The Weirdest Pro-Franco Blog You'll Ever Read

I don't want to get into a shouting match with someone I don't know, but this guy -- a student at Assumption College -- is so readably eccentric and out of it that I wanted to bring his blog to everyone's attention. The short, short version (as told by himself) is that he grew up in an atheist family and converted to Catholicism at some point, and is now headed toward a political science degree. The slightly longer version?

I love this democratic Republic, but want to make it Roman Catholic. Although I support the restoration of those monarchies that were overthrown in the Masonic
revolutions of the 18th and 19th Centuries, our Nation would be, I believe, best served by a Malta-type Republic with Catholicism as the official religion.

While this is unorthodox enough (not to mention delightfully oddball), he's not done with the antiquated political rhetoric.

I feel like Franco. Although ever at the service of God, or rather attempting to be, I give my all in combating the forces of evil in the world (and occasionally throw a good punch), while I consistently find myself having no core philosophy. While I always try to follow all the defined dogmas of the Faith, and outside the bounds of doctrine to support whatever is reasonable and in favor of individual liberties, the marketplace of ideas is full of those claiming to represent the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth, to the exclusion of all other beliefs.

What a strange thing to say, no? But the more you read his posts, or save yourself the trouble and do a search for "Franco," the more you realize that Dear Leader isn't just some kind of model citizen to him, he's a secular saint. To spend time inside the mind of Leslie Higgins is to wonder how Spanish Carlist politics found its way to New England with the original slogans intact.

There's a certain twisted allure to outright fascism, with the military braid and the flags and the "unity of purpose" talk, but on a subtler level, if you're not careful, there's also the dangerous possibility of misunderstanding someone like Franco (who only died in 1975) as a merely conservative politician and statesman. I doubt Mr. Higgins wants to bring back the torture chambers, but from reading him, you can't tell whether he knows they existed in the first place. There are lots of soft-focus pictures of El Caudillo sprinkled here and there, and he comes off not as a bloody-minded opportunist but as the Catholic savior of virgins and nuns everywhere.

There are further oddities -- his love of Nicaraguan Contra Daniel Ortega, for instance, for being apparently pro-life ("some Marxists aren't even that bad") -- and his belief that his "homeboy" will be canonized is more than reason enough not to take him seriously. But if you ever wondered what a Franco/Coolidge Republican looks like, you owe it to yourself to give him five minutes.

Almost Done With The Novel

From the time I woke up yesterday (Saturday) to the time I went to sleep around five this morning, I wrote two chapters in one long sitting. I took breaks, I watched some Arrested Development to clear my head, and of course I had to eat occasionally, but I wrote sixteen pages by forcing myself to work until I collapsed. If sixteen pages doesn't sound like a lot, consider how long an average double-spaced college paper is. Twenty pages? Twenty-five? Sixteen times two is, well, my eyes were too bloodshot to do the math on the piece of paper I'd started drawing doodles on with a magic marker, but you get the idea.

Why am I pushing so hard to finish it up? Because I want to have a draft done well before I go home for Christmas (so readers can read it and give me feedback), and also because I yearn for the day when I wake up and there's nothing left to write. I can just run around naked at the zoo and enjoy the freezing cold wind on my face, instead of holing up in the apartment or a cafe and writing writing writing. Even unemployment happens for a reason. I've always wanted to write a novel, and now I'm this close to finishing a first draft of a real, honest-to-God publishable book. I now steel myself for the climb up the final hill.