Waking up this morning from an extended slumber (literally, not figuratively, it’s 0644 GMT), it seems to me time to bore you with a “long”. There’s already one up at OoL:

https://orphansofliberty.blogspot.com/2026/03/handful-of-senators-dont-pass.html

The title of Thur 1 is obviously from Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge over Troubled Water, so let’s run with that analogy. As a little kid, it was not in the least obvious back then that that smash hit was anything but the most beautiful pastiche which, to a child, was in the ballad category and which offered hope to all tired and lonely, all the down-and-outs.

Except it did nothing of the sort.

In decades-later terms, it was the exact opposite of 12atonalism from the Frankfurt School, designed to keep us on edge and disgruntled, angry … as we are in the west today.

That was around too … screaming metal, “hard rock”, perversions in the guise of lightheartedness … but this song, like Candle in the Wind, like so many memorably beautiful songs of the time, inc. American Pie, posited anything BUT God as the giver of reprieve, comfort, courage … and so the 60s went, which I’ve been looking carefully at of late.

It posited nature, good music, bonhomie, the glass and bottle, as all we need in our lobg journey “to fulfil ourselves”, to hell with anyone else. Naturally, you’ll take issue with that insult … you of course were the most wonderfully altruistic guy or gal … you and the other guys and gals were there, as Cyndi Lauper sang, to have fun … just to have your own pleasure whilst projecting a compassionate, almost Christian concern for others, as far as it assuaged your conscience.

But as Chris Rea sang … that was actually the road to hell … a living hell we have in March, 2026. The Lie was that it presupposed safety and security … banks of wildflowers, the neighbourhood bobby, the postman (mailman), the grocer, the baker, the signalman … you see, the generation before had built those, had suffered, even through rationing, and now here we were, the product of our parents’ “never again those horrors” mentality, Dr. Spock and so on.

Sure the Beatles introduced us to other “pleasures” such as Lucy in the Sky, while the Stones exhorted us to have Sympathy for Altamint Speedway. We were exhorted to wear a flower in our hair as we spread STDs and prostituted every naive, pretty, but rebellious girl of our age.

Girls became feminazi warriors, imagining themselves Boadiceas or Statues of Ishtar in NY harbour. Until Kent State of course, or Tiananmen Square. Chivalry died too of course … the whole groundwork which had been the West was now built on shifting sands, no longer the rock.

Yesterday, I mentioned not officially following a lady unless she’d first followed … misplaced chivalry? She said I was a weak man … chivalry is weak? Lady Tia noted that this Lucy did not follow her back either. This a.m., I ran this song about those mistreating others:

|https://youtu.be/7roqDIv2kUg?si=DCaQk5PNa0eHbGlH

There we go.

Getting back to S&G’s B’overTW, on the surface, it’s just two NY Jewish youths reading the zeitgeist correctly and offering a “bridge” for people, esp. the young and already “12atonalled” to feel a bit better. An entirely different message to that of Amazing Grace.

In fact the message is … whatever comfort and succour you offer angst-ridden youth, make sure it has zero to do with John 3:16 … anything else will do … the old “philosophers”, or Nietsche, or Zimmerman … do anything at all to offer false succour, guidance, protection, courage … anything at all but NOT John 3:16.

And it becomes so easy, doesn’t it? Crusaders slaughtering Constantinople, Knights Templar, churchmen and nuns belting kids, Ian Paisley, the Vatican golden calf and sleaze, which motivated Chaucer, Erasmus, Calvin … pointy hats, gobbledegook, much chanting, incense-swinging, whilst the greedy, sleazy Jimmy Swaggarts rip off the newly faithful … read Somerset Maugham’s Rain too if you have time … the message is to highlight, to spotlight all the very worst aspects of John 3:16 or Matthew Chapter 5 when bad humans get control of them … whilst hiding away the pastoral care side of things.

Mother Theresa?

I was making fun of the Salvos as a kid and my grandmother (I once had a couple of those) admonished me, saying I had not seen them at work during the depression and war … she had. They were often the only ones out there in all conditions, helping. Now look at them … as Woke as the RNLI … corrupt, sleazy.