--Photo via "Sancta Sanctis" on the occasion of the Nativity of Mary (9/8)

Prayer, like weight-lifting, is a discipline that benefits from a more rigorous and perhaps even "scheduled" pursuit.
--Steven of Flos Carmeli

It's funny how true compassion is so easily seen on the face of a mom - text msg to her Dad, from Bern Luse, during Palin speech

If votes for women do not mean mobs for women they do not mean what they were meant to mean.
--GK Chesterton via "Ruri et Orbi"

Count me among the mob for Sarah Palin. Palin demonstrates very well the Chestertonian understanding of women as the Jack-of-all-Trades. It is only in our culture of death that anyone would venture to say that a woman couldn’t manage the job of Vice President because she had a large family to raise. One might argue (as Chesterton does in the actual context of the above quotation) whether other aspects of the feminine nature are consistent with the duties of a Vice President (few though they be), but it is ridiculous to suggest that a mother can’t handle hundreds of tasks at once. Only a society that so hates motherhood that it no longer recognizes it would make such an argument. - blogger at Ruri et Orbi, after posting previous quote

I watched a convention speech, the one delivered by Sarah Palin, you know, the woman who is completely unqualified to be vice-president because she's so inexperienced and has a large family which includes a pregnant teenage daughter and a Down syndrome child. - Bill Luse

I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations [for] Governor Palin...I trust even now Maureen Dowd is working on a hilarious new column mocking proposed names for the Governor's first grandchild. Perhaps Richard Cohen can just take the week off and they can rerun his insightful analysis comparing the Palin nomination to Caligula making his horse a consul. Whereas we sophisticates all know that if McCain were as smart as Obama he'd have nominated a dead horse to be his consul. No wait... - Jonah Goldberg

Sarah Palin works fast. She instantly became the object of the kind of partisan hatred that most politicians can raise only after prosecuting an unpopular war and lying about their misconduct in office (Nixon), after making sanctimonious dishonesty an art form and getting caught in flagrante with an intern (Clinton), and after winning a disputed election and botching a foreign occupation (Bush). Palin-hatred is an artifact of who she is rather than anything she’s done. Joe Biden famously rose from the working class to the U.S. Senate. Palin became governor of Alaska, but never left the working class...As such, she’s the object of the cultural disdain of a Left that loves the working class in theory, but is mystified or offended by its lifestyle and conservative values in reality. If there’s ever been an exemplar of the rural America that, in Barack Obama’s telling, “bitterly” clings to its guns and religion, it’s Sarah Palin. - Rich Lowry of NRO

When Catholics cry out that Biden is not a true Catholic politician, they adopt the same politics of identity as the mainstream culture. So much for Joyce's "here comes everybody!" But Catholic is different, you may say. After all, it's mainly a system of ideas, so ideological alignment is appropriate. After all, Sarah Palin is more Catholic than Joe Biden. Really? What makes a Catholic? To hold certain ideas? No. To be Catholic is to be in relationship with Christ visibly present in the Bishop who is in communion with the Pope. Are certain ideas more consonant with this relationship? Yes, but they are not the essential criteria. Ideally, this relationship includes reception of the sacraments, but it continues to remain even if the Bishop determines that reception of Communion is not appropriate. - Frederick of "Deep Furrows"

Every once in a while I come across a perfect book—not perfect in the sense of flawless or deep or indispensable, but perfect in the sense of being richly representative of an era or ethos or sensibility...Simon Critchley has written a book that has this sort of culture-reflecting perfection: The Book of Dead Philosophers...His book evokes the true spirit of our age: a self-congratulating honesty that protests against old hypocrisies and evasions—all in close conjunction with a winking lack of seriousness that insulates us from any real engagement or commitment. - R.R. Reno on 'First Things"

You can get knocked up from eating Kraft Dinner every night?! - Kathy Shaidle on word from a New York prof stating that poverty causes unwanted pregnancies

This button ["Against Abortion? Don't Have One"] at the NOW store is about as morally defensible as "Against slavery? Don't own one." It's amusing to recall that the Democrat party was the party of slavery as it is of abortion. - Bill of Summa Minutiae

Biden has claimed that "no decent religious person thinks fascism is a good idea." He has arbitrarily created a tautology that claims no decent religious person thought fascism was a good idea, but chooses not to also propose that "no decent religious person thinks abortion is a good idea."...Biden has claimed, "There is a debate in our church, as Cardinal Egan would acknowledge, that's existed." This is not a true statement, if Biden is referring to a debate about the evil of abortion. There has never been a debate about the serious evil of abortion. - American Papist

The thing about blogging is when something really interesting and bloggable that is surprisingly and instantaneously sucking up the world’s available BlogOxygen happens, the temptation is strong to well, blog on it...But if you blog on some funny thing that happened to you or some cultural blip, readers are gonna go, “Huh? Why isn’t she blogging about the thing that’s sucking the BlogOxygen?” So you end up sitting around, amazed, aghast and reading political blogs like a crack addict. And BlogParalzyed. - Amy Welborn

Many or most of the issues that excited those first social conservatives have since faded away. The pro-life movement, however, has gone from strength to strength, breaking away from its culturally conservative origins and finding new allies in unlikely places. The pro-life movement has made common cause with the movement for the rights of the disabled. Impaired pregnancies are highly likely to be aborted, including more than 90% of Down Syndrome pregnancies (according to a 2002 survey of American patients).
Pro-lifers have discovered shared values with critics of biotechnological research and commercial reproductive technology, such as the former Ralph Nader lawyer, Wesley Smith. The disproportionate incidence of abortion among non-whites has caused pro-life leaders like former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee to take a new interest in issues of race and discrimination...The whole world witnessed this week that the pro-life movement has accepted gender equality and leadership roles for women. - Frum of NRO

Songs of the Past & Future

Autumn is the season of nostalgia and thanks to the wonders of modern technology, in this case YouTube, I can see older as well as more recent live performances of old pop songs.

Heart's "Dog & Butterfly" 2003 live performance stands up so well to a 1978 one that I actually perfer it. That doesn't happen too often.

The singers themselves almost seem to incarnate dog and butterfly. I mean it not disparagingly to say that the lead singer continually pleases us, is always present, like man's best friend, while the blonde back-up singer is elusive and fitfully present, with a voice as incandescent as stained glass. But also rare. We wait for the butterfly to come to us; we seek it out mostly in vain.

The two singers also complement each other in how the lead singer is all Martha, seemingly doing all the heavy lifting, while the back-up singer appears to be transported as in a dream, completely in the moment and yet a thousand miles away.

* * *
Years ago, the song that most reminded me of what Heaven must be like was West Side Story's "Somewhere".

It depicts a future pleasingly non-material. In this gnostic age there is no desire that Heaven be populated with things, including bodies, let alone harps or clouds or seventy-six virgins. The closest the song gets to the material is a mention the existence of air. This is wrong, of course, since Heaven is corporeal, but the song otherwise strikes the right chord, most of all that of longing fulfilled.

It promises union with another, with God if taken metaphorically. It "promises peace and quiet and open air" and time ("time together with time to spare"). Heaven!

To borrow a campaign slogan, it is a place of change notwithstanding that we are to begin on Heaven on earth. Common experience suggests that most of us will never be saints on earth and thus will, in Heaven, need to "find a new way of living...and forgiving."

If the distance to Heaven sometimes seems so great in terms of earthly time and earthly fervor, there is hope in this song that if we hold God's hand we can be halfway there:

Hold my hand and we're halfway there.
Hold my hand and I'll take you there
Somehow,
Some day,
Somewhere!

Pro-Obama Coverage in Ireland

The olde sod ain't what it used to be!

WSJ Article on What Palin Can Learn from Margaret Thatcher

Link here:

The metaphorical hair stood up on the back of every licensed member of the feminist movement who could immediately see she was a monster out of a nightmare landscape by Hieronymus Bosch. Pro-life. Pro-oil exploration in Alaska, home of the nation's polar bears for heaven's sake. Smaller government. Lower taxes....

Mrs. Palin's emergence caused a spasm in American feminism. Caste and class have always been ammunition in the very Eastern seaboard women's movement, and now they were (so to speak) loading for bear. Sally Quinn felt a mother of five had no business being vice president. Andrea Mitchell remarked that "only the uneducated" would vote for Mrs. Palin. "Choose a woman but this woman?" wrote Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer, accusing Sen. McCain of using a Down's syndrome child as qualification for the VP spot.

The hypocrisy was breathtaking. Only nanoseconds before the choice of Mrs. Palin as VP put her a geriatric heartbeat away from the presidency, a woman's right to have a career and children was a shibboleth of feminism. One always knew that women with views that opposed those of official feminism were to be treated as nonwomen. To see it now out in the open was the real shocker...

Watching the frenzied reaction was déjà vu from my years as a political columnist in Margaret Thatcher's Britain. Modern history's titan of female political life suffered a similar hatred, fuelled to a large extent by her gender. Mrs. Thatcher overcame it magnificently, but in the end, the fact was that she was female and not one of "them"—a member of the old boys' club of the Tory establishment—played a significant role in bringing her down.

She was bound to be disliked vehemently by the left once she began to reveal her agenda of deregulation, sensible industrial relations, and tax reduction. Still among most of her enemies this had to do more with her ideas than her ovaries at the beginning. It was the aristocracy of her own Conservative Party that could not bear the notion of being led by "that woman." "Until she became leader," says Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and authorized biographer of Mrs. Thatcher, "it was assumed she could not be it because of her sex."

Mrs. Thatcher was originally given the education portfolio by Prime Minister Edward Heath, though she wanted to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, the equivalent of the U.S. Treasury Secretary. Education was considered a woman's job, and regarded as far less important than it would be today. In the education portfolio she was excluded from higher counsels and out of the way. When she challenged Heath for the party leadership in February 1974, at age 49, she turned the tables and used her gender to appeal to the gallantry of disaffected Tory backbenchers. "She's a very brave girl," they would say.

Mrs. Thatcher, a good-looking woman, used her sexual attractiveness to its legitimate hilt. She was known to flirt both with caucus members and the opposition, her face tilted girlishly in conversation. She succeeded politically with those leaders with whom she could flirt—including Ronald Reagan, Francois Mitterrand and most unlikely of all, Mikhail Gorbachev. Her stylish, hint-of-Dr. Zhivago wardrobe for a 1987 visit to the Soviet Union became something of a national obsession.

Such attractiveness had the opposite effect on the Tory grandees. Books have been written on what it was that nurtured their contempt. After all, they were in the same political party, and their fortunes rested on her popularity.

No doubt part of the animosity arose from her origins as the daughter of a Grantham grocer, a woman whose home address was a street number rather than an estate with simply the house name. Lord Ian Gilmour of Craigmillar dismissed Mrs. Thatcher as "a Daily Telegraph woman"—code language for some ghastly suburban creature wearing a tasteless flowered hat. Winston Churchill's son-in-law, Christopher Soames, a man of much genuine intelligence, allegedly called her "Heath with tits"—an inaccurate and inelegant description, but one that captured exquisitely the contempt his class had for her. Both Gilmour and Soames were fired by Mrs. Thatcher in the housecleaning that took place during the late '70s and early '80s. But the core of High Tories remained active in the party waiting to bring her down.

The British feminist movement at that time was of little import. "I owe nothing to women's lib," Mrs. Thatcher remarked, thus assuring herself of a permanent place in their pantheon of evil.

Hey Kids, Let's Hand Out Free Missile Condoms!

The fascinating thing about the Left is their Fideistic faith in education over the power of sin and evil.

For example, I heard a guy on talk radio exclaim that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is proof that she never received sex education and/or was never told how to prevent babies (that is, the "I don't know nuthin' about birth control, that's hows I got pregnant!" school of thought).

This is astonishing because it totally ignores human experience, emphasis on human. You wonder if these commenters have ever done anything they knew they shouldn't have. The whole idea that people are free actors gets lost on by the Left. You see the same thing in these endless diversity programs in the corporate world, as if prejudice will be banished given enough a corporate education program. It's a noble idea but ultimately totally misses the fact that people are sinners and don't like the idea of giving up their sin.

Similarly, on issues of war and peace, some on the Left seem to think that no one commits evil (except the Bush administration) and that talk (i.e. education) will prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

I can hear it now. A Democrat is at the table saying to the president of Iran, "I've scheduled a nuclear weapons education conference for us. We'll learn about the dangers of weapons and what happens to people and cities when one blows up. Free missile condoms will be handed out!"

That's right, that's all we need. Nuclear education for the president of Iran. Call the program "Condoms for Iranian missiles".


(To be fair to Obama, he recognizes that talk alone isn't always effective.)

Suffering

Reading this, I was reminded of priest who said in a recent homily that everyone has gifts and talents but the number one talent is... he who offers joy. It is a rare one these days. I'm also reminded how Mother Angelica wanted Raymond Arroyo to handle her suffering very carefully, I think to the point where he de-emphasize it if it got in the way.

Fred of Deep Furrows has touched on the necessity of getting beyond stocism in the past, specifically here and here.

C-Span's "In-Depth"...

...featured a former student of Obama commenting on Obama's books, especially the very positively reviewed "Dreams From My Father".

It was moving to hear how the senator grew up with a mythical view of his father as a great man and how when he learned that things were more complicated than he had been led to believe - that his father was not quite a great man - then he rebelled, using drugs and falling into a tailspin before pulling himself out. (I wonder how?)

It's interesting that we often fall into an opposite pattern. The devil tells us, as he told Eve, that God is not looking out for us, that he is not a great God. And over our life we have to deal with this mythical view of God, and coming to terms with his Goodness and Love. We must make the opposite journey as Obama despite our experience of suffering and feelings of abandonment. From Fr. Dajczer's "The Gift of Faith":

"The saints discovered the folly of God's love, which they sometimes expressed in their prayers by saying, 'Lord, it is a folly that you love me, such a sinner, so much!' The moment of astonishment, the characteristic trait seen in every authentic religions experience, can be seen here. A person who recognizes that he is a sinner and believes in God's love, starts to see that God is truly 'crazy' in His love for him...

St. Therese of Lisieux really liked to entrust her faults and infidelities to Jesus. In this way she said that she wanted to attract His mercy, for He came to sinners and not to the righteous. How important all this is to us who are saddened by our falls.

'What does it matter, dear Jesus, if I fall at each moment?' writes St. Therese: 'I see my weakness through this and this is a great gain for me...You can see through this what I can do and now You will be more tempted to carry me in Your arms...' (Letter to Celine, April 26th, 1889)."

Obama is no Bill Clinton

Clinton came of political age as a Democrat in the south, Republican territory.

Obama came of political age in the south side of Chicago, radical territory.

Clinton worked with primarily a Republican Congress.

Obama, if elected, will have huge Democrat majorities in Congress.

Clinton was a member of the moderate DLC.

Obama was a member of Rev. Wright's congregation.

Ooops!

Sometimes I Feel French

I share their instinct to whine, if not wine. From a newspaper article on the difficulties of re-entry:

The French are like “eternal children who return to school,” said Alix Girod de l’Ain, a columnist at Elle magazine. “There is a sacralization of vacation,” since nearly everyone takes August off, with la rentrée as “an important moment because we officially change our rhythm and enter a new cycle.”
...

Ms. Girod de l’Ain, who asked her readers to decide if they “really need to come back from vacation,” said that the French will recover. “French people like it when it’s sunny and they don’t work,” she said. “But this year the weather was bad, and now we have to start work again.”

And so, to my legions of French readers, I offer this substitute for vacation and sun in the form of an excerpt from a poem (I give and I give sans recompense):

The World Is A Book

Now welcome, summer. With thy sonne softe
Upon my head, the possibilities
Of pure escape again begin to haunt me--
Like June, say, in the higher Pyrenees.
I would depart for Zanzibar tomorrow,
Save for a qualm or two. There is, of course,
Always the thought that, if an ass goes traveling,
Proverbially he'll not come back a horse.
There is the man who journeyed to Beersheba
And cried out, "'Tis all barren!" So when I
Notice the look of flowering around me
And feel this qualm about a change of sky,

Then I remember. There are other tourists,
More like Thoreau who laughed at Zanzibar
As somewhere full of cats, yet chose to travel
Farther to Walden where the cattails are.
Or like that global Mr. White of Selborne
Who wrote a guidebook, journeys out of June,
Full of such planetary shine and wonder
As hoot owls hooting in B-flat, in tune;
A swallow in the air; a flight of lapwings;
The hayricks of July; the August field
Where harvest bugs walk up and bite the ladies.
And there it is, the perfect trip revealed--

A tour of world affairs with summer in it,
Priced modestly, in my own dooryard, Oh,
Even the vision of that prophet Daniel,
Who dreamed that 'Many shall run to and fro
And knowledge shall be increased!' yields to my vision!
For what some find in Tanganyika some
Find in a book--and stay at home to read it,
Maintaining thus an equilibrium.
I plan to travel, therefore, in this region
Among the lilies, like a bibliophil,
Though neither book, nor swallow, makes a summer,
The poet says. No doubt a dozen will...

-Helen Bevington, from "When Found, Make a Verse Of"

Generations

I'm reading an interesting book called "Generations at Work", written by what sounds like a (diverse) law firm: Zemke, Rains and Filipczak. I'm beginning to think I'd underestimated the impact of news events on the personalities and tendencies of a given generation, compared to the traditional formative influences of family and religion.

For example, Gen-Xrs are said to be skeptical and have a survivor's mentality. According to "Generations at Work" this generation:

...can be summed up by the question, 'Just tell me, is this going to be on the test?'...This generation has developed an almost myopic concern with survival, both economic and psychological. The question really means, 'What does this have to do with my survival?' They sensed early that no one was going to hand hold them, so they must take care of themselves.

Where did this survivor mentality come from? Try growing up in the wake of Vietnam, the only war the United States ever lost, and you'll get a hint. Then, as you're beginning to become politically aware, watch a President of the U.S. go down in flames.

Nixon's resignation...was followed by an oil embargo that, while it simply reminded the WWII generation of rationing, signaled to Xers what seemed to be an advent of a world in which anyone with a grudge could kick sand in the face of this once-respected superpower and bring our standard of living to its knees. In the 1980s, when many twenty-somethings joined the job market, the Japanese shadowboxed heavily over our economy...precipitating storms of layoffs.

Religiously how would might this translate? Maybe a Pelagianistic and legalistic attitude. Or possibly a therapeutic view.

I'd long thought the seminal influences on Gen-Xers were David Letterman and Alex P. Keaton of "Family Ties" fame.

Letterman helped give the Xers their love of informality (recall Dave wearing tennis shoes with his suit as if to say "yeah I got to wear this suit but (*wink*wink*) there's no dress code for shoes," as if he'd found a loophole. Letterman always complained about the bosses in upper management, a precusor to the comic strip "Dilbert"?

Alex Keaton appealed to Xers primarily because he was a realist and pragmatist amid starry-eye'd ex-hippies. Was his portrayal as money-obsessed a put-on? Did the viewers think of his over-the-top love for money and status as merely an act and that down deep he was a romantic? I think so, which allowed the viewer to accept his obsession with pragmatism and earning money and still find him likeable.

The book argues that Gen-X begins with those born 1960 or after though it also mentions there is a lot of crossover particularly for those born in the cusp of a generation. And though it's purely anecdotal, it's interesting how my own fraternity experience seems relevant in how it was run by Baby Boomer-types 'in 82, but then run by Gen-Xers a remarkably short time later, i.e. around '86, giving the whole thing a much different feel. You would think a fraternity's culture would linger but it's amazing how quickly ours changed. The new kids were much more interested in studies (i.e. the survivalist mentality) and definitely more laid back. The fraternity became far less about face time, conformity, ritual and hedonism.

What If the NYT Believed in Journalistic Transparency....?

Week in Review

By 9am on Labor Day we were taking the canoe down from its repose in the garage. The ol' hull was going to see water!

The weather was glorious and though we were unsure of the weight-bearing properties of the Ranger bumper, all went smoothly. I canoed by myself out to the little Devil’s Tower island at the end of Dog Lake, circling it as if it were unexplored land and the year was 1590. The birds looked all Galapagan and the water beneath was full of fish, full of bass and blue gill and all good things, as if an Ohio Cape Cod.

I gathered up Steph and Obi and then continued harvesting the field of liquid blue wheat. We rowed to the adjacent lake while Obi laid his head against the side of the canoe and fought off sleep.

Later we holed up in the shade and I laid down and looked at the sky. By & by my Guinness cap fell in the water -- requiring the panicky orchestration of an oar rescue.

How many times in the past had I been hiking the shoreline looking with longing at the glistening water? And yet here we were, in the middle of a lake, in solitudinal bliss, cell-phone and interruption free!

What is the fascination with being on the water, the ancient highway of the Indians? “Go jump in a lake,” goes the insult, which is to say I suppose ‘go where I don’t have to deal with you anymore’. A lake, the last place in America where solitude exists?

So I felt summery and full, remembering last Saturday’s long bike ride, the one where I fell off my bike & sustained various minor injuries before continuing down that virgin path.

I’d left the trail when I saw a castle through the leaves, or so it seemed, and I climbed the crumbling ruins of stone steps that might’ve been the envy of ancient Rome. I surfaced to modernity in the form of Ohio State University, to an apartment building (but Sancho, it is a castle!) and busy Lane Avenue. I hurried away, back to the indigenous bike trail, only to have the front tire lose its grip and there was the awful long moment that falling from a height affords. This one’s gonna hurt, you think, and I did the inventory afterwards, getting up slowly while checking for bleeds. “Are you okay?” a concerned walker said who’d heard the crash. “Yes,” I said, gathering a leaf to wipe the blood but generally pleased at the ability of the human body to survive impact. Later I re-grouped while leaning against a bridge and watching the geese move to and fro on the Olentangy. Steph called my cell and I dreamily watched the bucolic scene while she talked about her visit with her parents.

_____

The next day we had the obligatory Labor Day grill out at the in-laws, and I sat in sun salivating as the BBQ ribs cooked. They were being expertly tended by brother-in-law Bud, whose sleeveless forearms reminds one of Reds’ slugger Ted Klusewski’s or Bluto's of Popeye fame.

In the meantime politics were discussed and I was surprised to find Chris and me in the minority as McCain voters. The world has turned while we fiddled. Another brother-in-law tells us of his 80-year old white racist Republican father: “he’s voting for Obama!”. Punishment for Iraq? The economy?

I trade crude German phrases with yet another bro-in-law. He’s seen the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie while serving in the military. I am envious and tell him so. Growing up, my best friend’s parents (2nd generation Germans) had told me so stories about the Wall. It took on mythical dimensions but I thought of it as permanent as the Soviet Union or God Himself, and thus unworthy of urgency. I could go there any time, even when I was as old as, say, forty.

I tell him that a fellow bingo volunteer served in the army in Bavaria in the ‘80s also and how he had his souped-up car shipped to Bremen.

_________
The rains fall to shine the patio pavers and there is a uniformity in the weedless stones, like the floor of a monk’s chapel.

It’s the little things, like Steph's ingenious introduction of a solar grill light which now opens up the night patio to books. Convenience is the mother of usage isn't it? No light, no use, even though I could always retrieve a night light...

The patter of the rain on the roof encourages the reverie of an '80s song...:
_____
I heard you on the wireless back in ‘52
Lying awake intent at tuning in on you.
If I was young, it didn't stop you coming through.
Oh-a oh

They took the credit for your second symphony.
Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.
Oh-a oh

I met your children
Oh-a oh
What did you tell them?

Video killed the radio star.
Video killed the radio star.

Pictures came and broke your heart.
Oh-a-a-a oh

And now we meet in an abandoned studio.
We hear the playback and it seems so long ago.
And you remember the jingles used to go.
Oh-a oh

Blessed Are Those Who Give the Benefit of the Doubt

It's humbling to realize it when someone to whom you didn't fully give the benefit of the doubt, deserved it. I was unduly suspicious because I couldn't seem to square the fact that Novak said he didn't see the guy, with a very credible eyewitness with no axe to grind who said he did. Now I can. Shame on me.

Parody blog...

...updated with the stunning news of the New York Times briefly had a headline that didn't favor Obama.

(Inspiration via Bill of Summa.)