Shaidle's Revelatory Moment

The path that led Kathy Shaidle from anarchism to conservative began with an odd revelation: Ronald Reagan wasn't the devil because he ate. She was watching a snippet of a state dinner on television, and he was up on the dais listening to a guy at the microphone and...

He held a forkful of food to his mouth, put it in and started chewing. That's when I stopped hating Ronald Reagan. I owned punk rock albums with his face, disfigured, on the cover. I’d been chanting “Ronald Reagan/he's no good/send him back to Hollywood” pretty much every weekend for, what, five years at that point? People made dart boards with his face on it, burned him in effigy, put on Ronald Reagan Halloween masks and did goofy street theatre at our demos. My then-boyfriend was sitting right beside me, muttering something, smoking my cigarettes again. Could he tell? I just stared straight ahead...

Parody Blog updated...

...to spoof the received wisdom that if we see a presidential candidate with other world leaders, that's enough to tip the balance: "Well, by golly I'll vote for them!"

Steven Shoots & Scores

When employees are treated worse than disposable diapers, Steven hits back:

I always say, "There are not enough people for that" or "We do not have enough staff to manage that." It's a small way of continuing to point out that people are people and staplers and paper are resources.

Eggsactly.

I find it endlessly fascinating how it is that women allow themselves to be beaten by their spouse or boyfriend. "But he loves me!" they say, and go back to him despite the beatings. Or perhaps it's that they don't feel they have a lot of other options economically. But then why was Errol Flynn more interesting to most women than someone more unthreatening? Why do so many women put up with men who cheat on them? I can tell you my wife wouldn't.

Similarly I'm fascinated in how it comes that employees allow themselves to be treated like chattel. Free markets are by definition double-sided, yet we employees assume the employer has all the power despite the lack of a slave labor market in this country. It's one of the mysteries of life for me, as one who would polish my resume and send it out if my employer expected even 50 hours a week. I suspect fear is a great motivator and employees on balance have much greater fear than employers. And yet there are plenty of employers in the sea.

It also reminds me of how we complain bitterly of politicians lying while at the same time demanding they lie, as Ave Maria radio host Al Kresta brilliantly pointed out on Friday. He said the fault lies in not just with politicans but with the voters who want politicians to lie because we find the truth so unpalatable. Kresta pointed out how Phil Graham recently spoke the truth and how we are not in a recession but he was excorciated for it. Liberal Michael Kinsley said the same thing in his famous line about how a Washington gaffe is when someone tells the truth.

Rocky, Rocky!

Julie Davis liked the film Rocky, but now posts the views of a naysayer:

The boxing choreography is so fake, World Wrestling Federation workers think it could use some work. The gloves clearly do not hit bodies, the exaggerated reactions and head flailings...

This is not an unfamiliar complaint about movies. We moderns crave authenticity and everyone seems to have their own set point at which poor execution forces them to miss the beauty and the larger message. A professional boxer might be more put off by inauthentic boxing scenes than someone with no familiarity of the sport, just as many a historical-critical method scholar is more put off by pious interpretations of Holy Writ than the fervent grandmother in church.

Don't some of Shakespeare's plays have rather amazing "coincidences" and leaps of logic that could prevent the suspension of disbelief, but do we think less of them? Could you could ruin a Shakespeare production of Macbeth by the ghost appearing in a ridiculously inauthentic costume, such as a sheet, such that it lends an almost comic aspect? I suppose.

I suspect many critics like dark, unredemptive films because happy endings seem fake since "real life" is such a mixed bag, nothingwithstanding that in reality death has been defeated and our lives are eternal.

I've certainly been bitten by the "reality bug" to some extent (I've been surprised to learn just how sensitive I am to the culture). But if it's true we're reading far fewer novels, could this be related? For me Rocky was about the human drama, it was about personalities and only very tangentially about sport.

Rocky isn't all sweetness and light. The seedy side of life is not repressed, but neither is it glorified. The wasted lives, the alcoholism, the meaninglessness and poverty is present. To get hung up on the authenticity of the boxing seems to miss the point. It's like hearing the words of the Magnificat and rather than pondering the astonishment of the Incarnation we shrug and say, "those aren't Mary's words, they were lifted by Luke from the Old Testament."

High-larious UK Times Satire

Link here, via Ham:

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

Among the Disparate Reads

I like to read a lot of stuff at the same time. Well, not at the exact same time but you know what I mean. It has its pluses and minuses. It is fun to occasionally see a related concepts in unrelated books. For example, I was reading Pete Hamill's "My Downtown" and came across this passage:

Manhattan, Fifth Avenue became the street of social power. The early notion of a powerful native aristocracy was gone—they would not rule democratic New York—but there were more indirect forms of power. The Knickerbockers set social rules that would last for decades, even if the most brutal cruelties could often be expressed, as in James, with a raised eyebrow. They insisted that wealth itself was not a virtue. It was all a question of property versus trade. Wealth derived from the ownership of property, they insisted, was far superior to wealth earned from trade. They were people with property—real estate, distant farmlands—and property was a sign of long residence, of bloodlines that antedated the Revolution, of comfortable, essentially passive security. Trade was grubby, vulgar, active. Trade was forever hungry and voracious. It destroyed all permanence. It devoured the old to make way for the new. Trade must be resisted. Tradesmen must be kept at an immunizing distance.

One might be tempted to call that elitist, but it seems the old Knickerbockers saw things not unlike the Venerable John Henry Newman. In Ker's biography and he quotes the great one:

Not to the poor, the forlorn, the dejected, the afflicted, can the Unitarian doctrine be alluring, but to those who are rich and have need of nothing...Those who have nothing of this world to rely upon need a firm hold of the next, they need a deep religion...

Such is the benefit of poverty; as to wealth, its providential corrective is the relative duties which it involves, as in the case of a landlord; but these do not fall on the trader. He is rank without tangible responsibilities; he has made himself what he is, and becomes self-dependent...If he thinks of religion at all, he will not like from being a great man to become a little one; he bargains for some or other compensation to his self-importance, some little power of judging or managing, some small permission to have his own way. Commerce is free as air; it knows no distinctions; mutual intercourse is its medium of operation. Exclusiveness, separations, rules of life, observance of days, nice scruples of conscience, are odious to it.

Throughout the book the prescience of Newman is often apparent. On the doctrine of papal infallibility he worried that it would make the educated more skeptical and resistant to authority. Newman also writes of the middle class: "A religion that neither irritates their reason nor interferes with their comfort, will be all in all in such a society...Reason teaches them that utter disregard of their Maker is unbecoming, and they determine to be religious, not from love and fear, but from good sense."

For Your Files...

From the "unintended consequences" file, from the Times:

"Earlier this decade, two researchers affiliated with Vanderbilt University examined more than 100 studies on the effectiveness of antidrug campaigns and found that, in some cases, viewers’ levels of drug abuse actually increased when commercials were shown, perhaps in part because the ads reminded them about that bag of weed in the sock drawer."

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From the "Signs of an Approaching Apocalypse" file:

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From the "Understatement of the Week" file, via the Times:

"Problems in the Middle East have a bad habit of becoming big problems for the rest of the world. The Middle East isn’t Las Vegas: what happens there doesn’t stay there."

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From the parody file:

Parody is Therapy updated with a look at a new social networking site for social networking once removed.

This Was Something I Had to Read

Love and Economics by Ben Stein:

AS my fine professor of economics at Columbia, C. Lowell Harriss (who just celebrated his 96th birthday) used to tell us, economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods and services. What could be scarcer or more precious than love? It is rare, hard to come by and often fragile.

My primary life study has been about love. Second comes economics, so here, in the form of a few rules, is a little amalgam of the two fields: the economics of love.

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In general, and with rare exceptions, the returns in love situations are roughly proportional to the amount of time and devotion invested. The amount of love you get from an investment in love is correlated, if only roughly, to the amount of yourself you invest in the relationship.

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Research pays off. The most appealing and seductive (that word again) exterior can hide the most danger and chance of loss. For most of us, diversification in love, at least beyond a very small number, is impossible, so it’s necessary to do a lot of research on the choice you make. It is a rare man or woman who can resist the outward and the surface. But exteriors can hide far too much.

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In every long-term romantic situation, returns are greater when there is a monopoly. If you have to share your love with others, if you have to compete even after a brief while with others, forget the whole thing. You want to have monopoly bonds with your long-term lover. At least most situations work out better this way. ( I am too old to consider short-term romantic events. Those were my life when Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were in the White House.)

...

Have a dog or many dogs or cats in your life. These are your anchors to windward and your unfailing source of love.

Ben Franklin summed it up well. In times of stress, the three best things to have are an old dog, an old wife and ready money. How right he was.

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."
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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.

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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.

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