Chairgate '09 Resolved!

A poem on Chairgate '09:

Day 48 and all through the work-house
Not a bete noir was stirring, not even her blouse.
My chair it was tucked from her sight with much care
It hopes that it wouldn't be taken from my lair.

Interior designers nestled all snug in their Keds,
While visions of other floors danced in their heads.
Our nurse casually dressed like my chair in its cube,
Was using her stethescope assessing chairs far less rude.

Then out on the aisleway there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the ceiling
The music of Ireland, jigging and reeling.

As I drew up my head, and was turning around,
From the tiles nearby me came a Leprechaun sound.
He fell from a height and on my desk - splat!
While saying, "I heard you've had quite a spat!"

He spoke native buzzword, a corporate faerie it seemed,
And he promised to empower my chair as he beamed.
He sprang right away, as he drew out of sight,
"Happy St. Patrick's Day to all, and to all a good night!"

Noonan Snippets

Peggy Noonan, in her latest column:

Five weeks ago, when I asked a Wall Street titan what one should do to be safe in the future, he took me aback with the concreteness of his advice, and its bottom-line nature. Everyone should try to own a house, he said, no matter how big or small, but it has to have some land, on which you should learn how to grow things. He also recommended gold coins, such as American Eagles. I went to the U.S. Mint Web site the next day, but there was a six-week wait due to high demand. (I just went on the Web site again: Production of gold Eagle coins "has been temporarily suspended because of unprecedented demand" for bullion.)

"Wall Street titan", in terms of credibility, doesn't carry quite the same panache as it used to does it? Although I did put a little money in a gold mutual fund a while back and I'm big in the gardening thing, so I'm with him there. Noonan continues with the sort of fascinating thesis I hadn't heard anywhere else:

The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the '00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn't notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi.

I think the underlying assumption with the banks was that housing prices would never go down as a group. Maybe Michigan's housing would, and California's, but not the whole country's. I don't think there's a pill responsible for that but I could be wrong.

Public Outrage Has Its Uses

Outbreaks of schadenfruede occur now and then, for I have to admit to greatly enjoying the latest spectacle, that which involved Sen. Chris Dodd inserting a line in the original legislation involving the bank bailout requiring that AIG bonuses be paid.

On Tuesday he denied he did it.

On Wednesday he admitted it, but said Treasury made him do it.

The only way this expose happened is via populist outrage. Be nice if it happened more often on the social cultural front.

This particular outrage might've been helpfully directed at Fannie & Freddie, although that's likely too complicated. This, however, is an understandable story: we bail out a large corporation while Dodd makes sure they provide themselves bonuses. It's tailor made for a soundbyte age though admittedly my summary of it sounds suspiciously soundbyte-y. Normally Dodd would easily get away with sticking that bonus clause in there. But maybe now the public is beginning to perceive a big part of the problem in this mess - politicians like Chris "Countrywide" Dodd and our sorry ass'd SEC. While the investment banks have rightfully been crucified in public opinion, politicians like Barney Frank appear to pay no cost whatsoever. (Although Frank only has to please his tiny district in Leftzombia, MA and Dodd has used mass-hypnosis on CT.)

I have mixed emotions about the government freely dispensing with private contracts. Government, it is said, is the only entity big enough to "create justice". But I see it as the only entity big enough to enforce massive injustice as well.

Celebration of Life Statue

I was running down Broad Street yesterday and came across one of my favorite city sculptures: the "Celebration of Life" by Alfred Tibor.

It's depicts Arthur Boke, the first black resident of Franklinton, and Sarah Sullivant, the white woman who raised him. Via Google:

Murphy said she fell in love with a prototype of "Celebration of Life" when she visited Tibor's studio in Whitehall. As an adult student in the music program at Capital University in Bexley, she'd seen Tibor's sculpture "Promise for Life" on the front lawn of Trinity Lutheran Seminary and contacted Tibor to see if he'd be willing to donate a piece to honor Arthur Boke and his adoptive family. Tibor agreed to donate his work, so all funds raised will go toward casting the full-sized statue at a foundry in Athens, Ohio.

The sculptor, 82, lost nearly all of his family members in the Holocaust, was drafted into a German labor battalion at age 20, was captured by the Russians, and survived five years in a Siberian war prisoners' camp. In 1956, Tibor and his wife and brother escaped their native Hungary; Tibor carried their son on his back, and his infant daughter was drugged to keep her from crying and alerting guards as they fled across the border at 2 a.m.

He and Murphy agree that the Sullivants' adoption of Arthur Boke is a love story that needs to be told.

"Alfred said it touched his heart, the story, because he said it was so human," Murphy says. "Sarah [Sullivant] could see, here was a helpless baby, and she nursed him, Arthur, right along with William. It was a great act of love."

Today's Word Among Us Prayer

Yesterday's Word Among Us

Father, I come before you to acknowledge that I have received from you gifts that I can never repay.

First, I received life itself. You didn’t have to bring me into existence, and you don’t have to keep me here, but you do. How can I possibly repay such love? Next, you have given me talents and abilities. I confess that I often use them for myself, for my own pleasure. Forgive me. I repent for not using them to glorify you. I’m sorry for keeping them for myself for my own purposes.

Father, you created me to know you and love you and serve you. You created me for a relationship of love flowing back and forth between us. Forgive me, Lord, for living independently from you. Forgive me for being so busy and self-absorbed that I don’t take enough time to sit with you and enjoy your company. So often, I haven’t listened for your voice or sought your leading as I go through my days. I move through them not really knowing or concerning myself with how you want me to serve and love others, either.

Have mercy on me, Father! I can be so proud and selfish, withholding from others what I take for granted from you: mercy, unconditional love, and the overlooking of my faults. Judgment, blame, and criticism are too familiar occupants of my thoughts. Father, show me how to put them aside for good. Teach me how to love you and others with your own love. Help me to know that love deeply myself, and to be so filled with it that it overflows to everyone I meet. I want to give you glory. I want to know you more. I want to love others as you have loved me.

Father, you are so patient! You never stop loving me. When I ignore you or defy your authority, when I gossip or slander or envy others, when I overindulge my senses—still you love me. Forgive me for those things. I lay my sins and offenses before you. I trust you to deliver and heal and change me.

“Yes, Lord, come and change me! I seek mercy, so make me merciful. I can never pay you back, Father, so let me instead pay the people around me with the gifts you have given to me.”

Onward Christian Novelists

Interesting addendum to an interesting post:

"Your posting got me thinking about another Christian novelist. D. Keith Mano, in Reflections of a Christian Pornographer (Christianity and Literature, Spring 1979, v28 n3, pages 5-11) tried to explain why `[f]or any serious Christian writer the obscene, the grotesque, the violent seem almost prerequisite.'

"He quoted from an essay in Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners, in which she explains what Mano calls the Christian novelist's `special alienation' in an age so unlike Dante's, i.e. in an age where, according to Mano, there is not for the Christian writer a "prodigious consensus of emotion and shared symbolism':

"`When I write a novel in which the central action is a baptism, I am very well aware that for a majority of my readers, baptism is a meaningless rite, and so in my novel I have to see that this baptism carries enough awe and mystery to jar the reader into some kind of emotional recognition of its significance. To this end I have to bend the whole novel-- its language, its structure, its action. I have to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts. Distortion in this case is an instrument; exaggeration has a purpose, and the whole structure of the story or novel has been made what it is because of belief. This is not the kind of distortion that destroys; it is the kind that reveals, or should reveal.'

"`Our salvation is a drama played out with the devil, a devil who is not simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy. I think that if writers with a religious view of the world excel these days in the depiction of evil, it is because they have to make its nature unmistakable to their particular audience.'

"`The novelist and the believer, when they are not the same man, yet have many traits in common-- a distrust of the abstract, respect for boundaries, a desire to penetrate the surface of reality and to find in each thing the spirit which makes it itself and holds the world together. But I don't believe that we shall have great religious fiction until we have again that happy combination of believing artist and believing society. Until that time, the novelist will have to do the best he can in travail with the world he has. He may find in the end that instead of reflecting the image at the heart of things, he has only reflected our broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by. This is a modest achievement, but perhaps a necessary one.' (pages 7-8)

In particular, Mano tries to explain his artistic need to use `obscenity'...

"`. . . if there is anyone with whom I feel a blood brotherhood, whose purposes and tactics are mine, it is-- not a fiction writer-- but the poet John Donne.' [He quotes "Batter my heart, three person'd God" (http://www.bartleby.com/105/74.html).] `In that holy sonnet I could rest my case. For only the sexual act can approach-- in its wild animal consummation-- the working of God's love in the human soul. Match that with St. John of the Cross: you know who is the greater poet. And who the greater mystic. Though their language and imagery are similar, Donne and St. John begin from different starting blocks, different premises. John has attained and needs to express. Donne needs to express so that he-- and his readers-- might hope to attain.' (page 10)

"`In a profane age, the profane must be taken unawares and in their own tongue.' (page 10)

"`You might say that the end, doubtful as it is, cannot justify the means. But the Flood was a means. Saint Paul's blindness. And the crucifixion. God does not go gently into our self-imposed night.' (page 11)"

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

There is only one way to separate politics from science, and that is to separate politicians from scientists. What connects them is money. If you're not for government defunding all its scientific programs, then you aren't for separating politics from science. - Tom of Disputations

The test of "a real democracy" is its defense of the most defenseless. - - Vatican commenter quoted in Reuters article regarding stem cell research

There's a juxtaposition issue, which has in some way, often been an issue for me and blogging, since my kind of blogging is a mix of issue-oriented, personal and cultural, I have often worried about the effect of blogging, say, a stinging post on a cover-up of clerical sexual abuse, followed by a cute photo of the kids? Or an amusing story? I worry about the effect of Grieving Post then Followed by Wry Amusing Post. But the thing is - that is life right now... It's juxtaposition. It's inconsistent. I guess we are all going to have to live with it. - Amy Welborn at Blognet's Via Media"

Have you ever looked -- I mean, really looked -- at what a priest is holding in his hands as he says the words, "This is My Body," during Mass?... you don't see the bread become the Body of Christ. You don't see anything happen. There's no instantaneous flash, there's no moment where the bread seems to go a little out of focus, no visual indication of the fabric of time and space opening ever so slightly to let in the Eternal. You've seen the central act of the source and summit of the Christian life... and you've seen nothing happen. It's said that the phrase "hocus pocus" comes from the Latin "hoc est Corpus Meum," but no stage magician will be invited back if nothing at all is ever seen to happen when he cries, "Hocus pocus!" Yet so eager are we for priests to say, "Hoc est Corpus Meum," when nothing at all is ever seen to happen that we pray for even more priests. It's why they call it "faith," of course. But it's also very wise. We don't come to Mass for the spectacle...And then the question is for you to answer: What do you believe is happening? - Tom of Disputations

S o Lent is just about at the halfway mark, and I was sitting back and congratulating myself. "I'm not doing too badly," I thought. "It actually hasn't been that hard to get up early and say morning prayer." And upon further reflection I realized: it's not been that hard because I haven't been doing it. - Mrs. Darwin here (Note to Bill Luse: there's a breastfeeding reference.)

I would sometimes have very well-intentioned and good-hearted people say "you can make your [A.A.] Higher Power anything you want, anything at all! Like a tree, or a rock..." That approach never, ever, ever worked with me, as I would have to point out that as a literalist, I have operated chainsaws and jackhammers and I know what they do to trees and rocks, and I need something a little bigger (i.e. more powerful) than that. What I ultimately settled on was that indefinable feeling of hope I got from rooms full of people who had been where I had been, and were heading to where I wanted to go...and that the whole was much, much greater than the sum of the parts. I could look for and find reasons not to identify and relate to any individual's experience, but if I am in a room with dozens or even hundreds of people who are sorting through and overcoming the same kind of dis/ease I am dealing with, and I consistently leave feeling much better than when I got there, their stories and experiences and advice have collectively given me something much bigger and far more powerful than my problems...I did spend a lot of time during those years going to halfway houses and prisons, trying to carry that message of hope to others farther down the slope from me. As the slogan goes, "you have to give it away to keep it"... And ironically, I could recognize the fact on some level, even during depressive, going-through-the-motions phases when I was not buying what I was selling ... You can act your way into "right" thinking a lot easier than thinking yourself into "right" behavior. - co-worker named "Dute"

“I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.” Let’s make allowances for provocation – Hazlitt recognized a good lead when he saw one – but there’s truth here. I’ve never counted but I move with regularity, like Kant in Königsberg, within a small radius -- though surely more than 30 titles. And the books I most look forward to reading are ones I’ve already read, sometimes more than once – A Dance to the Music of Time, for instance. I’m not philosophically opposed to new books. Rather, I’m jealous of my reading time and don’t want to squander it on books whose only likely virtue is a recent copyright. - Blogger at "Anecdotal Evidence"

At first, the incidents of early February seemed like a dream, rudely intruding, disrupting, shattering a perfectly good reality. And then the ground shifted, and what was before is starting to seem like a dream, a dream in which I drifted along in ignorance, in which I knew nothing, in which I was operating out of a set of delusions - that everything would be fine until we were old, just because...it would. On paper I would say, well, of course we are not immune from anything life has to offer - but in my heart, I believed exactly that. Which was a dream. I suppose (and hope) the next stage is accepting it all as reality, and trying to live in it now, accepting all the mysterious layers through which we humans must slog - past, present, future, inner and outer life and memories. - Amy Welborn at "Via Media"

[Jim Cramer] refused to get the fundamental point, and you can't blame him for that: To do so would have invited an existential crisis. [John] Stewart, expressing chagrin that Cramer had become the single face of a multiheaded monster, made a persuasive argument that the financial-news networks behaved (especially during the yearslong run-up to the mortgage crisis) less like watchdogs than jackals. The notion was that the networks, being aware of a gap between image and reality that they had steadfastly refused to address in their coverage, had abdicated their journalistic responsibilities. - Slate piece on the latest ruckus

One of Boring's key theses, without which (in his judgment) you cannot unlock [the Book of] Revelation, is that it is a pastoral letter. It was written to a particular audience to address a particular pastoral situation.This means, among other things, that its apocalyptic imagery was not intended to be opaque or hermetic. The audience (and Boring emphasizes that the letter was intended to be read during worship, so there was a literal audience) would be familiar with the sort of symbolism John used, and would understand his meaning without resort to obscure codes or implausible logical inferences...Still, Boring gives several reasons why it's worth taking the effort to understand the book, the last but not least of which is that in our own time Christians are confronted with various critical religiopolitical situations, just as those to whom John wrote his letter were. As Boring puts it in the last paragraph of the introduction, "Revelation does not speak about our time, [but] it does speak to it." - Tom of Disputations

St. Faustina Kowalska simply awes me. Her love for Jesus is so pure. There is no other word to describe what shines out of every page. When I read the thoughts and feelings she has recorded, I see how deep is the truth that love of God is inseparable from love of neighbour--how it is in the very style of the cosmos that there have to be two greatest commandments and not one. Hers is a pure passion, not just for adoring God as only a mystic can, but also for drawing as many souls as possible to His mercy as only an apostle does. If every Christian in the world could reproduce even a grain of her luminous whirlwind response to God, then the rest of the world would become Christian in an instant. - Sancta Sanctis

St. Patrick's Day

Amy has an interesting St. Patrick's Day post up. She talks about feeling the outsider for having gone to an Irish Catholic high school and having only a smidgeon of Irish blood.

Ironically I felt the same in the early years of my discovery of the local Irish community. My features are not especially Irish. I wondered if being half-Irish was enough to confer acceptance amid the Ancient Order of Hibernian circles with people who looked as Irish as leprechauns. I didn't know the saint we celebrate today wasn't Irish. Of course, next to my English, non-Catholic friend Ham, who accompanied me to events, I felt positively teeming with ambassadorship and Oirish bonhomie!

In our old downtown parish, there's a large painting of St. Patrick on the wall that somehow made it from Ireland from among those fleeing the famine.

St. Patrick arguably penned the greatest prayer ever written, short of the Lord's Prayer. It speaks of the only consolation for we exiles: Christ's presence -

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.

Fiction for a Tuesday

I was traveling in the heart of Central America, accompanied by a man who lived there. He was carrying a shiny white automatic coffee maker under his arm, making himself rather conspicuous I thought, and was going to poor shut-ins who couldn't afford an automatic coffee maker but who apparently had the money to pay a man to bring a coffee maker & make them coffee. I questioned not the arrangement nor how the coffee maker worked in areas lacking electricity since this was a dream. Although I didn't know it was a dream at the time, had I known I would've told the man that I was appreciative since this one was better than average.

He was subject constantly to la mordida, "the bite", and with increasing frequency we would encounter policemen demanding a bribe. One gleefully ran up to us pantomining a proboscis going into an arm, shamelessly playing his part of a mosquito wanting a share of blood. I asked him if the policemen bothered him and he shrugged helplessly. One ran by us, too busy to collect money it seemed, and I pointed that out. "There must be an emergency," I said, and he said there must be a more tempting target elsewhere.

The Definition of Idiosyncratic

Part of the specialness of C-Span is its delightful eccentricities, which mostly reflect those of its founder, Brian Lamb. It's like walking into a mom & pop store. You never know what you'll find.

The Q&A program is devoting not one, not a two, but three consecutive Sundays to the trial of shamed Alaskan senator Ted Stevens. There's such a wonderful gratuitousness in this, an absurdly romantic lack of concern over ratings. It's well known that only five people in the lower 48 care about Ted Stevens. It's appropriate that yesterday's program, a full hour, featured only an "Alaskan blogger". (Full disclosure: I missed last night's program. Save your emails and snarks as I'm sure it was interesting and edifying.)

I take a preverse interest in trying to discover what Brian Lamb is thinking, mostly because he's so reticent about his thoughts. Back in the Cold War days there were Kremlinologists; I'm an amateur Lambologist. Besides being obsessed with Lincoln, my latest thought concerning his thoughts is that he's really, really, really interested/concerned/surprised by political corruption. His recent out-of-retirement hour with a Weekly Standard writer who wrote about corruption is my only proof outside of this three part series.

Not having seen the Q&A program I can't comment on it other than to say the principle behind it is sound: examine in depth - I mean seriously in depth - how it was that a beloved (in his own state) Republican senator could fall from grace. Just as some Christians study Judas, Julian the Apostate, and others for clues to the human condition, it probably is wise to study Ted Stevens to see what can be gained from Alaska's experience. (Full disclosure: I know nothing about Ted Stevens or the charges against him. This post, amazingly, was written without either seeing the program in question or having any knowledge of subject of the program - that's not easy! My mom would be so proud.)

More Testing Thoughts

Testing is often used as an exclusionary process but the great thing about God is that he is resolutely non-exclusionary Being, as shown by today's readings. The homilist mentioned that in every Mass Christ uses the word "all" three times:

“Take this all of you and eat. This is my body which will be given up for you” / “Take this all of you and drink, this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, this cup will be shed for you and for all."

Now of course Heaven is exclusionary since we can't hold a belief in universal salvation. But it is still who humans who long for exclusion and caste; when Jesus ate with sinners He was greatly criticized. In "The Power of the Cross", Michael Dubruiel mentions the parable of the Prodigal Son:

Jesus tells this parable when he is in the process of being judged as someone who consorts with sinners. The "punch line" of the parable hits home for all of us prodigals: Those who are most likely to come to their senses are those who have experienced the emptiness of a life apart from God. The elder sons really don't see any readon to party; they haven't come to their senses yet.

Who is the greatest sinner in the parable of the Prodigal Son? Could it be the older brother, who is angry that his ungrateful little brother had come home? Often we resent this; we identify more with the elder brother than with the younger. In fact, when I've spoken on this parable it has often angered someone: Someone in their family, like the Prodigal Son, has taken the family's money, only to come back penniless and in search of more.

Ironcally, some Scripture scholars think that in the parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus is the son who takes the inheritance of the Father - his divine mercy and love - and squanders it on sinners! In the end, the Father is pleased. Once you've heard this way of looking at the parable, it's hard to see it any other way.

Yes, God's mercy is great; however, to experience it fully always involves a bit of crucifixion on our part. Our natural human way of looking at things is invariably fallible and has to die.

Ratzinger's Faith

Through the miracle of the local public library, I borrowed Ratzinger's Faith yesterday. It was full of tasty morsels, such as the distinctions within Thomism and Augustinianism. Before I'd thought of everyone as either a Thomist or an Augustinian but Balthasar and Garrigou-Lagrange are both Thomists so that alone should've given me pause.

As I've blogged before, I find testing (i.e. the necessity of dying literally & figuratively before reward) fascinating because it seemingly contradicts the unearned nature of grace. Of course in our present flawed condition, marked by original sin, our presence on this flawed earth is fitting*. It's less comprehensible with Adam & Eve before the Fall, living in a world with Satan already present. If their test was easier than ours it was still a test. But reading Ratzinger's Faith it seems my question is a very bourgeois one, one far from the mindset of God who is "aristocratic and erotic". The mentality of the aristocratic and erotic is sacrifice regardless of cost or test and focuses on the goal rather than the obstacles to that goal. For the erotically-inclined, obstacles to a love relationship are interesting only in how they can be surmounted. Questions like why are irrelevant, betraying a lack of trust.

I struggle with testing because I associate it with a pointless machoism that uses it to confer status and feed a sense of pride. In the City of Man, testing is completely understandable and manifests itself in primitive societies by rites of passage. It is a necessary hardening process in order that one might provide for oneself and one's family in a world that requires a decent amount of self-sufficiency in order to function. (See Communism as the alternative.) And yet it's obivous we don't need to be hardened in order to be in Heaven, or rather we do need to be hardened but hardened against ourselves. We don't have to be toughened up to see Mary and the saints, but we do have to be changed. Changed, it seems, into the aristocratic.

For the aristocratic, noblesse oblige applies and it's not surprising that John F. Kennedy, raised in boarding schools and in the American aristocracy, would say "we will bear any burden, pay any price" (i.e. not counting the price) in fighting our foes and supporting our allies. Tracey Rowland writes in Ratzinger's Faith:

[Ratzinger] speaks of the twin pathologies of bourgeois pelagianism and the pelagianism of the pious. He describes the mentality of the bourgeois pelagian as follows: 'If God really does exist and if He does in fact bother about people He cannot be so fearfully demanding as He is described by the faith of the Church. Moreover, I am no worse than others; I do my duty, and the minor human weaknesses cannot really be as dangerous as all that.' This attitude is a modern version of 'acedia' - a kind of anxious vertigo that overcomes people when they consider the heights to which their divine pedigree has called them. In Nietzchean terms it is the mentality of the herd, the attitude of someone who just cannot be bothered to be great. It is the bourgeois because it is calculating and pragmatic and comfortable with what is common and ordinary, rather than aristocratic and erotic...:

'They [pious pelagians] want security, not hope. By means of a tough and rigorous system of religious practices, by means of prayers and actions, they want to create for themselves a right to blessedness. What they lack is the humility essential to any love - the humility to be able to receive what we are given over and above what we have deserved and achieved. The denial of hope in favor of security that we are faced with here rests on the inability to bear the tension of waiting for what is to come and to abandon onself to God's goodness.'

_____________

* - Richard J. Neuhaus writes in American Babylon: "This world, for all its well-earned dissatisfactions, is worthy of our love and allegiance. It is a self-flattering conceit to think we deserve a better world. What's wrong with this one begins with us."

O'Reilly's Badge of Journalistic Honor

Bill O'Reilly is persona non grata among those who exercise power; his show is almost always limited to B-list political personages such as Dick Morris and Newt Gingrich. Rarely does he score the big interview, though he did land Obama before the election by personally going to a campaign event and repeatedly showing the resulting footage of Obama promising to appear on the show. You got to admire that he's not above begging.

The latest is that Speaker Pelosi won't even deign respond to a Fox News inquiry as to how many plane trips she's taken on the taxpayer's dime. It angers O'Reilly to be constantly snubbed but it's part of what makes his show valuable. He's perhaps the last journalist with an outsider's mentality. While that is not all there is to journalism (after all, O'Reilly missed the banking crisis too and the Iraq post-war difficutlies), it's a precondition for success and in that O'Reilly is ahead of most journalists. From the NY Times Opinionator:

Cramer’s pathetic performance emphasizes an important weakness of celebrity journalism. It is not a coincidence that CNBC reporters do crappy journalism and worship access to the top names. If Jim Cramer did his job as a journalist then celebrixecutivess like Vikram Pandit would stop talking to him. Believe it or not this explains a shocking range of journalism’s symptoms. Why do reporters grant anonymity to the most inane and innocuous statements? Why does lying to reporters never seem to have a consequence?...

The answer is that reporters want important people to keep taking their calls. For a reason that escapes me, people who are paid to understand politics all seem to think that “access” to people with a PR staff will get them some special insight when the only difference between speaking to them anonymously and asking their spokesperson is that the person can lie and most people will never know. Naturally the public would know if you called him on it, but then he wouldn’t take your calls anymore. Catch 22!

O'Reilly should wear it as a badge of honor that they don't take his calls.

Steele Not Exactly Uber Competent

I hope Republican chairman Michael Steele's latest gaffe, is a gaffe, meaning that he really isn't trying to take the party a different direction on issue of life. Certainly so far his comments have been cringe-worthy and only serve to make the Republicans continue to look like the old Washington Senators (or Washington Generals, pick your sport).

The lack of competence on the part of Republicans mirrors an even greater lack found on the Democratic side of the aisle of course. It's dangerous when you have both parties not knowing what the hell they're doing. Whereas we used to long for JFK's mythical Camelot, now we'll all take Competence and rejoice if we get even close to it (to the tune from the musical):

Competence! Competence!
I know it sounds a bit bizarre,
But in Competence, Competence
That's how conditions are...

Competence! Competence!
I know it gives a person pause,
But in Competence, Competence
Those are the legal laws.

A Chair By Any Other Name...

Events have ratcheted beyond my control. Chairgate '09 has assumed a gnarled, twisting course I'd not anticipated.

For one thing, my bete noir turned out to be a composite character! My initial foe who confronted me that fateful morning in late January, the one labeled "a very strong woman" by our secretary in a fine example of understatement, is said to have been outside-the-loop for quite some time. All the emails that have been sent to bosses and secretaries and nurses - which I hadn't been cc'd on - apparently involved a different lady, but one no less determined. My reaction is akin to learning that the real Shakespeare might've been Edward de Vere. My mouth stands ajar.

My co-workers have not been disinterested in the outcome and so for their sake I must no longer feign indifference. My chair has become their chair too, my plight their plight! It would be the very height of selfishness for me to try to protect my reputation and discard my chair and allow their morale to suffer for it. So though I regret I have but one chair to give to my company it seems I must keep my chair for the sake of my unit, er, my fellow countrymen.

Longtime followers of As the Chair Swivels know that we left on cliffhanger: our sweet nurse had made an appointment to "assess" my chair. Ideally I would've cleaned and polished the chair, spruced him up a bit for the big date. But work intervened. Queries to be run, a new study to be done, and so I was distracted by the very purpose that the chair serves. Or so goes my convenient excuse.

Nurse Nightingale arrived at the appointed time, looking like no nurse I'd ever seen. She'd left her white coat purposely behind for this mission of mercy, of which I was glad because my boss is petrified of white coats and I'd planned to bring her over for a quick meeting with him.

She mentioned at the outset how she'd gotten off the elevators on our floor and assumed "the Chair" would guide her to my cube as a sort of reverse star of Bethlehem. Warned she was by this "eyesore", she'd assumed there were bright lights shining on it and that the ugliness was plainly visible to passersby. She was amazed to find it so far off the beaten track, and to see with her own eyes how un-eyesore-like the chair was. "We have many chairs like this," she said, adding only that it could use some cleaning. She also made mention that never to her knowledge have any floor moves engendered this sort of chair dispute.

We left it that the nurse would say that she'd now seen the chair and that my boss is supporting the keeping of said chair and that even though the purchase of a new chair would not come out of his budget it would come out of the company's budget but that since we work for the company perhaps that ought to enter into the equation.

My boss said he'd wanted to fight it from the beginning and said he was only holding off as long as he did because of my reluctance to have it rise as an issue above his level. That's sadly too late, as everybody and their brother on the org chart short of CEO have been notified by the hysterics of my composite bete noir. So fight on, I say! Fetch the mede and mount the horses and announce to the troops: "Forward, the Light Brigade!":

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reel'd from the sabre stroke
Shatter'd and sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Thanks go out to Tennyson, who really understands.

UPDATE: A fellow colleague also understands, offering:

'Tis but thy style of design that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not an approved office chair.
What's an approved office chair? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a chair. O, be some other style of office chair!
What's in a name? that which we call a chair
By any other name would fit my butt just as well;
So the old chair would, were he not the old chair call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Old chair, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.