July 23rd - Remembrance of Bishop Vasil Hopko

I had the honor of greeting a relic of Bishop Hopko last night at an enshrinement service at our Byzantine Catholic church. The physicality of any relic brings home the realness of that person but this relic, a bone still green from the arsenic poisoning he received by failing to recant his Byzantine Catholicism, makes him all the more real. One is reminded of how Christ still bore the wounds of the crucifixion after the Resurrection and how that made Reality more real for St. Thomas.

A brief biography:

Fr Vasil' became the newly-appointed Auxiliary Bishop and was ordained on 11 May 1947. He helped the Bishop greatly, preparing the people for hard times on the horizon.

Little by little the Czechoslovakian Communist Party prepared for the violent elimination of the Greek-Catholic Church in its nation. On 28 April 1950, the Communists carried out their work of "liquidation" during the so-called "Council of Presov", held without the presence of Bishops. Here they declared that the Greek-Catholic Church of Czechoslovakia no longer existed and that all its priests, faithful and churches were to be transferred over to the Orthodox Church. Bishops Gojdic and Hopko were arrested.

Following the arrest, Bishop Hopko underwent drastic interrogation and torture so he would deny his faith and confess to fabricated accusations. On 24 October 1951, after more than a year of cruel and diabolic interrogation, he was condemned by the State Court to 15 years in prison and a loss of all civil rights for 10 years. While in prison, in addition to the torture he received, he was given small doses of arsenic which caused a chronic poisoning, which was later verified by an analysis of his bones.

On 12 May 1964 he was released from prison for health reasons. After years of mistreatment, the Bishop suffered from grave physical ailments and mental depression caused by the constant torture and inhuman treatment. Notwithstanding all this, he continued to contribute actively to the resurgence of the Greek-Catholic Church.

On 13 June 1968, the renewal of the Greek-Catholic Church of Czechoslovakia was re-estabilized after 18 years of open persecution. From 1968, Bishop Hopko began living in Presov; on 20 December 1968, Pope Paul VI confirmed his appointment as Auxiliary Bishop for all Greek-Catholic faithful in Czechoslovakia. He carried out this responsibility with great care, encouraging the faithful and ordaining priests.

Bishop Hopko died on 23 July 1976 in Presov.

Our Byzantine pastor said "when I think of Bishop Hopko, I see my parishioners. All of you can identify with him in some way."

The pastor was intriguing regarding suffering, which Bishop Hopko shared in immensely: "No one can tell another person what to do with their suffering. My good Irish mother used to always say 'offer it up, offer it up'. If I hurt my knee she said, 'offer it up'. Which is true and good but now we rightly don't tell children to offer it up anymore. It's something that only comes about when we grow up. No one can make the decision for us."

That strikes me as essentially true because no one has ever grown up by being told to grow up, have they? Growth happens independent even of our willingness to grow, I think. Certainly physical growth does, since although we eat food, we don't eat it for the purpose of growth, we do it because we love food. I think we grow in a mature view of suffering only out of a love for Christ. I tend to feel like I have to have develop a theology of suffering, to explain it and/or dominate it, and then I'll more fully love Christ, when it actually works exactly the opposite.

Habitual Advertising

Advertisers have found another way to manipulate us - through the introduction of habits:

Procter & Gamble introduced Febreze in 1996 as a way to remove odors from smelly clothes. Consumer surveys had shown that people were leaving their jackets and blouses outside after an evening in a smoke-filled bar. P.& G., which at the time already sold products that cleaned one out of every two laundry loads washed in American homes, decided to spend millions to create a spray to remove offensive smells...

But Febreze flopped. In fact, early sales were so disappointing that the company considered canceling the entire project. One of the biggest problems, P.& G.’s researchers discovered, was that bad smells simply didn’t happen often enough in consumers’ lives.

At about the same time, the company’s staff psychologists were beginning to extend their understanding of how habits are formed...The researchers at P.& G. realized that these types of findings had enormous implications for selling Febreze. Because bad smells occurred too infrequently for a Febreze habit to form, marketers started looking for more regular cues on which they could capitalize.

The perfect cue, they eventually realized, was the act of cleaning a room, something studies showed their target audience did almost daily...

Today, Febreze is one of P.& G.’s greatest successes. Customers habitually spray tidied living rooms, clean kitchens, loads of fresh laundry and, according to one of the most recent commercials, spotless minivans. In the most recent fiscal year, consumers in North America alone spent $650 million buying Febreze, according to the company.

Dozens of other companies have also redesigned advertising campaigns around habitual cues. Beer commercials, once filled with busty women in ill-fitting tops, are now more likely to feature groups of buddies, because research shows that groups of friends are one of the strongest habit cues. Candy bar companies, through commercials, have tied their products to low-energy cues, transforming what was once a dessert into a pick-me-up for cubicle dwellers.

There Are Two Kinds of People in the World...

...those able to compartmentalize and those who aren't?: From a Sancta Sanctis post:

I far prefer something my friend Tariel once said to a five-year-old boy who wanted to give up meat because he didn't want to eat animals: "God created some animals to be our friends, but other animals to be our food."

Iraq: a Re-Assessment with the Aid of Hindsight

I try to stay reasonably well-informed on matters political, at least enough to vote effectively, but with Iraq it might be a worthwhile enterprise to see where I went wrong. Of course, any self-assessment will be necessarily biased but...

Decision to Go into Iraq

Morality?

I supported GWB's right to go in, which is different than supporting going in. The right to go in was demonstrated for me by the fact that Hussein had thrown out the UN inspectors out and had violated the terms of the Gulf War for years. In other words, there wasn't a Gulf War and an Iraq War, there was only a Gulf War with a decade break.

Perhaps now that seems a bit flimsy since wars are unpredictable and what is on paper doesn't have to be enforced. To me, the Gulf War ceasefire agreement was like a binding contract and if the terms were violated then it automatically should trigger action even though that sounds a bit like how WW I got started. Of course, some would say that the very fact that we honor some agreements and not others is why Saddam felt free to not take the U.S.'s threats seriously in the first place. So it's complicated. By not backing up your word you end up creating conditions for a greater conflict. But by backing up your word you can also create misery on an unparalleled scale (WW I).

It's interesting to me that Weigel & Novak seemed more interested in sanctioning the war for the notion of preemptive strike rather than any enforcement of the Gulf War treaty, which means my analysis was likely on thin ground.

Prudent?

I wasn't sure if it was prudent, given the conservative maxim is that culture trumps politics and we conservatives loathe nation-building. I misjudged Bush in thinking he was on the same page concerning nation-building; in fact he said before 9/11 that he wanted a "humble" foreign policy, which obviously meant not saving the world for democracy.

Bush changed his mind and I think that's because, for better or worse, he is loyal to people, not principles. Loyal to the citizens he leads in having to make sure every threat was responded to, preemptively if necessary. But the loyalty was not abstract but personal: I recall being greatly surprised that he could look into the eye of a Russian leader like Putin and say that he knew his soul. Later he nominated Harriet Myers for Supreme Court and that likewise spoke volumes. Finally, the fact that he constantly stayed far too long with bad appointments and generals suggests that loyalty was more important than performance. Who knew? It's the rarest of attributes in politics since a politician usually only tries to save his own skin. Is Bush the anti-Nixon who abhors "Real Politik"? Certainly the Real Politik'rs, like the Bush I buddies, hated the Iraq policy from the beginning (maybe seeing the friction between Iraq and Iran as keeping the other in line and thus beneficial to the West?).

I suppose I should've realized that toppling Saddam Hussein automatically meant nation-building, at least according to the Powell doctrine of "you break it, you bought it", though I've heard that Tony Blair advocated the attractive policy of toppling Saddam & sons while leaving the Baathists in charge (i.e. getting out of there immediately). I haven't been able to confirm it via Googling yet. The downside to that would be that naysayers would say "well, they'll just put another Hussein in and you'll have to go back!" but of course how could going back possibly be any more expensive in terms of lives and money than staying there for seven years (and likely 70) as we have now?

Two people I respected gave me pause. One, Pope John Paul II, and two, Russell Kirk. Kirk was not alive at the start of the Iraq War but he spoke from the grave when I read that he opposed the Gulf War. The Iraq War wouldn't seem prudent or legit if the Gulf War was not. But I couldn't see anything wrong with the Gulf War given that a) Hussein had tried to take over a sovereign nation and b) there was nothing to stop him from taking Saudi Arabia.

Post-War

Going in, I didn't think the war would be so obviously imprudent that it meant that for all practical purposes GWB didn't have the right to go in. I think that's primarily because I couldn't imagine that Bush didn't have a plan to get out before the next election. In other words, I completely misread Bush although I can't entirely fault myself since I had no exposure to, nor experience of, another politician quite like him. I'd never seen a politician so accepting of unpopularity. It's usually not in their nature. Ronald Reagan immediately backed the troops out of Lebanon. Not having been around during the FDR/Truman/Eisenhower era, I had no idea a president could be stubborn, patient and impervious to public opinion. So I took it for granted that Bush had an "exit strategy" even though most wars don't have exit strategies. While I'd seen Bush before 2001 as a pragmatist, a "CEO type" who would examine results and react swiftly, it turns out he was something of a dreamer and loyalist who would react slowly to the facts on the ground.

Surge

At the time it was highly controversial, but I wondered why it was so. How could geater force concentration not work? But at the same time I didn't think it would bring the troops home any earlier. In both of these it appears I was right. It appears though that the success of the surge was due mostly to the rather amazing effectiveness of General Petraeus.

Iraqi Civilians

This is a mixed bag. It's said that a million children died during the economic sanctions that were put in place to try to get Hussein to honor the Gulf War ceasefire, so the war seemed like a peace compared to that holocaust. Of course, who knows what numbers to trust? There are so many floating around. But it's true that Iraqi Christians have been persecuted and fled, such that there is perhaps only a quarter still in Iraq. Their sad plight and persecution I hadn't anticipated, nor had the media, at least the MSM I'd seen.

Iran

The renewed belligerence of Iran makes sense mostly in hindsight. Hussein feared Iran far more than America and thus covered up the fact that he lacked WMDs and now we realize he wasn't paranoid. Western "experts" I'd read about were optimistic about Iran because they thought that unlike states like Egypt, where the leaders were far more friendly to the West than its citizens, with Iran it was supposedly the opposite.

I got the impression theirs was a very unstable regime and that not most Iranians were too fond of being ruled by mullahs. Yet now any reversal of the Iranian revolution seems farther away than ever.

Reading Seasons?

An old TIME magazine discusses reading habits:

Naturally, there are still many constant readers who follow the same schedule all year round, and they seem somehow surprised to discover that everybody's habits are not the same. Says Novelist Peter De Vries, who is on many a vacation book list himself: "I'm always amazed at lists of summer reading. Mine is the same as fall, winter, spring—it doesn't shift gears, throttle down, rev up, or anything."
...

Such grandiose lists prompted the Saturday Review several years ago to discontinue polling writers on their reading. Many authors reacted as if they were being given an intelligence test. As Saturday Review Editor Norman Cousins remarked: "A man knows even less about his reading habits than he does about his sex habits."

That last line certainly gives me pause, but regardless my summer reading seems similar to my winter reading which seems similar to my fall and spring reading. In other words, I'm rather unCatholic when it comes to my reading habits, although Lenten reading is always different because I spend much more time in spiritual reading.

Eve Tushnet recently blogged:

Both NFP and (unless I'm an internet-educated moron!) the Jewish laws of sexual behavior create a sort of rhythm of times of sexual fast and times of sexual feast. E.g. it's a mitzvah to have sex with your wife at certain times. Time is sacralized in the marital act.

And so I wondered--can anything this side of the grave be sacred without some rhythm, without some time-boundaries, some liturgical season? Is liturgy, and its inherent musical shifting between sound and silence, necessary in order for us to apprehend some hint of eternity? This seems like the sort of paradox God always goes in for, where marriage prepares us for the place where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage....

Coleridge famously divided human beings between Aristolelians and Platonists - that is, between inductive and deductive thinkers, between those who move easily into abstractions and those who prefer dealing with particulars....The creative verbal imagination - most of us agree - is torn between polarities: the polemical and the Dionysian. There is that eximious infatuation with language, the sheer, lush love of the sound for the sound of it, sense be damned. - Reid Buckley, William F. Buckley's brother

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared. - PJ Plauger

I vacillate between optimistic neo-conservative and throw-in-the-towel 13th-century reactionary, depending largely upon my mood. The only thing clear, the only reliable “tradition”, the only institution left standing is the Catholic Church. The Church isn’t enough to make one feel at home in this world … but maybe that is exactly the point. - Jeff of Stoney Creek Digest

They die as they lived: imperfect, at times startlingly petty, and seemingly so ill-prepared. Yet the Master works all the while to master them; sometimes we perceive it, most of the time we do not.- Bishop Daniel Flores on "Inside Catholic" concerning the Ron Hansen novel "Exiles"

There is nothing poetic about the circumstance of Norberta’s or anyone’s death (the Tower of Siloam comes to mind). There is grace, though, in the surrender to the One who comes in it: “And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss.”Hopkins wrote to his mother that “it is our pride to be ready for instant dispatch”(172), and though speaking of the Jesuit vocation, and his own frequent transferrals, he doubtless intended also the transitus toward which all changes of address tend, and which they all foreshadow. We can hope that Norberta knew this as well, and could silently offer it to the “Father and fondler of heart thou has wrung.“ If hope is not enough for us in reading this end — I speak for myself, at any rate — then we are like those whom Hopkins describes as “trenched with tears, carved with cares.”And we are thus shown to be in further need of the Master’s particular touch, coming as of “an anvil-ding.“ - Bishop Flores again on "Inside Catholic"

I really, deeply don't believe that ethics are the sum and summit of the Christian life. If I had to pick something, I think I'd pick the Eucharist: the consummation of God's love affair with us. And I think this rejection of ethics-uber-alles is relevant in two ways: 1) Shame is community property--the domain of ethics, the domain of humans negotiating life with humans rather than the domain of humans pouring themselves out in the humiliating, confusing, transcendent love of God; and yet 2) Deus Caritas Est is right that love of others is sturdiest when it's based on the Eucharist. I can't count the times I've finally surrendered and confessed because I had to counsel at the pregnancy center that night. Love beyond ethics strengthens ethics..."Charity" gets a bad rep for condescension. I think for the people for whom it is genuinely the Wedding Feast--the people who can live at all hours within the Mass--there's no condescension. I would rather think about how to live that way than think about how to properly shame one another.... - Eve Tushnet

I’ve no faith in the power of my prayer.
Grant me the grace to phrase
a psalm of thanks and praise
from one who lists among his sins despair.
     -"First Things" poem "In David’s Line" by Timothy Murphy

When you’re drawn into the lives of others, you enter their problems, their hopes, their dreams, their families. They whisk you down unimagined corridors, toward possibilities that had been hidden to you before. So resolve to do little things for others. You don’t know where they’re going to lead but then again, you don’t have any idea where your life is going to lead. When I was your age, I had long hair, a beard and thought of myself as a socialist. You are going to pinball all over the place, from experience to experience, job to job. And I want you to remember that you’ve got company. - the late Tony Snow

When I look at how this issue emerges in the lives of Hopkins and the sisters, it seems that the struggles of every Christian are reflected there. They may be religious -- and further, 19th-century religious, where formation was marked by a suspicion of individuality and an emphasis on obedience -- but we contemporary laity are no more exempt from this paradox if we are trying to follow Christ seriously and totally, in obedience, willing to leave all behind. But neither are we dull, homogenous automatons. God created each of us with various gifts and capabilities . . . but how to use them? I am called to give my best to the Lord, but how can I keep pride at bay? How can I discern when this stops being about God and starts being about me? I may be tempted to pity these religious for that old-fashioned oppressive obedience culture in which they lived, but should I? Do my strivings actually put me under obedience to forces even more oppressive than Mother Superiors and Father Generals? Most importantly, in sorting all of this out, how can I avoid falling into the trap of cheerily and vapidly celebrating my "gifts and talents" as the goal of my spiritual life? And inscribing it all on felt banners? (Or on my blog?) - Amy Welborn

Thank you so much to all of you who have been praying for me, my family and my beautiful mother. I know that I have done so well so far only because of the enormous grace I have received from the prayers of my friends. I know that there are many hard days to come, but I must say that the day that your mom's obituary appears in the paper must be one of the hardest. It certainly is for me...I cannot see to type through my tears. And I want you all to realize what a precious jewel my Summa compatriot is. Smock came and prayed over my mama when I was too heartbroken to think of anything to say. Ya'll should be so lucky. - Terry of "Summa Mamas"

Last Week in Review

I've decided I don’t much like alcohol that comes at me too fast. I like the nice trotting pace of beer. Liquor is be quicker but do we need quicker these days? We need to learn how to slow down. Beer is the slow-down drink, something you can linger with for hours.

I came home Tuesday to catch a bit of the All-Star game, though it was disheartening to see the Reds ace give up the tying run.

At the fair, it’s always nice to get in contact with the real, to throw off the versimiltudes of simulcast (don't know what that means, just sounded good). The highlight was seeing the canine sheriff dogs do their thing, albeit not too impressively. It seemed like the handlers basically pointed out drugs or explosives and the dog reacted accordingly. With these dogs, turns out you can hide but you can’t run - they were at least very effective in running down a fleeing suspect.

photo via Columbus Dispatch...

It was a tactile experience and we breathed in the varying scents in the barns: the pigs, goats, horses, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, geese, cows and lambs. We hit ‘em all. Quick word association game with the various animals after seeing them in their pens: Pigs: “brotherly love” (they were always entwined); goats: “alert fellers”, horses: “the Gallant Ones”; turkeys: “Struttin’”, cows: “beached whales”.

It felt good to use the time, to not let the candle of work burn down the beautiful zenith July days.

* * *
Soft! What yonder brackish lighteth breaks! Oh it is Times Square! The sun doth rise o'er the muted lights of the Square. I recall the ghost of Vacations Recently Past (the Cabin Fever victim is always the last to know). Moments most recalled were keenly meditative, like when slumped like a bum off 5th Avenue waiting for the Tiffany appraisers (my wife & her friend). Or the stillness of that wooden Episcopalian church on 29th - such an odd space for a big city. It look like a bit of England transplanted, the rectory and church having a cottage-like, Shire-like feel to it. The dark interior was desolately empty. The only sign of life was a quiet man, staring ahead unnervingly, sits on a bench in front of the church.

Both vacations, Florida & NY, had a bit of coitus interuptus about them, for their brevity and premature endings. (Reminds me of a joke Col. Peters made on Fox News concerning Iraq - about how men hate premature withdrawal.) To complain about short vacations is likely obscene given how many can't afford a vacation at all, but this merely recognizes the wisdom of Europeans who when they go on vacations take trips of some length.

* * *

Parody blog updated ...with local man who is so authentically suburban that he will be of interest to historians two centuries hence.

The Tale of the Bills: O'Reilly & Joel

Seeing this Times article about the Long Island roots of Billy Joel reminded me of another Bill from Long Island, Bill O'Reilly.

I read the selections below to my wife without telling her it was about Billy Joel and asked her who it reminded her of. She immediately said, "Bill O'Reilly":

The romantic idealism and the yeah-right realism. The quickness to mock and to take offense. The need to prove oneself better than any Upper East Side twit...the worst that they can say is: He forgot where he came from. He’s full of it. A fake...

He comes from Long Island — and really, the thought goes, what hard-knocks artistry could possibly emerge from the land of suburban tracts?...

We Long Islanders have an inherent inferiority complex...we use ridicule and sarcasm to show affection.

“Everything was testing, testing, testing,” he says. “Testing your manhood, testing your humor — really, testing your friendship.”

Now a bad review doesn’t ruin his life. “I think that was a Long Island thing,” he says. “Someone would take a swipe, and I felt compelled to swing back.”

You can take the boy out of Long Island, but you can't take the Long Island out of the boy.

With O'Reilly, being an outsider has been put to good use in his ability to identify with the underdog, particularly with the defenseless: children.

Fiction for a Sunday...

It was the summer of '67 when I was invited by a Hollywood writer/acquaintance to a hot-tub party at the Playboy Mansion. I declined for reasons of fastidiousness - I couldn't (or didn't want to) imagine what bodily fluids were in the tub. I figured that hedonists, being of the "eat, drink, for tomorrow we may die!" disposition, wouldn't go to the trouble of changing the water or adding the chemicals.

I wondered then if the Playboy Mansion was like paradise for Muslims - 76 virgins, well... It seemed Muslims didn't leave anything to chance as far as motivating believers, at least not the male believers. The Christians took it on faith: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard...". If it was beyond human experience perhaps it wasn't beyond the imagination, though the harps and angels and music generally left something to be desired. Christianity being a social religion, I imagined it a very social place, like a large family reunion. Or a place of rest, like the Sabbath rest, although these were competing visions since what if you wanted a rest from the relatives?

I reasoned that Heaven was like girls though not in the Islamic sense. I figured it got more alluring as you got older or wiser or if you changed, just as girls were yucky until at some indistinct point in early adolescence when they weren't. Before then eye had not seen, ear had not heard...

At school and during summer jobs my default setting was to work rather than socialize, which set me apart. I found the latter more wearying than the former. It had the unintended effect of making me more interesting to co-workers and schoolmates who shared their exploits while I listened, having nothing to report myself. I learned that girls and concerts and alcohol were the Elysian fields that opened them to transcendence while I found the same through chaste Proustian dreams, at least until people broke the spell.

I wrote novels in my head while working, composed symphonies while showering. I began each novel lyrically, like a song, not to show off but because it was dreaming-out-loud and dreams were what made life worth living.

Dreams bled into real life too, like the time I saw a black dog walking in between the rows of a soybean field, his head just above the plants just like he was swimming on land, which is what day-dreaming was like. It was as surreal as the disembodied rabbit at a greyhound track.

Then, another real dream: I've strung etymologies of obscure words together, sang Hungarian folk songs, wandered amid wildflowers, became intoxicated by hectares but I never saw anything as beautiful as the Sunday I saw that farm sitting still in the sun.

It was exceptionally windy that day, though oddly not while I was looking at the small but prosperous spread, everything in exquisite order. Entropy was momentarily damned; God was in his heaven.

Fields flanked the structures like the seas flank the earth. There was a white house on the left with a perfectly manicured yard in front (as if done by hand with barber scissors & clippers), a long white barn that was neither too high nor too short next to it, and a plump silo surrounded by gravel.

The house had the patische of age without the neglect. The silo had a tall scaffolding of equipment attached that appeared - from the surrounding circle of gravel - to spin around the silo when the equipment was in motion.

Such profundities and peace this odd machinery produced in me! Not knowing what it was was its pleasure. I longed not to know for that would kill it, as certainly as it I figured it had killed it for the farmer then absent, who was presumably looking with longing at a Manhattan brownstone.

The gravel shown white under the sun, like beach sand, tasting of freedom and the Platonic ideal of the rural for in all my memories only rural estates had gravel drives and so I associated them with the plenary privacy in front of me. It was like Heaven, or so I imagined in the time before spiritual puberty...

What if Candidates Pandered to Economists?

Even though economists famously disagree about effects of many public policies, there are some things they agree on:

On many issues, from universal health insurance to increased taxes on the rich, economists do not speak with a single voice. But on some issues we do. Here is an eight-plank platform designed to attract a majority of economists. It is based on discussions I have had with my colleagues — call them focus groups, if you’d like — and polls of my profession:

SUPPORT FREE TRADE Economists are nearly unanimous in their support of an unfettered system of world trade. Here, Senator Obama lags behind Senator McCain. Senator Obama’s bad-mouthing of Nafta and his opposition to free-trade pacts with Colombia and South Korea make most economists cringe.

Many economists would go even further than Senator McCain has suggested by, for example, repealing antidumping laws. The ostensible purpose of these laws is to prevent foreign companies from selling in the United States at prices below fair value, but the law’s notion of “fair” rarely makes sense. In practice, these laws are little more than an excuse for special interests to shield themselves from competition.

OPPOSE FARM SUBSIDIES Economists like free markets, a principle that applies to agriculture as much as any good or service. Again, Senator McCain has the lead. Senator Obama’s endorsement of the recent $300 billion farm bill, his support for domestic ethanol subsidies and his opposition to imported sugar ethanol may bring votes from farmers, but economists view these policies as a burden on taxpayers and consumers.

LEAVE OIL COMPANIES AND SPECULATORS ALONE With the stunning rise in oil prices, both presidential candidates have been tempted to demonize market participants. Senator McCain has complained about the “obscene profits” of oil companies and called for a “thorough and complete investigation of speculators.” By contrast, most economists see nothing more sinister than the forces of global supply and demand at work. There is little benefit, and potentially much harm, in the candidates’ populist finger-pointing.

TAX THE USE OF ENERGY Senator Obama wins a point by opposing a summer gas tax holiday, a McCain proposal that economists greeted with derision. Most economists advocate increased taxes on energy products. The recent response of consumers to higher gas prices — including the increased use of mass transit and greater purchases of small cars, scooters, and even bicycles — demonstrates that the price mechanism is the most reliable way to reduce energy consumption and to curtail a variety of driving-related problems.

RAISE THE RETIREMENT AGE Like both presidential candidates, most economists recognize that Social Security faces a long-term problem. Senator Obama says he wants to fix it by extending the payroll tax to high incomes. Senator McCain opposes tax increases and wants the Social Security system to include personal accounts, but he has avoided proposing specific benefit cuts needed to make the numbers add up.

Some economists endorse Senator Obama’s tax hike, and some endorse Senator McCain’s personal accounts, but a much greater number would increase the age of eligibility for benefits. As Americans live longer, we need to redefine old age — a theme that should resonate with Mr. McCain, who is 71.

INVITE MORE SKILLED IMMIGRANTS As part of their embrace of globalization, economists are more open to immigration than is the general public. Admittedly, unskilled immigrants raise some potential problems: They may depress wages for Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder, exacerbating the rise in inequality, and they may overburden the social safety net. By contrast, skilled immigrants promote economic growth, especially among poorer Americans, and pay more in taxes than they get in government benefits. The more, the merrier.

On this issue, economists very clearly practice what they preach. Many of the best economists at top American universities were born abroad.

LIBERALIZE DRUG POLICY Many economists marry their support of economic freedom with a similar support of personal freedom. Drug policy is a case in point. A 2006 poll of professional economists asked whether the United States should legalize marijuana. Those in favor outnumbered those opposed more than three to one.

The Great New Yorker Controversy

The reaction to the satirical New Yorker cover depicting Obama in a turbin and Mz. Obama in guerilla wear was far more amusing than the cover itself. To see liberals targeting other liberals over the correct words to their hymns of victimology triggered a bit of schadenfreude in me. Hoisted by their own pretard has been a common enough experience this primary season, as I'd written before. (And to see Al Gore answer to the charge of hypocrisy on Meet the Press for his ten thousand square-foot home was priceless if only because for liberals the only sin besides intolerance is hypocrisy.) We're seeing things we've hardly ever seen before, and I think it's mostly a testament to the utter lack of fear liberals feel in this extremely favorable political environment. They can afford to attack their own magazines & candidates.

The downside is that enjoying the show is the purview of those out of power, as the Republicans are now (GWB is a lame duck). But you take your pleasure where you can.

Bush routinely received far worse cartoon covers than the latest from the New Yorker, but at least the dust-up has served as a barometer of who lacks a sense of humor and proportion (is it any surprise that Al Gore failed the test during today's Meet the Press appearance?). Just like with the primary race of a black versus a woman led to preference pyrotechnics, here we have freedom of the press versus liberal piety.

It all screams out for parody but I kept procastinating despite having a blog called Parody is Therapy. Thankfully, procastination often works to our advantage and it did this time when I saw the cartoon above, which was funnier than anything I could've come up with.

It was penned by a Glenn McCoy and published in the Columbus Dispatch and restores my faith in the comic ability of this fine nation. It's one job we won't have to outsource...

Story and Sacrament

For sacraments, the material and the signifier are necessary. It's interesting to look at good fiction in the same way: the material is the story itself, the signifier is that which sets it apart for the believer.

St. Ambrose writes of sacrament:

I see the water I used to see every day; does this water in which I have often bathed without being sanctified really have the power to sanctify me? Learn from this that water does not sanctify without the Holy Spirit...The catechumen believes in the cross of the Lord with which he too is signed, but unless he is baptised in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit he cannot receive the forgiveness of sins or the gift of spiritual grace.

Bishop Flores writes of fiction:

The author allows us to hear the thoughts of the sisters as they die...I suppose a non-believer would read those thoughts and be content to say, "Well, at least they had the consolation of their faith, though whether it is true or not is another issue." A believer, reading the same thoughts of the sisters laid bare, would likely recognize in them the signifying words that point to the reality embracing the sisters. If that sounds like a description devised out of deference to the Catholic Tradition of the Sacraments, it should. For I think sacramental signification is relevant here.

Thomas Aquinas says somewhere in his treatise on the Sacraments that the matter itself of a Sacrament is not sufficiently specific to signify the purposes to which the Lord, in instituting them, wills to put them. (He is elaborating Augustine here.) Thus, the words the Lord uses in instituting the Sacraments, the words the Church has custody over, are necessary in order sufficiently to signify the intended use of the matter.

Hence, in the Sacraments, if the matter is corrupted, even the addition of the words cannot supply for it; and if the form of the specifying words is so botched that the specification is lost, then the sign fails to signify, and the sacrament is invalid... Remember also that every deliberately conceived combination of event and word has an intended audience, for who signifies meaning into the air?

In any event, a Catholic author works in the world of things and events that signify in themselves, but not sufficiently clearly for us to catch their full intended significance. So the words an author uses are at the service of signifying the intentionality of life as guided providentially by God. But without the event, there is nothing for the word to specify, and without the word, the event flounders as a vehicle of meaning.

All this is simply to say that Catholic fiction is in some sense a work that participates in the dynamic of matter and form, thing and word. And the success or failure of a work of Catholic fiction depends on how well, how fluidly and effortlessly, the combination of event and word conspire to lead the reader to ponder the meaning of the intended sign.

This & That

This may be too cynical by a half, but a few weeks ago I began receiving Newsweek magazine despite not having subscribed to it. I'm wondering if this is a free 6-month subscription such that it would run till... drumroll... November. Which is to say that I wonder if Newsweek is providing free magazines to some of us in electorally-important states in order to try to swing the election towards Obama. After all, politics is the religion of the secular set and why wouldn't they want to prostyletize? On the other hand, I admit that does sound a bit conspiratorial.

* * *
My left-of-center brother-in-law becomes incensed when he reads of corporate ill-doing. Which seems odd; I'm always surprised by his surprise. Companies are run by individuals. Individuals are fallen. Why isn't he outraged by other news, including everything from shoplifting statistics to murder rates?

Economic systems often come under fire when human nature is truly to blame. Every economic system on earth is subject to some sort of particular abuse, has some sort of particular 'besetting sin', which is ameliorable only by a culture of life inspired by God.

* * *
Last night I was reading about 1920s/30s writer Jim Tully and how when he was a starving artist the socialist Upton Sinclair ignored him and returned his manuscript unread, while Rupert Hughes, a "reactionary" helped him turn his 100,000 word single paragraph into Tully's first novel.

* * *
Interesting excerpt from a highly respected scientific journal: :-)

Varieties of Physiological Stimuli Triggering Male Sexual Response

1) Change of Season
2) Stability of Season
3) Shapely female in immodest clothing
4) Shapely female in modest clothing
5) Happiness
6) Sadness
7) Low-fat diet
8) High-fat diet

* * *
Speaking of sex, least likely Jeopardy! category may well be: Lust & Religion. Be funny to hear Alex say it. The latter just came available on Gutenberg. (By the way, you can get an RSS feed and learn of new online books.)

* * *

You've heard of the Lives of the Saints...Well, Parody is Therapy examines the Lies of the Saints.

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God is often revealed in small actions. I was touched when while riding my bike yesterday someone down the street pulling out of their driveway with loud rap music playing. The sound decreased as I neared and then increased after I went by. He'd thoughtfully turned down the noise for my sake.

* * *

The Spanish blogger at Compostela writes of having recently seen My Night at Maud's, a film I remember seeing about a decade ago. I remember it having made a big impression at the time but ought watch it again since our reaction to art changes over time as Angel mentions.

He writes of how he would have viewed it differently before his conversion (colorfully termed "Copernicano turn" via the ever interesting Babelfish translation service).

Update: I sent this email to Ham o' Bone:

After a second viewing, I was amazed by how much lying the main charater, Jean-Louise, did. I don't recall the deception in the first viewing, perhaps because I was inclined to be sympathetic given he was the believer amid unbelievers. Don't you think Maud and the Marxist friend of Jean-Louise were more likable that Jean-L & Francoise, the blonde? I wonder if that was the director's intention. Maud & the Marxist just seemed more other-directed and less self-involved. A detail is that when Maud was telling Jean-L of the death of her lover, Jean-L seems to have moved off disinterestedly towards the window and expressed no sorrow.

The other thing that blew me away was the mention on a movie review site that his blonde wife, Francoise, was a fundamentally unhappy person. She didn't seem so at all to me; the only time she appeared otherwise was when she thought he'd found out about her affair. At film's end they go off happily for a swim. Anyway, well worth another viewing!

Governed by Emotion, Not Reason?

Inside Catholic has a poll question¹ which asks:

Putting aside your own political preferences, who do you think will win the U.S. Presidential election in November?

The audience of Inside Catholic is presumably skewed far to the right. Hence the importance of the "putting aside your own political preferences" disclaimer.

Now what's interesting is that we all go in with the information that McCain has never led in the polls despite a long primary fight between the Democrat candidates. And that it's a heavily Democratic year. And that the national media has swooned over Obama and will paint things to his advantage. (Although there's the possibility of backlash given the low prestige of the media.)

But Inside Catholic readers are unpreturbed. About 52% say McCain will win, about 45% say Obama will:

There's no way, obviously, to quantify how many are voting out of emotion and not reason. Certainly some might say Obama out of a native pessimism, just as others might say McCain out of a native optimism. Both are based on emotion.

But the right has the reputation of being more rational than the left², and so one might expect a 50-50 Obama/McCain split at this point in the race from this crowd. And yet how predictable is it that this poll would skew towards McCain in this forum? It's as predictable as Obama leading on the Huntington Post. And this despite the crucial disclaimer "Leaving aside your own political preferences...".

If the results are disappointing it at least proves we are humans and not robots. And it's always possible that Inside Catholic readers are more politically astute, pending the election results in November.

(This brings to mind a poll in which Democrats and Republicans both errored in their recall of the inflation rate in various presidential administrations (always erroring in their party's favor of course). Republicans errored less, but it still shows the Right certainly doesn't have a lock on rationality. But do we want a bunch of Spocks? Isn't our ability to love somewhat predicated on irrationality by which we see and emphasize the qualities of our family, country and self and missing or downplaying the negatives?)

This interests me in part because my friend Ham o' Bone has a deep faith in rationality combined with a deep faith in his own judgment of what is rational, seeing the two as equivalent. Which we all tend towards, of course, but it gets difficult not only in imagining our own irrationality (think John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind") but in also imagining our neighbor's irrationality. Years ago, when he lost thousands in stock options, Ham said this was the fault of the market and that it points to the prevalence of ignorance bad opinion. I say this not to be critical, as I fiercely admire Ham's confidence because that's how so many wonderful inventions and businesses came to be. But either he was directly wrong, or he had failed to account for the irrationality of others. It happens.

Or, as a liberal famously said after Nixon beat McGovern, "Nixon couldn't have won - I don't even know anyone who voted for Nixon!"

Of course, all of this assumes voting is a rational process when actually it's mostly a crapshoot and always the choice of the lesser of two evils given that we are all flawed human beings. The crapshoot nature is illustrated in recent history by the fact that our best president was a former actor and the one with the most experience (LBJ) was a complete dud.
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¹- link also contains great thoughts from Amy & gang on Catholic literature.

²- i.e. someone on the left, Chris Matthews, refers to the Republicans as the "Daddy" party and the Democrats as the "Mommy" party. (This was before the Republicans became spendaholics during recent years.) The parties often separate between head versus heart, though with notable exceptions like protecting the unborn.

summer

'Each summer the last summer.'
-Denise Levertov, 'Living'

Each summer the summer
it did not rain so
much the summer before
because Then is turning
to accommodate Now
with small movements like
the fluttering of birds' wings
& every night the world
ends
the way scientists warned us it would;
what is it about
summer
that is so evanescent?
each summer
the last summer.   ---ryan blood