One cannot read that Fallaci article without walking away feeling, “What a WOMAN! My GOD, this is a REAL woman! What PASSION! What INTEGRITY! What STRENGTH — strength the equal of any man’s who ever lived … nay, of any HUNDRED men’s who ever lived! What MORALITY! What LOVE! Yes, all you gen-Xers or gen-Yers or gen-Zers or whatever you’re called nowadays — behold a WOMAN! This is the way they USED to make the breed — before we were all blessed with the pathetic, whiney, vacant, non-entity likes of the Gloria Steinems and Patricia Irelands; with the monstrous sex-reversed likes of the Hillarys and the Janet Renos. No sex-reversal HERE! No empty mewling incessant whining, but pure, breathtaking character and sheer femininity. You won’t see this very often — GAZE on it … while you have the chance … and DREAM that one day if you’re MAN ENOUGH you too might be sufficiently lucky to marry such a creature — to be loved by such a one. But you’ll have to be man enough — most today, of course, won’t come anywhere NEAR making the grade. CERTAINLY no liberal, leftist, or Clinton voter.

“They are in Rome … where, pestering the world with his ecumenism, his pietism, his Thirdworldism, Pope Wojtyla receives Tariq Aziz as a dove or a martyr who is about to be eaten by lions. (Then he sends him to Assisi where the friars escort him to the tomb of St. Francis.)”

I very strongly doubt that the Pope is calling the shots. I would say there is not “a small chance” that he is mentally able to call the shots — and there is not “a tiny chance” that he is — and not “a minuscule chance” that he is — but there is “no chance, zero, zip, nada, null, nicht ein, kein, aucune.”

He’s not calling the shots. Period. Un point, c’est tout. Full stop.

But someone clearly is, and that “someone” in the Vatican Court who is pulling the Pope’s strings, trundling him around having him utter gaffe after gaffe and make humiliating mistake after humiliating mistake is obviously of the lefty-lefto-leftout-leftover-leftbehind-leftfordead — or whatever it’s called — persuasion.

*Disgrace* is the only word for it — for what these leftist tranzi priests are pulling, in making use of what is but the hollowed-out, demented (yes, demented) shell of one of the great men of the twentieth century.

It’s like the disgrace that was perpetrated by what was his name — Ralph Schoenberg? Schoenman? — who got hold of Bertrand Russell in his senile dotage and led him round by the nose in public making a fool of him when he should have been in a nursing home, or great novelist Pearl Buck’s unscrupulous former dancing teacher, who did exactly the same thing to her ‘til it got in Time Magazine or something, and someone put a stop to it.

Even if Unadorned’s distressing picture of a senile and demented Pope being controlled by his leftist Tranzi court is true, that doesn’t change Fallaci’s point: that the enemies of the West are in control in Rome, as elsewhere in Europe.

Over the lunch break today I heard Rush Limbaugh on the car radio say Chief Iraqi Arms Inspector, Hans Blix, just told someone he fears global warming more than he does any major military conflict.

Here is the man in the whole world who is probably most directly in the thick of this present crisis which has put two civilizations literally on the brink of a major conflagration whose outcome cannot be known with certainty, saying he thinks it — this almost unprecedented crisis — is outweighed by “global warming,” a pure invention of left-wing fanatics which doesn’t exist but has been debunked (debunked as being anything resulting from human-caused CO2 emissions or fossil fuel use: that is, if it’s real at all, it is a natural process having nothing to do with CO2 production from human activity).

Rush told where Blix had made this comment, but I didn’t retain it, so can’t check it. If this is accurate, and he really did say that, then it’s not just some Muslim looney-tunes like Rafsanjani who need to have their heads examined.

Talk about the transformation of Europe into Eloi … as Mr. Kalb has quipped, E.U. ought to stand for Eloi Union.

By the way, who knew that H.G. Wells was making such a profoundly insightful comment on the direction in which Euro-American civilization seemed to be evolving? I’ve never read the book, having only seen the 1960s Hollywood film version, “The Time Machine” (with Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux). Following my first viewing of it as a young teenager, and again after every subsequent viewing of it on TV, I felt puzzlement as to why Wells would imagine people in the future to be Eloi-like.

Now I understand his insight perfectly, of course, having had the good fortune to discover VFR and finally learn some truth about today’s world for a change — truth you’ll never learn from Katy Couric and Matt Lauer, I’m afraid.

Like Unadorned, I’d like to know what Wells was thinking when he wrote that. Surely, at the beginning of the 20th century, when England and British civilization and the white race were at their height of power and influence, it wouldn’t have made sense for Wells to have seen humanity as moving in the direction of Eloi. And yet, to us, in the post-60s West, we see the tale as absolutely prophetic. So, what specifically could have inspired that idea for Wells? It would be worthwhile to do some research on this.

Also, most commentators on the book remark simply that Wells was warning of growing class divisions in his society. But that picture obviously doesn’t fit The Time Machine, because the whole point is that the Time Traveler initially believes the Eloi are the upper class, and only gradually discovers to his horror that the Eloi are really the food for the Morlocks. The idea is so specifically descriptive of our own, liberal society, where the white “masters” go in fear of the black underclass, and so unlike Wells’s society, that I can’t imagine where he got the idea or what he was thinking. Perhaps the book is not a fiction after all and Wells really traveled into the future!

All I can think is Wells must have seen the very first cracks showing in the edifice, and had the wit — wit which is the mark of all great writers — to recognize what it was he was looking at.

I think Wells, like many great writers, was keenly observant. The seeds of what we now see in full flower were present a century ago: Marxism, women’s suffrage, social welfare programs administered by the state. England passed its first restrictions on firearm ownership in the early part of the 20th century as I recall. Among the English elite, Christianity was already dead. Perhaps he saw the already present trends amongst the upper class and extrapolated what things would be like when the middle and lower classes were similarly “liberated.”

I think Carl is on the right track. Wasn’t there another Wells book which showed a planned society in which the people were effete? With the rise of widespread modern affluence, he saw the upper and middle classes of his time becoming increasingly soft, while, with the simultaneous beginning of the weakening of traditional morality and authority and family structure, he saw the lower urban classes becoming increasingly brutish. So he extrapolated from that to the Eloi and Morlocks. We know that affluence and comfort weakens people’s will to defend themselves from enemies.

The idea is similar to A Streetcar Named Desire, with Blanche as the gentle, ennervated, exhausted Eloi and Stanley as the brutish Morlock who devours her. It’s a theme that could perhaps be traced through 20th century literature.

Another angle on this comes from Theodore Roosevelt, who was president during the same decade that The Time Machine was published (I believe). At that time the confidence of the white West was at a peak, a sentiment TR shared and symbolized. Yet, quite close to the surface, as revealed in his private letters, TR was troubled with all kinds of premonitions that civilization and the white race could be soon heading down hill. It would seem that Wells (who visited TR at the White House) may have shared the same dread about the future, even at the summit of Western fortunes.

Wells was a leftist reformer, what we’d now call a Social Democrat, but he also believed in Darwinian evolution in a strict sense. The conflict between the two, which he never resolved, caused difficult relations with his fellow Fabians. I’ve never read an analysis of the novel, but, in light of those bare facts, I’d infer that he was projecting an outcome of the passivity of the proletariat of his generation in the face of the aggressiveness of its capitalist oppressors: that natural selection would exaggerate those genetic traits and produce the two species he depicted.

He’d be horrified, if he came back to life, to find that we conservatives have adopted his vision into our own family of beliefs—with certain modifications, to be sure. I for one don’t credit Wells with great prescience. Given his socialist ideals combined with his Darwinist materialism, the Eloi and Morlocks are practically inevitable in his fictional forecasts.

For a different take on Morlocks and Eloi, see Neal Stephenson’s “In The Beginning Was The Command Line.” He argues that, yes, today the world may be divided into Morlocks and Eloi, but rather than a brutish underclass oppressing an effete upperclass, today’s Morlocks “are running the show, because they understand how everything works”. The Morlocks “have the energy and intelligence to comprehend details, go out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like Sensorial Interfaces so that Eloi can get the gist without having to strain their minds or endure boredom.”

Of course, he notes, Morlocks require higher salaries for their efforts.

However, his main point is that present-day Morlockdom is simply a matter of turning off the tv and reading a book, or a few books —a matter of tackling a subject and making decisions as to what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false, beautiful and ugly.

Viewed charitably, the Eloi are polite, sympathetic, and well-disposed towards others. Viewed less charitably, the Eloi (us?) are morally relatavistic, and, hence, —Stephenson’s term— feckless (feeble, good-for-nothing, irresponsible).

“Wells was a leftist reformer, what we’d now call a Social Democrat, but he also believed in Darwinian evolution in a strict sense. The conflict between the two, which he never resolved, … ” — Frieda

Perhaps this also fits: perhaps a leftist of lesser character would have resolved the two by means of an unprincipled exception. Perhaps Wells subconsciously possessed too much intellectual integrity to permit himself to take that “easy way out.” Perhaps the resulting unresolvability of the conflict was precisely the source of the tension that produced the novel, “The Time Machine.” Perhaps, like the tension which results from all conflicts, its expression in this novel was (implicitly) pointing (through the medium of “The Time Machine” itself) to an actual “paradigm shift,” which would have led Wells finally away from leftism, had he pursued it to its logical conclusion.

Leftism in those Fabian and early Marxist times was sort of nascent, and people, even great thinkers, didn’t — in a sense, couldn’t be expected to — see its flaws yet.