bryan paul rouleau

Gun-Grabbers Draft God

Posted in Political on January 20, 2013 by bryanpaulrouleau

Talk about fair weather fans.

America’s party of progress, the Democrats, have recently made themselves devout disciples of the Messiah (not Barack Obama this time, but Jesus Christ). That’s right – the party that voted in September at the Democratic National Convention to remove any mention of “God” from their party platform (before taking political fire, and the next day voting the good Lord back into their graces with a questionable voice vote), is now calling 2nd Amendment defenders to confession.

Just yesterday, the First Presbyterian Church of Dallas hosted a gun buyback program that offered $50 for handguns, rifles, and shotguns, and $200 for those more insidious “military-style semi automatic assault rifles” (a lengthy title that says nothing meaningful, and is the equivalent of calling a handgun a “quickdraw-style semi automatic assault hand-cannon” – but I digress).

Here in Connecticut, which laughably continues to call itself “The Constitution State”, the First Congregational Church of Guilford hosted an “adult education forum” on guns, where the visibly aloof state Senator Edward Meyer publicly proposed his bill to limit all firearms to a maximum of ONE ROUND – that’s right, no magazines required – and if you need more than a single bullet to drop an intruder, you can simply load another bullet into the chamber, right? Luckily the Senator, who admitted to having only ever shot a BB gun as a small boy, had on hand a retired Guilford police officer and Connecticut’s version of Piers Morgan to spew some meaningless statistics about gun control when pressed with a tough question. Piers, whose actual name and association I cannot recall, then went on to tell the crowd the true intent of the Second Amendment, in an English accent. The forum concluded with a prayer to end gun violence. The congregation, which numbered near 100 souls, was composed mostly of former Woodstock attendees and other concerned bobblehead dolls who devotedly bowed their heads before the cross, maybe for the first time ever.

God’s houses of organized worship are not the only venues where the liberals have espoused their new found faith. They have also taken to the internet media at places like the Huffington Post, where “Actor, Activist, Filmmaker, Humanist” Matthew Modine evangelized that “ I’m sure no god would give a blessing to weapons designed for the single purpose of killing people”.

Brian Kammerzelt, the Assistant Professor of Communications at Moody Bible Institute, wrote this theologically and rationally vapid attempt at appearing neutral and non-argumentative, while completely eviscerating some self-evident Christian truths, like the fact that men are created free to make choices; if they were not, we would all be Christians. But we’re not all Christians. Some of us are progressive opportunists hoping to invoke the pacifist nature of Jesus Christ into a politically expedient national gun debate.

The great irony is that Jesus, by his nature, would never have called for men and women across the Earth to be forcibly disarmed by Caesar and his squad of centurion goons and lame-duck Senators, because doing so would be an initiation of violence. Let’s also not forget that it was the Roman government’s Prefect of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, who ultimately ordered Jesus nailed to a cross to die because he would not obey the establishment’s dictates.

For now, at least the entertainment is good; watching liberals attempt to cram God into their relativist ideology and opportunist methodology is a lot like watching the world famous Uncomfortable Double Virgin Wedding Kiss. Hilarious, ineffective, and not pretty.

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3,000 Tyrants

Posted in Political on January 20, 2013 by bryanpaulrouleau

My favorite Founding Father quote was actually never spoken, to my knowledge. But it is the best one out there. Benjamin Martin, a fictional American colonist who is played by Mel Gibson in the The Patriot, stands and speaks to a convention of colonists who are on the brink of war with England.

“Why should I trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away?” he asks, drawing a roil of mocking laughter. Benjamin Martin is like the modern libertarian, caught between two distinct warring factions. There is no room for opinions outside of those held by the two faction dichotomy. You must either be a loyalist or a revolutionary; a Democrat or a Republican. There is no other choice anywhere between, unless you’d like to be called a nut bag, or laughed out of the debate (as Martin is).

When Martin loses his son to a British officer, he goes 18th century Rambo for the rest of the movie, and (spoiler) ultimately helps win America’s freedom from the distant tyranny of the English King. The movie ends happily. The movie’s epilogue, which is not shown, is your life today. And it is exactly what Benjamin Martin feared.

Today, every aspect of your life is controlled by tyrants – and many more than 3,000, unfortunately. Beyond the 535 U.S. Congressmen, there are untold numbers of federal regulators and bureaucrats filling the halls of dozens of executive Departments that house hundreds of offices, agencies, and military branches. Government employees represent approximately 7% of the U.S. population – up from less than ONE HALF of 1% in 1950. Let’s not even consider the tyrants who live on your street and mindlessly vote your legislators into office.

As Martin concludes, “An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a king can.”

In the movie, the comment was scoffed at by loyalists and revolutionaries alike, because it offends both of their partisan sensibilities. It would be scoffed at today too by the supreme reign of Democrats and Republicans whose worship of “Democracy” is a uniting force for both parties, the Establishment Class. If only someone had the courage to say it on the floor of the Senate, or the House, or from the Oval Office, and mean it.

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Genius in Ernest

Posted in Creativity & Literature, Men on January 18, 2013 by bryanpaulrouleau

When I think of a man named Ernest, I think of a man’s man who is scarcely aware of what he is. He is not aware because most of the time he spends in the solitude of his own thoughts, where he collects and connects the dots of the universe.

I would name my son Ernest if a name could bestow its properties upon its bearer. He would be strong physically, but you wouldn’t know it unless he took off his shirt. He would be wise beyond his years, but it wouldn’t be obvious unless he spoke, which he rarely would. He would be passionate, but you couldn’t see it except for when you struck a resonating chord, and then you would be shocked. You would believe that whatever he said had to be true, and it would be.

Ernest, the man’s name, is a functioning example of genius, although he is not a genius himself. He can’t always remember the acceleration of gravity in meters per second squared. To him, it is the principle of gravity that matters more than the number.

Ernest Hemingway is among my favorite writers. I’d assign him Second Place on my own list, for style alone. Never mind he was traveler, an adventurer, a sportsman, a wearer of the man’s beard, a story weaver, and eventually a violent suicide; all factors which make Hemingway more than just a name on the spine of a book, but a character in his own right. He also wrote with fluid simplicity.

One of my favorite Hemingway stories was one of his least favorite. ”To Have and Have Not” is a story about a smuggler who runs contraband between Cuba and Key West. It is told in shifting points of view, and is very short. I love it because it exercises the the principles of Ernest; strength under a sea soaked Henley with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, genius from behind a sunburned brow. It is life captured raw. It is less being more, as shown in this fantastic passage from the book’s first chapter:

“As they turned out of the door to the right, I saw a closed car come across the square toward them . The first thing a pane of glass went and a bullet smashed into the row of bottles on the showcase wall to the right. I heard the gun going and bop, bop, bop, there were bottles smashing along the walls.

I jumped behind the bar on the left side and could see over the edge. The car was stopped and there were two fellows crouched down by it. One had a Thompson gun and the other had a sawed-off automatic shotgun. The one with the Thompson gun was a nigger. The other had a chauffer’s white duster on.”

- To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

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Men Who Build Cages

Posted in Creativity & Literature on October 1, 2012 by bryanpaulrouleau

A favorite quote of mine goes , “God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.” It is by the French playwright Jacques Deval. I wonder if he thought about his own work as a bird, metaphorically.

I have read several books by legendary authors discussing the art of writing. Most of them went into depth about what was once a very foreign concept to me. The key to a successful story was to have no plan. Spend no time dwelling and dawdling over the intricacies of your tale, crafting the hills and valleys, damming the rivers, releasing their heavy pools of water in thin trickles, as necessary. In struggling to create, we are more apt to stifle the natural flows, the tectonic shifts that form the ridges and high peaks of our tales; the draughts that carve the dried ocean beds, and the desert bones of mammoth whales.

I once asked an acquaintance, who was at the time an amateur film maker, what his biggest challenge was in the business of movie making. He told me that he created fabulous movies in his head, and once they were perfected there, full of emotion and explosives and drama, that is where they stayed, because they could never be made better on screen. The desire to make them on screen was gone. Why struggle to share perfection with the rest of the world. After all, he had already toiled and toggled inside for months, but only inside his head. And in an act equal parts selfishness, fatigue, and fear, he did not commit a single creation to paper, never mind film. The world’s greatest movies may very well be caged, caged in the heads of timid artists.

It is in our nature, though, as Deval points out. And if it weren’t, maybe we would be Gods. The idea is to strive for godliness in writing. Unleash the dams, and stand on the peaks and watch what happens, however frightening, however raging out of control. Watch what grows in the path. That is true creation. And it keeps the act of writing fresh, and exciting, and exhilarating every time you sit down at your mundane word processor, because even as the cursor blinks, you are not in control, and will not know what might happen next.

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Writing – Don’t Make it a Habit

Posted in Creativity & Literature on September 24, 2012 by bryanpaulrouleau

I’m serious. I can’t count the number of times I have consulted writer self-help blogs, magazine articles, books, and other well-meaning instructors with a modicum of success telling me to make writing a habit – if I ever want to be any good. Maybe this advice is useful to most folks, but it never has been useful to me. Force yourself to write, even if you have nothing to write about, we are told.

“Force” myself is what I do every morning when my air raid siren iPhone alarm goes off and I fall out of bed and into the shower before work. Force myself is what I do when my grass is shaggier than every other lawn on the block and the mower still has a full tank of gas. The last thing I need is to come home and force myself to write. I think anyone can make writing a habit, like anyone can make picking their nose a habit, and produce just as tasty material.

Writing, at its best, is divine inspiration. Most sects of Christianity profess that the writers of the Holy Bible were divinely inspired, and therefore captured in their words unassailable truths. Whether or not you are a Christian, and whether or not you believe God inspired the writers of the Holy Bible, it is clear to most objective observers that those writers experienced some sort of divine inspiration, even if it arrived only from the secret untapped, teeming passages of their own brains. The Holy Bible has stood the test of time like no other work of fiction or non-fiction ever has.

My best writing happens when I am compelled to do it because there is something clawing inside me. It makes me speed on the highway. It makes me wash the dishes with maniacal glee, not because I love the scent of Citrus Orange Rush dish soap or the small bubbles swirling about my head, but because I cannot wait to spill my brain onto the paper when I am finished with the mechanics of life.

It takes only a little to set me off. Last night, while I was typing in bed with my girlfriend sleeping beside me, I thought I saw in my periphery that her eyes were open and staring at me blankly, although she had been asleep for hours. When I looked over, I saw her eyes were in fact closed. My memories reeled back to second grade art class. My teacher was an old woman with a strange habit (there’s that word again) of keeping her eyes closed when she was instructing. She reverse blinked – meaning her eyes were almost always closed, and occasionally opened for brief moments before sealing shut again. As I was lying in bed nearly twenty years later, I wondered if my art teacher slept with her eyes open, and if her husband sleeping beside her thought it frightening despite his love for her during the day. And that was all I needed for the opening scene of a deliciously terrifying story that I will feed as soon as I can hack around those other life habits, like sleeping.

For the sake of the art, and for your own sanity I would say, don’t make writing a habit because you just want to be Ernest Hemingway already. Let it be the manifestation of your own divine inspiration, and it will be the most glorious material you have ever put to paper. At least, that’s the way it has been for me.

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