B. U. G. S.

This is something you will have to deal with, so let me talk about it. Since you deal in the Mantra, unapologetic repetition is something you get used to.

I looked at the reviews in of my last book on Amazon. The only person who gave it low marks was the one who said he hadn’t read it. But almost everybody who reviewed it favorably complained that it was very repetitious.

It was repetitious as hell.

Look, gang, when you are writing a book to point out what a blind man should be able to see, how do you avoid repeating the exact same thing over and over? To me, someone like O’Reilly who just can’t understand why professors, who consider themselves Intellectuals and Idealists are leftists is an idiot.

I use the time advisedly, because idiot is technical term, legal, not medical. A moron is one who tests 50 to 70 on IQ tests. An imbecile is, legally, one who scores 30 to 50. An idiot is below 30.

Here we have a grown man who is being listened to respectfully by millions who cannot understand why a clique which defines ITSELF as Idealists and Intellectuals goes all out insisting that Idealists and Intellectuals, instead of businessmen or working people, should take over the world.

How can anybody but an idiot not SEE that? But when I pointed it out for decades, all I got was the cowlike look from whoever I was talking to, and then a comment on recent comments on recent events. Then they would completely miss the basic point.

So the book sounds a lot like the way I felt when I wrote it, like a person shoving a puppy’s nose in its poo, trying to say, “This is what it is.” You have to do over and over and over and some puppies NEVER get it.

The puppy wants to make up for it by showing you how much he loves you or how cute he is.

And all puppies, by definition, are idiots.

Now that BUGs is giving me some MINDS to talk to, I would do the book better.

I am always concerned about being repetitious here. If I knew that everyone here had been reading this blog for years it would move much faster. But we are in the opposite position. Not only am I dealing with new readers, my regular readers are themselves involved in missionary work.

And the repetition keeps ME on track. Writing is, when you come right down to it, talking to yourself. One of the sure marks of a beginning writer is that he misses steps. He goes right on and you wonder what the hell he is talking about. He is writing about something that seems obvious to him, but took him YEARS to figure out, and he expects the reader to follow right along.

Our work is a bit like math. You have to go all the way to the basic assumption and go through the basic stuff each time. But God knows I don’t want to make my stuff as boring as math classes!

We don’t have compulsory attendance laws to allow us to make our teaching a torture they have to sit through by law. Math could be made interesting, but, as with all monopolies, the product just gets worse and worse. We don’t have that luxury.

I think the reason you don’t complain about my going right back to repeating the assumptions and the instances is because you have to do it yourself. A good writer, like a good preacher, will tell you that the audience had better know at least 95% of what he is telling them. The reader or listener should go back through the basic stuff effortlessly, and be willing to do it because he want to know where you are going THIS TIME.

New preachers have a way of telling their congregation the stuff they learned in theology school. As one old guy complained, “All I heard was a lot about the Nebadrezzers and the Whoopdedooinites and I didn’t understand a word of it.” It takes YEARS for a young preacher to learn to talk to PEOPLE, and most of them never do.

You go into a big church packed with people and the young seminarians will think the preacher is an old ignorant buffoon, “THIS guy has a DOCTORATE in Theology?” But they couldn’t get twenty of the thousand people sitting in that church to come back voluntarily after their first sermon.

The old preacher spends almost all of his time reminding people of what they are familiar with. As CS Lewis said, “Prophets do not come into the world to tell us new truths, but to remind us of the old ones.” That couldn’t describe BUGSers better.

We are here reminding people of what simple loyalty is, how stupid a person looks when he is repeating nonsense and thinking he is being smart.

Successful preachers, like prophets, go back over what the listener is familiar, but they also know he is GOING SOMEWHERE with it. He is tying the old strings into a new knot. Prophets tell people the old truths, but they remind them of how those old instances apply to the new situation.