Sunday morning I ask my wife: "I've been reading the paper for twenty years and I still can't answer a pretty basic question. Ohio University is raising tuition six percent. Why does public higher education, year-in-year-out, go up faster than the rate of inflation? Aren't professor salaries relatively in line with inflation? Why is this information so hard to come by?"
She answers: "It's like The Wizard of Oz."
"Uh?"
"They don't want you to see behind the curtain."
~
Saw two movies over the weekend that reminded me that there are good things on television but that they are very difficult to find given three hundred plus channels. The first was a documentary of a Miami high school football player named Taurean Charles called Year of the Bull. Fascinating look at a different world. And the other was "The Inn at the Sixth Happiness", starring the lovely Ingrid Berman, which is based on the true story of a Christian missionary to China. The character played by Berman shows what real proselytization is. As an aside, she taught the children English through the song "This Old Man" which reminded me of how we were taught German through songs and now they are nearly the only German phrases I remember:
"Mein Hut es hat drei Ecke,~
drei Ecke hat mein Hut,
und hat mein Hut kein Ecke,
es war nicht mein Hut!"
In "Consider the Lobster" David Foster Wallace writes, "In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote."
~
In earlier version of films about the sinking of the Titanic, the ending came with the hope and consolation of God, in the form of the band playing "Nearer, My God" and a priest leading the doomed passengers in prayers. In James Cameron's incarnation, the hope of human love has eclipsed God, in the form of imagining the two main charactes reuniting some day (though that is in line with the hope of resurrection). Similarly, in the movie "The Perfect Storm", God is not invoked by the doomed fishermen but human love is, and predictably not between married couples but in a boy "newly in love", which seems to be the principle way love can be projected believably to modern audiences who tend to confuse love with sex.
Still, concerning the fisherman in The Perfect Storm, who thinks of God when first feeling the pulse of fear? Saints, yes, but those of lesser faith? Belloc writes comically of a small boat in rough seas in "Hills and the Sea":
"Then in despair I prayed to the boat itself (since nothing else could hear me), "Oh, Boat," for so I was taught the vocative, "bear me safe round this corner, and I will scatter wine over your decks." She heard me and rounded the point...~
I most remember Don Knotts, R.I.P., for saying that he didn't mind being remembered as Barney Fife, the television character on The Andy Griffith Show. What an example of humility! How many actors can you think of who wouldn't mind being remembered as a television sitcom character, let alone one so nebbish and un-suave?
~
Of a fellow parishioner, who is three years into a four year Byzantine Catholic deaconate program, I asked what he's learned: "How much I don't know." I was taken aback though perhaps his response proves the worth of his education.
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