Fiction for a Thursday

I woke to the sound of mourning doves, though I was young and thought they were called morning doves as they sang before noon and I was incapable of mourning, having never yet lost anything. It would never have occurred to me at the time that the sound was sad. Just peaceful.

This was the Summer of Love, 1967, but for me the Quiet Summer, the season I worked as a park ranger. I had no Smokey the Bear hat and gave no tours of natural wonders, but found myself king of a grassland playground revolving around a shelter, a series of six picnic tables covered by a pitched roof.

The panic of not being able to find a summer job had been high upon me. Jobs had taken on a scarce, every-man-for-himself quality, like a game of musical chairs without the music. I cared not a whit for money but cared greatly about pride since not having one was to have a scarlet letter emblazoned on your forehead, the only failure in life being to accept a welfare check.

This prospective job didn’t pay well but the hours were good and it promised something different, something out of doors, something other than the working over the greased fire pits of McDonald’s hell.

There were usually twenty kids though under the influence of memory the numbers swell to forty or sixty. (Actually, on slow days there might be eight.) I was temperamentally unsuited to ranger, finding children barbaric and loud. They were like Vikings without the redeeming quality of possessing neat-looking ships.

Fortunately they were amenable to instruction and could be quieted occasionally. I taught them the secrets of contemplative prayer while I verbally prayed they'd be quiet. Most slept, but they slept silently, without snoring, and sometimes I could hear a dove. I woke one day to learn that they came not in plunder but to give, albeit in a plundering sort of way.

Michelle, Our Conservative Belle?

I caught most of Michelle Obama's speech. A liberal co-worker said yesterday that Obamas were trying to present themselves as the Huxtables, and I said most of their voters weren't alive when the Huxtables were on television. I jest.

The speech, which included the Smirnoffian "I love this country" line, seems a bit like the apology after a gaffe. This was said almost surely because of having said she wasn't proud of her country until her husband garnered the nomination.

But most of all it was a very conservative speech. In fact, it probably could've been given by a conservative. One is left with the distinct impression of the overwhelming importance of love, specifically parental love, rather than government aid. There was nothing in it to suggest that she and Obama were helped by the government and thus wanted to give something back to the government. It's thus odd that they support abortion rights and larger government given the background she presented. You'd think they'd want bigger families and less government, since they both profited from extended family (Barack's grandparents) and were not seemingly helped by government.

She mentioned Joe Biden not forgetting where he came from, implying that most who go to D.C. do, which suggests the need for a smaller federal government since if you're making decisions at a state and local level you can't forget where you came from since you're still there. Duh.

She's for ending the war responsibly, which no Republican officeholder would dispute.

She mentioned the importance of jobs for returning vets, which implies a strong support for business, since jobs come primarily from businesses last time I checked.

So based on this speech (and not on the political platform of her husband), she does a pretty good Republican impersonation, with a few exceptions, such as the mention of universal health care.

That's What I'm Talking 'Bout

From First Things:

But as Kalven and Blum wrote, “whether the argument for redistributing income is put in terms of increasing the general welfare or of redressing the injustice of the existing rewards, it is always precariously close to being rested simply on envy.” (Remarkably, Rawls even espoused a doctrine of what he called “excusable envy,” encouraging people to feel envy whenever levels of inequality exceeded a particular–and unspecified–level, on the ground that envy would be “rational” in such cases, as it would lead to a demand for redistribution.)

Literary Soapbox Derby

Too many books in the world!? Ah, say it ain't so! That's like saying there's too many roses...too many songs...too many springs!

I ascended this soapbox even figuring I had the short end of the argument since anything Jeff Culbreath and Tom of Disputations agree on is almost surely true. But I couldn't go down without a fight, and I made a comment that in hindsight looks embarrassingly strident. I responded to his original post by saying that books are simply people speaking and that this is like saying there are too many people speaking, which is awfully close to saying there are too many people. Or rather saying there are too many people who aren’t like me. (Here I'm borrowing Sancta Sanctis's policy of quoting herself, which she'd borrowed from me. Very circular, 'eh?)

God is the master of frivolity - how can one look outside at the natural world and not wonder at the redundancy? A maple…looks like another maple. Thank God He who is Depth Itself does not look on our meagerness and become sad. What bothers me, and I’m guilty of it too, is looking around a room full of people (or books in this case) and thinking, “I can’t learn anything from them.” That’s not a Catholic (or catholic) point-of-view.

No one is more entitled to that attitude than our present Holy Father, and yet he always has an attitude of humility, of listening… of respect for even what is below him, as Goethe indicated was the mark of Christianity. (Btw, let me give a shout out to young Goethe!)

Jeff didn't let me slip that comment in the back, Jack. He shined the light on it and weighed in here, making the good point that a call for more silence isn't a bad thing and isn't the same as a call for less people.

Regarding books in general, everyone is created differently and everyone has progressed to different level of sanctity or lack thereof. There are those with high IQs and low IQs and high levels of sanctity and low levels. Therefore there is a need for all sorts of different books. Some people simply have little to no capacity for reading “deep” books. Others may suffer from ill health or depression and appreciate “frivolous” books more than we know. Others are edified and are drawn closer to God by what were formerly banned books.

Ratzinger Quote

I'd been wondering how to reconcile the concept of purification, with how help can come from prayers from others during that purification (given that it is an act necessarily individualistic), and now I find that Cardinal Ratzinger addresses this in his book "Eschatology":

Does not this prayer [for the departed] presuppose that Purgatory entails some kind of external punishment which can, for example, be graciously remitted through vicarious acceptance by others in a form of spiritual barter? And how can a third party enter into that most highly personal process of encounter with Christ, where the "I" is transformed in the flame of his closeness? Is not this an event which so concerns the individual that all replacement or substitution must be ruled out? Is not the pious tradition of 'helping the holy souls' based on treating these souls after the fashion of 'having' - whereas our reflections so far have surely led to the conclusion that the heart of the matter is 'being,' for which there can be no substitute? Yet the being of man is not, in fact, that of a closed monad. It is related to others by love or hate, and, in these ways, has its colonies within them. My own being is present in others as guilt or as grace. We are not just ourselves; or, more correctly, we are ourselves only as being in others, with others and through others. Whether others curse us or bless us, forgive us and turn our guilt into love- this is part of our own destiny. The fact that the saints judge means that encounter with Christ is encounter with his whole body. I come face to face with my own guilt vis-a-vis the suffering members of the body as well as with the forgiving love which the body derives from Christ its Head.

"The intercession of the saints with the Judge is not...some purely external affair whose success is necessarily doubtful since it depends on the unpredictable benevolence of the Judge. It is above all an inner weight which, placed on the scales, can bring them to sink down.
(Balthasar)

[Rick] Warren did not ask Obama when human life begins. Here’s what he asked: "Forty million abortions — at what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?" So the question was not about ensoulment or the beginnings of a unique biological entity, but about rights. Questions of rights are not above a president’s pay grade. And if Obama supports Roe and related decisions, that would indicate that a baby gets human rights at birth. If that is what he believes, then let him say so, openly. - Amy Welborn

While there is a great deal of interest in and curiosity about the devil in the realm of possession and exorcism, there is much less interest in him in the realm of one's day-to-day life. Indeed, in the realm of our own lives. For the most part, people of America generally proceed with their daily lives as if Satan did not exist at all. An undue fascination with the details of possession is perhaps not spiritually healthy but neither is ignoring the existence of the devil and the reality of evil. We can be sure he is not ignoring us. - Bishop Vasa, via Tom of Disputations

It’s true that some doctors and fathers and theologians of the Church raised the question of “ensoulment,” asking when an unborn baby receives a soul, and given different answers. But in Christian (as opposed to Gnostic) tradition, humans are not only souls but also bodies. And thus no Father ever, ever used the idea of later ensoulment (often borrowed from Aristotle) to excuse or permit abortion. Contrary to what Pelosi expressly says, Augustine never ever said life begins at three months. In Christian tradition, until the 1960s, life was thought to begin at conception, regardless of the details certain thinkers put forth about speculative embryonic anthropology. - blogger at Cathliodocy

Hello. I'm here to abduct your family and sell them into slavery. Now, I know that many people, people of good will, believe this is wrong. I understand that, and I respect their opinion. At the same time, many others are equally convinced of the need for slaves, particularly when our own government can't guarantee that hard-working families will have time to clean their own houses. For my own part, I have thought long and hard about this difficult issue, an issue that doesn't admit of simple answers. And I've come to the decision that the right thing for me to do is to be a slaver. But a new kind of slaver, one who does not vilify those who disagree. - Tom of Disputations spoof

I was at a gathering a few weeks ago for an aged Southern sage, a politico with an accent so thick you have to lean close and concentrate to understand every word, so thick, as they used to say, you could pour it on pancakes. Most of the people there were from the South, different ages and generations but Southerners—the men grounded and courteous in a certain way, the women sleeveless and sexy in a certain way. There was a lot of singing and toasting and drinking, and this was the thing: Even as an outsider, you knew them. They were Mississippi Delta people—Mizz-izz-DEHLT people—and the sense of placeness they brought into the room with them was sweet to me. It allowed you to know them, in the same way that at a gathering of, say, Irish Catholics from the suburbs of Boston, you would be able to know them, pick up who they are, with your American antennae. You grow up, move on, and bring the Delta with you, but as each generation passes, the Delta disappears, as in time the ward and the parish disappear. I miss the old geographical vividness. But we are national now, and in a world so global that at the Olympics, when someone wins, wherever he is from, whatever nation or culture, he makes the same movements with his arms and face to mark his victory. South Korea's Park Tae-hwan moves just like Michael Phelps, with the "Yes!" and the arms shooting upward and the fists. This must be good. Why does it feel like a leveling? Like a squashing and squeezing down of the particular, local and authentic. - Peggy Noonan in WSJ

There's nothing new about air travel, I've never known a time when it wasn't there, yet still I'm amazed at the fact that there are people in the sky. - Bill of Apologia

"There is something colorless and odorless about him," says a friend [about Barack Obama]. "like an inert gas." And Mr. McCain, in his experience, history and genes, is definitely military, and could easily come from Indiana or South Carolina or California...The lack of placeness with both candidates contributes to a sense of their disjointedness, their floatingness. - Peggy Noonan

Assigning the Odds

So Brad Paisley has a lot of unlikely scenerios in his song "I'll Take You Back". So let's assign the odds; your mileage may will vary (odds in bold face):

"I'll Take You Back"

When a freight train jumps off a track
And rolls down my road [depends how far train from road]
And it's summer time in Texas
And they're playing in the snow [40,000-to-1]
When politicians everywhere stop telling lies
And only state the facts [infinity-1]
Right then, that's when
I'll take you back

Let's say I get bucked off a bull and fall and hit my head
And then I get amnesia and forget the things you said [could happen]
I lose my better judgment and I take up smoking crack [10,000-1]
Right then, that's when
I'll take you back

[Chorus]
Go on keep trying
Come on keep calling
You know I like it
When you come crawling
It's like music
To hear you bawling
Waa, waa, waa, waa, waa

When Donald Trump takes a part time job parking cars [3-1]
When Clint Eastwood does ballet in a big pink leotard [100-1]
And a donkey wins the Derby as he takes his victory lap [1,000,000,000-1]
Right then, that's when
I'll take you back

[Repeat chorus]

The day that old morning sun rises in the west [Infinity-1]
And they pass a law in L.A. banning artificial breasts [5,000-1]
When cars can run on water, gasoline and oil ain't worth jack [10-1]*
Right then, that's when
I'll take you back

[Repeat chorus]

It's like music
To hear you bawling
Waa, waa, waa, waa, waa

Murakami writes surreal novels while running, and I try to come up with odds to the Paisley tune in my head. Oy vey.

* - I heard an urban legend about a guy who made a car run on water but the oil companies killed him.

Parody is Therapy...

...has been updated with news that Faulkner and Hemingway's classics are being asterisked for being alcohol aided, and the tragic story of a guy who bought expensive shoes and nobody noticed.

Dis 'n Dat

Kim of "bingo fame" (oxymoron?) sent a cheering note:

I was so sorry to hear about the end of your vacation. May you always remember it with fondness and know that is in a better place.

Indeed I will remember it with fondness. I see I received no love from my blog friends; it took an actual, real-live person to proffer sympathy. Although tis true her note had the ulterior motive of asking me to help at bingo Thursday. But let he among us whose motives are unmixed cast the first stone! (Speaking of ulterior motives, Kim, if you're reading this, will you take care of our dog when we go on vacation next time? We'll pay you!)

* * *
But enough about me, we're all interested in Joe Biden nowadays. Biden says of anyone who questions his faith that they can "pry my rosary beads from my cold, dead hands!".

Of course he didn't say that but that was the jist of it. The money quote I found was the following, culled from "On the Issues" website:

Q: You have changed your position on abortion. When you came to the Senate, you believed that Roe v. Wade was not correctly decided and that you also believed the right of abortion was not secured by the Constitution. Why did you change your mind?

A: Well, I was 29 years old when I came to the US Senate, and I have learned a lot. Look, I'm a practicing Catholic, and it is the biggest dilemma for me in terms of comporting my religious and cultural views with my political responsibility.

Political responsibility or political viability?

* * *
As a kid, I thought Catholicism was going the way of Judiasm: similarly ethnic, i.e. cultural, and not at all evangelistic. What I didn't realize was how evangelistic Catholicism was during the '40s and '50s, from the television show of Fulton J. Sheen to the street corner apologetics of Frank Sheed.

* * *

I read some of Alexander Solzhenitsyn last night. (Wouldn't his multi-syballic name have fit well in Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire"?). I read his thirty-year old Harvard speech to see what the great man was right and wrong about. My perception of him as a sort of right-wing are wrong. He was an environmentalist, worried about over-population and calling for conservation of energy resources, ala Jimmy Carter. Some would say that he's prescient now, but the conservation of oil merely puts off the inevitable, doesn't it? It's sort of like putting your money in a mattress - you'll be okay for awhile but eventually inflation will make you a pauper.

This is pure speculation but perhaps part of the appeal of the environmental issue for him was simply that it gives the West an opportunity to exercise self-restraint. If George Soros wants to save the environment so as to force a one-world socialistic government, perhaps Solzhenitsyn wanted to save the environment in order to save our souls. He saw the value of spiritual reality greater than material, and environmentalism could be a means to that end - i.e. conserve energy for it takes self-restraint. If Thoreau's message was "simplify, simplify", Solzhenitsyn's message to the indulgent West is "restrain thyself, restrain thyself". It's hard to disagree, seeing how most of our ills, from the foreclosure crisis to Enron to abortion-on-demand are at root about a lack of self-restraint.

The biggest chink in the armor seemed to be his overestimating the might of the Soviet empire. In '78 he thought Angola would never be the Soviet's Vietnam but another country starting with "A" - Afghanistan - was.

It was also interesting to see how he dissed the Middle Ages as being way overconcerned about the spiritual, to the neglect of the material, and how today we go in the opposite direction. It is hard to the hew to the middle! It takes great...oh, what's that word? Self-restraint...?

Live-blogging my Summer Vacation  so you don't have to!

10:12PM:  I just put Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” into the CD spinner in order to mourn the near end of my vacation week and summer as well. “If You Could Read My Mind” works well too, as in “if you could read my mind you’d know I need another Guinness.” No kid glove treatment on the beer front; great energy expenditures during the day demand generous beer drinking to offset. (For medicinal purposes only of course.)

On Thursday, visiting mom, she said that I looked exceptionally good: my hair shinier, my stomach flatter. Vacation agrees with me, I told her, though I’m not sure it’s exactly a vocation. "My vocation is vacation" or "my job is retirement" sound remarkably oxymoronic. I suspect that laziness works best in small quantities so please don’t try it at home.

I did the annual bookstore tour this morning, begging off water aerobics despite my promising to be the Michael Phelps of that activity. (Would Michael Phelps blow off swim practice for a bookstore?) On Wednesday I told my instructor/drill sargeant that she’s “got to be German” and she said “yes, how did you know?” completely oblivious and honestly curious. Which is perfect, because you know Germans are always accused of not getting a joke. She’s a lean, mean fighting machine: I'm guessing 100 lbs wet and 5% body fat. She adheres to a diet of only raw meat and veggies; humans have been cooking food for, what, at least a few thousand years and yet she’s got to be different.

The bookstore tour began with a Columbus Borders since it was the only one open before 10am. I found a dog book for my wife, though I made the mistake of not “vetting” it by reading the ending first. She doesn’t want sad dog books, defined by the death of the canine protagonist. This really limits the dog literature field. I scanned the ending back at home, reading something about “he stopped eating” and “cremated ashes” and rolled my eyes. That’s $9 I’ll never get back unless I take it back, though the gas to get there would be close to that.

After visiting a second store I hit the glazed asphalt for a bike tour through the lovely and talented Clintonville, a part of the city where the homes are traditional but the residents not. Lots of Obama signs tarnishing beautiful old stone homes. “War is Not the Answer” declares one yard sign and I wonder why in Republican neighborhoods there is never a modest “Raising the Capital Gains Tax Does Not Significantly Increase Government Revenue” sign. I’m never quite sure whether these sorts of bumper stickers are a way of claiming your tribe or designed to change people’s minds. It could be the latter since we are notoriously susceptible to momentum and what’s hot.

Decoding "Hungry Like the Wolf"

It's been far too long since this blog explored the lyrics of a popular song for the deeper meaning. (Last time was for Baby's Got Her Blue Jeans On.) Today we'll explore the subterranean meaning of the lyrics to Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” (dedicated to Sancta Sanctis and K-Lo of NRO for their Duran Duran devotion):

Dark in the city, night is a wire
Steam in the subway, earth is a fire
Do-do do do, do do do, do do do, do do do, do do

The first stanza poetically sets the mood: we are in a city and it is night. A wire suggests a narrowness in latitude if one is walking it. The presence of a subway suggests a major metropolitan area and hence the presence of multitudes. The “Do-do do…” is intentionally cryptic and builds suspense musically.

Woman you want me, give me a sign
And catch my breathing even closer behind
Do-do do do, do do do, do do do, do do do, do do

The first line express the human desire for a sign, for proof that God exists and loves us, in this case masquerading as love for a woman. “Catch my breathing even closer behind” communicates the narrator’s nearness; “Woman you want me” is a declarative posing as a query. As the song continues it gradually appears God and man will switch roles, the pursued having actually been the pursuer.

In touch with the ground
I’m on the hunt I’m after you
Smell like I sound, I’m lost in a crowd
And I’m hungry like the wolf

Here the narrator paradoxically declares himself ‘grounded’ (“in touch with the ground) and yet ‘lost’ (“lost in a crowd”). He compares his hunger to that of a wolf, a species possibly associated with hunger due to a rapidly decreasing habitat. Or perhaps the author confuses wolves with coyotes, specifically Wile E. Coyote who was always frustrated in his pursuit of Road Runner. “Smell like I sound” attests to the narrator’s truthfulness, saying that there is no disconnect between what he is saying (sound) and what he is (smell).

Straddle the line, in discord and rhyme
I’m on the hunt I’m after you
Mouth is alive with juices like wine
And I’m hungry like the wolf

Here we see the paradox of bringing together “discord and rhyme”. We struggle to understand how these can be reconciled just as we did before in the assertion of being grounded and lost. “Juices like wine” interests us because grape juice becomes wine over time. Juice is to wine what immaturity is to maturity. We wonder what the narrator means by conflating the two. A long desired merging of eros and agape?

Stalked in the forest, too close to hide
I’ll be upon you by the moonlight side
Do-do do do, do do do, do do do, do do do, do do
High blood drumming and your skin it’s so tight
You feel my heart, I’m just a moment behind
Do-do do do, do do do, do do do, do do do, do do

The narrator again mentions his closeness: even “too close to hide”. There must be something important in the exclaiming of the nearness of the pursued to the pursuer. Yet the mention of a forest suggests cloaking, of invisibility even. The blood “drums” and the skin is like a drum skin, tight in order to produce the correct concusive sound. The “high blood drumming” of the pursuer and the tight skin of the pursued suggests a likeness and similarity despite their evident separateness. “I’m just a moment behind” re-emphasizes nearness; the writer hopes to convey an inevitability of meeting, even going so far as to saying he would be upon her by the time the moon rises.

The next few stanzas are purposely repetitive, perhaps in order to convey the passage of time. Then there is a sudden break, literally so:

Burning the ground, I break from the crowd
I’m on the hunt I’m after you
Scent and a sound, I’m lost and I’m found
And I’m hungry like the wolf

Instead of being lost in the crowd as in the earlier stanza he’s now broken from the crowd. This suggests progress and yet he’s paradoxically still lost and found. "Burning" is indicative of a presence beyond the human. The hunger is again compared to the species canis lupus. The pursued seems changed now too; the woman mentioned in the first stanza has no words (logos in Greek) to say in the song but can be heard to laugh at the start. Towards the end of the song she begins to lose her breath and eventually moans as if in the pain of labor. It's as if the pursued has changed due to the actions of the pursuer. His scent and sound have so merged as there is no longer the need to claim that what he says is what he is.

Pindell says Ohio to Obama

Home Vacation Remedies

It's time for the annual home vacation - five days off spent in the luxury of primetime Northern Hemisphere weather. The official beer of the home vacation is Corona (light & summery). The official CD is Jimmy Buffet's Greatest Hits...

* * * I'm reminded again that the sun is a Republican, of German heritage, or must be given how fastidiously he adheres to schedule. At 5pm the remains of his descent are in the west sky, obscured by the neighbor's huge sycamore. He's touching the south hem of the behemoth's tallest stretches.

The tomatoes are coming in waves, almost too many to even give away. It's the consolation of the end of summer and the only good thing that reverses the scarcity principle - there is no end of them while they have their head. The vines have grown so fecund that harvesting becomes something akin to an Easter egg hunt. Earlier in the season there is a different, if less satisfying harvest: I rub their aromatic fronds and inhale the smell.

But now the air is scented by newly laid mulch, still regnant under my fingernails and on my clothes. I briefly ponder whether the modern wonder of bleach will return my clothes to presentability. Bass wind chimes chime in, sounding like church bells. Yesterday I'd heard bells playing church hymns while on the bike path, presumably coming from a cemetery just beyond it's end.

Now the sun has dipped between the large leaves of the sycamore, leaving only diamond splashes created by slight rustles of wind. It makes its way slowly through the leaves, in a northern direction, like a Windows progress bar, a natural time increment.

Eyes above: there are "people in the sky" as Bill Luse aptly puts it. I share his incredulity. A tube of steel carries a bunch of people in arranged aisle ways thousands of feet above me. The jet leaves twin white streaks like a speed boat on the Okeechobee. Just to the west I see either a UFO, or maybe a small black balloon. I report, you decide.

* * *
I feel all "Belloc-y" after a few beers, alive to the natural world and capable of delusions of grandeur. "Everything I learned about God, I learned from alcohol" is untrue but sounds good after a couple of beers. Our ancestors must've thought so giving whiskey a name meaning "water of life" and calling drink "spirits". The only thing I recall from my Driver's Education class is how the instructor insisted we not drink and drive but also pointed out that if you're drunk you stand a much better chance of surviving an accident because you go with the flow, you don't resist or retract in fear. There could be a metaphor in there somewhere. (Reminds me of Homer Simpson's famous line about alcohol being the cause and solution of all life's problems.)

"Spahn and Sain and pray for rain" goes the elegant baseball aphorism; less elegantly I think, "Beer and books and pray for more vacation time."

Speaking of drinking and leisure time, let us ponder, a moment, this selection from Walter Kerr's "The Decline of Pleasure":

I would like to consider, briefly, a man I know. This man lives in the suburbs, earns a satisfactory salary in an investment house, is educated and intelligent, gets along well with his wife and three children, has his evenings and Saturdays and Sundays at his disposal, and possesses many of machines invented to assure him of leisure and pleasure. For a while, several years ago, he developed a surprising habit; perhaps I should say he developed a habit that is not at all uncommon among twentieth-century middle-to-upper-class men but that was surprising at the time to his family. Three or four times a year, in a rhythm too erratic to be easily understood, he would lose himself for a long weekend in a succession of bars. These periods of escape did not seem to be related to domestic crises or office tensions; they did not spill over into Monday mornings but were cut off sharply and quite soon enough to enable him to return to work; the classic symptoms of an incipient alcoholism -- self-pity, indifference to family, fear of faltering in a career -- were nowhere in evidence. The problem was not acute, but a problem existed.

The problem was ultimately solved, as it is now so often solved, by the purchase of one more machine for the home. This man bought himself a power saw and installed it in his basement. Certain supplementary tools were added a little later. With his new equipment, the essentially responsible husband and father transformed a rather dingy room that had been used for laundering into a pine-paneled breakfast nook, which is both charming and useful. Having completed the task, he transferred his attention to an unfinished attic...an outdoor terrace.

[His] drinking bouts have ceased...He does not look particularly well. He seems tired. It is not unreasonable that he should be tired. He is now working five days at the office and two days and five nights at home...Still he goes on, content to have been rescued from his aberration.

* * *
Summer is a gateway drug, a mild hallucinogenic. I run like Olympian Emil Zapotec down the asphalt to U2's "With or Without You" and that "End of the World As We Know It" song. Friday music is....Friday music.

Afterwards the back patio becomes a second skin and I'm surprised by the cramming of so much beauty in such a modest suburban space. Flowers hover suspended in air. The regal crowns of the fence post stand like heraldic knights, and the dapper sash across the gates seems to signal some sort of hierarchical pride. The pavers are hot to the heel and Spanish in appearance. Wild sunflower stand with astonishing height and a few fireflies stand athwart Time yelling "Stop!" to no avail. Queen Anne's lace dot the tree line. A little moat of stones, a micro "Great Wall of China", demarcks the dark mulch from the grass.

I could stare for hours at the scene, as I might at Christmas lights given the right environment.

The sun dapples the pine and sets the fence at half-mast. Trees wave pedestrianly, like horses moseying. The world briefly stops, the days cast away their rock-ruttedness. Welcome to Havana, Ohio.

Whatever I might change I would not change, since they satisfy the designer, in this case my wife assisting the Almighty with her landscaping skills. It was a somewhat foreign concept to my younger self to find pleasure in another's pleasure but now sometimes I get it. If she likes it, I like it derivatively.

* * *
On the reading front...The latest New Yorker absorbs my attention only for a single ad (displayed in this post). Daedalus commands our attention with his single eye. Sometimes less is more, like less work and more vacation.

I also ponder Heather King's delight in writing. Based on "Redeemed", I find her stuff full of self-revelation and piquancies but not the least self-indulgent or non-utilitarian (do not only justice and mercy kiss in Heaven but also anti-utilitarianism and helpfulness to others?)

Evangelicals Moving Left

It's been interesting to watch the leftward march of certain prominent evangelicals, including one prominent in our community. Although the number is surely small, some of them seem to be de-emphasizing the right-to-life issue and re-emphasizing issues of poverty and health care.

Part of this may be due to gratitude for the attention being received from some in the Democrat party. Democrats understandably don't like losing elections based on "values voters" and so there is much more care & feeding of evangelicals given the gold mine of votes available. Hence Jim Wallis was deputized, or self-deputized. Books were written, websites like Beliefnet.com set up, and debates begun.

So it's self-evident what's in it for pro-choice Democrats. What's in it for evangelicals? Number one, it was a way to counteract an image problem. Christians don't like being perceived as narrowly focussed on the pro-life issue. One website - http://unchristian.com - came highly recommended by a conservative family member. (I saw the Jim Wallis imprimatur and didn't go much farther.)

This all fits nicely into Rick Warren's "Purpose Driven Life" view, since political activism revolving around poverty and universal health care seem more politically viable and have a greater chance of being solved in the short-run than the pro-life issue. It's harder to be an activist when you don't see much happening. To the extent we think of Christianity as defined by our works and our results, or to the extent we think that by changing our politics in order to make our religion more appealing to those closely following politics, we'll be tempted to vote for leaders espousing death for little ones as long as they do visible good in other areas.

Critiquing the Olympic Critics

Both the New Yorker and the Columbus Dispatch have their Olympic coverage stories out. I lean closer to the view of Molly Willow of the Dispatch fame, the tv critic who has good taste in television.

I thought: why am I able to watch this Olympics when past ones left me cold?

Answer: no lengthy, painful, melodramatic "set-up" stories that last longer than the events themselves. As Willow puts it:

Perhaps the biggest difference between NBC's coverage of these games and the last in Athens, Greece, is the smart reduction in long, saccharine profiles of athletes.

Instead, brief bios have filled the lulls between high-profile events, helping to ensure that viewers stay up well past their bedtimes.

Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker also has a few good lines:

In the four years since I was last forced to watch beach volleyball, I somehow have not found the maturity and wisdom to take it seriously as an Olympic sport, and, frankly, I doubt that NBC takes it seriously, either, except as a ratings grabber. Every time I turned on the TV, there was May-Treanor (the short one) and Walsh (the tall one), in those silly little Victoria’s Ill-Kept Secret outfits. I now know more about these two women than I know about some of my relatives...

Including their anatomy. I was amused that even that bastion of liberal propriety, NPR, got into the controversy of whether the bikinis were for comfort or ratings. Beach volleyball was way overcovered (by NBC that is) but I was glad for it because it allowed me to focus only on the swimming and the women's gymnastics. You can't watch 3000 hours of coverage so NBC actually did me a solid. Meanwhile, I could also relate to Franklin's take on "where's China?":

Watching the Beijing Olympics, for all the athletic and architectural spectacularity on display, has turned out to be more frustrating than I expected. What an opportunity this was—not, as is obvious, just for China but for the rest of the world, the people whose only chance to visit China would be through the lenses of NBC’s cameras. Thirty-six hundred hours of sports and features filled the network and its cable sisters CNBC, MSNBC, USA, Telemundo, Oxygen, and Universal HD, and the Web—but I feel as though all I saw of China on TV was tourists walking on the Great Wall and correspondents eating, or not eating, “funny” food like fried scorpions.