Linkin' Around...

One of George Bush's problems was he never felt the need to defend himself or his positions. Michael Novak never makes the same mistake with respect to his country. He examines American giving in First Things:

Anyone traveling to Europe this summer will surely marvel at how different it is from the United States—and how Europeans have trouble understanding the difference. “Individualists,” they call Americans, but the facts show far more personal social concern in the United States.

Here’s an example: In Europe, many leave philanthropy to the state. For Americans, the personal element—in giving, volunteering, and philanthropy—form an indispensable principle of democracy. According to this principle, people who do not want to depend on the state for all of their needs and wants must seek another source of funds. The best source—the most reliable source—derives from the tradition of reasoned giving.

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Eric Scheske helpfully tutors those lacking in online civility (oxymoron alert!). Indeed, the Byzantine Catholic forum had to close its doors.

Sad, but not too surprising. In our fallen nature we become more vicious to the extent an activity is untrackable (or trackable only by God or computer nerds).

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Phil Albinus has an interesting photo and caption:

The Surge Obama Didn’t Vote For — Part 1. Roughly 1200 soldiers re-enlist in Baghdad at a ceremony yesterday. They must not be reading the Huffington Post.

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About five or six years ago I titled some reveries "Lamentations and Exaggerations". Dylan picks up the theme. I never read it, but didn't Gail Sheey's Passages predicate we'd be grumpy in middle-age? I so hate predictability that I think I'll be cheerful. A good meal would help.

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As Bill Luse said, with friends like Commonweal who needs enemies? A recent article was titled "Why Catholics Don't Have to Vote Republican", which I agree with, only the article wasn't defending write-ins but Obama. Truth in advertising would've been to call it "Why Catholics Can Vote Democrat". I'm always pleasantly surprised when I see them defending the faith, such as a recent article contra Chris Hitchens' book "God is Not Great". I suppose the new atheism might actually bring us all together for awhile.

Mr. Luse pointed me to Dale Ahlquist's strong rejoinder to reports of Chesterton anti-Semitism:

I read the article in the New Yorker. For the record, I sent the following response to the magazine. I don’t know if it will get printed, but here's an excerpt:

For those of us who love Chesterton, we are always distressed to see him subjected to any vile charge. But we’ve gotten a little tired of the charge of anti-Semitism. He’s been absolved of that one too many times for us to count – from the tribute by Rabbi Stephen Wise to the official statements of the Weiner Library (the archives of anti-Semitism and holocaust history in London). Mr. Gopnik has added a new technique to making the charge stick – declaring that Chesterton’s admirers should not defend Chesterton against the horrible accusation. Hm. That is certainly one way to end the debate. I would meekly suggest that a better way would be for people to stop repeating charges that have already been dropped.

But we are still going to take Mr. Gopnik’s article as a sign of hope. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Chesterton was simply dismissed by the literary establishment as an anti-Semite and not taken seriously. Now he is at least being taken seriously before being dismissed as an anti-Semite. As the Chesterton revival kicks into high gear, we expect the trend to continue to the point where Chesterton is simply taken seriously without the obligation to mention anything about how Chesterton judges the Jews or how the Jews judge Chesterton.

In the meantime, we regret the unfortunate turn in Mr. Gopnik’s otherwise brilliant essay. There is something a little too desperate, too anxious in his attempt to prove that Chesterton is anti-Semitic. He is dancing as fast as he can to explain away Chesterton’s Zionism and his outspoken stance against Hitler for oppressing the Jews. (“I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.” What does it take to convince some people?)

Among the worn out arguments Mr. Gopnik uses is: Chesterton should not treat the Jews as if they are different because…well…they’re different. But far more troubling is his argument that Chesterton, the Catholic convert, has this pervasive nastiness woven into the very fabric of his philosophy. Whether consciously or not, Mr. Gopnik has broadened his implication to include the whole Catholic Church. Perhaps some future literary critic will be discussing Mr. Gopnik’s anti-Catholicism rather than Chesterton’s anti-Semitism. He can only hope that he will one day be considered so noteworthy a controversialist.

For now, however, the most important consideration should be of the following passage from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man:

“…the world owes God to the Jews… [T]hrough all their wanderings… they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle…The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. [W]hile the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe…”

Doesn’t exactly sound like the writings of an anti-Semite. Sounds more like someone who has a deep respect for the Jews. Also sounds like a pretty good argument for localism. Chesterton has thrown Mr. Gopnik’s main point into serious jeopardy. Either Chesterton is right to defend localism, which is what preserved the Jews, or localism is a menace and the Jews should have melted into their surroundings three thousand years ago. Mr. Gopnik cannot have it both ways.

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Often this blog feels far too bourgeois, especially after reading this and this. With writing, gotta crack an egg if you want an omelette.

The Liberal Feminist and the Book of Job

I caught a bit of the latest C-Span "In Depth", this time with pro-choice feminist Katha Pollitt. I did it in solidarity with any left-wingers who might've watched George Weigel last month.

Fortunately this wasn't too painful. No blood pressure meds were required during this airing. First and foremost, she has a sense of humor and playfulness which, like charity, covers much. All in all a very likable person.

She's a poet and a polemicist, someone with whom I obviously share few views, but I was edified by her humility in exposing herself to fellow feminist shrapnel: she had the guts to write of a failed relationship, of how she, the feminist, gave him the big office in her house. She admits she's a feminist who wants a man, saying that although it's said that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, "some fish want a bicycle".

She's a nonbeliever who respects people of faith, saying she's dismayed by the new atheists who haughtily demean the intelligence of believers.

She discussed the Book of Job (she's writing a poem about it, which looked pretty good from the brief view over her shoulder C-Span offered). I found her commentary about it interesting, because I like to see exactly what the obstacles to faith are. Her main objections were:

a) To paraphrase: "This book is God at His ugliest. God's answer to Job is 'Hey, where were you when I created the world? Huh? Huh?'".

b) The supposed happy ending - the recompense of God at the end of the book - was sorely lacking in her view. God took away Job's children earlier in the story but they were merely replaced, as if children are replaceable. She says: "God doesn't understand humans at all, as if quantity is all we care about." (Me: Breathtaking assertion; the Creator doesn't understand the created? Isn't it more likely the other way around?)

At the time Job was written, I'm sure the happy ending envisioned by the biblical author was very pleasing. I think it highly unlikely that people took the ending in Job as anything other than wonderfully satisfying, or simply as a parable that justice will be done. But God had more in store, as the New Testament attests. And God has much more in store ahead.

So I think she misses the point. The Bible was written in real-time, that is to say it was written to fill the capacities (intellectual and spiritual) of a people at that time. We tend to read the Bible solipsistically as if it were meant only for us, when of course it was meant first for a particular, concrete place and time, and secondarily for all time with the help of the Holy Spirit and the guidance of the Church. Our God is a living God. Job does teach universal truths, such as how man judges God and God judges man and it's only when Job meets face-to-face with God that Job apprehends. It's ironic that we are so often tempted to use the Book of Job in order to judge God, when Job learned that judging God was foolish.

So she's reading it literally, in a Fundamentalist fashion. God's answer to Job was not in words - which Pollitt says, accurately, were inadequate - but in the meeting, as Peter Kreeft eloquently puts it:

The ending answers another problem in Job: Why is Job satsified even though God does not answer a single one of Job's agonized and very good questions? Job is not a meek, humble, easily satisfied man. He's from Missouri. Fr. George Rutler is right: we must not speak of the "patience of Job", but of the impatience of Job.

Job is satisfied by the only possible answer that would satisfy such a man. If God had offered words, Job would surely have questioned those words again, and the verbal batle would have gone on eternally, as it does among philosphers. Instead of answers, Job got the Answerer. Instead of words, Job got the Word. Job got what St. Thomas Aquinas asked for shortly before his death, when the Lord, speaking form the crucifix, said to him, "You have written well of me, Thomas; what will you have as a reward?" Thomas gave the world's best possible answer: "Only yourself, Lord."

Her decision against God came early. She says at the age of six she was viewing a sunset with her friend and she knew, contrary to her friend, that God had nothing to do with the sunset.

And they say believers have simplistic views that were merely inherited from their parents!?

Writers who are in their own place and challenge it from the specific - that felt so universal to me, reading Mark Twain, reading Faulkner, reading Flannery O'Connor. I didn't always know what was going on, but the strangeness of the music, the peculiarity of it, just swept me along. And that means you don't have to be as performative and showy as someone from an older tradition has to be - people having to manufacture freshness and interest by feats of novelty and bombast and linguistic daring, where the style is essentially the story. - Australian poet Tim Winton

I have found that when it comes to diehard wrestling fans, they are either some of the dumbest people you will ever meet or the most intelligent. There’s no intellectual middle class in pro wrestling, compared with American Idol viewers or NFL fans, where I would imagine the IQ level of the vast majority of fans likely hovers around the pedestrian level. I was not shocked to learn that Flannery O’Connor liked rasslin’, for example. - Jack Hunter of the Charleston City Paper

Awaiting vacation reveals a will to live. It's exactly for this reason that vacation can't be a vacation from our 'self'. So, summer can't be an interruption or procrastination from taking life seriously. By means of the commitment to the ideal in our free time, we will learn to pursue it as a hypothesis even in the rest of our time, where the pressures of duty and contingent influences make everything tougher." - --Fr. Giussani via Fred of "Is it Possible?"

I remember reading the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet as a cynical teenager and thinking that nobody could possibly pull off something so sappy. Then my English teacher screened this adaptation of [Zefferelli's] Romeo and Juliet for us. I couldn't eat my words fast enough. The whole movie is so beautiful and it makes a too-familiar story seem new each time I watch it again.- Sancta Sanctis

I'm not surprised to hear that he had issues with the Catholic Church. Most comedians of his era had problems with authority of any stripe and, of course, God is the Ultimate Authority. - Catholic Media Review on comedian George Carlin

I understand he was supposed to be controversial, brash and iconoclastic, which, translated from media-speak, means he said absolutely nothing to contradict modern received opinion and instead focused on making fun of anyone who wasn't in the room at the time. In any case, it is a good and fitting thing to pray for the dead. - Matthew of "Holy Whapping" on George Carlin

It seems that many of the relationships which give us a sense of purpose, wholeness, love, or meaning are also among the most stressful things: Love is reassuring, but also tiring! Perhaps our real difficulty is that we too often conflate happiness or "emotional well-being" with sense of meaning or purpose, when in fact they're quite distinct.... - Eve Tushnet

How do we become saints? It’s very simple: the Eucharist. Every saint has made the Eucharist the center of his or her life. If we center our lives on the Eucharist, we will become saints. We may never have “St.” in front of our name, but we will live heroic lives. The power and grace of the Eucharist is what allows saints to live extraordinary and heroic lives. Mother Teresa once said that she would have only lasted a week serving the poorest of the poor if she didn’t receive the Eucharist every day at Mass. The Eucharist is what leads the saints to do extraordinary things. - Fr. Greg of "St. Andrew's Parish"

The root of all sin, said Luther, following Augustine, is a condition described in two words: Incurvatus est--we are turned in upon ourselves. The young Augustine, like people of all times, including our own, thought he was searching for God. Yet in his mastery of all the philosophical paths, he was the master, and therein was the problem. Finally he faced the question: "What am I to myself but a guide to my own self-destruction?" Perhaps his best-known line is this: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Rest comes with surrender, with being shaken out of the state of incurvatus est, with submission to an other, and finally to the Other. The Other is embodied, as in the body of Christ, the Church. The form of the body, most fully and rightly ordered through time, has a location as specific as the location of New York. Finitum capax infiniti--the finite is capable of the infinite. One's search could not forever stop short of the finite that is the Catholic Church. - Fr. Neuhaus via Terri of "Summa Mamas"

Tofu may raise risk of dementia...I rather think, though, they may have that the wrong way round. In my considered opinion it is dementia that causes the eating of tofu. - John at "The Inn at the End of the World"

For me (and not just for me), the heart is that innate desire for total satisfaction, a satisfaction that engages every part of the human being and not merely the emotional or the logical. For Augustine, also, the heart is restless until it rests in the ultimate. If one takes Augustine's word heart to mean emotional only, then what does one make of his intellectual quest? As intelligent as Augustine was, if total satisfaction left out reason - there would still be a nagging persistent restlessness. So, either Augustine is deluding himself OR perhaps he found something that has the capacity to satisfy his heart in totality. Another approach, which differs from Augustine and Giussani somewhat in terminology is that of Walker Percy. What tradition calls the heart, Percy terms the "self." This self seeks both transcendence and placement. It seeks both to know things and to be a part of the world which it understands...I don't care which term is used: heart or self. What's important to me is the experience of the person as unity. It's also critical to know that the impoverished notion that we moderns have of the heart (as emotional reaction) is inadequate for understanding Augustine. - Frederick of "Deep Furrows"

Naturally I’d like to believe that my own retrospection is in some way more important than the old S.V.P.’s, which, when I was exposed to it, seemed to amount to not much more than a cheap longing. But there’s no such thing as a cheap longing, I’m tempted to conclude these days, not even if you’re sobbing over a cracked fingernail. Who knows what happened to that fellow over there? Who knows what lay behind his story about shopping for balsamic vinegar? He made it sound like an elixir, the poor bastard. - O'Neill's novel "Netherland"

Parody is Therapy...

...updated with parody of Amazon Kindle mania.

The Catholic Catechism...

It surprises me there is no .txt file available of it!

Update: Blog and you shall receive! Bill White sent me the file. You can download it here if you'd like...

Gopnik's Chesterton

It's not every day you check the table of contents of The New Yorker & see an article subtitled "The Genius of GK Chesterton". In the latest issue, Adam Gopnik waxes enthusiastically about the great one. Tis always interesting to see how revered figures with Catholicism are seen outside the fold. (Gopnik is an atheist.)

Chesterton and Friends has already made note, linking to Brookhiser of "The Corner" and Commonweal, which has a few snippets:

Gopnik has many good things to say about Chesterton’s style and sensibility, about changes in English prose style in the twentieth century, and about the differences of outlook between cradle Catholics and converts. An atheist (or, as he likes to put it, a “freethinker”), Gopnik is not insensible to the appeal of religion, and of the Catholic religion in particular:

[I]t was as obvious that Chesterton was headed to Rome as it was that Wilde was headed to Reading jail. If you want a solution, at once authoritarian and poetic, to the threat of moral anarchism, then Catholicism, which built Chartres and inspired Dante, looks better than Scotland Yard. If you want stability allied to imagination, Catholicism has everything else beat.

But this, for Gopnik, is part of the problem. Chesterton’s hunger for stability and authority led him not only to Rome, but to a rebarbative political philosophy that logically entailed “Jew-hating.” Gopnik argues that Chesterton’s anti-Semitism was not merely casual or customary; it was personal (his brother, Cecil, had been one of the main players in the Marconi Scandal, a small-scale English version of the Dreyfus Affair), and it was programmatic:

The trouble for those of us who love Chesterton’s writing is that the anti-Semitism is not incidental: it rises from the logic of his poetic position. The anti-Semitism is easy to excise from his arguments when it’s explicit. It’s harder to excise the spirit that leads to it — the suspicion of the alien, the extreme localism, the favoring of national instinct over rational argument, the distaste for “parasitic” middlemen, and the preference for the simple organ-grinding music of the folk.

It is a mistake to try to defend Chesterton (or Belloc) against the charge of anti-Semitism. Looking back from this side of the Final Solution, as we must, we are bound to find many of Chesterton’s arguments about the Jews — and much of his language about them — suspect or disgraceful. Nor is it any use to try to quarantine our judgment about his attitude toward the Jews from our more general opinion of his merits as a thinker and writer. Anti-Semitism was a part of the package, though never a big part.

* * * Gopnik says all the favorite historical arguments for Jesus - "that he had to be either crazy or right, and he doesn't seem crazy; that he changed the world with a suddenness not plausible in the ordinary human... apply just as equally to Muhammad" - but Jesus did it without killing anybody, i.e. without force, and that of course makes all the difference.

For Muhammad to use power in order to create a religion is of this world and not surprising. And this is the rub isn't it? The thing we boast of Jesus - that the "still small voice" does not impel belief is also that which can be exasperating. As then-Cardinal Ratzinger once said, we could wish God would manifest Himself with greater clarity and power, but then it gives more glory to God that He not, allowing the little of the world to know the secrets.

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It's interesting to me that Chesterton hated homogenization and the leveling of differences and yet celebrated the mundane, saying that we ought look in wonder while being stopped for a train, observing the red and green of the stoplight as it were the sun and moon, and becoming entranced by the long arm that falls as the train nears. (Sort of like being enthused over "spam poetry"?) Train crossings seem awfully homogenized don't they?

Chesterton loved the denseness of a city like London ("a city is, properly speaking, more poetic than even the countryside, for while nature is chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones...a city has more significant symbols than nature." Reminds me of my trip to New York. I suppose while Chesterton relished diversity he did not require it. Very Christian in the sense that for Jesus fasting and feasting was not either/or but and/both. For Chesterton it wasn't diversity/homogenization, but dealing with whatever came (preferably diversity).

Chesterton's answer to the mundane seems to be to infuse it with imagination so that it acquires what it appears to lack. Of a friend whose desk drawer was constantly jammed, creating frustration, Chesterton said "imagine you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, and the struggle will become exciting, not exasperating...an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."

Thoughts Said Aloud

Ironically, as my work becomes more important it seems to me to be of less importance. Counter-intuitive, but even as I do something that influences the decision-makers such that it directly impacts the bottom line, I can't call it rewarding because I have trouble seeing the excitement of the bottom line. I'm ashamed to admit that I feel more passion for sports teams than companies; a Reds loss is harder to take than a quarterly loss, even though the latter could directly impact me by my losing my job!

What's with that?

I think that the key is to see a job as attractive to the extent it does more than just feed yourself and your family. To the extent you give to charity it gives greater meaning to the job, although that requires a constant keen appetite for helping people, something not easily maintained. An example is my in-laws. They are sitting precariously financially, mostly through their own free choice, such that it gives greater motivation to save not only for our retirement but for others' in the family. On the other hand, when my appetite for helping others is not keen I'm more of a "spend it now, before everyone will have a claim to it". Including the government. (Of course, God has the true claim to it all.) Reading Ben Stein's book, poverty looks like "the new black" when social security is cut back drastically and pension plans begin to fail, as he argues will.

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According to Sister Donna Markahm, OP, a strong sense of mission is necessary :

If persons felt that they were simply part of a service delivery system, they were at far greater risk of becoming victims of burnout... regardless of all the efforts made to ensure a healthy workplace environment.

Mission makes it, I suppose. The old way they put out fires was to have the town gather and each person passes a bucketful of water to the one next to them. A service delivery system, if you will, each person sees little impact of their individual efforts but the burning house provides much impetus.

*****
As a lover of things systematized, I'm a sucker for levels and staircases and stepladders and interior castles. The last is a reference to St. Teresa's great work, which desribes the way to holiness, and even though I'm usually drive to despair by this type of literature since I’m inevitably at square one. But this one so far is encouraging in some ways. (Though Steven Riddle mentioned that the levels are not sequential and that you can bounce all around them, which pretty much means that you can't really systemize them can you?) It seems that through the first three levels we have to seek, to put in the sweat, blood and tears, and it’s only the 4th-7th mansions where God takes a very active role, even though there is a lot of suffering in the 6th mansion. This seems perfectly in tune with reality.

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Chesterton had London (see post above), and we have Manhattan. My everyman’s book of the Poetry of New York (redundant title?) still holds sway. I can recall the fresh breeze from our perch atop a double-decker bus and the reassuring rumble and rhythm of bus and tour guide. I recall the bliss of the panels of the New York Public Library periodical room, fested with murals of NYC landmarks, which I pledged to re-visit after the tour was over but had not the time. (Still, sometimes the momentariness of a memory freezes it more permanently than had you lingered.)

I remember the gargantuan breakfasts at the hotel buffet, how good the eggs were, the cereal and the fruit and the omelette and… I never was one much for breakfast, my father being the one for that, and now here I am a fellow afficiando. I was merely behind him chronologically. (The Monday after NY we went to Bob Evans at 1pm for breakfast(!) and it was heavenly.) I suppose we become our fathers, though my mother's pessimism that makes me think we inherit the weak points of both.

I recall all the people swarming outside the hotel. You felt like you were in a movie, like you could just hang out outside the hotel and have entertainment enough. At night the amazing lights of Time Square were like a permanent fireworks display. It was like the mezmering colored lights of a Christmas tree times a thousand.

Boyle's Short Story

It's interesting to see the varied reactions on the 'net to a T.C. Boyle story titled Thirteen Hundred Rats from the latest New Yorker. I surfed the TC Boyle message board and some opined it was actually about rats - i.e. that the moral of the story is dogs are a better companion than rats. That's seems the one thing you can rule out given its mundaneness.

I think he was zeroing in on the idea of replacing children with pets, although one person actually thought it was about our "overpopulation problem", presumably meaning people. (I'm unsure about my own thesis, hence why I went to the forum in the first place. I could just be looking at the story through my "Catholic lens".)

Another person thought it was about how neighbors aren't neighborly enough. But in the story, the man's kids would've likely served the grieving widower better than pets or neighbors, at the very least by staying with him and cleaning his house.

The tell-tale sign of this horror tale is this snippet:

...we saw each other at the lake nearly every day in the summer, shared cocktails at the clubhouse, and basked in an air of mutual congratulation over our separate decisions not to complicate our lives with the burden of children.

The final lines - in which the narrator expresses gratitude for his wife and dogs - is perhaps somewhat ambiguous:

I was very tender with my wife afterward. We went out to lunch with some of the others, and when we got home I pressed her to me and held her for a long while. And though I was exhausted, I took the dogs out on the lawn to throw them their ball and watch the way the sun struck their rollicking fur as they streaked after the rumor of it, only to bring it back, again and again, and lay it in my palm, still warm from the embrace of their jaws.

"Jaws" seems an oddly harsh choice of word. The use of "exhausted" was intentional, implying (when coupled with an earlier anecdote in which he says that when he's home he "likes to give them as much attention as he can") that dogs could be burdensome too.

What interests me is how society has constructed itself such that everything is more burdensome. Perhaps that's a natural consequence of capitalism in which more is never enough. It seems as though a culture becomes more baroque as it becomes broke; would Thoreau's "Walden" have become a classic if not for its prescience concerning the necessity to "Simplify, simplify!"? (In Annie Dillard's latest novel there's a line: "Nothing about them was rich except their days were swollen with time." Do the poor have more time or less time? On the pro: they can disavow yuppie ambitiousness in living through their kids. Con: they may be working two jobs just to get by.)

Kids enjoy much less unstructured play time than tweny years ago with activities involving lots of ferrying to and fro by mom or dad. We have infrastructure-rich public schools in which character can't be taught, meaning the duty falls completely on the parents. Two-earner families create the need for day care and, unfortunately, fast food. Expensive parochial schools and nearly unaffordable undergraduate education complete the picture. It seems as though societies, like Judiasm in the ages before Christ, become more and more burdensome over time.

An in-law, who spoke of the scenerio where very imperfect parents (such as alcoholics and/or mild child abusers) pass on their imperfections to their children, who raise their children the same way and someone asked "How do you break the cycle?", and the in-law's answer was: "don't have children." I said "God". Grace may build on nature, but that doesn't mean grace doesn't have a say now and then.

I remember NRO's Derbyshire's comment about how 50 years ago in Britain children basically raised themselves, at least until they could be shipped off to boarding school. He made it sound like parental neglect was the norm. Is there a middle ground here?

So how to break the cycle of a society that makes having children seem increasingly burdensome?

I like dogs as next as the next guy but the narrator's replacement of dogs for humans feels vaguely apocalyptic, doesn't it?

Pictures--now featuring accompanying text!

I call this "Dog, Interrupted" because it sounds pleasingly pretentious. It was taken with my cell phone on a recent hike through a local park. Here our German Shepherd is eyeing something in the middle distance; perhaps he's attempting to discern the meaning of life or perhaps he's on the lookout for scat to smell. With a little photoshopping perhaps Obi's sloping head could match the slope of the tall grass.

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I'm calling "Hammock in June" since I can't think of anything more pretentious. Here we see the juxtaposition of waves of Juney green with the astonishing white of the hammock. The hammock looks almost like the sloop of a sailship (I'm not entirely sure what the sloop of a ship is, but I liked the alliterative aspect of 'sloop of a sailship'. Perhaps I actually mean sail.

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This is the doorway of an art gallery in NoHo ('north of Houston street') or SoHo ('south of Houston') in Manhattan. On the far left, you might be able to make out a farm scene. Something like a totem pole stands next to it. The girl in the black dress acts as a framing device along with the totem pole.

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This was taken while walking through the Essex House, a hotel on Central Park that I had stayed at many years ago. I like statuary and I like the female form, so female statuary is exceedingly attractive.

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My wife took this shot in Times Square, and I love the look of this guy on the phone in the lower righthand corner. It's the look a native New Yorker might have, frank and perhaps slightly exasperated.

They Don't Make 'Em Like X Anymore

"They don't make 'em like Tim anymore. He was a product of a specific time and place and milieu." -paraphrase of Pat Buchanan speaking of the late Tim Russert on MSNBC

"The sobering irony is this: we, the second generation, have not been able to pass down the special quality of this inheritance to our children, the third generation; and it will not be repeated, ever." - Reid Buckley

Reid Buckley (William F.'s brother) has a book about his family, primarily concerning his mother & father. It's something that wouldn't have interested me much ten years ago, back when I thought brilliance was independent of family or society. I fear my attitude then was unconsciously something along the lines of: Bill Buckley was the shooting star; why read about the non-stars? (Though in his book Reid claims none of the children have quite lived up to William F. Buckley Sr.'s example.)

My then (very American) attitude of seeing anyone as capable of everything has changed such that now I have to guard against a creeping determinism, as if we're only a product of our family and society. Reid Buckley writes, "What we think, feel, do lasts for all time, is genetically and experientially continued in our children, even though our children may have no knowledge of us."

NRO's Uncommon Knowledge Features Tom Wolfe

Good to see Mr. Wolfe backing down from his famous "your soul has died" article. He sounds Walker Percy-like in his seeing language as the crucial dividing line between man and beast.

Amazingly optimistic about America, he's a pessimist about the novel, saying the latter will go the way of the epic poem. He's likely right, which if true would make the hand-wringing over the lack of Catholic fiction academic. No one today is upset by the lack of Catholic epic poets.

FRIDAY, MAY 09, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 5 of 5 Tom Wolfe and America? He loves the place, a position that puts him at odds with much of the charming aristocracy. He’s also an optimist about America — and American greatness. “The biggest problem,” says Wolfe, “is all the people who see a problem.” PERMALINK

THURSDAY, MAY 08, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 4 of 5 Tom Wolfe says evolution ended when man learned to speak — with the dawn of homo loquax. Where status for the beast of the field is determined by power, for man it is determined in innumerable ways because of language. And it is language that gives us rational thought. Wolfe asks, “Have you ever see an animal shrug?” PERMALINK

WEDNESDAY, MAY 07, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 3 of 5 Darwin, Marx, Freud, (E.O.) Wilson? Tom Wolfe says the common thread there is the power of the word — of ideas that change human history in large and obvious ways. PERMALINK

TUESDAY, MAY 06, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 2 of 5 Tom Wolfe says the ideas for his novels grow out of conversation — from what’s really happening. His critics have pounced on this, calling his novels more journalism than literature. But Wolfe shrugs this off: He says he doesn’t write for the “charming aristocracy” — the aristocracy of taste that believes the novelist must aspire to things the masses cannot understand. PERMALINK

MONDAY, MAY 05, 2008 The Word According to Tom Wolfe: Chapter 1 of 5 Tom Wolfe begins by discussing the written word, in its popular forms. The master novelist and journalist says the novel is dying a horrible death, although non-fiction work will continue and the memoir will never die. He then talks about the subject of his latest novel (still in progress): immigration. PERMALINK

Newsweek's Sally Quinn & Communion

You know someone on the left has overstepped bigtime when America, a magazine perceived as being on the "liberal" spectrum of American Catholicism, gently chastizes you. More here, via TB.

I can understand what she did however, albeit I was much younger than she and not a reporter and religion editor. (Fr. James Martin gets it exactly right in that she should know better.) But I recall back in the '90s wanting to go to a mosque (in the same way I wanted to see the Kremlin during the Cold War; enemies fascinate) and not being particularly interested in whether or not I was allowed into one. The reason was because I knew Islam to be false and thus didn't have to honor their rules since they weren't grounded in reality. Of course this was an uncharitable view and completely disrespectful of the human person. It's easy to conflate the views a person holds with that person, as if they are no longer worthy of dignity and respect. Not to mention that I would like what I cherish to be respected even by people who don't believe in the truth of it.

Various & Sundry

Watched Gangs of New York again a couple days ago, an amazing cinematic experience. The visual effect is stunning and beautiful. It feels like you've gone back in time. While featuring gratuitous violence and nudity (thankfully TNT cut or otherwise obscured the nudity in the latest showing), the actor Daniel Day-Lewis is mezmerizing in his role and the visual art of it lets the story off the hook to some extent. (Perhaps if I had the patience to watch Moulin Rouge I would feel similar to the way Ham o' Bone does, who swears by it.) In one particularly memorable scene, set on the night before the New York City riots of 1863, a wealthy man is shown praying for mercy and the two poor tenants praying for justice and/or revenge. Pretty much the story of life here on earth.

National Geographic attempts to separate fact from fiction concerning the film, but after the Gospel of Judas debacle this is sort of like the National Enquirer opining on the truth in The Star.

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The cynical view of politics is that in a democracy politicians vie to buy votes.

This generally occurs by buying off different groups with favors, ideally increasing the number of groups, for the more people you can make dependent on government, the more power and influence and status government officials will have. Never underestimate the importance of status as a source of motivation.

But rarely has the buying been as naked as it has been this year. There is talk on Capitol Hill of a second stimulous package. As talk show host Bob Brinker says, it's no coincindence this is happening during an election year: "Never underestimate the ability of politicians to send money to their constituents during an election year." Don't be fooled into thinking they love you. They love you only for your vote. (If babies in the womb could just vote...).

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In that Vatican URL I posted the other day, the link between poverty and depression was emphasized, the former causing the latter in many people. Which is all the more motivation to help the poor since mental pain is worse than physical. Their needs are also indirectly spiritual since, as Karl Keating wrote in the most recent "This Rock" magazine, if you're struggling to survive then doctrine or learning about God isn't going to be a priority. Keating seemed almost apologetic for all the time he'd spent on apologetics, quoting St. Augustine's "late have I loved you".

To actually see the conditions changes you according to a fellow who went to my high school. In our alumni magazine he writes of going to Cambodia (he received 42 vaccinations beforehand): "I'm going to remember those kids forever. It's something that changes you and you don't really understand why. It gets into you and you just have to do something. It was difficult to leave."

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It's hard to be satisfied with helping the poor simply through income redistribution. Certainly welfare was a system that made things worse. The root cause of poverty in many countries is corrupt leaders; no wonder Richard Brookhiser says our best president was our first. At the very least it's hard to think of anyone in that office since who was as virtuous. So I guess all we can do is give to the poor and ask God to raise up "secular saints" like George Washington in those countries where the rule of law and economic system lay in ruins.

St. Thomas & Bureaucracies

Found the following prayer to my patron St. Thomas, whose feast day is Thursday, a prayer pleasing because it's charitably disposed towards he who received much guff for not believing initial reports of the Resurrection:

O Glorious St. Thomas, your grief for Jesus was such that it would not let you believe He had risen unless you actually saw Him and touched His wounds. But your love for Jesus was equally great and it led you to give up your life for Him. Pray for us that we may grieve for our sins which were the cause of Christ's sufferings. Help us to give ourselves in His service and so earn the title of "blessed" which Jesus applied to those who would believe in Him without seeing Him. Amen.

There seems a parallel in that just as we believe we were the cause of Christ's suffering though we were not there at Calvary driving in the nails, we also believe that He did it for us individually and not just mankind in some collective sense. Perhaps you can't have one without the other since sorrow for sins is magnified when we think He would've done it just for us and not corporately. (Small companies tend to be leaner and more efficient because bureaucracies in large companies obscure a given individual's impact -- mistakes have very little impact on the bottom line and rewards are felt less keenly.)

One difference between saints and sinners is that for saints it is all intensely personal: their sins were grievous because they were the cause of His suffering, and the salvation gained from the Cross was expressly for them.

That Jesus said "Blessed are you who have not seen and still believe" would imply - to continue the business analogy - that working for a large company is no excuse for not making it personal. And that, in fact, there is more merit in striving even when the impact of that striving is not perceived.

It's easy to think of St. Peter and St. Paul in binary terms: one as the positive to the other's negative. Heck, we could draw two tables on a piece of paper and make a parlour game out of their contrasting personalities and ministries. Then, if we get excited enough, we could take the division to its logical conclusion and form two rival factions within the Church, declaring to one and all that which saint you pick for the positive and which saint you pick for the negative reveals volumes about what kind of Christian you are, et cetera . . . It was probably already that way when the Church first started weaving the tapestry of the liturgical year, which is why She has wisely settled that we are to celebrate two different saints and two different martyrdoms in a single feast...If we go by Scripture alone, we notice that their only noteworthy encounter was a clash. Thank God for Tradition, which gives us the light of this Feast with which to interpret that encounter. In Sts. Peter and Paul, we have two pillars with one purpose: holding up the Church which Jesus founded. Knock down one pillar and you threaten the whole Church. If today's Feast were a fable, its moral would be: Unity. - Sancta Sanctis

"SMEAR: Barack Obama is a Muslim; not that there's anything wrong with that." - Terrence of "The Provincial Emails"

Small groups are things that trick us into believing we’re serious about making disciples. The problem is 90% of small groups never produce one single disciple, ever. They help Christians make shallow friendships for sure. They’re great at helping Christians feel a tenuous connection to their local church. And they do a bang-up job of teaching Christians how to act like other Christians in the [in this case] evangelical Christian subculture. But when it comes to creating the kind of holistic disciples Jesus envisioned, the jury’s decision came back a long time ago – small groups just aren't working. - Non-denominational church pastor via Terrence Berres of "The Provincial Emails"

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. - Aldous Huxley

[This] shows two sons demonstrating emergency field stretcher techniques on younger brother. (They tried to move me in it, but one of the poles broke.) - picture caption from Jim of Bethune Catholic that struck me as humorous

It takes but one bad idea to ruin a man or a state. The idea that mankind can control nature, and that nature concerns only matter and energy, has lost us belief in the divine order of the universe. Materialism with all its accompanying isms is a sorry substitute. To put it in religious terms, we have lost the covenant with God; we perforce must practice magic. What is magic but the pretense and effort to control nature toward some private end. That end is inevitably power. -Andrew Lytle via William of Apologia.