modern day mom having her unborn practice soccer. 

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* - A note of explanation: It's come to my attention that narcissism is the new black.  We just elected a president with no other discernible skills but for an admirable facility with bankruptcy laws.  I know I can be more narcissistic too. I know I have it in me because I'm a blogger for heavensake. So I've decided to write a memoir in a series of over fifteen-thousand blog posts in which I describe the history of my life in real time.  Ideally, it should take the average reader 24 hours to read about each of my 24 hour days.   Don't be daunted, this'll be great; We're I'm going to make blogging great again.  (I almost used "we" instead of "I" - I'm a budding narcissist but I've got the goods, trust me!)

A November Hike

King Readings

Beautiful readings for the feast of Christ the King today. The first line in the first reading about David becoming king immediately caught me:

"Then all the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron, and said, 'Look, we are your bone and flesh.'"

This is part and parcel with by far my favorite view of Scripture, the marital view. "Your builder has come to marry you" as it says in Isaiah, as well as the Pauline teaching of the one Body of Christ made up of us (just as two become one in early marriage). It just doesn't get better, news-wise, than God not only created us, and forgives us, but wants to marry us and become one body with us.

This 2nd Samuel verse was an Adam and Eve reference and how the tribes basically are going to "marry" David, much as we Christians would "marry" Christ.  And sure enough, I see Fr. Barron jumped on this as well:

Having come to David, the elders of the tribes say, “Look, we are your bone and flesh” (2 Sam. 5:1). They cannot mean a physical, tribal connection, for these are not men of Judah, but they do indeed assert that David is the head under which a kind of mystical body can form. No one familiar with the Bible can miss the connection between this language and the words used by Adam of Eve: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). What the elders of Israel are proposing is a sort of marriage between themselves and David, a joining together of what had become separated, a union that will result in fruitfulness. Most Christians will recognize the link between this description of David’s relationship to Israel and Paul’s description of Jesus’s relationship to the church: “He [Christ] is the head of the body, the church” (Col. 1:18); and “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27).

Friday Seven

Even the year of Mercy has its limits: "Pope: 'People can't forgive a priest attached to money.'"

Francis might add: "And neither can I forgive lay people who like the Latin Mass."

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The problem with division is that it's so divisive.

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Best tweet I've seen lately, from a newspaperman: "Know what isn't normal? Overly-politicized, angry societies full of people that shun their own families over politics."


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There are few as judgmental as those who judge the judgmental.

And those judgmental towards those who judge the judgmental.


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I'm at coughing stage of the cold now, hopefully soon to end. You can't hurry love or a cold virus it turns out. It travels at its own leisurely pace, not much noticing your ZiCams or healthy eats or alcohol-for-medicinal-purposes-only.


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Jonah Goldberg's G-file continues to be a Friday joy. Calling Hillary a remora on Bill was insti-classic.

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But enough nonsense!

The readings at Mass are always intriguing, including today's from Revelation:


"He was given the scroll to eat, “and the scroll was sweet in my mouth but bitter in my stomach." 


My take was to think how initially we receive the Word and then we suffer for it, like how Mary received the joy of Christ's birth but ended up with the crushing sorrow of his death on the cross.


St. Augustine says:

"It suggests that the church’s mouth is to be found in the saints, in spiritual people, and the church’s belly in the carnal people...[Scripture] says he was given a book to eat, “and the book was sweet in my mouth but bitter in my stomach.” What can that mean? Surely that the highest precepts, which spiritual persons accept, are unacceptable to the carnal, and that commands that delight the spiritual only give the carnal indigestion."

Modern commentaries flow along these lines:

"Inspired by Ezek 3:13, a prophetic investiture; eating the scroll symbolizes the prophet’s digesting of the message which he has to transmit. In Ezekiel, though the book was sweet in the mouth, its contents, with regard to Israel, were full of “dirges and laments and words of woe”.


It's almost like "I've got good news and bad news for you. The good news is that this message is of God, the bad news is that it is of judgment."

Voice of Reason

From David French at NRO:

The worst case against Trump goes as follows: He’s a Klan-endorsed champion of an alt-right that is racist and willing to use threats, intimidation, and violence to get its way. He hates Latinos and Muslims and wants to introduce national stop-and-frisk targeted at black men. He will rip families apart, go house to house in search of illegal aliens, and leads a vast army of white-supremacist voters who are intent on re-establishing their cultural and economic dominance. One writer, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie — in a piece called “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter” — even compared Trump supporters to the people who watched lynchings.

But wait, wasn’t there also a worst case against Hillary Clinton? As much as the Democrats try to normalize her, isn’t she a Communist-party endorsed champion of a Black Lives Matter movement that is not only committed to “disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” it has inspired riots and deadly violence from coast to coast? Didn’t she mishandle the nation’s national-security secrets and support attacks on Americans’ religious freedoms? When she lost, didn’t some of her supporters align themselves with anarchists and other radicals (including “Black Bloc” thugs) to stoke violence in American streets?

Sadly, both of these worst-case scenarios have more than a few kernels of truth. There is an alt-right, it is evil, and a key member of Trump’s team — Steve Bannon — bragged about turning one of the Right’s most-trafficked sites into a “platform” for that vile movement. Trump’s own record of insensitive and outrageous comments and policy ideas is too well-known to repeat. As for Hillary, she did of course carry with her the Star Wars–cantina of radicals and revolutionaries that tags along with virtually every modern Democratic nominee. Some of these radicals did riot. She did mishandle our nation’s secrets, and she was an extremist advocate of abortion rights.

So what’s the case for the deep breath? Simply put, the vast majority of Americans didn’t and don’t support the fringes (if they were even aware they exist), the American system is built from the ground-up to block radicalism, and the real-world proposals that are so far on the table for the Trump administration are in the main sensible, conventional, and hardly revolutionary (even when I disagree.).

First, it is no more illegitimate for 58 percent of white people to vote for one candidate than it is for 88 percent of black people to vote for the other. Those votes don’t automatically render one candidate a white nationalist any more than opposing votes render the other candidate a champion of black separatism. Moreover, in key communities, many of these white voters happily voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012 and like him still today. Millions more voted for Trump in spite of Trump, arguing in well-documented battles with Never Trumpers like me that Trump represented the lesser of two evils, that a vote for him was nothing more than a vote in self-defense against leftist radicalism.

 Read more at: here.

Killjoys!

Our company is not making America great again.

Cohen's Lyric

Since Leonard Cohen died the other day, I listened to his Hallelujah song five times. I just love the lyric:

"I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch...
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah."

It just doesn't get better than that in encapsulating the general human story: Adam and Eve did their best, it wasn't much, they couldn't feel His love so they had to touch (the apple), it all went wrong, but even now they stand before the Lord of Song and thanks be to God, have nothing on their tongues but 'Hallelujah'. Or so goes my personal interpretation.

There are few things more moving than affecting that all going wrong and yet being grateful nonetheless. It reminds me of how as a kid I was so moved by the cartoon The Grinch Who Stole Christmas when the citizens still sang merrily on Christmas despite the theft of all their food and toys and tinsel. Gratitude in the face of an often ungracious world, man, that's just the secret to life it seems like sometimes.

The timing of his death almost seems like a reminder of how paltry a subject politics seems compared with the big picture. And of course I googled to try to find out the circumstances of his death, wondering if somehow he hung on just long enough out of curiosity of how the election would turn out... To the extent we can control those things.

From First Things

"[Christians]  should speak tentatively in the political mode. And we should speak with generosity to those who draw different conclusions about what course of action, here and now, in our always compromised circumstances, best serve God's purposes in public life." - R. Reno, First Things

Politics as Idol

Kind of stunned by the reaction to election, but in a post-Christian society there's a strong pull to raise politics to idol status.  From a book blurb:

Emilio Gentile argues that politics over the past two centuries has often taken on the features of religion, claiming as its own the prerogative of defining the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life. Secular political entities such as the nation, the state, race, class, and the party became the focus of myths, rituals, and commandments and gradually became objects of faith, loyalty, and reverence.

So all the hysteria is understandable in light of that. This will likely get worse as faith in God wanes because if this world is all there is, then politics is all there is.

Gregory Wolfe, the editor of Image, wrote:

If you followed me [on Twitter] because I pointed out the irony of the "NotMyPresident" protesters doing what people feared Trump might do -- That is, potentially refuse to accept the results of the election and thought it was because I supported Trump, you are mistaken.

The irony is that some people -- on both sides -- are so ideological and alienated that they seem prepared to deny the rule of law.

And that scares the hooey out of me.

So I'll say it again: I loathe and fear Donald Trump; I will "resist" when necessary, but I will also try to shape the larger conversation in such a way that -- however remote the likelihood may be -- I can be some influence for good on the world that shapes HIS decisions.