Country Daze

"I look to the hills, from whence cometh my help," always come to my mind in the mountains of Hocking Hills, the land the glaciers forgot. Puffs of cloud hover just above the trees crowns like halos. And how clear the birds sing here! They sing in a foresty, full-throated way as if oblivious to habitat destruction, global warming, and Adam's fall.

For our 10th (there's something relaxing and impressive to me at least about reaching the double-digit milestone), we rented a place with a wrap-around porch on the second-story affording grand views of the forested foothills but also, unfortunately, a highway: "Got an interstate runnin' through their front yard" indeed. One need never feel lonely here, the parade of traffic being more or less constant on Memorial Day weekend. We wish for silence but the view is nice; the interior is fabulous enough to make up for the sins of location.

I must have been more contemplative as a youth (is it sad to be competitive with a former self?) or at least to have had a more Thoreauian boredom threshold for now it amazes me I spent a week in a tent down at a Kentucky state park with my uncle way back when. No TV, no radio, no Internet...."not a single luxury" as the theme from Gilligan's Island goes. Breakfast and dinners must've been repetitious to put it mildly. Could kids today do what I did? Like a muscle I suspect it must be exercised.

But as a two-day trip it's wonderful if a bit Roman: hot-tub in the a.m., breakfast, exercise, followed by long smoke of a cigar for a couple hours afterwards which felt like a couple minutes. Friday night we watched the movie Fireproof which was preachy but at least had a great message. (If I'm going to be preached to I prefer it concern something as important as marriage.) It had an evangelical bent for sure - becoming a child of God was defined only in terms of the personal commitment of the character rather than with Baptism. Pelagianism we have always with us.

Saturday afternoon I headed to the KOA campground to explore. The way there, all uphill, felt like ascending to the ceiling of the world, as if I was visiting Ohio's Tibet. On the road a flat-stomached boy was selling firewood in that uniform peculiar to this area: long jeans sans shirt. I did a cost benefit analysis in my mind concerning the value of a flat stomach and, not surprisingly, it didn't merit further consideration.

There was a high kitsch general store at the foot of the trail. My cheap sunglasses had broken in my pocket requiring new cheap sunglasses. The only semi-decent pair they had looked like something from Elvis's Late Period but beggars can't be choosers.

Afterwards I headed to Old Man's Cave which was as crowded as Disneyworld. How stunning the Smokey Mountain-like green moss, the trickling water, the cool caves with boulders like glacier erratum. Not long on the trail I came across a family huddled around a motionless dog who had apparently fallen from a height, the same height that so enraptures me. Rangers were notified and they said they thought the poor thing has a chance.

I ponder the binaric meaning of the couple hiking past, the man with a Yale t-shirt and the woman with Harvard; it seemed somehow fitting: men are from Yale, women from Harvard...

The waters felt almost Lourdesian, with large crowds of people walking single file down towards the pools, patiently waiting for others when the passageway grew too narrow for two.
____
Home again in Columbus, I feel the gentle fatigue from hiking up those strength-coming hills, as well as the lingering imagery of the majestic scale of our cabin with the eighteen-foot ceilings and comparable windows which let in such a variety of light. It felt like we were living amid the tree tops and I've always wanted a wrap-around second-story porch, and so I did for a fortnight or two days, whichever is less. The wood panelled walls and floor gleamed amber in the reflected light.

Literary-wise I read deliriously from Dickens's Little Dorrit, so transportive it twas, but ruined the palate with some non-fiction such as Court of the Red Tsar. Dickens can write so lyrically while at the same time create such interesting characters.

I don't think I've read everything from Chesterton and Orwell concerning Chas Dickens yet. Whereas before I would read something like "Thoreau and His Contemporaries" now I'm less interested in what his contemporaries thought than what Orestes Brownson or Fr. Hacker did. Authority for me has become less democratic. But I do want to read more, especially after watching the marvelous PBS production of Little Dorrit. These Masterpiece Theatre shows make me feel sorry for the networks: the set designs, the photography, the actors! - the actors look exactly as the characters, just as the names Dickens gives them so often reflects their inward reality. And of course the writing is grand.

____
Ohio has warmed up nicely lately. The days' temps now visit the mid-80s and winter's long reach has ended. The last frost date is officially behind us. The air is humid now which gives off pleasant associations of vacation time. Spring is fickle and not to be trusted, while autumn is faithful but is always eventually overcome. Late May is like God: all vigor and loyalty without a scorched earth policy.

I step out the back porch and catch my breath - it's like walking back in time to last summer, or of all summers' past. The sun is warm, the patio stones hot to the foot, and grass, sun, tree and flower greet me like welcome paparazzi. You're a star, they say, the earth affording me the red carpet treatment. There is no discernible wind which makes paper stay in place like magic. Forgetfulness, in the form of not placing weights, is rewarded for once. When the rains came, they came in sheets straight as a young girl's bangs: I could sit under the patio umbrella without getting wet from sidewinders.

Fiction for a Sunday

Fred was a Pabst Blue Ribbon sort of guy, at least before the brand got hot.

For a few uneasy months there was an overlap in sales of PBR between the blue-collar bait-'n-tackle drinker and the metrosexual urbanite. But since Fred didn't label himself by the products he consumed so it didn't much matter.

He lived close to the ground with a healthy lack of self-absorption. To him, the "unexamined life" was the life for him. He'd married into a family of blue-bloods who traced their ancestry to certain ducal personages in medieval England. They had get-togethers so often that he often lacked anecdote to share, not even a new successful car repair. But he liked being with them.

They were always going to "the City", which meant New York City, and they always invited him to MOMA or the latest on Broadway or the Philharmonic. Fred was bored by it and wished Phil and his harmonic would cease and desist. He longed not for the transcendent experiences but for simply his in-law's presence.

Le Bike Ride

I turned the corner and rode into a Monet painting, the air suffused with southern France and bewitched with the stray cottonwood wisp here and there, like the ones that softly blew in between the slats of the open stained glass window at Mass. They were like planetary-sized dust motes, I thought at the time, before untracting my distraction back towards the altar.

Oh yes but did the ride feel full of inexplicablilities, of lost youths, of alternate realities, all buffeted by six-foot hedges that bloomed tiny white dimples and gave the air the smell of apricots.

I rode by Lady Britannica's house, the bookseller whose eccentricities I've long meditated on and wondered about, wondered in the sense of "wonder", she who called me all sorts of horrible names including "liar" but whom I felt a great measure of pity towards afterward, the way Christopher Buckley felt when Gore Vidal wrote horrible things about his father almost on the eve of WFB's burial. To hate so fiercely as Vidal becomes a sort of love in its self-sacrificial aspect - sacrificing his dignity, intelligence and part of his sanity for Buckley; perhaps that's why God said it was only the lukewarm he spat from his mouth.

Lady B had a large sign festooned on her front porch that said:

Help Wanted! Strong, intelligent* young man. (* - knows the alphabet!)

I laugh, enrichened by her humor, she who wants a boy of high school age to re-stack books. The alphabet being a low threshold to meet, one would think.

Her side gate has multiple signs that say the same thing:

I won't tell you when I am watching YOU from a window - I will only call the police!

This in a town where crime is not exactly rampant.

I bike on, listening to the otherwordly ballad "My William" by the band Stark Raven. I marvel at the talent it represents; the poetic wordsmithing, the perfect marriage of lyric and tune. Days like these make me long to read Proust, although I figure it's not Proust but some idea I have of him, something he couldn't possibly live up to in print...

An Amateur Did it Better

It's probably not especially newsworthy, or blogworthy, when a Catholic blogger produces a better headline than the professionals at the LA Times but...

The latter's headline read (last week), as reprinted in the Columbus Dispatch: "Pope Calls for End to Barrier in West Bank".

Which certainly got me reading. Did he really?

Well what Pope Benedict actually said was: "First, though, it is necessary to remove the walls that we build around our hearts...".

Immaculate Heart of Mary’s Hermitage Report's headline more accurately reflects the reality of what Benedict actually said: "Hostilities That Have Led to Building of Wall Must End".

Quote o' the Day

Comes from blogger Paul Lambert:

Should there even be such as thing as public schools - that is, school systems which are funded by taxes, managed by elected officials, and which have near exclusive rights to provide service to assigned geographic areas?

My answer to that question would be "NO!"
---

If this kind of system works so well, why don't we use it for food distribution? Instead of taking your own cash and going to the supermarket of your choice, everyone would be issued food coupons that could be used only at the government-operated commissary in your local community. You could choose not to use the coupons, and go to a private supermarket and pay cash, but you would be paying for the food coupons anyway. It would be hard for most to pay cash for food at the private supermarket when it seems free at the public commissary.

That is, of course, not what we do. Consumers take their cash and go to the supermarket of their own choice. Supermarkets compete with each other by offering choices in terms of variety, quality, convenience and price. And for those people in our society who cannot afford adequate food, we give them vouchers - called food stamps - which they can spend anywhere they like. The government sticks to the task of making sure everyone can buy food, and the food industry takes care of putting food on the shelves.

Why not the same thing with schools?

Closing in on Summer

Like the other Mae, when May is bad, she's very bad. But when she's good...

Bias Rears Its Familiar Head

It's just so tragic when a self-identified objective reporter finds information that makes the Dems look bad, isn't it? NY Times reporter Stephanie Strom was looking into the Obama-ACORN connection and expressed sadness about where it was leading, writing in an email to a source:

“Am also onto the Obama connection, sadly. Would love the donor lists. As for helping the Repubs, they’re already onto this like white on rice. SIGH!”

Bad Repubs, bad!

It may actually be helpful to have these sorts of comments come out because it provides some sunshine. It's helpful when reporters identify their own bias upfront. We're going the old-fashioned way of broadsheets. My understanding is that in early newspaper history there wasn't much pretence of objectivity. Sort of like now.

Is the "sunshine" (i.e. clarity) that came out of the Notre Dame scandal, specifically the rapturous cheering of the ND students which asserted that ND is a thoroughly secular school now, good or bad? It's good in that it will give impetus and strengthen more orthodox Catholic schools like Stuebenville and Ave Maria; it's bad in that it will make Notre Dame that much less salvageable.

But back to Ms. Strom's sturm and drang: her bosses at the Times killed the story lest it hurt Obama's election chances...

Today's Word Among Us Meditation

...is here:

We might wonder how St. Paul was able to turn his prison cell into a place of worship. If you had just been falsely accused, beaten, and imprisoned on account of doing God’s work, would you stay up all night singing his praises? You’d be more likely to give God or the jailer a piece of your mind, protest your unfair treatment, and then withdraw to sulk. When our lives take a turn for the worse, it can be difficult to even understand God, let alone praise him!

But Paul responded the way he did because his life had been steeped in prayer. His primary desire was to please the Lord. A few years after this incident, from yet another prison cell, Paul would write, “For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8). He had learned how to be content in any circumstance. It was Christ who gave him the strength to endure any situation (4:12-13), and not only to endure it but to rejoice and glorify God in the midst of it.

You may or may not be in jail right now, but each of us has had some situation in our lives where we may feel bound. Illness, unemployment, and unresolved family issues are just a few of the things that can lock us in prisons of anger or frustration. Don’t give up! If you do anything, try your best to praise God for his goodness and his mercy! He can lift you up above your immediate circumstances if you try to release them to him. Remember his promise: “They that hope in the Lord will … soar as with eagles’ wings” (Isaiah 40:31).

“Lord, I lift my heart to you in praise and thanksgiving. Help me to rejoice in you through all of life’s circumstances, good or bad. May I bless you at all times.”

Bruni's Words

Carl Olsen articulates my confusion over Carla Bruni's recent revelation:

Bruni may have been born and baptized Catholic, but her approach to living has been, to use her apt words, profoundly secular, as described in this December 2007 news piece:

Bruni herself says she does not mind her man-eating reputation. "I’d rather be called a predator than an old flea-bag. Predator — it’s not that bad for a woman."

In February this year she remarked: "I’m monogamous occasionally but I prefer polygamy and polyandry. Love lasts a long time but burning desire — two to three weeks."

Nor is she shy of talking about sex. "Sex, very pleasant. It’s one of the advantages of getting older... age increases sensuality and the pleasure," she has said.

But, amazingly, not a word about Mass, studying the Catechism, considering life in a convent, or praying the Rosary! Are you as shocked as I am?

So there you have it: a baptized Catholic who seems to have had flings with nearly every famous man she's ever met is saying she is now—just now! only now! just today!—a lapsed Catholic because the Pope's/Church's refusal to condone the use of condoms is going to cause AIDS to spread further in Africa.

Where Christianity always becomes a scandal is exactly at the point - here's a shocker - at which it becomes a cross. I say this only out of a recognition of my own distaste for the cross. In other words "it's all good until somebody gets hurt," meaning the potential, in this case, for self-inflicted physical hurt by promiscuous sex. Spiritual hurt and spiritual death seem completely uninteresting to her. Body uber alles. Better Africans go to Hell than get HIV.

As long as the Pope taught something without seeming repercussion - i.e. preaching chastity while she (or we) enjoy unchastity - "it's all good". But should he wield political influence, in getting in the way of a condom-a-day for everyone, then he's just an awful person.

I suppose it was ever thus. We constantly wish to put Christianity in a separate box, away from the public square. The scary thing is that she self-identified as Catholic until so recently.

Contrasting the example of Bruni-Sarkosy, I was so moved by what Lydia said in the reading from the book of Acts, chapter 16, recently:

And when she and her household were baptized, she begged us, saying, “If you consider me a believer in the Lord, she said, come and stay at my house."

Even after Baptism, she doesn't proclaim herself a believer so much as hope the Apostle does. She cedes to him the right to call her what he will. I daresay she's St. Lydia now.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

A man who came to interview me for a publication the other day pointed out that I was never bored. I hadn’t thought of that before, but it’s true: I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).- Theodore Dalrymple quoted on "Anecdotal Evidence"

Liebling, like any writer worth his prose, was an inveterate prickly individualist. He lived up to one of his own sentences, now taped to the Cartier-Bresson photograph of Liebling hanging above my desk: `The way you write is well, and how is your own business.’ - Patrick of Anecdotal Evidence

If you think you have nothing at your disposal to do the good works which God is demanding of you, then you might have forgotten your health. It is His Blood in your body--and that is everything you really need. - E. of Sancta Sanctis

I was as distressed as anyone by the rock-star reception by Obama, just as I would if Bush or any other politician were greeted in such a way at a Catholic institution. We've had enough problems with sucking up to civic authority over the last few dozen centuries, haven't we? It was creepy in a "Justice Sunday" kind of way. - Amy Welborn

Of course, the protests are going to embarrass elite university professors, even when those professors are strongly pro-life and disapprove of Notre Dame’s awarding of an honorary degree to a man who, by rescinding the Mexico City Policy, now has American tax dollars funding abortions in foreign countries. The protests began among the ordinary people and they are couched in the vulgate language of ordinary people: Shocking! Loud! Graphic!—how could the sophisticated not find them vulgar? - Joseph Bottum at First Things

Like many pro-choice politicians, Barack Obama says he wants abortion to be safe, legal, and rare, while doing everything in his power to advance it...It would be like Ronald Reagan at Notre Dame saying that he wanted to take down Soviet communism while simultaneously subsidizing it with taxpayer dollars throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR. It would be like Reagan calling on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall while sending in cement trucks and rolls of barbed wire. - Paul Kengor quoted on Ignatius Insight

The few bishops who have stated that their understanding of canon law moves them to declare that abortion-rights supporting Catholic politicians have cut themselves off from the Eucharist are accused of "politicizing the Eucharist." Which never made any sense to me. If a bishop said, "You're a Democrat. You can't receive Communion." That's politicizing the Eucharist. But focusing on a position and support for organizations that provide and promote abortion is not about politics. It's about moral issues that do happen to have a political dimension. It's the same with Obama and Notre Dame. Is the criticism being leveled because Obama is a Democrat? No...does anyone really think that if Rudolph Giulani or Arnold Schwarzenneger were invited to serve in the same role, that those protesting Obama's role would be either silent or cheering? - Amy Welborn

The other day I was watching "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, and Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, came on from Washington to talk about health care. A reporter on the set, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, asked a few clear and direct questions: What is President Obama's health-care plan, how would it work, what would it look like? I leaned forward. Finally I will understand. Ms. Sebelius began to answer in that dead and deadening governmental language that does not reveal or clarify but instead wraps legitimate queries in clouds of words and sends them on their way. I think I heard "accessing affordable quality health care," "single payer plan vis-à-vis private multiparty insurers" and "key component of quality improvement." In any case, she didn't answer the question, which was a disappointment but not a surprise. No one answers the question anymore. - Peggy Noonan

The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any. - Katharine Whitehorn

From Ham of Bone on ND

From Ham, mentioning how Obama's message was Orwellian:

"The message that President Obama delivered in his speech at Notre Dame was: morality is immoral. Pro-life is the extremist position, not a moral position. Yet we should compromise and work to reduce abortions. Where's the compromise between life and death -- and why work to reduce the number of them occurring if there's nothing wrong with them?" -Rush Limbaugh

Ham continues:

Also, while riding on the train into NYC today, I saw the following headline in the New York Post referring to Obama at ND: "Into the Lions' Den." Which is about as evil a phrase as I've ever come across.

For My Bro-in-Law Who's Always Callin' "Hoax"

Snope Dog E.

If you're tired of the scams then Snope is the name
'Cuz I don't play those lame old email games
I get five a day and they tell me that it's real
but it turns out they're not and it makes me wanna squeal.

CHOR: 'Cuz you know I'm the Snope dog
and I'm always callin' "Hoax!"
'cuz my homies don't stay real
and I gotta correct the folks.

Let me set it to you strait y'all
Cuz you make me want to holla
you won't type snopes.com
Gets me hot unner the colla'

CHORUS

'Lizbeth is the queen of the chain email
she hits the Forward button like she's gettin' out of jail
Won't go to snopes.com for love or money
so I holla's HOAX, oh it's just too funny.

CHORUS

"Don't dial 876!", "You gotta see this"
"Forward to your friends" and don't nobody miss
But the Snope Dawg's on the watch and I'm gonna holla Hoax
if you don't check your facts and get yer butt out to Snopes.

In Praise of Rain

There's something ineffably homey about a rainy day.

It makes me crave homemade soup and a comfy chair on the protected front porch that offers a front row seat for nature's drama.

I especially love the very beginnings of rain, its imminent threat. The world becomes hushed and calm. No one's outside but the birds. There are no lawn mowers or leaf blowers or any of the detritus of modern audial life.

It's not unlike a very minor illness which gives you leave to spend your time in sedentary pursuits like reading and introspection. It gives introverts an even playing field since even extroverts must be more introspective when the rains come.

I like that the dream-state rain begets, the sort of healing, disassociative state. I like the dark purply clouds, the rustling wind with the smell of water in the air and the first tiny droplets of rain. I like the way it makes you feel hungry for poetry and solitude. When it pours, there is nothing nicer than reading in the bookroom while the rain pelts the roof.

Because No One Else Is Talking About It...

...I'll talk about Obama at ND. (Joke.) A few thoughts....

Seemed to go according to script, with the exception that the crowd was a bit more friendly than I expected (almost a Democratic National Convention type of crowd although I was relieved when they started chanting "We Are...ND" and not "Yes We Can!" or "Obama!").

Didn't catch the whole intro, but Jenkins more effusive concnerning Obama than I thought he would be. I think Catholic university presidents are generally incapable of feeling chastised except by the Magisterium of Newsweek and the New York Times. But they do want to avoid hassle & potential alum dissatisfaction...

Where the students are concerned, if it was a teaching moment, the teaching seemed to come mainly from President.

First time I've heard of conservative protesters interrupting someone's speech. High ground = lost?

The big uproar made was probably the right thing despite the fact that in the short run it's not pretty. Every media outlet covered the speech whereas without the controversy no one but C-Span would. Unlike the State of the Union, there is no rebuttal or response. In an age where reading is dead and only pictures matter, the pictures sadly say: "Magnanimous reasonable-sounding president" and "unreasonable mean protesters". The only way to won in this situation is not to have invited Obama in the first place. American Catholic Church big on circular firing squad concept. But in the long run it seems likely Catholic universities won't want the headaches involved in honoring pro-choice politicians.

Concentratus Interruptus

One of the things that's been true about the work world as I've experienced it is that concentration is not something highly valued, if at all. Not by ourselves and not by our bosses. It’s broken more often the $10 Rolex I bought on 34th & 5th Ave last summer.

It is what it is, and I notice the tendency in myself. When I’m walking out and about, those in their cubicles seem quaint with their furrowed brows and low centers of gravity. They can’t possibly be doing anything important. Easy marks. You almost want to interrupt them. At the very least you want to give a shout out to your psuedo-homies.

But when you’re actually trying to do something it’s sort of annoying, be it work-related or not. Especially when you realize the interruption is so unimportant that it simply must be a masked cry for help from the bored or socially deprived. Then you feel bad for your abruptness. Because you can't hide body language.

An example occurred recently when two strangers who work for a company acquired by ours were laid off. Apparently our bosses were involved in this, and no doubt it was a tough decision for them even if it was about five years overdue in strictly business terms given the redundancies. Surely there was a “writing on the wall” aspect to it for those unfortunate fellows.

My boss came over to tell me about it yesterday and it meant about as much to me as Pelosi’s flap with the CIA. It was interesting for about the first two to five seconds.

Then today we get an email from a higher-up expressing regret that these two-folks-whom-I-don’t-know-from-Adam were let go. But here’s the kicker: my boss comes over again and and asks if I have any questions about the note sent out. I thought it had to be a trick question. Did he forget we talked about it yesterday?

Let's recap: two strangers working three hundred miles away are let go and it results in no less than three communications. These are the times that I feel like I live in an alternative universe, as if I'm missing some fantabulous "caring gene" that my boss carries but I lack. I overheard him asking the same question of a co-worker who (soothingly to my ear) also said "no".

In the words of Yogi Berra "you can't make it up". (If Yogi didn't say it he should have.) And, of course, I recognize the inanity of being irritated about a thing so minor as to defy description.