Point/Counterpoint

Interesting exchange at Jeff Culbreath's Facebook page, where he quoted John Senior:

The whole of our semi-socialist society is a vast, lopsided dis-economy in which few do necessary work and many are parasitic. It would be rash to fix any definite degree of sin on the part of those involved in parasitic work, but from the point of view of economic health we are suffering from a plague. Economic life ...has become an occasion of sin in which virtue becomes morally impossible for the majority.

To which Michael Liccione replied:

The more prosperous a society becomes overall, the smaller the percentage of people needed to actually make, fix, or maintain things, and the more opportunities there are for leisure and contemplation. I don't think that's bad in itself. It's only bad when people aren't taught how to use those opportunities well.

Indeed, as John Adams famously said, "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." Personally, I'd skip the porcelain. It breaks too easy and there's no one with the skills to fix it.

NFL & St. Therese

Regarding prayer, St. Therese of Lisieux famously wrote:

"Prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy."

And I think how this encapsulates football players after a good play - they point towards heaven and it looks like a surge of the heart, a recognition and of love for the Creator and in a desire to credit Him. And yet where it breaks down is "embracing both trial and joy." There's rarely if ever any looking towards Heaven after a bad play, after a fumble, that is during a trial. Not that I'm a whiz at that either...

"Mass Hysteria"

Title comes from the title of an email from an acquaintance in KY, who writes:

My husband is from Mass and he was so excited about the election last night that he was having chest pains. I was afraid that he was having a heart attack but he refused to go to the emergency room.

I'm still having trouble digesting it. I can't figure it out, perhaps because I have a tendency to label people or states and MA is a blue state as has been pointed out ad nauseum. I was also a bit surprised to find the western part of the state more pro-Coakley than the eastern side. I figured all the elites were along the shoreline and the more rural denizens out west, but then my level of knowledge of MA politics is limited at best. Maybe it's as simple as recognizing Bay staters are more influenced by a candidate's charisma (Brown, Kennedy) than by reflexive ideology, although admittedly that makes Michael Dukakis & John Kerry perplexing.

On one level, given the string of Republican governors from Weld to Romney, I guess I shouldn't be surprised a Republican could win a Senate seat. But then too the margin of Coakley - up some 30 points in December - and the rate of decrease was just phenomenonal. I wonder what impact the 24/7 cable media has on races; the dynamic seems to be able to change in a hurry. Her free fall occurred not over months and not even so much over many weeks. The electorate turned, and turned in a hurry.



For the first time in eons I watched Keith Olbermann - simply for purposes of schadenfreude. "It's never over till the other team's cheerleaders are crying," said a friend in the '80s. Grim faces dominated the landscape there, and tiny leakages of humility were seen. I assume they were restrained from calling the voters idiots simply because some of the five people who watch MSNBC would be turned off by that sentiment.

Dreams of Memes (via Steven Riddle's blogorhythm)

1. Which book has been on your shelves the longest?
A Child's Book of Poems

2. What is your current read, your last read and the book you'll read next?
Currently reading "Game Change". Just finished "Come Be My Light", next to read hopefully "The Sober Intoxication of the Spirit".

3. What book did everyone like and you hated?
Dante's Inferno

4. Which book do you keep telling yourself you'll read, but you probably won't?
Proust's Remembrances of Things Past

5. Which book are you saving for "retirement?"
What retirement?

6. Last page: read it first or wait till the end?
Wait.

7. Acknowledgments: waste of ink and paper or interesting aside?
Rarely read unless the author/book is of especial interest.

8. Which book character would you switch places with?
No, not Skimpole. No....!

9. Do you have a book that reminds you of something specific in your life (a person, a place, a time)?
Laurie Colwin's "Happy All the Time".

10. Name a book you acquired in some interesting way.
I acquired a New Testament from a church in the Smokey Mtns. In retrospect, not sure they were free for the taking or just for church services.

11. Have you ever given away a book for a special reason to a special person?
Yes.

12. Which book has been with you to the most places?
The Bible.

13. Any "required reading" you hated in high school that wasn’t so bad ten years later?
Oh Shakespeare for sure.

14. What is the strangest item you’ve ever found in a book?
religious card

15. Used or brand new?
New if possiblie.

16. Stephen King: Literary genius or opiate of the masses?
What, there's no middle ground?

17. Have you ever seen a movie you liked better than the book?
Lord of the Rings

18. Conversely, which book should NEVER have been introduced to celluloid?
Moby Dick

19. Have you ever read a book that's made you hungry, cookbooks being excluded from this question?
"The Naked Pint" with all the talk of flavors.

20. Who is the person whose book advice you'll always take?
"Always" is a strong modifier.

Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

"Nou atè nèt”: three words in Creole that roughly mean, we are on our knees, conclude an e-mail sent from Father Andre Siohan, a missionary of the French San Jacques Society, writing from Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince a few hours after the quake that hit the city. - Missionary News Service Agency

Since the day of his Resurrection, the Church exists only to make God's affection an experience, through people who are His. - Frederick tweet

Can you imagine a more cantankerous duo--a diptych in irrascibility and harsh (as an artform)? - Steven of "Momentary Taste" on Christopher Hitchens versus Gore Vidal

So here we have an atheist who, in arguing that there is no God, acts like God. And not just any god, but the God of Abraham. There are a lot of possible explanations for this. That the omnipresence of God extends even into human arguments against His existence is just one of them, but it may be the most satisfying. - Tom of Disputations

I don't expect Christmas Day to be magical and perfect. I'm happy to just get through it. Realizing that Christmas is a season and not just one day has also given me a sense of relief in that area - not too much expectation piled on to one day. - Elena of "My Domestic Church"

Privacy is not only essential to life and liberty; it’s essential to the pursuit of happiness, in the broadest and deepest sense of that phrase. It’s essential, as Schneier implies, to the development of individuality, of unique personality. We human beings are not just social creatures; we’re also private creatures. What we don’t share is as important as what we do share. The way that we choose to define the boundary between our public self and our private self will vary greatly from person to person, which is exactly why it’s so important to be ever vigilant in defending everyone’s ability and power to set that boundary as he or she sees fit. Today, online services and databases play increasingly important roles in our public and our private lives - and in the way we choose to distinguish between them. Many of those services and databases are under corporate control, operated for profit by companies like Google and Facebook. If those companies can’t be trusted to respect and defend the privacy rights of their users, they should be spurned. - Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog

I don't mind being ruled by elites. I just wish they were less ordinary. - Tom of Disputations tweet

I find that whenever I finish a book that purports to give me the "history" of anything, I find myself dubious. For example, on the issue of Pope Pius XII, I find it extremely difficult to believe any of the detractors or many of the supporters. I get the sense that the truth, slippery though it may be falls into the cracks between the two. Did Pius do as much as he possibly could to have turned aside the Holocaust--I somehow doubt it--but I don't know. Did he do nothing at all for any Jews ever--the voices of David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir (neither known for their tolerance of anti-Jewish sentiment) strongly suggest otherwise. But once I've finished a book, I am no better off. I know neither more nor less that I did before, merely other. The documents are cited and cut to show the jib of the argument, and thus, one needs to return to the primary sources, which in the case of the documents of someone like Thomas Jefferson, may well have been tampered with by Jefferson, his partisans, or his detractors. - Steven of "Momentary Taste"

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong. - G.K. Chesterton

Parody is Therapy blog...

...updated with the FBI's lame attempt at Photoshop and how Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab's didn't get the memo that Bush is no longer in charge.

The Daily Blog

So will there be another Lexington & Concord today? Will the MA minions shoot at the Coakley redcoats? Tis a fascinatingly impossibly drama to this outsider. It's hard to believe Coakley won't get a huge turnout today given that Obama still has a castely following and he reportedly revved them up. Still, the weather's schlecht and on such things battles are won or lost, be they military and political.
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Over a ribald pint I gathered in the literary critics on Homer. And instead I'm given over to nostalgia, touching the old books that I bought when I knew nothing but did not know it unlike now when I know nothing and know it. I began to read from Sam Tannehaus's Literature Unbound and admired the words for their erudite sophistication; the philosphy hardly mattered. I was into the baroque and so the profusion of profundities were enough.

Gently I handle the mass-market paperback from the '80s, $3.50 for the slim volume. I relish the fact that now I've heard of Mr. Sam; back when I bought the book he was as no-name to me at least. He seems now to be a semi-sane voice albeit from the liberal side of the aisle. Experience has taught me to have low expectations of academics.

I then moved my hand down book row to a trifecta of Updike nonfiction and I am again in awe at the ocean of matter he's produced, the relentless sea of words, words, words, forming sentences, sentences, sentences. Sentient sentences. I always picture, when seeing the Updike books, of me in my old age, dottering through page-by-page, like a mad scientist in his laboratory, seeking the goal of having read all of Updike's literary criticism.

I pick up the Kenneth Rexroth and enjoy the fine brevity regarding Homer. I call up wikipedia on my computer and read about him. It's hard to believe that before the Internet we could not easily get something like that. With wikipedia, I learn more than I need to know, about his marriages, politics, and some lit crit on his own poetry.

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There are types: Augustinian or Thomist, Dickensian or Dostoevskian, comic or tragic. I think of my friend Hambone and how he loves Dostoevsky - like the late Richard Neuhaus - and in both there is a pugilistic tendency, a thirst for the fight. And then I think of myself and other Dickens fans, many who are of perhaps a more settled disposition. We long to recline inside a poem, or rest in the byzantine twists and turns of a Dickens novel.

Rexroth opines on Homer's classics and The Odyssey sounds much like Dickens rather than Dostoevsky:

The Odyssey is entertainment. It is enterainment of the highest order, but it is difficult to imagine anyone saying, 'Reading The Odyssey changed my life fundamentally.' The Illiad can be read only superficially as entertainment. If we make ourselves available to it, it confronts us with a vision of the nature of reality and the being of man. The Illiad says: 'This is life. It is trgic, and if it has meaning, that meaning is an incommunicable mystery; it can be presented, but never explained.' The Odyssey says: 'This is life. It is comic, and it is full of meanings. These meanings are all the multiform techniques for living; they can be learned by work, intelligence, and a canny conscience.'

Tragedy is posture; comedy is an activity. If one read enough comedies, they might change one's life fundamentally. Life as comedy can be learned; as tragedy it can only be assumed. Most men are predominantly one type or the other; an individual's view of life is seldom equally balanced between tragedy and comedy. However, the dramatic artists of the world's literature have usually written both; they have realizd that there are two faces of the coin of life...

Excerpt taken from Classics Revisited by Kenneth Rexroth.

Readings & Listenings

The 'vescent glow of lamps polish the gilt-surfaces of the book soldiers languidly laying about waiting their turn of service. I pick up The Odyssey and by Jove I find in Homer's epic the pages referring to the Sirens and to Scylla and Charybdis, those fascinating remnants of ancient lore. The book reads in places as modern as yesterday, the same human nature displaying itself and therefore reminding me of the patience of God (if not Greek gods) in enduring human nature.

It makes me hungry to check my library for any lit-crit books on Homer, but I forget and instead pick up the NBA book and read a quote from Halberstam's classic Breaks of the Game which makes me desirous of that book. A clear case of being in having, rather than being, mode and so I surfed to the Vatican website and downloaded a transcript of Benedict's Christmas and New Years Day homilies and saved them to read later.

* * *
Have been watching more sports lately; a return to my roots as it were. There must be something about sports burnt into the male psyche since we've been watching them for thousands of years. I wouldn't be surprised if mankind used the wheel first for amusement rather than work and fire first as an endurance contest instead of for cooking. There is something inherently inspiring in sports as opposed to politics; with sports there's always a winner, with politics no matter who wins we lose! Or so it seems. But it's no secret that the news is always news is always grimmer than the sports pages.

* * *
Heard Amy Welborn talk about her Pope Benedict on Al Kresta's show. She passed on a sense of the Holy Father's childlike wonder and lack of cynicism, and it was a profound reflection that what a relationship with God means is that we don't have boundaries anymore, because we are dealing with an infinite God, and thus life becomes an adventure.

* * *
My idea of risk-taking is drinking Newman's Own bold coffee a couple hours before bedtime, but I know someone far more risk-averse than me and it's sort of a wonder: my libertarian stepson. Be it eating healthy food, exercise, financial matters, guns, or survival skills, he's all about preparation and minimizing risk. I think his favorite Christmas gift was a "throw-in", an all-in-one knife/pen/scissors item.

* * *
Disappointed that Stephanopoulos demoted himself to GMA from This Week. A curious move it would seem, and now there's no Sunday show that appeals. I suppose it's on to Fox News. I heard Brit Hume made news recently, the good kind of news.

* * *
U.S. states have official birds, flowers, mammals, insects and musical instruments, but I bet you didn't know they also have official weather patterns. Ohio's is: "Mostly cloudy with a 2% chance of sun between 2pm & 2:10pm." Just thought you'd like to know. I'll serve no whine...

Excerpt Sunday....

From Descouvemont's Therese and Lisieux:

Therese had a keen sense of the absolute gratuity of the Lord's love for us. Like Luther, she often meditated on the passages where St. Paul affirms that we cannot acquire salvation by our own efforts...Is this to say that in the end Therese thought she had to eliminate from her spiritual world any idea of merit? Absolutely not. Throughout her life, she was excited by the thought that on the Last Day, when he would return in his glory, the grateful God would cry out, 'Now it is my turn! I owe them my eternal and infinite substance.' This was an expression she had found in 1887 in Canon Arminjon's Conferences. It encouraged her to bear all her sufferings patiently.

In other words, though Therese wanted to work only 'to please God,' and not to have a more beautiful crown in heaven, though she expected eternal happiness from him, she also knew she had to 'earn' his children's lives, to obtain their conversion by fidelity of her love. She went so far as to say: 'God must grant all my requests in heaven because I never did my will on earth.' Admirable equilibrium of this spirituality!

* * *

Therese certainly did not scorn those souls 'who offered themselves as victims to God's justice.' She even thought this offering to be 'great and generous,' but she was not inclined to make it. And since 'there are many rooms in the Father's house' (Jn 14:2) - a gospel passage to which she often had recourse in order to legitimize the originality of her Little Way - she did not hesitate to surrender herself to God, as he increasingly appeared to her to be in that year of 1895: an inexhaustible reserve of tenderness and mercy. There was no pride in this attitude, but perfect docility to an inspiration of the Holy Spirit received...Note, moreover, the boldness of this young professed nun. She dared not to follow the example of Mother Genevieve, whom she did consider to be a saint and whose last tear she had collected with reverence.

Strange Days Indeed; Most Peculiar Mama

How improbable is Scott Brown's candidacy in MA? Jonah Goldberg opines:

"It’s a bit like Tibet holding its own against China in a land war, or Abe Vigoda giving Tiger Woods a run for his money at Augusta."

Indeed, win or lose Brown can say with Rocky Balboa that he went the distance. (Rocky reference goes out to Enbrethiliel.)

Jottings Worth 25% More Than You Paid For Them

Feel tired from water aerobics, which was filled with ample ladies numbering at least thirty, a new world record. "Welcome to January," our instructor said, reminding me why I don't like other people's New Year's resolutions. I can't hope that the ladies turn from the goodness of exercise but I can hope that new classes get added.

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From our C.E.O.:

Happy New Year!

Have you ever had the feeling that something big is about to happen? We all know it. It’s that feeling of anticipation that you might get before a sporting event, or the pleasure of seeing a young child’s birthday party, or perhaps the excitement of getting your first vehicle.

...Or just before downing large quantities of beer. I'm so cynical. :-)

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Wasn't in the mood for an after-work party at a local bar yesterday given how tonight I'll be hitting the bar. Back-to-back days are not what the doc has on tap. So missed a party that was for someone who left the company and who is now leaving THAT company. Only one parting gift per customer please. Only one after-work party per sojourning former team member.

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Am in significant reading deficit, defined as more than two days without a steady diet of read. I want to RMAO soon. I can't wait to captain my chair and burn the midnight oil reading about the whale oil in Moby Dick or maybe attempt to finish War & Peace in one sitting using Evelyn Woods's course. I jest. I met a lady who reads that fast and I wondered why. Reading, like eating, is best done leisurely.

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Fried my brain yesterday via copious spreadsheet work, but with the benefit of background listenings to A Prairie Home Companion, the Nutcracker Suite, and Thomas Sowell on National Review. I've a surfeit of news and information so I should stick to the glow of Scripture and holy things at home. That and the long-form narratives we all crave.

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Haiti isn't godforsaken, though it sure seems that way. Like a dysfunctional family, there's a tendency to want to have them start over in new families, i.e. countries. It's just unfathomable that a country so poor, so challenged, should have this happen; it reminds me of the potato famine in that you had this huge numbers of people living very vulnerably; the Irish depending too much on the potato, and the Haitians, relying on an unstable government and even less stable buildings not even close to being built to code. But the ambassador from Haiti is a proud man with obvious pride in his country when he said called Haitians a courageous people, and I don't doubt it.

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On the elevator I noticed a young blonde offered me good body language. She leaned towards me, and I thought about how this was not unlike other girls her age and it occurred to me I've become safe to them. Old enough not to be taken seriously as a potential papabile, so to speak.

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There's a point at which caution and wariness becomes paranoia. I do find the conspiratorial mindset intriguing if only because I tend to lack the imagination for it. Sometimes the paranoids are right; a family member suggested I not fund my Roth 401k versus a regular 401k because it's better to get the tax benefit now rather than later, a later that might never come. The government could easily renege and begin taxing Roths in the future just as they did with Social Security. With debt skyrocketing, all bets on the security of governmental promises are iffy.

Why Can't Harry Read?

The only cringe-worthy part of Harry Reid's otherwise reasonable observation (in Washington saying what you consider to be the truth is considered a gaffe) is that he used the word "Negro"; a quick check of dictionary.com reveals what most of us already knew:

...because of its perceived association with white-imposed attitudes and roles the word was ousted late 1960s

On Pat Robertson's Comment....

Ha! (via Steven Riddle of "A Momentary Taste of Being").

Haiti Relief Efforts

It's interesting to me that both Amy Welborn and the Anchoress recommend the nondenominational Food for the Poor instead of Catholic Relief Services for aid for Haiti. Could be indicative of more of a concern for the people on the ground than for who gets credit for helping those on the ground? Using the Catholic blog search, CRS bests Food for the Poor 34-14 in terms of mentions over the last few days. Of course be it the Red Cross, CRS or Food for the Poor or another help to Haiti charity, it's all good.

Update: a fellow blogger reminds me: "I remember vaguely hearing about problems with CRS: that, incredibly, somehow some of the money for, let us say, Africa, or other developing parts of the world, was getting diverted to contraception. I remember some of our fellow bloggers urging that people not donate to any collections for CRS unless & until the situation was rectified."

Found Art

Milton Elting Hebald (American, b. 1917)
Capriccio, 1986