It Was a Dark & Bloggy Night...

According to the NY Times, publishers are noticing blogs.

Teasin' the Bureaucrats

I study the arcane rituals of that species known as beltus australopithecines (known colloquially as "inside the beltway types") and the things they find compelling always amaze me. Of course they have forgotten more about politics than I know so this post is necessarily of the "how can this be?" rather than "they are wrong!".

One little mystery is this brou-ha-ha over Bernard Kerik. I puzzle over how this will harm the career of Guiliani. I haven't read much about this since I find it mind-numbingly boring, but the 50,000 foot view is that Guiliani put up Kerik and thus embarrassed the President for all of six minutes. Are not failed candidacies for cabinet positions painful only to the candidate himself/herself? Does anyone outside the candidate's nuclear family gives a rat's a*s about this flub? Is someone going to say, "well, I think the President was right about Iraq, but he screwed up with the DHS nomination so I'm not going to vote for Guiliani". Yet somehow not only is the President damaged, but even a third-party twice-removed type like Guiliani. Amazing. I suppose the thinking is Bush will hold a grudge for gosh sakes. He doesn't strike me as that petty.
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It's great that someone is watching the homefront and has the President's ear. So, assuming Ridge did more than make air travel more painful & color code threat levels, this wouldn't seem to be a bad cabinet position, if you're into them. But Commerce? Education? Education is a prime example of a useless cabinet post. It was a way to getting people to think you care about edu-ma-cation without doing anything. Since the Dep't originated, S.A.T. scores have dropped and more and more children got "left behind".

Cabinet posts and gov't spending tend to grow like lichen on creek rocks. At some point we'll have to build a bigger cabinet room for those weekly photo ops with the President. It's not widely known, but the White House is considering additional departments and I obtained the list from my friend Bob Novak. Without further ado, the new posts are: "Department of the Internet", "Department of Sports" (for the regulation of steroid abuse and overturning wretched rules like the designated hitter), "Department for the Ethical Treatment of Republicans" (requested by Tom DeLay) and the "Department of Departments" (to keep track of all the cabinet positions).

Where's the history?

...asks one of the two blowhards:

...all this makes me wonder that I don't see more references to history either to support or to criticize social theories, be they economic, political, or even moral. It would seem to me hard to determine what in any given situation is merely local or accidental as opposed to what is fundamental and permanent, without examining multiple examples of similar situations from history. My sense is that history served exactly this function for previous generations. Has our society, despite our vast historical resources (never more plentiful than today) become oddly a-historical?

Yes.

Teachout's Book List

Terry Teachout wanted suggestions on what to read, and one of them was Berlin Noir, a trilogy by Phillip Kerr. I read that five or six years ago and recall it fondly. The only other thing I've read on that list is Wolfe's book, but the next fiction for me (after finishing Updike's Early Stories) is Richard Russo's Empire Falls. Everbody love that book! Surely anything that MamaT, Amy Welborn & Erik of Erik's Rants can agree on must be good.

Update: Though how can I pass up Russo's Straight Man after this recommendation?

Prayer of the Confederates

I'm slogging my way through biographies of the major players on the Confederate side of the Civil War. After reading of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson & Robert E. Lee, Cooper's Jefferson Davis:American is a bit of a letdown.

Last night I read about how Davis' intelligent and charming wife said she was praying for Confederate successes but she feared her "righteousness does not my prayers avail."

There are a couple ways to look at this I think. One is that you have to have confidence in your prayers regardless of your "righteousness". That's not to say you have to think you are righteous but merely that your prayers do avail. Prayer without confidence is sort of oxymoronic.

The second thought is that righteousness might be best expressed as wanting the will of God, so perhaps the righteous choose their prayer targets correctly. They are so aligned with God's will that they pray for that which is in accord with it.

It's an Odd World After All

Via Two Sleepy Mommies, I've been hyp-mo-tized by this blogshare thing.

I feel a burgeoning sense of responsibility to my shareholders. Now I will have to sweat quarterly hits, or earnings, if not for my sake than for theirs. Suddenly it's not all about me anymore. Suddenly I have kids to support.

You can imagine my surprise when I learned a blogger from Manilla, whom I don't know from Adam, purchased shares in the seldom updated Flannery O'Connor blog. 'Scuse me while I hie me to Habit Of Being...

Metablogging

...the practice of writing each day seems to act as an aid to invention. If we write 20 or 30 times a month, we will have thoughts that would not have materialized without the blogger's writerly habits of mind. --"Weblogs in Higher Eduction"

Exactly. If I hadn't been a blogger it'd never occurred to me to write the following:

ACLU in Arabic means "al jazeera".

And the world would be poorer for it. But seriously writing does help one think. In keeping a journal there are times I write and discover something I didn't know I thought. If that makes any sense.

From the latest National Review

Ramesh Ponnuru writes:

It may be said that apparently reasoned arguments against embryo destruction are really rationalizations for religious views. The opponents are overwhelmingly evangelicals and Catholics. It is certainly possible that our reasoning goes wrong because we are influenced by extra-rational, unacknowledged factors. But the reasoning of people from different religious traditions or none can go wrong, too. Atheists may have their own forms of rationalization, as do we all. Self-consciously secular thinkers can generate their own orthodoxies. Liberals tend to assume, without reflection, that the rational view of an issue is the one that most non-religious people take. The idea that a religious tradition could strengthen people's reason — could help them reach rationally sound conclusions they might not otherwise reach — rarely occurs to them.

During the campaign, Joseph Bottum of The Weekly Standard quipped that John Kerry apparently believed that the fact that his church agreed with him about the wrongness of abortion was a reason not to act on that view. The mental tic Bottum neatly identified is a special case of liberalism's general tendency to identify reason with irreligion.

Liberalism's hymns to reason always end up truncating reason. They are pleas for open debate designed to rule things out of debate. John Rawls himself notoriously ruled that arguments against abortion could not meet the test of his "public reason" (a position from which he later backed away). To someone unsympathetic to liberals, it must begin to look like a kind of trick. Let us imagine a conservative who says that abortion should be illegal because it kills human beings. His liberal friend responds that this sort of theological talk is inadmissible in a democracy because it violates the rules of open debate. We can see that this liberal has misrepresented his friend's views and shut down the discussion — all in the name of reasoned argument. Yet that conversation happens all the time in our politics, and somehow we don't see it.

He also says:

...And while there is no constitutional requirement that people make political arguments in terms that can be understood by fellow citizens with different religious views, it is a reasonable request. Since an appeal to a religious belief, authority, or text will be unpersuasive to people who do not accept it, such an appeal will often be counterproductive (rather than "dangerous").

But even that concession must be qualified. The contention that blacks, like whites, were made in the image of God and thus deserve fair treatment was probably "accessible" to more people when it counted than were purely secular arguments. The vast majority of Americans do not find such religious rhetoric alienating, and in a democracy that ought to count for something.

Bible Only?

Amy Welborn vents:

But this "Where is that in the Bible?"...drives me crazy because 1)it's intellectually nonsensical 2)those who use it as a weapon don't live and believe by it themselves and 3)it's novel in this present form. An innovation of the last hundred years, really inconsistent with the way the Christians have understood their faith and its relation to Scripture, for the most part, since the beginning.

More on Garrison Keillor's Joke...

...about denying evangelicals the right to vote.

Three Sizes That Day

I didn't know that the "Welcome Christmas" song in "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" has a history:

Welcome, welcome, fah who rahmus
Welcome, welcome, dah who dahmus
Christmas Day is in our grasp
So long as we have hands to clasp

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Three thousand feet up! Up the side of Mt. Crumpit,
He rode with his load to the tiptop to dump it!
"Pooh-Pooh to the Whos!" he was grinch-ish-ly humming.
"They're finding out now that no Christmas is coming!"
"They're just waking up! I know just what they'll do!"
"Their mouths will hang open a minute or two
Then the Whos down in Who-ville will all cry Boo-Hoo!"

"That's a noise," grinned the Grinch,
"That I simply MUST hear!"
So he paused. And the Grinch put his hand to his ear.
And he did hear a sound rising over the snow.
It started in low. Then it started to grow...

But the sound wasn't sad! Why, this sound sounded merry!
It couldn't be so! But it WAS merry! VERY!

He stared down at Who-ville! The Grinch popped his eyes!
Then he shook! What he saw was a shocking surprise!

Every Who down in Who-ville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any presents at all!

Old Book Resurfaces

While trying to corral marauding books, I came across Mary of Agreda's Mystical City of God found at a garage sale when I was a teen, since lay buried, unread, for lo these many years. A couple scenes from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ were based on this book.

It's difficult to know what to make of private revelations but the quotes inside the cover are nothing short of amazing:

The learned and pious Cardinal D'Aguirre says that he considers all the studies of fifty years of his previous life as of small consequence in comparison with the doctrines he found in this book, which in all things are in harmony with the Holy Scriptures...The Venerable Superior-General of St. Sulpice, Abbe Emery, adds: "Only since I read the revelations of Mary of Agreda do I properly know Jesus and his Holy Mother."

Even allowing for hyperbole these seem astonishing claims.

Fr. William Most...

...attempts to answer the age-old query: How do the saints avoid lying when they say terrible things about themselves?

Fun With Google Searches

Here are some of the strings that found the way to this blog (my replies in italic):

dominic the donkey sound byte
Ass not what your country can do for you...

vitamin k i by dr.henry poncer
Alas, the perils of drinking & Googling...

poetry about the colour blue
Blog, sung blue every garden grows one...

Christianity Today review of Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons", concerning the book's premise that all human behavior is sociobiologically pre-determined:

What is really happening in the story is something that theists have always known: that we choose to think the things we think, and that what we think will largely determine what we do.

That is precisely what happens to Charlotte and to all the other characters in the book. After all, it is only when Charlotte finally changes her simple, down-home, Christian way of thinking about what a human being is, and what choice means, that she descends into the personal miasma that is the inevitable consequence of the bad choices she makes. These latter, in turn, are the direct result of the bad ideas she chooses to hold. If she had kept to her old assumptions, her behavior would have been completely different. Of that, there can no doubt whatever.

Despite Wolfe's extremely skillful and detailed efforts to show exactly how relentlessly events push Charlotte toward doing the things she does, he cannot conclusively establish that she could not have acted otherwise. Such a thing would be utterly impossible to prove, of course. One can only accept or reject it inductively. And that leaves freedom of choice as a possibility, and indeed the more likely explanation for her actions—the one that in fact best fits the facts of the story.

This leads to a very interesting and important sociological observation that one can draw from the book: that a society's leaders, and in particular its intellectual elite, its philosophers, bear a heavy responsibility for what goes on in it.

That last paragraph sounds very Fr. McCloskey-ish, who has said that society won't become healthily Christian until the elites do. Ideas matter, and their noxious nihilist philosophies are in the very air we breathe.