News of our Week



The big news around our homestead this week was the Obi emo-a-thon (short for “emotion-athon”). The “bright” dog, so labeled by a vet assistant, had swallowed eight to twelve inches of dental floss. I have a hunch he could've eaten far more without ill effect since he routinely “dumpster dives” and consumes the contents of indoor garbage cans. There’s often been floss in this particular can but it was only this time I’d caught him and I sense he's like the drunk driver who got caught the seven-hundredth time he'd driven drunk. We tried to induce vomiting with hydrogen peroxide but he’s a big dog and is able to fend off bodily assaults that would’ve had smaller dogs puking their proverbial guts out.

Two days later, after noting a rare loss of appetite and an episode of (belated) vomiting, we took him to the emergency vet. They took x-rays of our dog and our wallets and found both with excesses that needed to be purged. Obi’s was a suspicious “gas pocket”. Now, since the colon is the natural environment of gas, it seemed a stretch even at the time that he should be kept overnight for observation and fluids. Reports have it that he barked quite loudly and crisply at 3am. He seemed nonplussed at all the fuss. “Why am I here?” asked Admiral Stockdale in the ‘92 vice-presidential debate and one imagines Obi saying the same thing with more cause. The crisis was over as soon as it’d begun and a day later we were laughing about the “$600 fart”. (I was laughing because I wasn’t paying for it; Obi's officially my wife's dog.)

But fortunes changed as they often do. Our laughter was shortlived after receiving a disturbing phone call a few days later. The vet had sent the x-rays to a radiologist as they routinely do. The radiologist noticed an alarming mass which the emergency room vet had not the training to have noticed. An ultrasound was called for, and Obi was taken to his regular vet for that. This vet said the large mass was next to either the spleen or liver – only a specialist could tell for sure. Naturally we assumed it was a tumor as that seemed the likely explanation though son Aaron came up with an extremely plausible one: “it’s probably a sock.”

So Friday my wife took him to the specialist for a second ultrasound and to possibly take a biospy. But about 11:15am she called me at work sobbing jubilant tears -- the mass was just part of his spleen! It was not only beyond our expectations it was more than we dared hope for. German Shepherds have larger spleens than normal, and apparently Obi’s had “folded over,” at least during the xray & ultrasound, making it look like there was a foreign mass next to a smaller-sized spleen.

The night before when all was dark, it was touching to hear of my wife's yearning for clarity with respect to animals and Heaven. If she could know for sure then Obi’s death, either now or in the future, would be bearable. I was touched by it in part because it was evidence of her reverence for truth; she would not believe a lie only to give her comfort (though there is no evidence it is a lie and that animals don't go to Heaven.) But how could God not be pleased by her seeking truth? How many determine their doctrine or morals by what they can personally bear? Perhaps some small personal revelation is in the offing but if it is not it’s all for the good. In her is the familiar struggle between faith and reason and I was proud that she abandoned neither reason or faith. Real faith works its way through the fog of cloudiness.

My own fog is how Heaven can be truly heavenly while being exclusive rather than inclusive. If something or someone is missing, how can there be perfect happiness? One can look at it such that the Beatific Vision is like a drug, something that takes our mind off everything else. In that sense looking at God is like being so drunk with love that you scarcely notice anything else. But that is proven blatantly false by the saints, who intercede for us poor earthly saps even while enjoying the divine vision.

Fictional Friday

He was a bundle of contradictions. Morose but capable of a huge smile. Lover of the workplace, yet avoider of actual work. Serious of mien, yet hard to take seriously. He lumbered around to various cubicles as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders and indeed he would not take a day off to save his life. Every year he carried over unusued vacation days and would come in even on declared off days.

His presence was naturally startlingly. I’d be minding my own business when suddenly there was the gleaming bald head and gremlin-like teeth and high forehead, the latter which always reminded me of National Review’s Richard Brookhiser’s, though not surprisingly he'd never heard of Brookhiser since he was an avowed liberal who called himself a moderate. Liberals and moderates don’t read Brookhiser.

He had the kind of yogic self-composure that reminded me of single people or the narcissistic. He was the former, I can't speak to the latter. You say blogging is by nature narcissitic and that I’m splitting hairs. Perhaps so.

His presence was contemplative. He spoke of his yoga stretches. He was into psychology and Myers-Briggs and something called “emotional intelligence”. I could've wished for an intelligence a bit closer to the ground. I think: Where's the love for "practical intelligence"? There was, of course, much enthusiaism on his part when his boss asked him to collect our Myers-Briggs scores. I couldn’t help but wish some of that enthusiasm would transfer to our joint project, a project joint only in the way that a man and a goat jointly accomplish the production of milk. Still, the letter of the law was that he was the lead and so if he seemed needlessly authoritarian (for a socialist) then I could deal.

I’d always wondered how others dealt with him successfully. Rumors all had it that he didn’t but of course, in my pride, I always liked a challenge. I would be the one to get along well with him. Ponderous and slow, he approached each difficulty using a two-pronged approach: 1) what was the maximum pain he could inflict on me and 2) how little could something matter and still draw his attention (i.e. why clean a bathroom with a mop when you could use a toothbrush?). Yet he was like Pat Morita in “Karate Kid” -- every job ought be done perfectly, no matter how long it takes and indeed time for him was irrelevant, transcendent. Take as long as you want! Do little things with great love is what he did, though admittedly it wasn’t him doing the work. Laying up large burdens with great love might be said to be his specialty. Still, he had a fine craftsman’s appreciation for quality and he knew that the end towards which we were working was not the company’s bottom line or the utility of the product made, but how well the product was made.

Conversation that could only take place in Columbus

Relayed to me by my wife:

"Did you hear about Schembechler? Getting his boys fired up for the game like that? A--hole."

"Was he a bad guy?"

"I won't speak ill of the dead."

"Uh you just called him an a--hole."

Week in Review Items

Made the mistake of checking out The Drudge Report. Learned that some reprehensible person (Judith Regan) is publishing OJ Simpson's book. Pardon me while I vomit. Profiting from crime is a truly horrendous idea.

I was oddly discomfited by the watching PBS’s special on Okinawa. At least that’s what led me to google my great uncle, who’d served in WWII. I found nothing about his service to our country but instead found too much information (TMI) about his son, who shares the same name and who is also a devout Catholic. He’s a comer in the union world and is making a healthy $140K as a union leader. The other thing Google told me was that he contributed at least $200 to Hillary Clinton’s 2006 Senate campaign. Ouch. Goethe, phone your office?

The weightroom was filled with butane-lighters of girls, with hot flames of skin jutting above halters and peaking below shirts tight and small. One can almost not blame the girls for where can they shop for non-harlot clothes? I suppose they are assuming the shape of their culture as fully as I did mine back in the 80s.

Say What?

This news story, about how pollution might solve the problem of global warming, reminds me of one of my favorite Homer Simpson quotes: "To alcohol - the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

Oh Yes...

Announcing the Nigerian Scammer T-shirt!


There's one for the Christmas list.

Excerpt...

I'm reading an interesting book, The Historical Dimensions of Irish Catholicism by Emmet Larkin, which sheds more light on why the Irish became so fervent in the Faith between the 1830s to the 1860s, a "devotional revolution" that carried with great strength until just the past few decades when materialism and exposure to the globalized culture have triggered a re-paganization of the country. Ultimately it comes down to the familiar refrain that it is only when we're stripped of the earthly do we tend to go to God (i.e. God as "Friend of last resort" and His Body the Church as culture of last resort). It also reminds me of how our pastor Msgr. Lane reads St. Paul's mentions of the "flesh" opposing the Spirit as referring to "culture" rather than physical flesh:

The crucial question still remains - why did the Irish people respond so readily to the reform of their Church and become virtually practicing Catholics within a generation? The Great Famine was truly a gigantic psychological shock, and it certainly would be both neat and convenient to be able to assign so impressive a cause for so remarkable an effect. A guilt-ridden and frightened people turning more formally and fervently to their God in their hour of need makes more, indeed, than a good deal of superficial sense. The problem, of course, is that the devotional need appears to have been increasingly present before the famine, and only the adverse circumstances of population growth and the lack of money and personnel on the part of the Church prevented the need from being realized. The famine, therefore, was as much the occasion for as a cause of the devotional revolution being made and consolidated in Ireland, and one must probe more deeply if one is to understand why as well as how this remarkable historical phenomenon took place.
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...The Irish, after all, had been gradually losing their language, their culture, and their way of life for nearly a hundred years before the famine...In a word, then, Irishmen who were aware of being Irish were losing their identity, and this accounts in large part for their becoming practicing Catholics.    --Emmet Larkin

Those Who Can't, Write

Lord knows I shouldn't be telling journalists how to do their job, but it's funny how often they are incurious to the point of missing the story. I too had read the line "she had been curator of manuscripts at two universities in America, Princeton and Huntingdon" [sic] and immediately became skeptical.

Friends in High Places

Celestial matchmaker
make me a match--
Sheen for Mom
Thérèse for Ron
Blessed Margaret for Margaret,
and Mary for all.

Referring to that last post...

What to make of the fact that those gifted with money (welfare) are less generous than those who have earned it (the working poor)? It's counterintuitive, isn't it? We would seem to feel less claim to that which is given to us rather than earned.

Of course it's not random as to who works and who receives welfare. The spiritual poverty that often accompanies material poverty might predict less generosity among the welfare recipients. (Although I'm also thinking of Mr. Skimpole, admittedly a fictional character dreamed up by Charles Dickens in Bleak House, who was both generous and utterly dependent on the largess of others.) It's also possible, of course, that those receiving welfare have less money to give than even the working poor.

On Giving

Some interesting statistics on who gives:

The working poor in America give more to charity than the middle class

The American working poor are, relative to their income, some of the most generous people in America today. The nonworking poor, however—those on public assistance instead of earning low wages—give at lower levels than any other group. In other words, poverty does not discourage charity in America, but welfare does.

More from the book Who Really Cares:

The conventional wisdom runs like this: Liberals are charitable because they advocate government redistribution of money in the name of social justice; conservatives are uncharitable because they oppose these policies. But note the sleight of hand: Government spending, according to this logic, is a form of charity.

Let us be clear: Government spending is not charity. It is not a voluntary sacrifice by individuals. No matter how beneficial or humane it might be, no matter how necessary it is for providing public services, it is still the obligatory redistribution of tax revenues.
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In 2000, households headed by a conservative gave, on average, 30 percent more money to charity than households headed by a liberal ($1,600 to $1,227). This discrepancy is not simply an artifact of income differences; on the contrary, liberal families earned an average of 6 percent more per year than conservative families, and conservative families gave more than liberal families within every income class, from poor to middle class to rich.

If we look at party affiliation instead of ideology, the story remains largely the same. For example, registered Republicans were seven points more likely to give at least once in 2002 than registered Democrats (90 to 83 percent).

The differences go beyond money and time. Take blood donations, for example. In 2002, conservative Americans were more likely to donate blood each year, and did so more often, than liberals.

The Media...

...plays right into Ann Coulter's hands. It's amusing how obvious the bias of the MSM. Perhaps there will come a day when Coulter has to stretch for material but for now her columns write themselves:

In the past week, there are 476 documents on Nexis heralding the magnificent achievement of Nancy Pelosi becoming the FIRST WOMAN speaker of the House. I thought we had moved beyond such multicultural milestones.

The media yawned when Condoleezza Rice became the first black woman secretary of state...

Our Columbus Dispatch led the parade this past Sunday with a piece on Pelosi that would make a public relations firm blush with embarrassment.

Sur-prise, Sur-prise! (say like Gomer Pyle)

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
North Central
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The South
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Via Irish Elk

The More Things Change...

...the more they stay the same. Anti-Americanism that is. Came across this in a decade-old journal entry:

Now the U.S. tries to save Grenada for democracy and you'd think we marched on Paris, sacked the Louvre and installed the Mona Lisa at the Smithsonian.

Iraq & Lowry's Vietnam History

The bishops' statement on Iraq mentions how public discussion has been sorely lacking given its dumbed down "cut & run" versus "stay the course" character. Very true. The Conference also seems to put faith in James Baker's commission - which might at least provide political cover to do the right thing whatever the heck the right thing is in Iraq. Whatever the merits of the "wise men" of that commission, it's hard to believe they come up with a rabbit out of their hat. If they do then my hat's off to them.

There are conflicting views on our role. The New Yorker showed a picture of George Bush in a shop with a lot of broken glasses and pots. This is the "you break it, you buy it" school, which suggests America should be there until the violence has lessened to some level of livability. (Of course, the New Yorker folks would probably favor immediate withdrawl, so that cover was more about giving George Bush hell than anything else.) Complicating the matter is that we don't want to have inadvertently created another terrorist-sponsoring state. Rounding out the complication is undoubtedly part of the equation is how it would look to withdrawl. But why should how something look matter? We made a mistake; it happens. Reagan withdrew from Lebanon back around '86 - did that really have such horrible repercussions? And yet Lowry in the article quoted below says that if we "lose in Iraq our enemies will realize insurgency is the surest way to frustrate us." Well, duh, I think they've already discovered that. The cat's already out of the bag on that one Richard. Win, lose, or draw every nation in the world learned that with our experience in Vietnam and has re-learned it in Iraq.

Interesting to me is how we are supposedly fighting in part for democracy in Iraq and yet we don't simply let them vote whether they want our military there or not. What would've been helpful from the bishops is to know where our responsibility for Iraq ends. We arguably had a right to remove Saddam, given that he didn't honor the Gulf War ceasefire agreement, but after that it gets very murky very quickly. What if you wanted a civil war but American troops wouldn't let you? Is it our moral obligation to prevent a war there? Where does "you break it, you buy it" stop and the freedom of a society to determine its own future begin?
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Rich Lowry in National Review has a unique take on Vietnam and Iraq, one that I've long shared, even though I thought his reason to stay in Iraq was questionable. He says that the U.S. did not lose in Vietnam because the military wasn’t given the freedom to pursue a conventional war:

The true lesson of Vietnam is that the civilian leadership should exercise close supervision of the military and ensure that, when fighting an insurgency, it utilizes all those tools — such as intensive small-unit patrolling, intelligence gathering, and training of indigenous forces — that don’t come naturally to a U.S. Army that is most comfortable when simply closing with and smashing a conventional enemy.

As Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. recounts in his classic book on the military’s failures in the war, The Army and Vietnam, it was a civilian, President John F. Kennedy, who was prescient about the coming era of guerrilla warfare. He pushed the Army to learn counterinsurgency warfare, but it fundamentally ignored him. It undertook a lot of activity related to counterinsurgency, but most of it was superficial and intended only to create the impression of responding to Kennedy’s proddings.
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The military was particularly clueless about counterinsurgency, which typically requires careful discrimination in applying firepower, light infantry undertaking intensive patrolling, and political action to undermine the basis of the insurgents’ support in the population. With the exception of the Marines, the military wanted nothing to do with that: It was always more bombing and more troops. The military dreamed of replicating World War II with a strategy of bombing industrial sites in the North and of bleeding the Viet Cong into submission in the South.

Prior to our massive intervention, the South Vietnamese had been running large-scale search-and-destroy missions for years that were easily avoided by the VC, but the American military assumed that, if it took over, it could succeed in implementing the same flawed strategy on the basis of its superior firepower and technical prowess. Whenever it was clear that the strategy was failing, the Army’s answer was always more of the same.
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Even in defeat, the Army wasn’t going to change its doctrine. It just decided never to fight insurgencies again. That has played a role in our difficulties in Iraq, as the Army was insufficiently prepared for the counterinsurgency it has had to wage. If we lose there — partly because we were slow to adopt with any consistency sound counterinsurgency tactics, partly because we didn’t have the troop levels to support them once we did — it will likely prompt the Army, and many conservatives, to try to write off counterinsurgency for another generation.

This would be ill-advised for two reasons. One, insurgencies are defeatable. Max Boot notes that post–World War II guerrilla fighters have been defeated in Italy, Spain, Northern Ireland, Greece, the Philippines, Malaya, Turkey, El Salvador, Kenya, Guatemala, and Mexico, among other places. Two, if we lose in Iraq, it will put an even greater premium on insurgency warfare, as our enemies will realize it’s the surest way to frustrate us. So we will have to either scale back our geopolitical ambitions or learn how to fight insurgents after all.

President Bush believes he is learning from Vietnam, but in misunderstanding that war — and absenting himself from decisions of the utmost consequence — he may be playing his role in a repeat of it.