"O MY PROPHETIC SOUL"

Plenty of winds gotten in the bowels, holes, and corners of the earth, bursting out of the earth, and the earth closing again, causeth the shaking or earthquake, and is a token of ensuing war. Tully's Almanack

EXHIBIT: Page 3, Column 1, MHT "Seminary" (LOL) Newsletter, August 2016:

Father Hecquard showed me a property which his brother acquired which could serve well for our priests who wish to establish an apostolate in France.... It would be an ideal place for a small seminary. It would be wonderful to one day establish a seminary in France where young men could be trained as they ought... (Emphasis ours.)

Call us imaginative.

Call us conspiratorial.

Call us off our rockers.

But very soon you may be calling the Readers CLAIRVOYANT. 

Why? Because we see in Big Don's apparently off-the-cuff travelogue remark another sign of the impending consecration of the Swampland Boy-Bishop-Elect (with at least one co-consecrator, mind you, and maybe one more, if he grovels) — an event, you'll recall, that we predicted earlier.

By way of a reminder, the first sign was the Donster's promise in his May 2016 newsletter to morph into Tradzilla by founding a new organization of sede "priests" (see our post of June 12 here). For his replacement, the Swampland's Big 3 families have one of their own, not an outsider Flushing Rat. By all accounts, the Kid's more than ready for his long-overdue miter.

Adding to the impatience must be a burning itch to rush the rector out the door, along with all his cumbersome baggage. (The biggest pieces of which, BTW, are "One-Hand Dan" and Tony Baloney.) The time has at last come for the Mad Mullah of Tradistan to fold his tent and not-so-silently steal away: the Big 3 want their social media accounts open again so an admiring world can follow them as they live to the max the good life, unfettered by the petty traddie rules that bind the unconnected and moneyless.

With the August pesthouse newsletter firmly in hand, we surely have a second sign — active scouting for "seminary" property in France. O.K., yeah, sure, it's couched in conditionals and sounds like wishful thinking. But keep this in mind: published statements from Tradistani kingpins, which look to you and us like wishful thinking, are actually concrete schemes in disguise. In this case, it's donor bait intended to reel in small fry to fund the Donster's new adventure cum escape plan.

The revelation that True Restoration's terminally naïve junior-varsity cheerleader "was with [Tradzilla] for the entire ten-day trip [July 2016 Europe + England] ... [which] would have been impossible to do...without him" sounds as though the Donster's already lined up at least the initial bankrolling he needs to make the break from paludal Florida (see p. 1, column 2 of the newsletter here).

That makes total sense.

Swamp Boy will take over the entire B'ville cult compound, "covent" and "seminary" included. There'll be neither need nor desire for two "bishops" on the Big 3 family homestead. "Swampy" is already working full-time at the pesthouse and will soon journey to Australia in Big Don's place — on-the-job prep for his new rôle as the Mini Pooh-bah of the family-cult enterprise.

Tradzilla will save face by slinking off to jump-start his already stalled new organization and then get even with the Big 3 by setting up a rival "seminary" in France. The Big 3 won't care, however, because they can spawn all the "priests" they'll need for generations to come. All they have to do is be careful that not all the boy-crazy female progeny are captured for a life in the golden cage of the "convent."

Be on the lookout, then.  Watch for the next emerging signs of the coming consecration. When it finally takes place amid the costly pomp and ceremony befitting a cult princeling, Tradistan U.S.A. will shake mightily. To close the fissure opened by Big Don's removal, "bishops" of all stripes will surface to fight among themselves for dominance and donations. "One-Hand Dan" won't be among them, nor will the Long-Island Jellyfish: they're both in bondage to the fleeing Tradzilla.

As protection from the aftershocks, the Swampland cult will close up in perfect isolation, forcing all members unrelated to the Big 3 to high-tail it out of the fetid bog.  Meanwhile in France, the disruptive Tradzilla will find himself the target of better-funded, intellectually sharper European trad leaders deeply resentful of his trespass.

Oh, yes, indeed, when the newest wandering bishop takes to his faldstool, there'll be a massive tectonic shift in Sedelandia, which will usher in

TRADMAGEDDON. 

Ruat caelum!
 

EPILOGUE

It'll be a grand day for genteel American traditional Catholics when Big Don a.k.a. Tradzilla packs up to recruit for his new but already moribund organization. Then it will be the French who'll have to suffer this uncouth philistine's spectacular deprivation of higher culture, of which the August newsletter provides a sterling example.

On page 4, the boor "bishop" tarred Wagnerian opera as he pandered to his low-brow American cult followers. In the primitive brain of this cultural Neanderthal, who apparently hasn't the attention span of a swatted fly, these masterpieces of Western music are "interminable," "endless affairs." To his churlish ears, consummate works of genius are no more than "women screaming for about four hours."

Worse, he can't even get the name of the "principal screamer" right. In Wagner's Ring cycle (which according to the moronically reductionist rector is about a "stupid gold ring"), Wotan's daughter is not "Brunhilda," as he mistakenly writes, but rather "Brünnhilde." And if he replies he used a commonly found English form of the name, then why did he write Walhalla instead of the more usual English form Valhalla?* (BTW, if our memory serves, the German form Wagner used throughout was Walhall.)

(Pssst! Somebody, please, get this New York yahoo a libretto! Obvously he's never seen one.)

But Don's gaucherie doesn't end there. To characterize as an "aria" what urbane opera lovers admire as the "Immolation Scene" (Götterdämmerung, Act 3) is a staggering blunder, for it betrays an astonishing absence of musical sophistication.** Among cosmopolites, it's common knowledge that in Wagner's mature works, the "formal divisions" of the traditional aria "had been totally dissolved" (Oxford Concise Dict. of Opera), and "the distinction between aria and recitative is largely replaced by a more continuous style throughout" (Havard Concise Dict. of Music). 

Let's face it: This gawking barbarian doesn't belong at the head of any "seminary," even a pseudo-Catholic cheap imitation like the pesthouse, and certainly not in charge of an organization of Catholic "priests." Young men and traditional "clergy" need a civilized leader, as in the past.  So, as Americans, let's be grateful the ill-bred Donster may well be on his way out of these United States. Soon enough the debonair French will put him in his place, and, à coup sûr, they won't stomach all those obsessive, rigorist prohibitions and screaming sermons (nor the screaming Scut the Prefect). The French prefer their traditional Catholicism to be like their cheeses: unadulterated by artificial American ingredients.

* Here's an interesting aside for logophiles, therefore off limits to Donnie and Dannie: the form Valhalla (less frequently Walhalla) comes from the modern Latin adaptation of the Old Norse Valhǫll = "hall of the slain" (see, for instance, Bartholini's 1689 Antiquitatum Danicarum or Magnússon's 1828 Priscae veterum borealium mythologiae lexicon or the 1818 Latin Translation of the Edda, if you don't believe us).

** Big Don's prose style is equally unschooled: he refers tautologically to the Valkyrie's immolation as her "incineration in the flames." It seems Big Don doesn't know the definition of "incinerate" or the Latin behind it, otherwise he'd've deleted "in the flames." It's hard to believe he attended Catholic schools, isn't it?