Kreitzberg's Baby Photo!



Via Old Oligarch.

Pedigrees

Just finished a biography of Robert Hamilton Bishop, the first president of Miami University of Ohio (founded 1809). Bishop lived an interesting life in interesting times and it's fun to construct the "intellectual family trees" of great men - noting who influenced who and how ideas were handed down. (I recently read that there was a straight line from Luther to Hitler but that seems to be taking it a bridge too far.) Bishop was primarily influenced by Adam Ferguson:

Ferguson, Adam , 1723–1816, Scottish philosopher and historian. He was professor of philosophy at the Univ. of Edinburgh (1759–85). His Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) criticized earlier theories of a state of nature; it was an important contribution to intellectual history and influenced Hegel. In his Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792), Ferguson advanced the principle of perfection and attempted to reconcile self-interest and universal benevolence...In his ethical system Ferguson treats man as a social being, illustrating his doctrines by political examples. As a believer in the progression of the human race, he placed the principle of moral approbation in the attainment of perfection..."We find in his method the wisdom and circumspection of the Scottish school, with something more masculine and decisive in the results. The principle of perfection is a new one, at once more rational and comprehensive than benevolence and sympathy, which in our view places Ferguson as a moralist above all his predecessors."

One of Ferguson's influences was French political philosopher Montesquieu, especially his Esprit des Lois (1748):

By far, [Montesquieu's] most influential work is The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Two main ideas are presented in this analysis concerning the nature and workings of government. His first assertion is that forms of government will invariably differ according to the political and social climate and circumstances which they have to deal with. He concluded from analysis that despotic rule is best in large empires as to maintain control and order, especially those in the "hot climates." As for democracy, he concluded that small city-states would be the best situation for it, because it would be Senk simpler to maintain and govern, with general agreement of the populace being easier to achieve. His second assertion, the most important of the treatise, is the fact that a balance and separation of powers is needed for an efficient and successful government.

The Bloggification of Newspapers

It had to happen sooner or later. The self-indulgent post has appeared in the newspaper.

The editor of the Columbus Dispatch now regularly serves up a column that attempts a spiritual work of mercy: enlightening the ignorant, that is, we the readers. Disturbed by the low regard journalists are held by the public he uses the column as an apologia for the profession and ends up sounding like Officer Krumpke's West Side Story delinquents: "we're just misunderstood / deep down inside there is good". (One could say that he's just following Kinky Friedman's father's sage advice: "treat adults like children and children like adults". I find that I've become more childish as I age if only because in the cutthroat world of childhood and adolescence survival trumped self-indulgence.)

The column tends to be a bit whiney and defensive, which is not uncharacteristic of blogs (though not St. Blogger's, who are indefatiguable in their sheer outwardness). One can see his reasoning: "we buy ink by the gallon so why not spill some defending our grand profession?" And so the article begins with the customer's lack of gratitude: "you expect us to be there for you when you note an injustice..." and yet we readers don't give back the love. Apparently it's not enough that it's his job. Can you tell I've been reading the heartless Florence King today?

Anyway, his column inspires me to want to write an apologia for computer programmers. Let's see...

"Surveys show that computer programmers are not loved by the general public despite the constant problem-solving that we provide (ok, problems we introduced, hey let's not get technical). So your computer has a bug and who you gonna call?"

You getteth the idea.

I'm not against whiney, self-indulgent posts in blogs but I'd rather not see them in the newspaper. I like beer, but that doesn't mean there ought to be bars in chapels.

Zell, the Great Indoorsman - new fiction!

Zell Lawson was an inveterate reader and referred to himself as a fine indoorsman. If he’d coined the word then he thought that an outrage: what was it about the outdoors that suggested a man define himself by it without an equivalent for those who labor under General Electric’s finest?

He couldn’t understand it when he heard folks say that they could never work “behind a desk”. At least not until after he’d gotten a job and found out that the thrill of having his own desk and nameplate lasted thirty-six days. The thrill of toiling in God’s earth might last longer but he couldn’t know for sure.

But he did know he had a soul and he began to notice the effect of soul on body and body on soul. He knew they spent their lifetimes dancing together and how one never did nuthin’ without it affecting the other and that they were more closely bound than white on rice. What was the effect of all this concrete and artificial lighting on the body and soul? Grace builds on nature but what if we were killing nature by laying concrete and spending the best hours of every day under the influence of fluorescence?

He found a book about the ‘70s crop of homesteaders and back-to-the-landers. And he wasn’t sure if he was sad or relieved when he learned the great majority had long since come back to the desks and offices and artificial light. The odds were excellent that if he'd tried it the results would be identical and yet…and yet it felt like cheating. It was like looking at the back of the book for an answer to a high school mathematics problem. Or looking at a bible study guide for the meaning of a particular passage….

Catching up on Last Weekend

Busier than usual so many more images to assimilate. First a fond favorite – going to Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati. Was Clemens pitching? I didn’t notice. Did the Reds win? Okay, I did notice. But it barely affected my mood.

Oh but there’s a peacefulness felt there on the orderly diamond. Perhaps I've played just enough baseball to be able to feel every hit and shag every fly. My muscles have memories and I move with the fielders and strike with the hitters and they don’t even know it. The field is an effervescent green and the sun shines unfailingly. And the boats go by on the muddy river just outside the stadium. And all I can think is: I have to get here again. We move to the smoking section and smoke cigars behind an imaginary line that an usher enforces. And we drink Germanic beer in a Germanic town as the Germanic Reds, slow of foot but hefty of bat, strike out like so many Mighty Caseys (or at least the German equivalent).

The next day is the 4th and so there is the parade tour. First the local parade; we ride there on our bikes and catch some of it. My favorite was the barbershop singers singing “God Bless America”. Then we go to the alternative 4th of July parade, the DooDah Parade, because I wanted to see how the other half (progressives) live. We left Red State America and travel fifteen minutes to Blue State.

As we walk to the parade site we see them lining up and there's an old man sitting on a chair wearing nothing but a barrell, and we fear that he doesn’t have anything on underneath. We don’t verify.

The parade starts and I’m wondering when dressing like a priest or nun will get old. Apparently some schticks just ne’er get old. And they must hate the Church to endure 93 degree temperatures dressed in black. They go by carrying a banner that says “Separation of Church and Hate”.

Then there’s a float with a huge dinosaur straddled by the “Runaway Bride” dressed in a wedding dress. Later a float of full-figured ladies allied against breast reduction surgery. My favorite was the little group of five that held signs saying “People Against Signs” and “Signs Lie” and such. My type of humor. The DooDah parade makes me wishes Red America's parades were no less patriotic but with more wit & humor.


DooDah parade (photo credits: my wife)... another pic here & here

Writers Who Blog

"Blogs are a way to listen in and find out what people find funny and respond to," said Marion Maneker, editorial director at HarperCollins's HarperBusiness unit, who said it was too early to determine whether blogs would affect sales.

Quotable

I always thought there was no way Shakespeare could've labored in the sense of belaboring:

Mark Van Doren (who also wrote very well on all the plays in his 1939 book Shakespeare) once remarked that Shakespeare must have written his plays easily or he could not have written them at all. There is just too much in them: so much brilliance, so much meaning, all happening at once. This is all too much if a writer has to work it up. Shakespeare wrote plays the way Mozart wrote music.

-Jeffrey Hart

Latest in NR

Michael Potemra reviews "Is the Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism" by Mark A. Noll and Carolyn Nystrom in Nat'l Review:

In this well-written volume, Noll and Nystrom give a lucid — and often highly inspiring — account of the amazing distance Catholics and Protestants have traveled in the years since JFK’s statement. By 2004, evangelical politician Gary Bauer was able to say the following: “When John F. Kennedy made his famous speech that the Vatican would not tell him what to do, evangelicals and Southern Baptists breathed a sigh of relief. But today evangelicals and Southern Baptists are hoping that the Vatican will tell Catholic politicians what to do.” Bauer’s statement was hardly even controversial: In a poll that same year, evangelicals gave a higher approval rating to Pope John Paul II (59 percent) than to Jerry Falwell (44) or Pat Robertson (54).

The ice had melted on the Catholic side as well. In 1956, a commentator in the Catholic magazine Priest was still dismissing Martin Luther as “a lewd satyr whose glandular demands were the ultimate cause of his break with the Christian Church.” Less than a decade later, a writer in the same periodical admitted that “we’d feel quite silly today declaiming against Luther in the intemperate words of yesterday”; by 2004, a Catholic reviewer of a new Luther biography was declaring that Luther simply could not “have foreseen that the Church of Rome would some four centuries later, at Vatican Council II, adopt many of the reforms that he championed.”...

"What we see today may be described as an incarnation of Christ in Catholic form and an incarnation of Christ in evangelical form. Since there is only one Christ, these incarnations are pulled toward each other."

And Then There Were None?

What happens if Bush can't get a judge through the obstructionist Senate Democratic minority by October? Does the court operate on eight justices? And since it's unlikely either party will control sixty Senate seats this century, will each subsequent vacant seat go unfilled? Will it be...(drumroll)...Justice Thomas deciding everything by himself in 2030?

On The Demise of France's 35-Hour Work Week

NY Times article :

How could the futurologists be so wrong? George Jetson, we should recall -- the person many of us cartoon-watchers assumed we would someday become -- worked a three-hour day, standard in the interplanetary era. Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted that by 2000 we would have so much free time that we wouldn't know how to spend it.

Economic globalization obviously has a great deal to do with the change. It has leveled the playing field all over the world, so that the have-nots can now compete more equally with the haves, especially if they are willing to work harder, longer and for lower wages, which so many of them are. And the haves, in turn, find that they have to pick up the pace just to stay even.

But there may be a more insidious force manifesting itself -- something along the lines of an evolutionary law that says, paradoxically, the more you try to simplify or eliminate work, the more of it there is to do. Scholars estimate that medieval peasants, for example, worked between 120 and 150 days a year....The Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert William Fogel has studied what he calls the "efficiency of the human engine" and found that the mechanical advances of the Industrial Revolution were paralleled by an equal increase in the human body's size, strength and endurance. In his view the great growth industry of the 19th and 20th centuries was the capacity for work itself.

The more work we do, apparently, the more we're able to do, and though Fogel himself takes a sort of Toffler-like view of the 21st century, predicting that leisure will become the next great growth industry, there's little evidence of that right now. Working hours in America -- the nation in the world with by far the most efficient human engines -- have risen steadily over the last three decades. And far from complaining, we have adopted a superior, moralizing attitude that sees work not as a necessary evil, a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Can't Keep Up...

...with either Scott Hahn or Cardinal Ratzinger's prodigious output of writings. I just learned that Hahn now has his definitive bible study out, which he considers to be his most important work. A back-to-school gift for high-school or college students?

Takes All Kinds

Jonah Goldberg cracks me up:

That my words do not carry weight with you is not evidence whatsoever that my words do not carry weight.

Let's hope someone starts the SADL (Skydiver's Anti-Defamation League). KTC? *grin*

Spinning Spam Into "Poetry"

Don't forget: the more you drink, the better this blog reads. Here's another poem made up of 100% biodegradable spam:

This site is straightforward
when it comes to finding what you need. buckshot

Hey, friend, I see
you are very upset! XANA
L0RAAZEPAM, AMBIEN surely jealous
meant shining.
You were Accepted.
Here is your Money.

Inspired by reception of email with the subject header:
This site is straightforward when it comes to finding what you need. buckshot

Quick Asides

Was listening to WLW, "the Nation's Station", 50,000 watts out of Cincinnati. And I learned that the game show host Wink Martindale has a "game show room" at his home. He asks guests play board games like Trivial Pursuit so he can moderate.

The mind reels, doesn't it? It's hard not to come to the conclusion that God wanted him to be a game show host. Do those who love their job do so because they're extremely good at it or are are they good at it because they love doing it?
*
Listening to David McCullough on Russert's show and he said that many of the key players of the Revolutionary War (such as Thomas Paine) were Quakers who had put aside their pacifism, recognizing that "some wars are worth fighting". Wow. That's not what I thought pacifism was about.

*
A progressive Catholic I know was surprised when I told her that Cardinal Ratzinger, back in the '60s, was on the "liberal" wing of the Church. It's almost as if that gave the Pope a bit more credibility in her eyes. Conservatives are given no credit if they've always been conservative because then they are seen as blindly & brainlessly following Church teaching. Of course, on the other side, if you change your mind someone could say "well, they were wrong once, they could be wrong again." It's all about faith.

*

I try not to get tangled in apologetics but when the topic comes up and I have a lengthy exchange with someone I think it's God's sneaky way of getting me to pray for that person because afterwards I almost always experience PASD (post-apologetic stress disorder), characterized by "I should've said this!" and "Gosh I sounded self-righteous there!". Also Bishop Sheen's "win an argument, lose a soul" resonates. So I end up praying that God undoes any damage I'd done.

*

Picked up some good ol' KFC ('a heart attack in a sack' to quote Tim McGraw) and there was an eager, enthusiastic worker at the window. She was probably a Somali (Columbus has the second largest population of Somalis in the country). Dark-skinned and pretty, she had one obvious flaw: a missing front tooth. She had braces on the rest of them, which suggested this was a work-in-progress and that soon she'd have teeth as good as any American. Is that what Purgatory is like? Getting our teeth fixed while being eager of mien because we're in the anteroom of Heaven?

Habit of Being

Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post on Flannery O'Connor. And the hat tip goes to... Two Sleepy Mommies