Obama No Messiah to the Unborn

Bill Luse says of Obama, "I've always thought he was a suave suit over an empty vest, but it appears that millions of people who call themselves Christian are prepared to vote for him."

With respect to the life issues, there is absolutely no reason to vote for him over Al Gore or John Kerry. Obama is to the pro-life cause what Richard Nixon was to eliminating corruption in government: i.e. not particularly helpful.

Bill O'Reilly surprised me yesterday, which he rarely does, when he said the question he'd most like to ask Obama is how he can have "found Jesus" and still be for partial birth abortion. For this to come from O'Reilly, who speaks much more about terrorism and national security than unborn children or Christianity, is telling. But O'Reilly sees it as a key to understanding Obama, whom for Bill is still a mystery.

I don't see Obama as mysterious as I did before the primaries. I now see him as someone with a yen for socialism but who excels in being politically palatable to centrists via externals like speech and looks. What makes someone mysterious and attractive are those who have an underlying philosophy, a way of seeing the world, but who are open to "new data". Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan was a Democrat who was open to new data; he warned of how the collapse of the black family was going to have far-reaching effects in terms of poverty and disintegration of inner cities. As an example from the other side, Willam F. Buckley was a conservative who was for legalizing drugs. Moynihan was excoriated, predictably, and like Pope Paul VI who was excoriated after Humane Vitae, lowered his profile. Pope Paul VI never wrote another encyclical and Sen. Moynihan never bucked the Democratic establishment again, at least not on the primary issue of our time (although at least he did say that partial birth abortion "comes as close to infanticide as anything I have seen in our judiciary.")

So guts interest me, presumably because of my lack thereof, but only guts with intelligence and self-restraint. McCain has guts, but it is guts without philosophy, guts without self-restraint (Feingold-McCain law is unconstitutional), guts for the sake of guts. The warrior ethic, but without the leavening of depth.

I'll definitely vote for McCain but without much enthusiasm. His philosophy seems to be neither conservative or liberal but some sort of hybrid based on his gut instinct on a given issue. He's against lobbyists so he limits free speech. He's weak on stem cells, which means his stand on the life issues is not due to principle. He admits to not knowing anything about economics. I don't trust him not to give away the store due to global warming. None of these things bothers me individually so much as they bother me collectively. I don't think he has much of coherent world view. "Mister we could use a man like Ronald Reagan again."

So the wealthiest nation in history kills a million of its children annually, but Jim Wallis would prefer we focus on a government solution to poverty. Even though abortion would not go away with the reversal of Roe v. Wade, that reversal would likely save more lives than any income redistribution plan. I've heard it said that we long for a scapegoat and that Christ ascended the cross in order to be that scapegoat, to show us how capable of evil we are that we might repent. If nothing else, the acceptance of abortion is the clearest proof since Calvary that humans are tragically flawed and capable of great evil.

Got a phone call from Ham of Bone who told me about his former evangelical pastor who has "drunk the Kool-aid" of his new mentor Jim Wallis, and who now supports Obama and eschews the fundamental issue of life.

He (Bone) humorously said he called that I have might schadenfreude for the miscues of the "junior circuit" as I refer to the "upstart" American League, he applying it to the Protestantism vis-a-vis Catholicism. But I felt no schadenfreude as evangelicals and Catholics are indispensable not only to the pro-life cause, but in seeing the kingdom of God as something that can't be measured in purely materialistic terms.

Selections from Recent Reads  Or Why's My Kindle So Heavy?

From Pete Hamill's "My Manhattan":

The creators of the American Yiddish theater also provided what earlier entertainers had given to the Irish and the Germans: the immense gift of laughter. They used gags, skits, slapstick, and wit to make fun of one another. Romanians made fun of Hungarians. Both made fun of Poles. All made fun of Russians. They skewered the greenhorns, the pompous nouveau rich, the greedy landlords, the humorless goyim, the corrupt politicians; and they added something else, an attitude that forever shifted the New York mind: irony.

That is, they made jokes out of the difference between what America promised and what America actually delivered. Irony remains the essence of American humor to this day. They were also triumphantly eclectic. The creators of the Yiddish theater made their own versions of what they saw the Irish doing in the rowdy theaters of the nearby Bowery.
...
The Gilded Age had begun. Old New York sniffed. The new people, to Knickerbocker noses, smelled crude, ill-mannered, ignorant about the refinements of life. They showed far too much, uh, energy. They bought art by the crate. They failed to distinguish between forks at dinner. They preferred fat slabs of beef and mashed potatoes to the intricate delicacies of Delmonico’s. But the old Knickerbockers could count. Their own fortunes were dwindling. They had given their faith to the monotheistic god of property, and that god was now failing them. They would buy houses of summer refuge in Saratoga or Newport, if only they could afford them. Why should some robber baron peddle his homely daughter to an impoverished English duke?There were, after all, many beautiful young Knickerbocker women who could begin the process of civilizing these rich new American men. Slowly, an exchange was made. The Knickerbockers began to merge with the new money, exchanging bloodlines and manners for a share of the new wealth.

Liked the humor of the dog taking the man for a walk in this "Netherland" (by Joseph O'Neill) snippet:

On my floor there lived an octogenarian person of indeterminate gender—it took a month of surreptitious scrutiny before I’d satisfied myself she was a woman—who told me, by way of warning and reassurance, that she carried a gun and would kick the ass of anybody who made trouble on our floor. There was also an old and very sick black gentleman (now dead), apparently a legendary maker of prints and lithographs. There was a family with three young boys who ran wild in the hallways with tricycles and balls and trains. There was an unexplained Finn. There was a pit bull that never went out without a panting, menacing furniture dealer in tow. There was a Croatian woman, said to be a famous nightlife personality, and there was a revered playwright and librettist, whom it almost interested that I knew a little Greek and who introduced me to Arthur Miller in the elevator. There was a girl with gothic makeup who babysat and walked dogs. All of them were friendly to me, the crank in the suit and tie.

From George Will's latest book:

Matthew Arnold, for example, was a fastidious social critic and hence an accomplished complainer. When he died, an acquaintance (Robert Louis Stevenson, no less) said: “Poor Matt, he’s gone to Heaven, no doubt—but he won’t like God.” American social critics wince when this country, in its rambunctious freedom, falls short, as inevitably it does, of the uniquely high standards it has set for itself. But different things make different people wince, because sensibilities differ. And nearly four decades of observing American politics and culture have convinced me that, in both, sensibility is fundamental. That is, people embrace a conservative (or liberal) agenda or ideology, or develop a liberal (or conservative) political and social philosophy, largely because of something basic to their nature—their temperament, as shaped by education and other experiences. Broadly—very broadly—speaking, there are, I believe, conservative and liberal stances toward life, conservative and liberal assumptions about how history unfolds, and conservative and liberal expectations about how the world works. This is one reason why we have political categories like “liberal” and “conservative”: People tend to cluster. That is one reason why we have political parties. This collection of my writings is not designed to recapitulate the large events of recent years.

From Ross Douthat on Chesterton:

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it's worth pointing out that a great many opponents of slavery in the United States, Abraham Lincoln included, were racists in much the same way that Chesterton was an anti-Semite - possessed of ideas about black inferiority, the necessity of the separation of the races, and so on and so forth, that look morally abominable to us today. But it would be at least mildly peculiar to attack Lincoln, let alone the more strident abolitionists of that time...

But as with Chesterton, the two faces of Solzhenitsyn were really one face: His witness against Communism emerged from the same ground as his critique of Western liberalism. When Hitchens writes that the great dissident's "mixture of attitudes and prejudices puts one in mind more of Dostoyevsky than of Tolstoy," he's absolutely right. But it's not a coincidence that Russia's two most eloquent and prophetic critics of utopian radicalism - Dostoevsky who attacked it in its infancy, and Solzhenitsyn who helped usher it into extinction - were both standing outside Western liberalism, while so many people inside liberalism busied themselves making apologies for terror and mass murder. Which is why Solzhenitsyn, like Chesterton, isn't important despite his deviations from "the current consensus of liberal good will." He's important because of them - because his deviationism allowed him to see things that others were blind to, and because reading past giants who stand foursquare outside the current New York liberal...

Spiritual Reading List!

Darwin Catholic Explores Hiroshima/Nagasaki Bombings...

Don't nobody tell Zippy! He'll go zipistic:

ZIPISTIC - adj. derived from ballistic; occurs whenever Zippy Catholic sees an issue in which the possibility of evil being used for a good end is considered viable in an online Catlick discussion.

I tease Zippy since I respect him so much. Very smart dude.

(BTW, I can much relate to Darwin's evolution (pun unintended) concerning the morality of the bombings, having experienced the same.)

Olympic Musings

Been enjoying the Bejing games for some reason, since I've hardly watched any Olympics since 1984. A few stray thoughts...Caught an interview between Costas and George W. Bush and Bush seemed awfully casual about China and its evils. Is the great idea - that engagement would change behavior - really working? It's certainly working with China's economy which is booming beyond ken, but what about slave labor and religious freedom? On the other hand, Bush said, with twinkly eyes, that those who are of a religious nature know that (paraphrase) once Christianity is introduced it tends to take off. Hopefully Christianity, rather than engagement, will change the country.

Been following the woman gymastics. The girls each seem to have such distinct and separate personalities. Of course Shawn Johnson is irresistable but my favorite is Bridget Sloan. She seems a genuinely nice gal. Watching the balance beam routine you get the feeling these girls, no matter how drunk, could ace any field sobriety test.

The interviews with gruff but loveable Boris Karlof (sp?) were priceless. Turns out the Commie judges are back, under new forms of government but just as corrupt.

The synchronized diving routine is pretty cool. Hard enough diving that way as an individual, hard to believe two can do it in synch. One American diver has a fear of hieghts, even to this day, and won't jump off the high platform. Says she has to be diving so it'll distract her as she's going down. Makes sense to me! (Maybe she could drink a Guinness on the way down. That might work for me.)

New Orleans, Revisited

"There's a fine line between stability and stagnation, and by the time I was born, New Orleans had already crossed it."   --Michael Lewis, quoted in "The Great Deluge"

I'm reading two "what went wrong?" books concerning Hurricane Katrina, one from a liberal and another from a moderately liberal. And what's interesting is how the "blame game" is quite different in both cases. Even those who view things from the same side of the political spectrum can't quite decide who is at fault.

I figured enough time had passed such that the misinformation and raw emotion had subsided (although, as it turned out, I chose two books written back in '06). Historian Douglas Brinkley writes beautifully and comprehensively in his "The Great Deluge", and Ivor van Heerden has a scientist's take in "The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina".

Brinkley is brutal on Mayor Nagin, seeing him as a Republican in Democrat clothing who cared only about business and thus was hesitant to call for a mandatory evacuation on Saturday before the storm because he was worried about hotels losing money and the possibility of lawsuits.

Van Heerden, by comparison, is gentle on Nagin, apparently giving him slack since he was relatively new to the office. Heerden says flatly that once it was declared a federal emergency then everything was off his (and the Governor's) shoulders. For van Heerden, it's mostly a failure of FEMA. With Brinkley, however, it's more along the lines of why should the Feds worry if the state and local were not taking it too seriously? Governor Blanca requested the federal emergency with a form letter with the fill in here's still saying "fill in here". (Meanwhile the Weather Channel was going ballistic, but was there an element of crying wolf since the network goes wild when there's a snowflake in Kentucky?)

Brinkley points out that it's the job of the state to communicate what they need from the Feds, not for the Feds to figure out what they need. Gov. Blanco did not do so, in part because she was doing Nagin's job. The principle of subsidarity had broken down.

Leaving aside the destruction of wetlands and abysmally inadequate levees, the main problem was evacuation and Brinkley says the chain of responsibility was "really quite simple":

The pecking order, according to protocol, was (a) the mayor; (b) the New Orleans director of Homeland Security (who reports to the mayor); (c) the governor; (d) the secretary of Homeland Security; and (e) the U.S. Presidnet. Both Nagin and Blanco, even before Katrina hit, were already chastising the federal government for New Orlean's rank unpreparedness. The blame game had begun even before Katrina made landfall.

There's your smoking gun. If they're blaming the Feds before landfall then you know who's really to blame.

Many people simply refused to leave before the storm but Van Heerden points out that that is no reason not to save them afterward. You can't let people die even when they've made suicidal choices.

Some of the heroes and villians were somewhat predictable. The fire department acted nobly and heroic while the police department incompetently and cowardly. The NOPD was famously corrupt so it's probably a stretch to draw anything from that, but it does seem like fire departments care more about people than police, perhaps because the police reguarly see the worst side of human nature. It hardens them. Besides that, surely some are drawn to the career for the power, while that is never a reason to become a fireman.

The disaster reminded me in some ways of the Titanic, how there was 1) inadequate technology and 2) not taking nature seriously enough. The two are related, but you can do either 1 or 2 but not both. With the Titanic, they could've built the boat better or had more lifeboats and the tragedy of human loss would not have occurred. Or, alternatively, instead of racing through and iceberg-strewn ocean at night they could've slowed down and had more lookouts.

With Katrina, they could've either built the levees much higher and stronger or they could've had excellent evacuation plans. Certainly building a city in a bowl, under seawater, is itself a sort of dare to nature.

But one difference is with Titanic the catastrophe seems due primarily to hubris and activism, while with Katrina primarily due to sloth and procastination.

The most puzzling thing is understanding how this happened given the inevitability it would eventually happen. It's almost like trying to figure out the reasons Rome fell; in both cases you could see it happening, almost in slow motion. Certainly New Orleaners knew it for decades, knew of their vulnerability. Nagin was not only elected but re-elected.

Perhaps it's as simple as the rich and middle-class didn't worry about it because they knew they could get out. They had access to cars and information. Nowadays hurricanes are always announced. For the poor, the day-to-day struggle is enough to clear the mind of any thoughts of the future. Although their votes count just as much as the rich, they would understandably demand help and city services now, and not worry about building up wetlands that would lessen the severity of hurricanes of the future, or even about the levees. (Especially since the accountability for the levees was across all sorts of governmental entities.)

One could simply say that all politicians think short-term (except perhaps George W. Bush, who thinks in terms of decades rather than immediate aftermath, at least with respect to democracy in the Middle East). The problem lies with us; we elect people like us. And by definition an instant gratification culture is not going to be good at planning ahead.

When talking about scientific theories, one must understand the science and the philosophy, which may not be so apparent. One must tease them apart and point out the problems with the philosophy without discarding the valid science. Indeed, the most powerful argument against the philosophy that underpins some scientific theories is the "rules" of science itself. Can what you propose be tested and repeatably, reliably tested in some way. If not, the matter is not a matter for science, but one for the salon. - Steven of Flos Carmeli

The requirements to cite...the New American Bible, the official USCCB English translation, are fairly strict. I don’t remember what they are, but all you really need to know is that most Catholic publishers don’t even bother to use the NAB. They tell their authors to use the RSV or NRSV, not just because of the quality of translation but also because of the degree of hassle and expense involved in getting permission from the respective copyright holders.Which probably, in the end, and act of God and all for the good, considering how dreadful the NAB is. - Amy Welborn

"I think the (accounting background) will be very beneficial. It's a way of thinking that will be very useful. Something that I think our churches are lacking is good, solid administrative skills so that we can more easily and effectively proclaim the Word of God," [newly ordained priest Philip Bogacki] said, adding that nearly every pastor he meets tells him that the accounting background will be invaluable. - from Milwaukee Catholic Herald via Terrence Berres who writes, "While a parish might have someone with administrative skill on staff, and many such people among its members, delegating appears to be among the skills not taught in the seminary."

Describing oneself as an "evangelical" tends to be a proxy for religious intensity in a way that describing oneself as a Catholic isn't. Many evangelical churches subsist within mainline denominations, attracting a self-selected pool of the denomination's most devout churchgoers; many others, especially in the megachurch sector, rely heavily on spiritual seekers looking for a more intense experience than their mainline upbringing (or Catholic upbringing, more often) provided. If you're a member of an evangelical church, chances are your congregation demands more from you - and you demand more from your congregation - than even the minority of Catholics who fulfill their Sunday obligation every week, let alone the lukewarm, once-a-month variety. - Ross Douthat on why more evangelicals are pro-life than Catholics

My grandma had some interesting things to say about my life here. She said I worry too much (this seemed to be the theme of the weekend, actually). She said life is too short for all the things that fill my head. She said to read more and argue less. She said I don't move my body enough: "Remember how you used to dance and dance?" She also told me that all those years she had spent pining for her son Billy were stupid. When she finally got reunited with him, she saw suddenly, that they'd never been parted in the first place. - blogger at "Come to See" via Fred

I think the media’s focus on the culture wars — whether between secularists and believers, or the religious right and the religious left — has led them to underplay the larger theological context in which its occurring: Namely, the collapse of orthodox Christian belief in the United States, and its replacement by a cluster of competing religious narratives that tend to offer variants — some socially-liberal, some socially-conservative — on what Christian Smith has termed “moral therapeutic deism.” I think there’s still a core of orthodox Christian belief (broadly defined to include Catholic, Orthodox and Reformed traditions), but there isn’t enough coverage of the extent to which the “conservative evangelical” who gets her religious teaching from Joel Osteen the Prayer of Jabez and the liberal Protestant who cheers for the consecration of V. Gene Robinson actually share a lot of theological premises, most of which are functionally post-Christian. - Ross Douthat at "Get Religion"

You know there’s something wrong with an election that makes one wistful for Bill Clinton, and start re-evaluating one’s opinion of Jimmy Carter. - Commenter on "Stony Creek Digest"

In general, there is nowhere I would rather live than this world/time, simply because I think it was chosen for me. I take Gandalf's words to Frodo seriously, when Frodo complains about the time he has to live in. And while it might be "romantical" to live in Heyer's Regency England--that would only be if I could be one of the higher ups in Society--not, as would be more likely, if I were the head maid or something...And to answer the other question, I'd want Flannery O'Connor to write my life. Then maybe I'd have some clarity on it. - Terry of "Summa Mamas"

In On the Road, a girl tells [Sal Paradise, Kerouac's idealization of himself] "I'm bored." and he reacts abruptly: don't say that, don't ever say that. To confess that one is not satisfied is to admit defeat, to admit that one needs something else, something more. I'm a lot like Sal Paradise, but I'm hoping to change. Could it be that so many times when I'm blocked a major reason is that I won't face my own insufficiency, my own lack of satisfaction? A few weeks ago I admitted to myself that making phone calls bores me. It wasn't this excuse or that excuse, but simply a human reality. Sometimes making outbound calls is boring. Know what? After that, calling became so much easier. Jesus came to heal the bored not the ones who are too sophisticated to be bored. And confessing that everything is not enough is the human prerequisite to begging for the One Who Is. - Frederick of "Deep Furrows"

NRO's TV Show, Uncommon Knowledge,...

...is uncommonly interesting. Richard Brookhiser, Victor David Hanson and Christopher Hitchens have been recent guests.

The Feral Girl

Riveting story about a little girl in Florida who became "environmentally autistic" due to neglect.

Olympics, New York and St. Blaise Day    i.e. a week in the rear view

Caught the opening ceremony of the Olympics. It’s always heartwarming to watch the huge number of countries represented, big and small and in between. The common humanity always comes through, along with the diversity. Asians in general seem to be especially good hosts and there was something exotic in seeing the perfect grace and posture of the lady (ladies?) who led the delegations holding a sign identifying the country. Perhaps it merely my thinking of the East’s greater discipline and self-control. That discipline was also shown by the dancing girls who greeted each delegation for four hours in pentitential heat. “Dance, Dance, Dance” as Japanese author Murakami titled his book. I was tired for them.



Spent Saturday reading like the wind, “going long” in QB parlance, and I fell into the sweet spot of smittenness while reading O’Neill’s “Netherland” which is proving to be that elusive annual good novel. So far O’Neill has that uncanny ability to say meaningful things while having a lyrical bent. I'm fortunate if I encounter one good novel a year and if it doesn’t get read during the summer it likely won’t. Last year was Annie Dillard’s “The Maytrees”, the year before Bill Luse’s “The Last Good Woman”, the year before that Randy White’s “Sanibel Flats”, the year before Roth’s “The Human Stain”, the year before that TC Boyle’s “Drop City”, the year before that there was none, the year before was Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein”, the year before a John MacDonald novel, the year before that “Cold Mountain”, the year before that… I could go on you know. I keep records.

Despite the evidence above the good novel feels elusive. It also feels irreplaceable since the summer isn’t the same without it. Full days spent outside preclude television but not books, which is a feature not a bug as the programmers say. (Which reminds me of a comic who, during his routine, once asked me what I did. “A programmer,” I said, to which he said, “oh like on television?”. Funny as a crutch!)

I also read a lot of “The Great Gatsby” since it’s for work (my personal development goal even though it can’t be documented anywhere since reading a novel is seen as irrelevant by upper mgt though my immediate supervisor occasionally hounds me). Also tasted a bit more of Hamill’s nostalgic look at New York, purely for nostalgic purposes.

It’s possible I’ve been remiss in reliving vacations – really reliving them, actively holding them close in memory, like what you’re supposed to do with Scripture and God. (Come to think of it…?) Perhaps I treat vacations too cavalierly, like they’re disposable or something when I can recycle them in my memory, like a good environmentalist.

New York is magical and I can relive a tinge of it by re-playing some of the All-Star game on the DVR, set sentimentally in Yankee Stadium. That’s major league baseball for you – they only love you when you're dead. Like giving someone a gold watch and a big retirement party during a downsizing. Was chutzpah invented by television execs?

Nostalgia is a key to baseball in a way it isn’t to any other sport. “Bronco Nagurski” doesn’t quite have the same ring as “Lou Gehrig”, especially after the latter’s “luckiest man in the world” speech. Baseball produces either great saints - Clemente, Williams, Gehrig, Maris – or great sinners, Rose, Bonds, Cobb. “Say it Ain’t So, Joe” wouldn’t be said of a football player since we have lower expectations. Football, in general, produces more mediocre characters.

The baseball gods (i.e. television execs) see nostalgia as no different from mawkish sentiment but mawkish sentiment is fine if I’m into it. (And the kids eat it up, so let’s do it for the kids.) I watched as they rolled the red carpet down 6th Avenue in the heart of midtown Manhattan on a gorgeous summer’s day and interviewed the stars. Shots of Yankee Stadium hung on the screen like fireworks or erotica, and I tried to identify those buildings just beyond center field that I’d gazed upon in between innings a couple months ago. The pre-game show ended with a sparkling rendition of Sinatra’s “New York, New York”, an appropriately nostalgic, mawkish song that never seems so while you’re listening to it. And it took me back to hearing it as we walked out of the stadium after a Reds win, which made the song seem at the time stirring rather than gloating.

* * *
We replaced the old patio this week, such that I can almost imagine it as part of a Mexican hacienda. The pavers are of sandstone, desert-colored brick with a hint of adobe. We put them over concrete and the change is pleasingly natural, surprisingly so as I’d not thought about that, not really expected it. Nor did I expect the feeling of it having been expanded, presumably because the old one was so patchwork (cracked concrete with add-on cement pavers). This week the furniture in our primary room – the back patio – was strung out all over the yard like castaways set adrift on the Atlantic. Now it is back where it belongs… A busy summer it’s been but that is what summers are for. Some rest in the summer and work in the winter but if you ask me the bears got it right…

* * *
Took Kindle into a grueling two-hour Friday afternoon meeting that felt like two hours 48 minutes. (The German in me likes precision.) I’d actually looked forward to the meeting since I knew I could Kindle during it, but it turned out that I’d misjudged the efficacy of the situation. For one thing it taints Kindle, in associating it with work, and one can’t do that too many times before Kindle begins to take on the savor of disfavor. Second, it’s impossible to have undivided attention since I’m too conscientious to completely mentally abandon the meeting. Despite past performance, I always have hope that I might learn something and so I keep my antenna attuned should that remote possibility occur. I ended up jumping from one book to another and it only fragmented my already fragmented attention span. Multi-tasking is overrated. On a related subject, I’d heard someone say on the radio that reverence and technology are inversely related. The more technology, the less reverent we become.

My boss took me and another employee out after work for a couple o’ beers and it was interesting to hear, from this other employee about other employees. Not gossip, necessarily, but information about co-workers of a deeper level than I’d expected. He’s more than a decade younger than me and an extrovert. I always suspect extroverts of “breadth rather than depth” but I was surprised to learn that his relationship with our mutual co-workers seems much less superficial than mine, i.e. breadth and depth. Appears that there is a lot of religious diversity going on in our neck of the woods. The guy I was talking to is a Lutheran. Another guy at work is a devout Mormon. Another is of a Christian of a church which apparently believes in taking the Old Testament literally, such that he doesn’t eat pork and follows the OT laws and celebrates the Sabbath. Basically a Jew who also believes in Christ though having no Jewish ethnic background. I was shocked to learn his religious denomination is huge. My boss and the other guy dislike/don’t believe in organized religion, and I thought of all the good lines afterwards (i.e. “my religion is very disorganized”). My boss doesn’t like the Mormon because he’s offput by all that “one true Church” stuff, which I couldn’t, of course, in good conscience feel similarly offput being Catholic though I’d wished I’d have said something like “well, some Church has to be the true one, doesn’t it?’ but that would’ve fallen on deaf ears because they believe that details over which churches split don’t really matter. Although shouldn't God decide what is trivial?

My boss’s mother was fiercely anti-Catholic and his Presbyterian college so strict that drinking and gambling were expulsion-offenses, which probably explains why he's big on drinking and gambling today. I told him he should be Catholic since we can drink and gamble. He tells an interesting story of a Catholic roommate bringing him to church on St. Blaise Day, and my boss was in the middle of the pew when people were going up to have their throats blessed and he wanted nothing of this, knowing that he shouldn’t even be in a Catholic church though he was curious and had wanted to come. There seemed no way to easily extricate himself from going up without being obvious about avoiding it, and his friend said it wouldn’t hurt to go up there. And so my boss did and, would you know, a few days later got a sore throat? He said this was punishment for going into a Catholic church. (Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence, I say.)

Fiction for a Friday

It was almost post-time as I took in the scene. The dirt was dry and spiff'd by wind gusts, the horses smelt of Eire and the breeze was accompanied by pipe, tobacco, and whiskey punch, along with a faint pitch of peat-smoke. Graffiti near the entrance: "Ask not for whom the turnstiles turned, they turn for you."

I longed for novelistic approaches to novelty shortfalls. I hungered for it having reached the saturation point of conformity, including the conformity of rebelliousness for rebellion's sake. "Beauty is underrated," she told me, "for it masquerades as non-utility."

By week's end the newsprint was getting on my hands. I was relieved to read, apropos of nothing: "Once he gets it [...] then he'll also probably start to notice that the water doesn't actually taste like water where they are. More like Dewar's single malt whiskey. Only better."

It was buried in a post that read like fiction, at least to eyes longing for sprites and the numinous wonders of Yeatsian Ireland. I remember, just last weekend, lounging in the sun-dyll with a summer ale in my hand (they'd run out of porter, necessitating a change). The fiddle players played jigs and reeled in sustaining succession while I pondered the mystery of the jig versus the reel: who could tell them apart?

The horses were in the gate, my ticket stub in hand. How marvelous they looked!

As a kid I took no aesthetic notice of the race track. It seemed a betting place with horseflesh as mere adjunct. Now it seemed a green space with horses and betting as the adjunct. Then it seemed a dismal affair, full of unshaven old men with bleary eyes looking for an excuse to gamble. Now the gambling seemed the excuse to leave the office and see green grass and glamorous horses...

Summer in the City

What Feminism Has Wrought

Entertaining Atlantic read from a feminist taking down an academic who wrote a screed against stay-at-home mothers:

Not that being an academic isn’t a hell of a lot of fun; in fact, its very pleasantness contributes to a bias peculiar to members of the thinktankerati. So argues Neil Gilbert, a renowned Berkeley sociologist, in A Mother’s Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life. According to Gilbert, the debate over the value of women’s work has been framed by those with a too-rosy view of employment,

mainly because the vast majority of those who publicly talk, think, and write about questions of gender equality, motherhood, and work in modern society are people who talk, think, and write for a living. And they tend to associate with other people who, like themselves, do not have “real” jobs—professors, journalists, authors, artists, politicos, pundits, foundation program officers, think-tank scholars, and media personalities.

Many of them can set their own hours, choose their own workspace, get paid for thinking about issues that interest them, and, as a bonus, get to feel, by virtue of their career, important in the world. The professor admits that his own job in “university teaching is by and large divorced from the normal discipline of everyday life in the marketplace. It bears only the faintest resemblance to most work in the real world.” In other words, for the “occupational elite” (as Gilbert calls this group), unlike for most people, going to work is not a drag.

Indeed, what does Linda Hirshman know about “work”? (It’s a veritable WWE Smackdown of Academics!) Parries Gilbert:

Linda Hirshman claims that “the family—with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks—is a necessary part of life, but allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government.” Many people would no doubt find unpaid household chores less interesting than Professor Hirshman’s job … But walking up and down the super­market aisle selecting food for a family dinner is a job that has more variety and autonomy than the paid work being done by the supermarket employees who stack the same shelves with the same food day after day, and those who stand in a narrow corner at the checkout counter all day tallying up the costs of purchases, and the workers next to them who pack the purchases into paper or plastic bags. That space in the market is a bit cramped for human flourishing.

To be sure, attacking feminist criticism as being the extended whine of a privileged, educated upper class is as old as … well, as bell hooks’s 1984 critique of Friedan’s Feminine Mystique: “[Friedan] did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.” It’s a point that keeps having to be made, though. And hooks’s list doesn’t even include the legions of colorless office jobs that most women endure, “real” jobs that trap them from eight to five in a cramped cubicle under hideous lighting...The eight-to-five routine entails quite a few repetitious, socially invisible physical tasks (think Rob Schneider’s Richmeister on Saturday Night Live: “Makin’ kahpies!”). Research suggests that such drudge work holds no special lure even for (free at last!) females. Citing a survey of 909 employed women on how they had felt during 16 different daily activities, Gilbert notes:

Employed women expressed a higher degree of enjoyment for shopping, preparing food, taking care of their children, and doing housework than for working at their jobs—an activity that was ranked at the next-to-lowest level of enjoyment, just above commuting to work.

Further, in a development that would shock only today’s most radical feminists (where are those last two hiding? Buffalo?):

When it came to interactions with different partners, the women ranked interactions with their children as more enjoyable than those with clients/customers, coworkers, and bosses.

But aren’t women at home subject to the oppression of their chauvinistic, soul-crushing husbands? As if a mere human could compete with clogged freeways and Sisyphean paper pushing (or its more up-to-date equivalent, paperless pushing) and burnt-coffee-laced afternoons counting the acoustic tiles in stale conference rooms, and the hours spent arguing over the wording of a memo that within minutes after its dissemination will be dragged into the now-two-dimensional circular file. Unless he’s an abusive alcoholic or something similar, to be more oppressive than a “real” job, a husband would have to possess tireless text-messaging thumbs: “Where’s my dry cleaning?” “Did you pick up my dry cleaning?” “Where are you shopping right now?” “No! No! I told you—no butter lettuce from Safeway, only Whole Foods!” (Come to think of it, this may be a fairly accurate bit of communication between a privileged mother and a micromanaged nanny.) Even providing a chilled martini at six o’clock and roast beef at seven to the legendary suburban alpha male of yore allowed most of one’s day to be fairly flexible. As for today’s poorer husbands, many of them are likely too tired from their job’s repetitious, socially invisible physical tasks—such as makin’ kahpies!—to continually oppress their wives.

UPDATE: Apt Chesterton quote, via the ultimate Chesterton fan:

Of the two sexes the woman is in the more powerful position. For the average woman is at he head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else. He has to put one dull brick on another dull brick, and do nothing else; e has to add one dull figure to another dull figure, and do nothing else. The woman's world is a small one, perhaps, but she can alter it. The woman can tell the tradesman with whom she deals some realistic things about himself. The clerk who does this to the manager generally gets the sack, or shall we say (to avoid the vulgarism), finds himself free for higher culture. Above all, as I said in my previous article, the woman does work which is in some small degree creative and individual. She can put the flowers or the furniture in fancy arrangements of her own. I fear the bricklayer cannot put the bricks in fancy arrangements of his own, without disaster to himself and others. If the woman is only putting a patch into a carpet, she can choose the thing with regard to colour. I fear it would not do for the office boy dispatching a parcel to choose his stamps with a view to colour; to prefer the tender mauve of the sixpenny to the crude scarlet of the penny stamp. A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger.

-- from essay "Woman" in the collection All Things Considered

Swing Vote Swings Close to Nausea

A political movie. Made by Hollywood. During an election year. What was I thinking?

If that isn't a recipe for predictability then I don't know what is. As the saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." I've been fooled by Hollywood political movies masquerading as entertainment before so shame on me.

This was like an Obama campaign commercial except you couldn't fast-forward through it. The only reasons I stayed till the end was so that I could have the slim satisfaction of being proven right in its predictability and for blog-flame purposes. It was not only cloying in its liberal piety but at the same time having a plot predictable as the sunrise. That's what we call a two-fer, as in two thumbs down. In short, you can make it propaganda or you can make it predictable but not both. It almost makes you pine for Leni Riefenstahl.

I had trusted the USCCB review, which painted the movie as "nonpartisan". Is it? Well don't believe me but Google it like I just did and see who's plugging Swing Vote. The first blogspot'r pumping it was from a site with the tagline: "Your home for Progressive news and entertainment in Aboite". I suppose that says something about the USCCB.

There were three or four chuckles; if labeled a comedy it left a lot to be desired. The acting was mostly weak. Watching Kevin Costner try to play a blue collar worker was a painful exercise in itself. Costner looked as authentic in the role as Mitt Romney did duck-hunting or Barack Obama did bowling. Think nails on chalkboard. The casting director must've been as drunk as the character Costner portrayed. [Update: I just learned that Costner cast and paid for it himself. That explains it. My faith in casting directors has been partially restored.]

The political slant was so obvious that at one point it was unintentionally humorous. The Democratic candidate begins pandering to the one swing voter (Kevin Costner character) by flip-flopping on the issues, but the one issue in which he looked grave and sick to his soul was forsaking the holy Democratic Party sacrament of abortion. Suddenly the candidate wonders if it's all worth it, if he should be betraying his principled pro-abort position. High-laire.

All of the issues that mattered to the conscience of the film, the daughter of Costner's character, were talking points of the DNC. The ubiquitous whine of the Left: "if we're the richest country in the world then why can't we have X for all Americans?" was on full display, where X = the latest thing that everyone should have the government give them. Needless to say, you come away from the film not understanding how anyone, anywhere has ever voted for a Republican.

In short, the movie was as deep as cotton candy, nuanced as Fred Rogers, funny as a crutch (Rich!) and predictable as a bloviating Sean Penn. After reading Mrs. Darwin's account of King Kong, I breathed a sigh of relief that I hadn't sat through it. Now you, gentle reader, may breath a sigh of your own after reading this assuming you didn't make the same mistake I did.

Formatting of Texts

Inspired by this post, I wrote (or rather Word did for me) a Word document macro that will format Gutenberg texts (and others like it) for electronic-readers. Email me if you would like a copy.

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And, while I'm here, a puzzlement -- I really don't get the benefit of bond fonds. Over the past ten years look what this core bond fund did compared to the SP500:

Ben Stein in his book on saving for retirement recommends a 50/50 mix of stock and bonds, but bonds seem to (pardon my French) suck. Especially in the environment going forward which presages inflation and higher interest rates. But Stein has forgotten more about investing than I know so...