Cartoon Violence

There's something ironic about Muslims responding with violence to cartoons that criticize Islam as violent. Or perhaps the word I'm looking for is predictable. The cartoons exploit the Muslim world's Achilles' Heel - their intolerance of criticism of their religion & prophet. My initial reaction was that it is good for European newspapers to help Muslims "exercise" tolerance, although, of course, I'm hypocritically not in favor of anyone exploiting my Achilles Heels in order that my soft tissue be exercised. And it's hard to dispute the Vatican Press Office's assertion that "a reading of history shows that wounds that exist in the life of peoples are not cured this way." Islam will be fixed by Muslims, not from the outside.

So the cartoons are probably less a strengthening of a weakness than a pouring of salt on a wound, although the temptation is to feel that this was bound to happen sooner or later so we might as well get it over with. Newspaper editors worship the First Amendment and Muslims near-worship the Prophet Mohammed so this train wreck was all too obvious. Were the cartoons disrespectful? When is humor not? (See WFB's comment below about Heaven being the place where 'humor does not lacerate'.) Let sleeping dogs lie, they say, but Islamo-fascism is already awake and biting. But there are degrees of "biting" and I wonder how smart it is to needlessly antagonize biting dogs by poking sticks at them.

Tony Blankley in his book "The West's Last Chance" imagined a scenerio in which Muslims began rioting outside European museums because of the depiction of naked females in art, but it seems the real incite to violence is criticism of Islam. And there is a surprising diversity of opinion. The respected blogger Hugh Hewitt came down against the cartoons, as does Robert Duncan of Spero News. Amy and Rock (here and here) have interesting posts up. Mark Shea has also come out against the cartoons.

Dust-Jacket Photos of Writers

Link:

"It's about math, but the writing is passionate and beautiful," Larbalestier says, "and I kept trying to reconcile the smug picture of the author with the elegance of the text."
__

Ettlinger...has photographed more than 600 writers since 1983. She's aware of the incongruities of the process. "They're being photographed because of their intellect, their inner life, and here they have to do these things involving their appearance. It seems like a big contradiction," she says.

O'Rama's French Toast^TM

I recently expanded my culinary rolodex. It previously consisted of Campbell's soup and cereal, but now includes something I'll call "french toast", which, not coincidentally, is what everyone else calls it too.


your results may vary

Ingredients:

three farm fresh eggs (no city eggs, please)

three pieces of bread that are at least 75% free of mold

milk

1 lb of butter

Cooking Procedure
Step one is the most difficult part, as it usually is. ("The distance doesn't matter; only the first step is difficult." --- Mme du Deffand.) You need to remove the inside part of the egg from its shell. Egg shells are not part of the recipe because they are more bland than mushrooms though, come to think of it, more crunchy.

Mix the egg insides in bowl. Add milk to taste (I've noticed all recipes include 'to taste' but don't actually taste this now, because it will taste bad. Trust me on that. It needs to be cooked first).

Ladle the admixture generously on the bread. Allow it to soak, like the hands in the old Palmolive dishwashing liquid commercials. Place bread in a skillet and cook for two to eight minutes, depending on when they're done. Then slather with pound of butter. Bon appetit!

In Christopher Buckley's book...

..."No Way to Treat a First Lady", there's a spoof of those ridiculous surveys they give to potential jury members (as Jim Curley reported awhile back):

The two of them had prepared a juror's questionnaire extensive even by their standards. It consisted of eight hundred questions. Number 11: Did you vote for President MacMann? Number 636: Are you regular at bowel movements? During his years at the CIA, Pinky had discovered that defectors and moles - switchers of allegiance - tended to be constipated.

Fictional Friday

Often a quick glance at the printed characters induced a small fever. A momentary flash and he was off to work, the quick kiss that would leave him unsatisfied, like R. Montague beneath the balcony, but which also gave him hope and something oddly material. He could put the words in his pocket, figuratively speaking, and pull them out anytime, morning, noon, or night. When the taste of gall reached his lips it could be replaced with the taste of the morning wine. He was suspicious though, suspicious that he liked the wine for what it did for him rather than for the wine itself. But how could he separate the one from the other? How could he say "I like the wine because it is good, not because it makes me feel good," as if goodness could be anything other than itself? Yet he wanted to like the wine for its own sake and not because of the feelings it produced.

He grew attached to the book, the one that contained the sweet words, holding it reverently when he read it and trying to preserve its pristine condition, careful as he placed it in his jeans's back pocket, worried for its corners. He understood it as a lifeline, a totem that made him glow when it was on him. He could feel it burn in his back pocket and he felt about it in the way a person who can scarcely breathe appreciates a respirator. Scripture was the antidote to his own ridiculousness.



His years were divided into those in which he lopsidedly emphasized the Liturgy of the Word and those in which he lopsidely emphasized the Liturgy of the Eucharist. When he was young, he bore impatiently the readings that were obvious prologue for he was interested in miracles and not instruction and adults always had a way of burying the lede. He was used to having things happen without effort on his part, the way food magically appeared every night on the dinner table.

Years later he grew up and got a job and came to the conclusion that nothing got done unless he did it himself. He gorged on Scripture but saw Communion as an adjunct, far too magical for a budding rationalist. He was an American, which is to say practical, and believed that you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and there didn't seem to be much practically gained by ingesting what looked and tasted like bread and wine.

But he was grateful, when it suddenly happened, that the words pointed to the Word and the Word back to the words, and he consumed both as the Maker intended. He felt like Someone understood him, understood him better than he did himself, understood that he was body and soul. And he thought how odd it was that the ancients who'd constructed the Mass as a reflecting pool seemed to know what they were doing. He wondered: What else were they right about?

"Weidemann, Weidemann Beer...

...brewed with family pride for over one hundred years."



So went the jingle. But Weidemann is no longer brewed with pride, family or otherwise, as it went out of business before I started drinking beer. Which I think is a shame since my father and his father drank that beer (along with Burger and Hudepohl) and now I'll never know the pleasure (or lack thereof, since they apparently weren't great beers).

Even Ohio Breweriana has nothing on it. But someone on an internet message board remembers:

When I was a young fart, many moons ago, I lived in Cincinnati. Believe it or not, it was a big commercial beer-making town long ago, before beer became Big Business...I won't be able to come with all of the names, but some of them were Burger Beer, Hudepohl Beer, Weidemann Beer, you get the idea.

The only nice thing I can think to say about them was this: when you went to a Reds game, you could find on a hot summers day a vendor who would cry out:

"Get moody with a Hude (pronounced HOO-de) - just raise your hand, and I will be by your side"...

If You're Going to Have Earmarks, Why Not This One?

Well I see Boehner took the nod over Roy "Earmarks R Us" Blunt. Definitely an upgrade, though Boehner's no Shadegg. But Tim Russert made good sense when he asked why the heck couldn't one of those earmarks been for something like this instead of that?

vs.

Quote from Noonan's JPII Book

Peggy Noonan writes that the most moving scene for her in The Passion of the Christ (which happened to be the most moving scene for me also) was where Jesus said to Mary, during the walk to Calvary, "see, I make all things new.":

"What choked me up was thinking of Jesus. And thinking of how we all want to be new again, and how we can be if we rely on him; but it's so hard. While we believe deep in our hearts, we do not believe, or else we'd be new again." - Peggy Noonan

An Outsider's View of America

French writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy toured American and followed in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville. Roger Scruton reviews the resulting book, American Vertigo, in NR:

Like Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One, or Martin Amis in The Moronic Inferno, Lévy is drawn to the grotesqueries of the democratic culture — the gated communities where only retired geriatrics are allowed to own a house; the Mormon project for the redemption of mankind through genealogical research; the glassy-smiled lap dancers who offer vicarious sex while carefully ensuring that no pleasure, affection, or excitement could conceivably attach to it; the big Gospel churches where God is packaged and branded to suit the needs of every client; and the prisons, which were for Lévy, as they had been for Tocqueville, his first port of call...

As Lévy puts the point, America is obese, growing outwards not only in the bodies of its citizens, but in its heartless cities, its crowded prisons, its overflowing churches, its landscape-devouring shopping malls, its ever-expanding roads, plazas, car parks, its “mausoleum of merchandise, the funeral accumulation of false goods and non-desires” — in short, its fearful spilling of noise, needs, and niceness into every available space. America lacks poise, elegance, style, discretion. It has none of the self-irony with which the French contemplate the distasteful facts of human appetite, and therefore refuses to find them distasteful. It is, in short, a real democracy, in which ordinary people can put their ordinariness on display and not feel disgraced by it.
____

It is not Lévy’s fault that his book has been made to stand beside Tocqueville’s, and of course it suffers from the comparison. Lévy is flippant and frothy where Tocqueville is sober and deep. Lévy lacks the quality that Dr. Johnson called “bottom” and his interest in day-to-day realities is too easily eclipsed by his appetite for the ludicrous. There is another America than the one described in this book — the America of volunteer groups, neighborliness, and little platoons. But that America makes no effective backdrop to the observing bohemian, and therefore defies Lévy’s self-centered style. It was this other America that Tocqueville saw, and that he recognized for what it is — a new start for mankind.

Quick Vignettes

On the drive to work I saw a big van with the yellow caution stickers and the verbiage "A Blind Man Drives This Van". Well, I thought, you don't see this everyday. And of course thus distracted I almost didn't see the guy in front of me who stopped while trying to change lanes. Now who's the blind driver?
_

I'm on the elevator with three young women. Two are Chinese and speaking it. The other is Indian. Unlike most European languages, where you can make out a word here or there, Chinese is completely impenetrable. The Indian girl, whose language I would not understand, looks over her shoulder at me and we smile at each other, as if sharing in our mutual incomprehension.

Pondering Deus Charitas Est

"When I speak of peace, they want war." - Psalm 120:7

How can you have a Catlick blog and not mention the first encyclical of a new pope? You can't. So here goes.

First, isn't it nice that the Pope is re-claiming the word love from its use and abuse and tainted association with "free love" and anything-goes philosophy? Discipline with love is godly but rare as a hothouse flower. Few combine the two as readily as this pope who already had his discipline bones fides before this love encyclical. (St. Blog's errors on the side of discipline - there is more enthusiasm for correction than charity in most comment boxes - while the hippy fringe appreciate love without discipline.) As Fra Lawrence Lew, OP commented:

I think some people are disappointed that he has not 'cracked down' on dissidents etc but this is precisely what is winning over the 'liberals'. The role of the Holy Father is to unite the Church and this he does very well by focusing on Christian charity.

I think one can't go far wrong as a Christian, if one concentrates on charity and I think the saint who is made holy in charity transcends all barriers and speaks across divides and ideologies. If this Pope calls more Christians to this, we would advance the mission of the Church and restore the Church to greater unity, thus addressing our missio ad gentes and our internal ecclesial dynamics.

As Balthasar said: "Only love is credible"!

Amen. He ought to have a blog.


Here are some passages that struck me in the encyclical:

...there is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence.

Many views of Heaven seem ersatz. Harps and clouds and walking through walls. It would all get old after, say, a few hundred years. I like that the Pope portrays Heaven as far more than meeting folks and being able to drink beer without a hangover.

Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility.

I liked the word "compenetrate". I can envision this with respect to the incorruptibility of some of the saints. The spirit has so compenetrated that even their bodies are affected.

God's passionate love for his people—for humanity—is at the same time a forgiving love. It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.

Marvelous. This is Divine Mercy. This is exactly what gives us the impetus to boast about our God. To be just is human. To be merciful is divine.

The saints—consider the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta—constantly renewed their capacity for love of neighbour from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord, and conversely this encounter acquired its real-ism and depth in their service to others. Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment.

A potent passage. The typical way we, or I, think of the relationship between love of God and love of neighbor is to fill up on God in order to spend this fuel on neighbor. A common imagery, but it has the side effect of creating a temptation to "hoard" God's fuel. This passage points out that serving one's neighbor is not a spending of fuel but in some way gives you fuel, gives you the fuel to re-encounter the Eucharist Lord with greater realism and depth.

Note to self...

...print this link on pietism and capitalism.

The Thrilla in Manila: Culture vs Politics

I think the quote below bears repeating, because Iraq appears to be testing whether politics or religion & culture will trump in the shaping of their nation. George Will, a few years ago, wrote:

Sen Pat Moynihan said: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." ....The issue is the second half of Moynihan's formulation -- our ability to wield political power to produce the requisite cultural change in a place such as Iraq. Time was, this question would have separated conservatives from liberals. Nowadays it separates conservatives from neoconservatives.

Condoleezza Rice, a political scientist, believes there is scholarly evidence that democratic institutions do not merely spring from a hospitable culture, but that they also can help create such a culture. She is correct; they can. They did so in the young American republic. But it would be reassuring to see more evidence that the administration is being empirical, believing that this can happen in some places, as opposed to ideological, believing that it must happen everywhere it is tried....In "On Liberty", John Stuart Mill said, "It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say" that the doctrine of limited, democratic government "is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties." One hundred forty-five years later it obviously is necessary to say that.

Ron Chernow's magnificent new biography of Alexander Hamilton begins with these of his subject's words: "I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be." That is the core of conservatism.

I'm Annoyed That I'm Annoyed...

NR has an excellent article in the lastest issue on what went wrong with the Republicans in Congress regarding the pathetic lack of fiscal restraint.

I'm not sure why pork spending bothers me so much. Perhaps the brazenness of it, but it's really small change in the big picture. It's not that high a percentage of the budget. I guess it's more what it symbolizes. I recall back in the '80s there was a lot of grumbling about foreign aid. And I thought, "what's the big deal? It's a tiny portion of the budget." But foreign aid, whether boondoggle or not, seemed more appealing than these "bridges to nowhere" we're currently building.

Social security. Health care. Medicare. Alternatives to oil. Rebuilding from Katrina. AIDS in Africa. The war in Iraq. Those are the issues to think about. And yet I'm disproportionately interested in, and annoyed by, the coming election of Roy "Earmarks R Us" Blunt as House leader. From Rich Lowry:

Who would have predicted that ten years after taking Congress and promising to clean it up, Republicans would be rocked by their own set of scandals, including the abuse of earmarks for contributors? Actually, it was predictable, given the typical course of revolutions — a burst of energy, followed by a period of consolidation — and the inevitable temptations of power. “I always thought that we would lose the majority in 2002,” says an architect of the 1994 takeover. “I thought we would have an eight-year run. The fact is it’s not good for either party to control the place for too long. You do get an institutional mindset.”...No one who knows him thinks Tom DeLay is venal. But that can’t be said for now-notorious members of his team. One of them is going to jail (Michael Scanlon), and two others could yet be implicated in criminal activity (Tony Rudy and Ed Buckham).

It is often remarked that there is no committed constituency for limited government. Certainly, government programs like farm subsidies have more intense and organized supporters than detractors. But there is at least a diffuse constituency for limited government — they are called conservatives. If they realize that wholesale cuts in government won’t be forthcoming, that doesn’t mean they have to sit still for discretionary spending growing at 10 percent a year, for thousands of special-interest earmarks, and for a new entitlement being hoisted on top of an already out-of-control entitlement state. If all this is combined with gross insider self-dealing, conservatives have cause to recoil in disgust, and they have done so.

...But among conservatives in Washington there is a sense that the House GOP needs a broad renewal, and no one seems to know how it will happen. Elections to replace DeLay seem likely to promote whip Roy Blunt up one slot, so the leadership will be, as Stephen Moore has put it in the Wall Street Journal, the DeLay team without DeLay. Whatever is the next new thing in national conservative politics probably won’t emanate from the House. For veterans of the 1994 revolution one word comes up again and again as they survey this scene: “sad.”

Nomination

I think there should be a category Blogger Most Coming Out of His or Her Shell - for which I would nominate the blogtress at Sancta Sanctis. She started out slowly, only posting very POD things. She wouldn't put her email address on her site. Her site had no comments. Over time, she became more and more comfortable to the point of admitting she liked movies such as the euphoniously named "Hellboy", "Terminator" and "Robo-Cop". Beneath the veil of a contemplative lurked the heart of someone attuned to pop culture. And over time, she added her email address and opened up comments. But she's still very POD.

A runner up might well be the Kelly Clark of Pew Lady fame. Kelly started out posting witty essays on her website very infrequently. Begun in Feb of '02, Kelly was able to resist the daily blog lure until July of '05, which is, in blog years, many lifetimes.

Update: I completely forgot about Zippy. Zippy was an obscure commenter on Disputations, ridicuously smart, always trenchant and about getting to the root of the thing. Zippy had no blog. Then one day Zippy got a blog. And then one day Zippy told us all sorts of things, like how many people made millions working for him. Here again we see how blogging induces disclosure, confessional medium that it is.