Ep. 37 mocks the absurdity of a fake "bear rape" hoax in Revenant while critiquing Hollywood’s Christmas-season violence and media bias in the 2016 election, where Clinton’s lies went unchallenged while Ben Carson faced scrutiny. The Paris climate talks are dismissed as performative, with the host arguing capitalism—not no-growth policies—lifted humanity from poverty, contrasting it with leftist nostalgia for oppression. Hollywood’s sanitized Christian films are mocked for avoiding suffering, except The Passion, while T.S. Eliot’s bleak Journey of the Magi and the host’s memoir reframe Christmas as a stark, faith-driven alternative to saccharine escapism. [Automatically generated summary]
Yesterday, the Drudge Report reported that the new movie Revenant includes a scene in which Leonardo DiCaprio is raped by a bear.
Fox, the studio that made the film, denies that.
They say the sex was consensual and DiCaprio lied about it later because he regretted it.
They produced an earlier interview that Leonardo had done in which he said that he was simply sick and tired of sleeping with an endless string of supermodels and had begun fantasizing about lumbering, carnivorous forest creatures who could rip his head off with a single swipe of their paws.
Anyway, he said, you know, he later admitted, DiCaprio later admitted that he'd gotten drunk on the set of Revenant and had made a boo-boo.
Or maybe he'd made a yogi.
I was too confused.
Anyway, the picture will be released for Christmas because nothing says Christmas like, well, now I'm going to let you finish that sentence yourself.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
All right, this just shows you what a great writer Shakespeare is, all right?
Because the first thing that came into my mind is Shakespeare is such a great writer that even his stage directions are famous.
He wrote the most famous stage direction ever written, which was Exit Pursued by a Bear.
From a Winterstale, okay?
And that actually became a saying, exit pursued by a bear, for writers, when writers want to get rid of a character, but they don't want there to be, they don't want the hero to kill him, and they can't quite figure out what to do with him.
They just introduce some, you know, a bear or some kind of machinery that gets rid of him.
So he's exit pursued by a bear.
It actually became a saying.
So this was exit pursued by a bear, except, you know, Leonardo kind of enjoyed being pursued by a bear, apparently.
Anyway, the story is totally untrue.
But we're actually going to come back to this because I'm going to talk about something that is happening.
The picture is apparently insanely violent.
And it's being released at the same time as Hateful 8, which is also insanely violent.
They're releasing them both for Christmas.
So I'll get back to that in a minute.
The news of the day, first of all, the Quinnet Piak poll is out, which just says that Trump is still ahead and Hillary is still ahead and Carson has fallen back.
I love the way the New York Times reported this, saying Carson had fallen back in part due to questions about his biography.
And I get this newsletter from Cheryl Atkinson, who was the CBS TV investigative reporter who had to leave CBS because they wouldn't let her report on the scandals dogging the Obama administration.
They wouldn't let her report on Benghazi.
They wouldn't let her report on the IRS.
And so eventually she had to leave.
And now she has her own kind of syndicated program and she sends out a newsletter, which I get.
And she has this thing she calls the substitution game, where she says, imagine how they would report this if the parties were reversed.
And the thing about Atkinson she's not political.
I've heard her speak, and she's kind of naive about politics.
She doesn't really know.
She just likes to expose powerful people lying.
That's what she enjoys.
And she said, you know, all they're talking about is Ben Carson telling lies.
Hillary Clinton is also in the lead, and they're not talking about all the lies that she told.
They're not talking about the fact, she says, she says, with Clinton, the lead Democrat running for president, are reporters engaging in days of passionate arguments with her about her false sniper fire claim.
Remember when she said she had fallen, she had been under sniper fire, or the fact that she lied about the Benghazi terrorist attacks and said they were inspired by a YouTube video.
So she just points out that all of this is utterly ridiculous.
Republicans do have a choice, however, since Trump is, the poll shows that Trump will lose not only to Hillary, but to the crazy guy, Bernie, what's his name?
The communist.
So he'll lose to both of them.
So we have to choose whether we want to vote for Trump and lose or vote for Rubio, who's probably the next guy in line, and possibly take back the White House.
That would be exciting.
However, speaking of lying, we've got to go back.
I know I keep returning to this, but it's what's going on this week, and I don't mean to be obsessed about it, but we have to return to Paris, where Barack Obama is saving us from the sun.
You know, this is where they're having this climate change thing, where the leaders of the world are gathering together to save us from the fact that the earth gets hotter and colder.
You know, this is what they're spending their time doing.
You know, I'm not going to play that cut of, there's a cutout of a former, the former intelligence chief saying that Obama ignored all the warnings about ISIS and all this stuff.
The point is simply that he is ignoring now everything that's going on.
And listen to these speeches they're making in Paris.
Obama says, this is a turning point.
This is the moment when we finally determined we would save our planet.
French President Hollande says, never have the stakes of an international meeting been so high since what is at stake is the future of the planet, the future of life.
You know what this reminds me of?
It reminds me of little boys.
You know how when little boys tie towels around their neck and pretends they're a cape and they're Superman, you know, and they go off to fight battle?
This is what this reminds me of.
I mean, real stuff is happening.
And this complete fantasy.
I mean, the earth is falling into the sun.
That's what's happening.
And sometimes it gets, some of our lakes used to be glaciers, you know, long before we did anything about it.
It's always, the climate is always changing.
So why we're getting upset about it now, complete mystery.
It's a complete mystery except that it gives these guys something to do while they're not taking on ISIS and saving the world.
So what we've been talking about is about purpose all week.
There is an excellent article.
You will not credit this, but there is an excellent article today in the New York Times.
And the New York Times, a former newspaper, has this really interesting thing that it does, that the front page of the New York Times is virtual left-wing propaganda.
They leave out stories.
No scandal story about Obama will touch the front page of the paper.
No scandal story about Hillary.
It'll flash up there maybe for a day and then disappear.
Anything that's a scandal, if Hillary is in a scandal, the headline will be, you know, Republicans seize the moment to take advantage of a misstep by Hillary.
It's always how the Republicans are using this thing.
Anything that a Republican does wrong is immediately brandished across the front page.
Front page is all lies.
The New York Times front page is just one big lie.
Their op-ed section, which I call Knucklehead Row, is a series of highly educated, well-dressed idiots ranting about their left-wing prejudices and they're wrong.
I mean, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, they are wrong again and again and again, provably wrong.
They say this is going to happen and it doesn't.
It doesn't matter.
They just never lose their jobs.
And there's Ross Duthot, who's a very intelligent kind of, he's a Catholic columnist, but he writes about the culture and very intelligent.
He must be like the guy in the thriller movie who wakes up in an insane asylum and has to prove that, you know, no, I'm not one of them.
I'm not, I'm not.
Yeah, right, right.
Put him back in, you know, put him back in the cell.
Please, not back into the New York Times op-ed page.
Yes, back onto the op-ed page with you.
You know, he's just this weird voice of reason in the New York Times.
But, but inside the New York Times, there are frequently good reporters.
And what they do is they do good reporting on the war and good reporting on the economy.
And then when people go back and say, you know, you guys never reported on this, the New York Times says, oh, yes, we did.
We did a three-page article on page B17 that you may have missed.
And so they do.
They do report the news sometimes, but it's buried inside.
So today they have this excellent piece on the inside, on the economics page by a guy named Eduardo Porter.
And he points out that in order to get rid of carbon, which is causing climate change, according to this fantasy, there would have to be no growth.
And for most of human life, there has been no growth.
There has been no economic growth whatsoever, except for 200 years ago when the Industrial Revolution happened and they started finding oil.
So he says it's innovation and oil.
I would add capitalism, but if you said that in the New York Times, the entire paper would burst into flames.
So it's really innovation, oil, and capitalism are what have caused this amazing explosion in human civilization.
And what's happening in terms of carbon emissions, 70% of carbon emissions are coming from developing countries.
China is the leading one, India, but all these poor countries that are trying to catch up with us.
And what they're saying is, they're saying to America, you should stop growing so that we can catch up.
That's literally what they're saying.
You have to stop burning coal so that we can burn coal.
And Obama's going, yeah, good idea.
You know, that'll really help.
And what this guy points out is without growth, and he interviews leftists and he quotes leftists who want there to be no growth.
They want growth to stop to save the world.
And he points out that without growth, we'd have to have slavery again.
That's how people lived before there was growth.
It was innovation and technology that ended slavery, that made it possible to start talking about, well, maybe we shouldn't be holding people as property.
That's what it was.
It was oil that kept people from being slaves.
And of course, as he points out in this article, it was also that that gave women a chance to do other things because women bore a lot of, a lot of the stuff that women did is now done by machines.
I mean, a lot of the stuff in homes that women did, you know, women worked just as hard as men throughout history, but a lot of the stuff they did is now taken care of by technology, and that gives them a chance to explore other options outside of the home.
All that stuff goes away without growth.
All the good stuff, all the stuff about life that we love is gone without growth.
And this guy actually points this out and points out that the left wants to do this.
And he concludes by saying we can stop the evil of climate change with technology instead of cutting carbon emissions.
The fact that climate change is a complete imaginary problem doesn't come up.
All right.
This brings me back, as I will explain, to bear rape, okay?
This all comes back to bear.
The fact that these guys are dealing with imaginary problems while we have real problems.
And the question that I keep asking is this question of purpose.
What is the purpose of freedom?
Because the problem with freedom is it makes you rich.
Freedom makes you rich, it makes you happy, it makes you peaceful.
You know, free countries are usually more peaceful.
And then the question is, what do I do now?
And it's the same question you ask in your everyday life.
All of us have problems, right?
We get sick, we have romantic problems, we have money problems.
This happens to everybody.
And when that's happening, you have to deal.
Dealing with Hardships00:15:05
So you have to make money.
You have to have money.
You have to take care of your health.
If you don't have your health, you can't do anything else.
Your wife or your husband walks out on you.
You've got to deal with that.
You're emotionally a wreck.
All those things.
When hardships come, you find out what you're made of.
But when the hardships stop, when you reach the place of peace, that's when you find out what you're about.
When you find out what your purpose is, when you have enough money, when your marriage is stable, when your health is good, what do you do then?
Do you volunteer some time?
Do you give money to charity?
Do you build a new business?
Do you start take the business that you're in and do something fresh and new that you've never done before?
What's your purpose?
What's the purpose that you have?
Because for most of human history, before oil, before innovation, before capitalism, we're clawing our way out.
We're just eating.
Just give me something to eat because I'm hungry.
I've got to eat.
And after you get to that point, and you have this beautiful America that we're in where everything is great, what do you do then?
So the Hollywood Reporter points out that all these Christmas movies are coming out and they are just filled with violence.
And here's the picture.
It's called, How Much Blood and Guts Will Oscar Voters Endure.
And the reason they open these movies at Christmas is not because they're necessarily Christmas movies.
It's to get them in the Oscar running.
So they're open this year.
So the Hollywood reporter says a frontiersman is impaled through the head by an arrow.
A bear rips the flesh off Leonardo DiCaprio's back.
That was the scene that people thought was rape.
And then DiCaprio dives off a cliff on a horse, eviscerates the dead beast, and scoops out the guts so that he can take shelter in its carcass.
These are the scenes from the Revenant about a frontiersman.
Might be a bit much for the faint of heart.
The Fox and Regency film isn't alone in stretching voters' appetite for gore in Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, which none of us is going to see because he calls cops murderers.
A bullet blasts a man's head to pieces while a woman gets slapped around so much that it isn't quite clear if all her teeth remain.
These two major movies will attempt to outdo each other in the brutality stakes this award season, and just how willing Oscar voters are to tolerate their extremes may go a long way toward determining whether they emerge as frontrunners in this year's extraordinarily heated competition.
Many people, by the way, walked out of screenings of these pictures because they were just too tough.
Okay, so sex and violence, you know, are huge deals in the movies, and these are movies they're opening for Christmas.
We're opening Christmas with a bear ripping Leonardo DiCaprio apart and whatever they do in their personal life is none of our business.
But it's obviously a very, very violent movie.
Now let's compare this to Christian movies, okay?
Now, I am part of a sort of like weird little society in Hollywood of Christian filmmakers, people who are involved in filmmaking, who are Christians, who don't want to make Christian films.
And we get together sometimes in these like, you know, networking gatherings and we sit around and talk about the fact that Christian films, how can I put this?
They're not very appealing.
One night I stayed up and I was channel surfing.
I understand that women don't channel surf.
Is that true?
No?
Yeah, men channel surf.
So I'm sitting up with a scotch and I'm channel surfing.
And channel surfing for me is like a game of Russian roulette because if I hit the movie The Godfather, two hours of my life disappear because I can't stop watching it.
I don't know what that is.
But I'm channel surfing and I hit the Hallmark channel, which I've never seen before, or I've never noticed it before.
And they're playing Christmas movies.
And I think it's like September, you know, they're playing this Christmas movie.
And they play them one after another after another, and they never end.
So I brought in just trailers for these Christmas movies, okay?
Just play the first one.
I don't even remember which one I put first, but it just doesn't matter.
Just play the first one.
This holiday season, the search for the perfect gift is on.
And the one thing Jesse Armstrong wants is to find his mom, a husband.
Join Gail O'Grady.
Jesse.
And Jimmy Jack's Pincher.
Jesse!
In a Hallmark Channel original movie.
All I want for Christmas.
Okay.
Now play the other one.
I just brought in two.
These are two samples, but they're all the same.
So just to prove to you that they're all the same.
Just put up the other trailer.
One act of kindness.
Are you okay?
Turn strangers into family.
I want to find that girl who saved my life.
I'm on it.
I've been up and down Main Street, Grandpa.
I don't think this girl exists.
Don't worry, we'll find her.
Chrissy.
You!
Okay, this is unbelievable.
You saved my life.
Do you believe in miracles?
The Christmas secret.
I don't want to make fun of these, but you know, I sat and watched these movies, and I think, I seriously think I stayed up till three in the morning watching one after another, and one would end and the next one would begin.
And they were indistinguishable.
In all of them, there's an unmarried woman.
She's either unmarried because of her husband has died and she's left with a child, or because she works too hard.
You know, she's too involved in something else.
Some other thing has, you know, and there is either an angel or an accident of some sort, like some kind of coincidence, and that brings into her life the guy who is going to be her Christmas love, and then over Christmas, they fall in love with each other.
And there's always a mom or sister who is bothering her again, well, why aren't you married yet?
And, you know, so who's the audience for this thing?
I mean, every single one of them is the same.
And again, there's nothing wrong with watching these things.
And when you go to the theater, the same is true.
They have, what do they have?
Heaven is for real and God is not dead and fireproof and all this.
And again, it's not like, I mean, I thought Heaven is for real was a bad, actual bad movie.
But the other movies, they're okay.
You know, they're clean, they're sweet, they're kind of entertaining.
They affirm the beliefs of Christians in some sense, in some sense.
But they're just too neat somehow.
And the way you know they're too neat is there's always a scene in them where somebody says, things aren't neat.
Like, if they got to tell you, they ain't showing you.
That's the first rule of storytelling.
And this is part of a view of Christianity.
Let me tell you something.
I write books for young adults in the Christian market.
I write, you know, I have a series, The Homelanders.
I have a series called Mind War, which is just about to conclude.
In fact, you can get the third book now on Amazon.
So, you know, I write these books, and I can tell you for a fact that you can't say hell or damn.
Now, I don't mind this with the young adult books, because I think books for young people should be clean, and my books can be read by pretty young people.
So it doesn't bother me, but it gets really absurd.
I mean, you're talking about teenagers, you can't really think too much about sex, you can't really have any kind of drinking that is pleasant, you know, where you have plenty.
Even in my memoir, which I'll plug later on in the show, but even in my memoir, you know, they asked me, there were only a couple of lines where I might have said, I don't give a damn, or what the hell, or something like that.
They said, you know, just can you rephrase that a little bit?
And this is, so this is what movies are like.
You know, the Christian movies, when they say this is a Christian movie, you know it's a family movie.
One exception.
There's one exception that is so violent and so terrifying and so full of awfulness and so full of badness and so full of the good guys.
All the good guys die.
All the bad guys live.
It's a tragedy.
It's terrible.
It's as bad as DiCaprio being raped by a bear.
There's one movie that that's that Christian movie that that is that violent, and that's The Passion of the Christ.
The one movie, the one Christian movie that is violent and awful and tragic is the one movie that deals with Christianity.
Because that is Christianity, right?
That is what Christianity is about.
And so we get together, you know, me and other Christian people in the movie business and in the arts, and we get together and we talk about this.
But the kind of thing that hovers over us is that we're not sure the market wants this.
The artists want to make tough, gritty films about life that include a Christian worldview, because after all, if God is God, he's God of this world where people get raped by bears, you know, people get torn to shreds.
All right, they don't get raped by bears, but they get eaten by bears.
And nature is actually red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson said.
Bad things happen in nature.
And that's a tragic thing that we do horrible things to each other.
Movies are about sex and violence because people are about sex and violence.
That's why they're like this, okay?
So we feel like, yes, we want to do this because we're artists, we want to write about life, but there's no audience.
There is no audience out there because the audience that wants to see DiCaprio torn to pieces by a bear is not a Christian audience, and the Christian audience wants to watch those Hallmark pictures.
So there's almost no point in us doing what it is our hearts and our muses call us to do in the service of our God.
There's almost no point in doing it because the audience doesn't exist.
So why does that matter?
What's the problem with that, okay?
Let me take a look.
I mentioned Ross Duthot before, and I have a conversation he had with Bill Maher.
And a lot of conservatives hate Bill Maher, and I don't.
The reason I don't hate Bill Maher is Bill Maher is the one leftist who talks to conservatives, and if he respects their intelligence, will debate them openly.
Andrew Breitbart used to say this, that Breitbart, he would go on his show, and Maher would let him talk.
And Coulter, they were friends.
I think they knew each other in college or something.
They would get together.
Now, there are things about Bill Maher I don't like, and you might see some of that in this clip.
I don't like the fact that every debate has to be snied.
You know, he has no way of making his point without being snied and derogatory.
And I also just, I hate this in all TV shows, but Maher is the worst offender, I think.
I hate this thing where people applaud moral points, metaphysical points, as if applause, I mean, it's the whole, it is a problem with democracy as people begin to think that truth is a democracy.
Truth ain't a democracy.
Truth is a monarchy.
Truth is true because the king says it's true, and that's it.
You know, there is no debating about truth.
You know, every single person on earth could vote for the truth to be untrue, and the truth would remain true.
And that is what is so appalling, what is so appalling about this Paris meeting is that they are just living in this fantasy world where they can do something about the changing climate and telling us what heroes they are.
We are saving the world.
We're saving the planet with their Superman towel tied around their neck, but the truth remains true.
So just listen to this debate and listen to what Duthot says.
It's really interesting.
This is Bill Maher who made this film religious and he is asking essentially how can a smart person like Duthot believe in this talking serpents and God thing?
You must know because you're a student of history that other civilizations had supernatural gods and we know now that they're myths or we could describe them as myths.
We think Zeus is a myth.
We certainly think Thor is a myth.
We now have supernatural gods.
You must, the rational part of you see that pattern there.
The rational part of your mind must see that pattern.
The pattern is this, right?
People find themselves in a mysterious and mysteriously orderly universe.
They find themselves equipped with sort of intense moral instincts, and they have religious experiences, and they develop systems that explain those.
And over time, Christians think that God, you know, intervenes and sort of reveals himself, and that's why we have sort of progress in religion.
But even, I think the point I would make, Bill, is just, you know, you ask how an otherwise intelligent person can believe in something metaphysical.
But human beings are believing animals, period.
You were talking about secular religions.
Even, you know, secular liberals have their, you know, where are human rights, right?
What is the idea of universal human rights if not a metaphysical principle?
Can you find universal human rights under a microscope?
Is it in the laws of physics?
I would say it's in the laws of common sense, which I certainly would not put Virgin Berg.
See, that's where Maher is completely wrong.
And this is what Maher doesn't understand.
There is nothing commonsensical about human rights.
If there were, every civilization would have discovered them, right?
Every civilization knows it has to eat to live.
Every civilization knows that it has to find food and build fires to stay warm.
They all know this.
Everybody figures that out because it's common sense.
It's just common sense.
That a weaker man has a right to keep his property even though there's a stronger man nearby.
That's not common sense.
That's not something that occurs to everybody.
That a woman has a right to determine to whom she will give herself.
That is not common sense.
It took centuries to figure that out.
Only one civilization figured that out.
And it figured it out for a specific reason.
It figured it out because of its relationship with God.
It was not just the Jews who did it, the Greeks did it too.
In fact, we have one of the great college professors of all time who will explain the entire history of Western civilization in two minutes.
Listen to this.
It'll explain where it all comes from.
Western culture began with the democracy in ancient Athens.
There, since Christianity hadn't started yet, everyone was gay.
As a result, theater thrived, including the groundbreaking production of Sophocles' Antigone, which dramatized an extraordinary question.
Does an individual have a natural right to defy the power of the state in order to obey the gods?
Unfortunately, there were very few Jews in Athens at the time, so no one actually went to the theater, and Antigone folded out of town.
There were Jews, however, in Jerusalem.
One of them, Jesus of Nazareth, seemed to many to personify the presence of their one God, lending to individual man an authority and worth that superseded the prerogatives of both church and state.
Church and state celebrated the joyous revelation with their traditional banquet followed by a crucifixion, a clever plan to make sure Jesus' philosophy would never spread.
Now, within the crucible of the Roman Empire, Jesus-inspired Christianity united the visions of Athens and Jerusalem, giving Western man the raw materials he needed to understand the imperative of individual liberty.
Birth and Death Merge00:07:13
He also had the raw materials he needed to invent the light bulb, but he didn't do that either.
Instead, Rome was overrun by savage tribes who spent the next 1,500 years slaughtering one another while working out the ramifications of Christian loving kindness.
This blood-soaked melee was known as Europe, and despite all its wars and persecutions and French people, it managed to create the single greatest culture the globe has ever known.
Bach and Mozart, Shakespeare and Dante, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Descartes and Newton, a culture whose spirit informed the astounding moment in 1776 when the most brilliant group of political thinkers ever born gathered in Philadelphia to declare, individual man has a God-given authority and worth that supersedes the prerogatives of both church and state.
Why didn't we think of that before?
Why indeed?
Why indeed?
It takes a relationship with God, with a kind of God, a specific type of God, over years and years, centuries and centuries, to develop the ideas that Bilmar now thinks are just common sense, that he just comes up with because they're right in front of his nose, and they are indeed right in front of his nose.
This begins to speak a little bit to the idea of purpose.
We talked yesterday, I was talking about how purpose is not a place, it's a motion towards something.
It's a movement towards something.
It's a movement that replaces common sense with a different kind of thinking.
It's a movement that replaces no growth, this world of savagery in which slaves have to, people have to have slaves, in which women have to do certain kinds of jobs, not other kinds of jobs, in which people are not free, with the imposition, with the imposition of a human vision on the world that changes that, that changes nature, and violates the laws of nature in some ways and the laws of common sense.
When our image of God becomes empty and candy cane like these Hallmark stories, then the logic that led us to freedom, the logic that led us to individual rights, the logic that led us to the world we know and love, becomes invalidated.
If we look at our God and we see fantasy, then the rights that grow out of that relationship with God become a fantasy.
It's only when we see that in the tragedy of life, in the blood and thunder, in the world in which Leonardo DiCaprio was ripped to pieces by a bear, in that world that God lives, then liberty begins to start to make sense.
So an idea of purpose, of freedom, begins to form that it has to do with people imposing themselves, imposing what they know from a metaphysical relationship on the world.
Which brings me to the next issue of Christmas stuff I like, because so much of Christmas stuff is happy, go-lucky, you know, fantasy, and I have no problem with that.
Yesterday I recommended The Bishop's Wife, which I hope you'll watch.
It's just a really wonderful fantasy.
But not all Christmas work is like that.
T.S. Eliot, I spoke about before when we were talking about Veterans Day and World War I. T.S. Eliot was the great poet, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.
I would say one of the probably top three poets of the 20th century.
And he wrote this powerful, powerful poem, The Wasteland, describing the world laid waste after World War I and how Christendom had been sort of invalidated.
And yet T.S. Eliot rebuilt the Christian faith within himself and he became a Christian.
And just as he was becoming a convert to Anglicanism, what in America is the Episcopal Church, essentially, the Church of England, he wrote this poem called The Journey of the Magi, which is essentially a Christmas poem.
And I'm going to read it because it's only 40 lines long and it's like or so.
And it's very simple language, very straightforward.
And it's just one of the Magi remembering what it was like to travel to see the birth of Christ.
And the only thing you could, I'll just point out before I read it is as they travel to see this birth, there are all these symbols of the death of Christ all around them, like the three trees against the hill or the three crosses on which Christ and the two thieves will be crucified, and the guys dicing, the soldiers dicing, the soldiers who dice for Christ's clothing after he's crucified.
And so the birth and death of Christ start to come together in this journey until birth and death almost become one thing.
And the ramifications of that are so profound that you'll have to think about it after I read the poem on your own.
But here's the Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot, Christmas stuff I like.
This is one of the Magi remembering.
A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year for a journey, and such a long journey, the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted the summer palaces on slopes, the terraces and the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camelmen cursing and grumbling and running away and wanting their liquor and women and the night fires going out and the lack of shelters and the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly and the villages dirty and charging high prices.
A hard time we had of it.
At the end, we preferred to travel all night sleeping in snatches with the voices singing in our ears saying that all this was folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley wet below the snow line, smelling of vegetation, with a running stream and a watermill beating the darkness and three trees on the low sky and an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine leaves over the lintel, six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, and feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued and arriving at evening, not a moment too soon, finding the place.
It was, you might say, satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember, and I would do it again, but set down this.
Set down this.
Were we led all that way for birth or death?
There was a birth, certainly.
We had evidence, no doubt.
I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different.
This birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death.
We returned to our places, these kingdoms, but no longer at ease there in the old dispensation with an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
That's T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi, Christmas stuff I like.
For another conversion story, I hope you'll pre-order The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, my own memoir.
It is now available in both Kindle form and hardback form for pre-order.
It's going to take months and months and months to get it, but I would appreciate it if you pre-order it now.