I once lived in a culture that considered chicken feet, fish heads and durian delicacies. I find all of these repulsive. I now live in a society where many people have to restrict what they eat to remain healthy: if they are not sensitive to the natural allergens in wheat, oats, and nuts, they are damaged by the various chemicals put into food.

I have become fussy about hygiene, after having the nasty respiratory virus that has infected almost every worker in the hospital that employs me.

I do tend to be obsessive (this blog is evidence enough). But there as some places where you have to lighten up. Otherwise the joy in life leaks out of the cracks.

Adults have been around the block. We’ve already spent several decades eating, so what we do today won’t have as big an impact. Kids are starting from square one. They can get away with a lot in the sense that they have fast metabolisms, they heal quickly, and they carry less physiological baggage. That makes them appear impervious to damage. A Snickers bar may very well send a diabetic’s blood sugar to the stratosphere or trigger weight gain in a middle-aged man, while the average toddler will channel that candy bar into pure ATP and use it to scale bookshelves, leap from sofas, and sing the feature song from the latest Disney flick twenty times in a row.

But from another perspective, a child’s nutrition is way more crucial and precarious. You have an untouched, uncorrupted member of the most complex, creative, intelligent, courageous mammalian species in the known universe. A being of pure potential. You have the opportunity to realize that potential by nourishing it with the best food—or you can tarnish it.

A prudent position is the middle one: Feed healthy foods, but don’t flip out because they ate Baskin Robbins ice cream cake at their friend’s 5th birthday party. After all, look at your own history. Many of you spent decades eating the standard American/Westernized diet. You ended up fat and unhealthy. And you and thousands more turned it all around just by going Primal.

It’s also the position that promotes sanity in a world full of industrialized food. Candy’s going to slip through the cracks. They’re going to be at a friend’s house and have boxed mac and cheese for dinner. Full-on food intolerance or allergies aside, be a little flexible. Your lives will be less stressful, believe me, and you’ll all be a bit saner.

Enough on my food fads — I try to keep that somewhere else (If I ever get the blog back up). the reason I mentioned it is because of the distinctions the Jews had. And for this we need to ask why the Jews were held distinct, and why temple worship consisted of discriminating between the clean and the unclean: the worthy and the unworthy.

Moses was called to lead the people out of Egypt, where they ate like all Egyptians. Basically anything that had calories. They were fed manna in the desert, and given restrictions on what foods were clean and unclean. They were also given rules on returning goods after a period of time without compensation (the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee year) and leaving the ground to recover. The dietary restrictions may indeed have been good.

The Jews had a tabernacle and temple. Only those ritually clean — having eaten the right food and not having had sex (if you had a seminal discharge, you were ritually unclean until nightfall, if you were menstruating, you were unclean until that stopped, and if you had running sores you were continually unclean, like a leper) — could be in the congregation. Only the Levites could put the temple up, run the gates, and be in the choir. Only the priests could conduct worship and perform sacrifice. Only the high priest could enter the holiest of places.

This was a witness against the pagans, who thought there were no rules. It was also a place where people could virtue signal. And Christ called this. The rub of the parable of the good Samaritan is that touching a dying man made you unclean, so the priest and Levite on the way to the temple were afraid to touch the injured man in case he died, and they would not be able to take their place in temple worship.

The Pharisees loved credentials and virtue signals. Christ treated that correctly. With contempt.

Mark 7:1-23

¹Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, ²they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. ³(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; ⁴and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) ⁵So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” ⁶He said to them, ”Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,
‘This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
⁷   in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.’
⁸You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”

⁹Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! ¹⁰For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ’Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ ¹¹But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban’ (that is, an offering to God) — ¹²then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, ¹³thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.”

¹⁴Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: ¹⁵there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

¹⁷When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. ¹⁸He said to them, “Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, ¹⁹since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) ²⁰And he said, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles. ²¹For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, ²²adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. ²³All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

If you want to see virtue signalling, intolerance, and microregulation of all things, do not look at the Orthodox Jews, Hasidim, or the Orthodox and preVatican Catholics. Though they restrict and fast, they know better. Do not look at the Calvinists: we have eaten sausage on Friday because what goes into a person does not defile them but what comes out.

Look to those who think that their avarice and wickedness qualify them to lead. Look at what they hate: honour, truth, beauty and love. And look at what they love, which is degeneration, and how they put all their effort into appearing holy while they rot inside.

Eh, the left is not liking Dunkirk, that’s for sure.

There have been two very negative reviews in The Guardian about the film — one from a male reviewer who just doesn’t seem to like Nolan very much, but who also made the requisite leftist critiques of “whitewashing”, and then another by a South Asian British female writer who thought the film was a Brexit justification, with Olde England escaping from being tied down in Europe. And then there was the NYT review by Manola Dargis which viewed the film as a reminder that fascism still must be defeated in the world by force (I mean, really? So Dunkirk is about Richard Spencer and his hundreds of followers, or about Steve Bannon, or something like that?).

The message is clear from the cultural left: anything that does not promote their narrative, and their narrative only (ie, multulturalism, feminism, intersectionality, anti-tradition, anti-history that is not extremely critical, etc.) will be subject to substantial critique from the cultural left. Truly they are today’s totalitarians, without any question.

Nolan made a film that was bending over backwards not to be political. Heck he doesn’t even name the Germans, the Nazis or show them at any point in the film, and he doesn’t emphasize the political situation in London much at all other than in passing here and there (although big things were happening, with Churchill having just stepped in). No, he made the film about what was happening there on that beach, the human story of survival without obvious political over- or under-tones. And that, friends, is a capital crime to the totalitarians of the left. Very telling.

Oh, and Harry Styles isn’t even a main character in the film. He comes up about halfway through, as I recall, and isn’t one of the main characters in any of the three main threads in the film. Of course it isn’t surprising that he was a big focus of Bonner’s eyes, but that says more about her than it does about Nolan or his fine film.

Dunkirk is a historical movie. You cannot retrofit the current neuroses into it to signal to the perpetually offended that they are perfect and lovely. For the movie to have power, it must reflect the truth of the time.

And this is the greater lie, that we are perfect, lovely, and that what comes out of us does not defile. For we are fallen, and it does, it does.