Politics, Schmolitics

As cynical as Donald Trump is in his shameless position changes (and stabbing other candidates while humorously feigning concern for them), Jeb Bush might rival him simply because of Bush's complete disregard for anything but money.

Jeb couldn't even be bothered to prepare what he'd say when the Inevitable Question came up: that of  the Iraq War his brother engaged in.  His fumbling, defense of the war before his non-defense was, in its way, as telling a moment as way back when Ted Kennedy was running for president and stumbled over the simple question of "why are you running?"

That's pretty insulting to voters, not to take the run seriously enough to have more than a half-baked thought on the Iraq war.

Jeb was focused on money not message while Trump was focused on message, not money.  Of course that's easier to when you're a billionaire but certainly the optics of it was: Jeb is courting big money donors while Trump is courting Joe Six-pack.

What's truly brilliant about the Trump campaign is how we all thought he was winging it as he went along but apparently it was planned.  Who knew he had that sort of discipline? He is treating the campaign for president like a long TV series, presenting a hot, new plot twist each week.

Someone should've predicted this awhile back since the line between entertainment and politics (or pretty much everything) has shrunk to the vanishing point.  So Trump is ideally situated.

Isn't it hard to believe there's no one in a Republican party, no conservative think tank, not National Review or the Weekly Standard, smart enough to come up with a 21st century political strategy like Trump's?  And wasn't it Barack Obama and the 'Crats who pioneered the use of big data analytics?  Do you ever get the feeling that the Republican party is the ultimate amateur, junior-high school production? (Disclaimer: sorry to 7th graders everywhere for comparing them to the Republican party.)

On the other hand, maybe it's that the party wants to try to firewall the partition between politics and entertainment even at the risk of not winning the presidency ever again.  Nah, I don't think so.

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Interesting take in National Review:

As [Sowell's] Wealth, Poverty and Politics comes to a close, the author focuses his attention on controversies closer to home. He has much to say about the persistence of black poverty in the United States, and the role that the welfare state has played in perpetuating it. African Americans are, according to Sowell, a lagging group that has been ill served by its leadership, not entirely unlike the Malays in Malaysia. I can’t say I agree with every aspect of Sowell’s take on the contemporary American scene. For Sowell, the chief obstacles facing poor native-born blacks looking to better their lot are ghetto culture and a welfare-state ideology that rewards idleness. My own view is that many of the pathologies Sowell identifies can be explained at least in part by the failure of governments to protect African Americans from violence. For much of U.S. history, officialdom turned a blind eye to “black-on-black” violence, which in effect meant that predators routinely got away with murder and innocent victims knew they could not trust the state to protect them. People who live in fear are often less productive than those who live in peace. Nevertheless, Sowell has done us a great service by placing our current controversies in international context. We may be thankful that the U.S. is not yet a society in which productive minorities are despised. One wonders whether this will still be the case a generation or two hence, when there is a very good chance that racial disparities in wealth and income will have grown even more pronounced than they are today.

 Read more at: https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/429377/causes-wealth

Elsewhere in National Review:

Among all the other candidates, only Ted Cruz — who has gone out of his way to avoid alienating Trump’s supporters, while declining to embrace Trump’s toxic rhetoric — seems to understand this. (It is no coincidence that Cruz has by far the best data operation of any candidate in the race.)  Meanwhile, many a Republican Candidate Ahab seems to be haplessly chasing the great Hispanic whale, which, even if miraculously caught, wouldn’t do much to improve the party’s 2016 electoral prospects.

Strong establishments take insurgencies’ best issues and co-opt them. Weak and stupid establishments don’t. Right now, the GOP establishment is weak and stupid. Rather than attempting to present a forward-looking agenda that would appeal to a large number of Trump supporters and draw them into the Republican coalition, the establishment is seemingly working overtime to alienate them. Rather than pursuing an immigration policy that would protect vulnerable American workers and bring in skilled immigrants while disavowing Trump’s divisive tone and his impractical and overbroad prescriptions, it is promoting a quasi-open-borders policy that will perhaps keep maid service cheap for GOP donors — while electing a generation of Obamas. Rather than thinking through what a strong 21st-century Reaganite American patriotism would look like, too many candidates have embraced a hyper-militaristic nation-building strategy of which GOP voters have wearied, and that a national electorate decisively rejected in 2008 and 2012."

  – Mr. Carl is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Following Jesus with Jugs of Water

One of Russell Kirk's favorites, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, took pains to educate his son Commodus in the Stoicism and virtue and asceticism, which completely and utterly failed to take. Edward Gibbon writes:

Nothing, however, was neglected by the anxious father, and by the men of virtue and learning whom he summoned to his assistance, to expand the narrow mind of young Commodus, to correct his growing vices, and to render him worthy of the throne for which he was designed. But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

Gibbons's pessimistic line about the efficacy of instruction feels sort of truthy but I'm not sure how a Christian can subscribe to that given the pains Christ took to instruct us. I suppose it's a “both/and” - we need human and divine instruction but also Grace.

I found out who the priest is at our local St. Patrick's is, the one with the wonderfully and preternaturally calm voice and manner: Father Cassian Derbes. Turns out he was interviewed on National Review Online for the 800th anniversary of the Dominican founding. Makes me want to support NR more!

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On my way to UPS Store Saturday I listened to Catholic radio personality Jennifer Fulwiler on the radio talk about how when she was an atheist she found the argument against having children (i.e. that they're a lot of work, they annoy you, etc..) persuasive, but now she sees the meaning of life being to live with those who annoy you. That the only way to have a long-lasting, meaningful relationships is to be at peace with your plans being disrupted and being annoyed. Makes sense. The meaning of life is relationship since that's what God is (Father, Son and Spirit) and obviously humans have differing wills, priorities, personalities, peccadilloes.

Luke's gospel makes it sound so easy:  “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth.”

I love the nonchalance of the statement that it's God's pleasure to give us the kingdom, i.e. everything.

I like the archaic language in this version. “Sell what ye have” - and what do we have of value besides Christ? Thus the imperative to evangelize and “advertise” Jesus.

Luke 12:32 is a pretty awesome verse and it could stand up well as being anyone's fav in my opinion. Matthew chapter 7 has a verse that a confessor once told me to memorize, and rightly so: "Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things…."

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I read In Cold Blood in high school. Does that even count? Does any classic I read then count given how completely different I am now after two trillion words read and innumerable experiences behind me? Was I so much in my own dream world then that Capote didn't really reach me, just as Moby Dick was a “non-experience experience”?

They say youth is wasted on the young but the classics were mostly wasted on me. I had not reached the depths of despair that I would on college - in high school I was still an innocent little burgher. The dark notes of classic books either played tunes too low to hear (like how humans can't hear dog whistles). To quote from Capote's classic, “Drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.”

The only thing I read then that resonated at all was Great Expectations. Would I be immune to its charms now? I think so, given I picked it up recently and wondered why it so captivated. I guess to every time there is a season, or a book. Great Expectations for the young, Bleak House for the middle-aged perhaps.

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Fun adventure Sunday - took the grandkids to a kids symphony concert. We got there around 2:30 for about 20 minutes of pre-concert goings-ons, specifically a temporary tattoo table. Tried out a violin as well.

Then we went into the concert and heard a good variety of great music and story-telling. “Pop Goes the Weasel” was a highlight, but by 3:20 the bloom was off the rose for the boys. Heck by 3:05pm Will was asking for my iphone, which I gave to him with the sound turned way down. So he got nothing out of it at all, other than a temp tattoo. Sam was initially enthused but soured and tired and by 3:35pm we were outta there. I think it was scheduled till 4 or 4:30.

The highlight for the boys was likely the escalators, which they enjoyed mastering. It was like a ride at King's Island.

All told a bit of a fail as far as introducing the boys to the joys of classical music. It was intended for ages 3-10, but kids of any age are pretty hard to entertain consistently, it seems to me.

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From a WaPo article:  "Voters 'do not want the truth,' Shenkman writes. 'We want hope. If the truth robs us of hope, we don’t want to hear it.'  With Christianity, truth and hope are conjoined.

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Ben Franklin: “The only thing that hurts about a rebuke is the truth.”

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Sighted on FB:

"I have no problem believing the Miracle at Cana. What's implausible is how there weren't people following Jesus with jugs of water for the rest of John's Gospel."

"Until about 200 years ago - and really until about only 85 years ago, most people were mostly drunk most of the time, for most of their lives.” [I was obviously born in the wrong age.]

“Christ turned water into wine, not wine into water. Too bad for Southern Baptist teetotalers.”

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Someone thought I'd be outraged by what Peggy Noonan wrote about Cardinal Law and the bishops who allowed abusers to continue their crimes in her collection of WSJ columns.  I don't get it because I don't see my job as cheerleading the hierarchy.  A misconception about the Church, I think, is that the misbehavior of its members somehow undercuts either her authority or her truth.

It's not “pro-Catholic” to defend Cardinal Law's inexcusable behavior around the sex abuse crisis. It's not “anti-Catholic” to excoriate him. Jesus was not being anti-Jewish when he excoriated the Pharisees in his own church – and he said they lost not one iota of their authority (“You must be careful to do everything they tell you to do,” he says in Matthew 23:3).

We live in a hyper-politicized culture, so it's natural to think of the church as just another political organization but: “If I see the Church only under the aspect of power, then it follows that everyone who doesn't hold an office is oppressed… If belonging to the Church has any meaning at all, then the meaning can only be that it gives us eternal life. We are not in the Church in order to exercise power as if in some kind of association,” as Cardinal Ratzinger wrote.

I have no problem with seeing the Catholic hierarchy in great need of change. But what I don't understand is seeing the Catholic Church as equivalent to the hierarchy. That would be like seeing America as simply the president and Congress and Supreme Court. If faith means anything, it means the Holy Spirit can act through flawed instruments. If America is much more than just Barack Obama, how much more is the Catholic Church, with Christ at the head using flawed instruments, than a mere earthly nation?

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From Scott Hahn's Catholic Bible Dictionary on sacrifice:

Sacrificial themes are not confined to the actions of Christ in the NT but are likewise applied to Christians. In one sense, this is implicit in the teaching of Jesus, who summons his followers to “take up the cross” in imitation of him (Matt 10:38; Mark 8:34; Luke 14:27). Once he describes his own crucifixion in cultic and sacrificial terms, it follows that the life of Christian discipleship would have this character as well.

This theme is developed mainly in the epistles of Paul, who uses sacrificial images and ideas to describe an array of Christian activities. For instance, he urges believers to present their “bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom 12:1). This is an appeal for such things as chastity, temperance, mortification, and other actions of gospel morality and spirituality that surrender the body and its cravings to the will of the Lord. Other forms of sacrifice include monetary giving, such as the gift that Paul received from the church of Philippi, which he calls “a fragrant offering, a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God” (Phil 4:18).

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After reading the recent liturgical readings about Saul, I wondered why David was forgiven a much worse sin than Saul? St. Augustine said God isn't showing favoritism, but their results differed because their hearts differed, and we can't see their hearts, only God can. Not overly comforting, given my fickle heart.  Thank God for 1 John 3:20.

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I don't quite understand why Pope Francis is so polarizing in the Catholic community. I don't understand why some are giddy over him (if he was performing miracles of healing or drawing huge numbers of new people to Mass I might understand it better), nor why others think he's the anti-Christ or a heretic. He's human. (Update: I was reminded by someone that "Joy is contagious" concerning the giddiness. Yes.)

Goldberg Quotes

Jonah Goldberg:

"....All of the talk about how our political system has been bought by the “billionaire class” is simplistic nonsense. If “big money” rules, why is Jeb Bush at 6 percent in the polls? Why is Bernie Sanders poised to beat Hillary in New Hampshire and maybe Iowa?

I definitely think the system is designed in a way that benefits rich people (that’s a significant theme of the book I’m working on), but that has not much to do with the preferred policies of a bunch of  mustache-twirling fat cats. Indeed, the whole notion that rich people are ideologically homogenous is little more than the grimy, greasy, stain left behind from Marxism’s departure down the toilet bowl of history. There are rich people -- and some big corporations -- that are for limited government and there are rich people -- and far too many big corporations -- that want to expand the role of government.

My very short, partial, explanation for why the system seems rigged for the benefit of rich people has to do with the fact that complexity is a subsidy. The more rules and regulations the government creates, the more it creates a society where people with resources -- good educations, good lawyers, good lobbyists, and good connections -- can rise while those without such resources are left to climb hurdles on their own. On this basic point, Donald Trump is indisputably right. Bribing politicians to come to your wedding may seem insecure and weird, but there’s no doubt the ability to do so comes with payoffs. Big government by its very nature helps people who know how to game the system."

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Also from Goldberg, on the strangeness that the Left sees a boogeyman in the Koch brothers despite the Kochs being friendly to their values:

Concern Trolling Liberal: I just wish Republicans would get rid of the religious crazies and become socially liberal, fiscally conservative.

You: Oh, like Charles and David Koch?

CTL: No! Not those right-wing whackos. I mean Republicans should be pro-choice . . .

You: Like the Kochs?

          CTL: . . . and pro-gay rights! . . .

You: Kochs, Kochs, Kochs.

          CTL:  . . . And pro-immigration . . .

You: The Kochs are way to the left of Bernie Sanders on immigration.

CTL: . . . and they should oppose all of these foreign wars and being the world’s policeman.

You: Kochs again.

CTL: But they’re racists! They support the drug war and locking up young black men!

You: Actually, they oppose the drug war and . . .

CTL: But, but, but…
[ End scene.]

Seven Quick Takes

Read interesting Time magazine piece on the Trump phenomenon. The gist is that Trump is simply ahead of the curve as far as “cutting out the middleman”, a term they call disintermediation. People don't want the media - or even political experience - in between themselves and their choice of candidate, and Trump does that via his rallies, Twitter, free media in which he speaks directly to the American people. They say Reagan did the same thing, which he had to since the media hated him.

The digital revolution is dismantling gatekeepers left and right: record companies (slain by music streaming), big book chains like Barnes & Noble (slain by Amazon and e-books), Blockbuster video (slain by Netflix), newspapers (killed by Craigslist advertising).  That which happened to the Catholic Church during the Reformation when the Bible came out in the vernacular and people decided to become their own priests, has come out now in politics. It's interesting to see the powerful liberal media humbled as decisively as the Church was in the 16th and 17th centuries.  Maybe they'll have a bit more respect for the idea of our dependency on intermediaries.

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One of the interesting aspects of this election season is how the conservative “gatekeepers” in charge of policy purity, people like Ann Coulter, Limbaugh, and Laura Ingraham, have seemed so pro-Trump despite the fact that he appears to have no core convictions beyond a will to power. He makes Mitt Romney look like a “severe conservative”. And yet the gatekeepers of purity have mostly been coy.

Coulter is an interesting example. Her last book, on illegal immigration, has either made her a single issue supporter on building a wall, or maybe she wants immigration in the forefront for book sales (or both of course). Perhaps illegal immigration has been her pet issue for some time which might explain her utter disdain for John McCain.

And now we learn that she is insisting Ted Cruz (Ted Cruz! the tea party poster child) is not a natural-born US citizen and cannot be president despite saying the opposite in 2013. Her response? She changed her mind.  Does she have a touch of Trump fever?

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The phrase "the inhumanity of man" is paradoxical.  It's like saying, "the non-wetness of water".  But, on the other hand, it's a tacit recognition of the inherent dignity of man such that he should not be capable of inhumane acts.

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Wow, Herman Melville was startingly pessimistic. He says the man who sees truly is the pessimist, the sorrowful, the serious, the grim:

…The sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth.
So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped.

With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” All.

This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing grave-yards, and would rather talk of operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing wise, and therefore jolly;—not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon. But even Solomon, he says, “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain” (i.e. even while living) “in the congregation of the dead.” Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.

He could flat out write though.

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Zoo trip last weekend. We wandered pleasantly through the North American part, past chickens, sheep and deep-grunting goats,  pigs, miniature cows and caribou and then off to the lions. A sun bear was later sighted as well. A moose, sheep, and gorgeously-coated wolves. Side trip with the grandkids to an old plane where you could sit at the ancient controls, a bush plane from the 1940s, a Beech-18 prop via Middletown, Ohio.

Then at 11 it was time for the tour with an enthusiastic lady for a “behind the scenes” to tour the vet hospital, but no animals being worked on, just a bunch of empty rooms. I'm sure part of the appeal was simply that you coudn't normally go back there since it was employees only.  I guess it's for animal lovers what it's like a Catholic getting a tour of the papal apartments in the Vatican.

Sam was at his cutest, questions frothing from him like water from a fountain.

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Am reading some of Susan Cheever's engaging history of drinking in America, which suitably whetted my whistle.  I'm always cheered by reading of those with drinking habits exceeding my own, as the 17th century Americans did. They drank morning, noon and night. Don't try that at home!

Cheever's book was borrowed from the library and I found myself loving the physicality of the book, which reminded me I read too much on Kindle and should occasionally pony up for the increased expense of buying print versions. I do miss, lately more than ever, the joys of reading a physical book with its wide margins and sturdy, tactile presence. There's a certain glamour to a well-produced hardback that the Kindle version can't match. And for the cover photo and design there's no substitute since the Kindle covers are tiny and in black and white. It's like the way old album art was big and beautiful in the '70s before tiny CDs and now online, streaming music took over.

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Watched Meet the Press and have begun making my peace with the likelihood that Trump will be Republican nominee.

Patiently we'd put up two seemingly acceptable candidates: John McCain, war patriot and maverick who got along with many Democrat senators, and Mitt Romney, a blue state governor. And the thanks we got? Two whippings by a lightweight/no weight senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

So there's understandably some feeling of simply taking our marbles and going home, of nominating whoever the hell we want, despite the recklessness.

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Watched NY Times columnist Ross Douthat video on the web - he gave a lecture on the angst of conservative Catholics in the Pope Francis era. Fascinating. Then I found a rebuttal on the liberal National Catholic Reporter magazine. A reasonably effective one, making the  point that conservative Catholics have a blind spot in not seeing the link between materialism/capitalism and the sexual lack of restraint (porn, sex outside of marriage, divorce, etc..). Reminded me instantly of this remark in the Russell Kirk bio: "…the West had created a dreadful world, 'a world of frenzied producers' and a 'world of frenzied consumers.'… Rather than giving them control over the self, their education had only created insatiable longing."  Also reminded me of the Malcolm Muggeridge line about how “sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”  I'd not really put together lust of the flesh being a cousin to lust for worldly goods.

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Fareed Zacharia in the Washington Post asks why middle America is so self-destructive (obesity, alcoholism, drug abuse, all leading to high death rate spike in middle-aged whites only):

"The answer might lie in expectations. Princeton anthropologist Carolyn Rouse suggested, in an email exchange, that other groups might not expect that their income, standard of living and social status are destined to steadily improve. They don’t have the same confidence that if they work hard, they will surely get ahead. In fact, Rouse said that after hundreds of years of slavery, segregation and racism, blacks have developed ways to cope with disappointment and the unfairness of life: through family, art, protest speech and, above all, religion."

That neatly parallels a Flannery O'Connor quote I saw recently: "To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

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I'm sorely tempted to get Jimmy Akin's commentary on the book of Mark after reading Jeff Miller's excellent review.  But I have so many other resources on Logos that I'm not sure it makes sense. An interesting dynamic is how I can't rule out grudge-holding on my part after Akin blocked me on Twitter. I should get a badge for this blog: "Banned by Akin!" As Trump as taught us, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Trump fever

One of the interesting aspects of this election season is how the conservative “gatekeepers” in charge of policy purity, people like Coulter, Limbaugh, and Laura Ingraham, have seemed so pro-Trump despite the fact that he appears to have no core convictions beyond a will to power. He makes Mitt Romney look like a “severe conservative”. And yet the gatekeepers of purity have mostly been coy.

Coulter is an interesting example. Her last book on immigration has either made her a single issue voter or maybe she wants immigration in the forefront for book sales (or both). Perhaps illegal immigration has been her pet issue for some time, which might explain her utter disdain for John McCain.

And now we learn that she is insisting Ted Cruz (Ted Cruz! the tea party poster child) is not a natural-born US citizen and cannot be president despite her saying the opposite in 2013. Her response? She changed her mind.  Does she have a touch of Trump fever?  The kind that makes you take leave of rational thought?

A Fresh Look at Myrrh

Odilon Redon;  Dante et Béatrice (1914)

Myrrh can be a bit of a downer, seemingly implicitly attested to by Isaiah in the upbeat first reading on the Epiphany that mentioned only the bringing of gold and frankincense.

I thought briefly that maybe the omission was due to the people of the Old Covenant mostly measuring success in terms of earthly rather than eternal life and thus death was without much silver lining.

I even wondered if perhaps the wise men's additional gift of myrrh was a cryptic message to Jesus, relayed to him much later by his mother, that he was to go the way of suffering and death rather than being a worldly messiah.

But wait, there's more! (say like in those infomercials). Because then I came across this excellent post from Henry Dieterich and realized how that's only the half of it...

Syria

Today I got slightly obsessed with the Syrian crisis. Because some sort of tipping point of my ignorance was reached such that I wanted to overcome it to some extent.

I really wanted to know who or what caused the Syrian mess. To assign blame, since I put the “J” in the Myers-Briggs INTJ.

Was it the dysfunctional Arab culture itself?  Islam and its despotic tendencies? Was it George W Bush, directly or indirectly? Was it Obama by pulling out of Iraq and punting on Syria?

The proximate trigger in Syria was simply a couple teenagers scrawling graffiti. The government killed them and that lead to massive protests. The teens had written pro-revolutionary sayings, a lesson in “be careful what you wish for" since sometimes the status quo looks awfully good, if only in hindsight.

The timeline:

    2003 - Iraq is invaded
    2008 - U.S. surge in Iraq ended; troop withdrawal in '10 and '11
    2010 - Tunisia protests begin; a man self-immolates and triggers overthrown of gov't
    2011 - Teenagers scrawl graffiti in Syria; gov't action triggers civil war
    2015:  Syrian civil war now proxy war with other countries participating

A few theories:

1) Iraq War and Bush Administration: Fall of Saddam was said to psychologically empower Arab activists. US government began funding “democracy promotion” agenda including training on social media, one of the top causes of effectiveness of protests. U.S. policy misled many Arab youth to believe freedom was possible in their societies especially given the expectations of US temporary “success” in Iraq post-surge.

Syria's Assad, not unbiased of course, blames the war:

“It was the Iraq war in 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. We were strongly opposed to that invasion, because we knew that things were moving in the direction of dividing societies and creating unrest. And we are Iraq’s neighbors. At that time, we saw that the war would turn Iraq into a sectarian country; into a society divided against itself. To the west of Syria there is another sectarian country – Lebanon. We are in the middle. We knew well that we would be affected. Consequently, the beginning of the Syrian crisis, or what happened in the beginning, was the natural result of that war and the sectarian situation in Iraq, part of which moved to Syria, and it was easy for them to incite some Syrian groups on sectarian grounds…Why didn’t they lead to revolutions in the Gulf States – particularly in Saudi Arabia which doesn’t know anything about democracy?“

2) Unemployment with large youth populations

Large numbers of youth + unemployment = huge trouble for societies. If one simply looks at the unemployment rate of each Middle East country you can see where the dominoes fell. In general, the Gulf States had much lower rates of unemployment and poverty than Tunisia, Egypt and Syria.

3) Religious hatreds

Syria has Sunni/Shia combo, always a deadly mix.

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One of the comments that look particularly cringe-worthy in retrospect was made in 2005 by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither."

And she thought we didn't have stability then...?

And the other thing about Rice's comment that leaves me perplexed is the premise is that our policies will determine the fate of the Middle East.  Notice the huge tell: "we achieved neither" as if the people who actually live in the Middle East are completely impotent or in someway ancillary to the policies of our "empire".... I'm beginning to think Republicans are to foreign countries what liberals are to blacks: Paternalistic and condescending.

Isaiah

It's interesting to read all the readings for the various masses for Christmas. It's a biblical greatest hits collection, starring Isaiah, the poet laureate of ecstasy. No one does joy better than Isaiah which is why the Christmas readings, per se, exceed even the Easter readings despite Easter being on paper and logically, the greater boon. At Christmas, the Second Person of the Trinity came to earth. At Easter, we celebrate the defeat of death and the acceptance of the offering of Christ, so I've always assumed we weren't saved by the Incarnation so much as by the Crucifixion & Resurrection. And yet Christmas looms like a colossus. I've always puzzled why but figured it's at least partially because we can simply relate to a baby more than man and God. There's a reason St. Nick went from tough guy who punched a heretic to a harmless old gentleman with a big belly.

Un-imprimatur'd Thoughts

It seems like the typical religious error is either a semi-pantheistic view or a overly transcendent one. The transcendent view sees God as the only Good and therefore the only one inspiring of awe. The relationship is mostly vertical, God to man; other human beings are seen as so much lesser than God that they're hard to appreciate or love or serve. It makes God too confined, not able to vivify others or ourselves. "Emmanuel" gets a lost in the shuffle; the Blessed Sacrament is holy, our neighbor and us louts. 

The other view, that of emphasizing only the horizontal, makes it seem like God is an absentee Father such that his children need to love each other as proxies.  This is the dry theology like the one I grew up with in the '70s: "love one another" was the whole focus and there was little thought of God enabling or inspiring that love. We were on our own as the song American Pie went, and nothing better exemplifies this than the teaching that the miracle of multiplication of the loaves and fishes was not a physical miracle but a result of people sharing what they had. You can say that's a miracle, that everyone wanted to share what they had, but the way I read it back in the '70s was that it meant God was secretly a deist. 

As usual, it's "both/and".  God loves us enough to come into our temples and thus loving neighbor is loving God "in disguise".

Links

Interesting lines about blogging:

Most of the personal blogs I once followed have vanished, or haven’t been updated in months or years. The blogroll in my sidebar reads like an honour roll of war dead. But I keep on blogging because, compared to tweeting for thousands of followers or posting to hundreds of Facebook friends, the single-digit pageviews my blog now attracts are a paradoxically private way to express myself.

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What adults can mistake for narcissism – performing one’s intimate self as thoughtless, obnoxious "selfies" – is just kids larking about for their mates. 

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Blogging persists, of course. But it’s mostly for adults – professionalised to the point where the old "bloggers vs journalists" debates now seem hopelessly quaint. Maintaining a personal blog has become entrepreneurial: a job that earns an income through display advertising, network marketing, ebooks and blog-to-book deals.

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Ross Douthat on Star Wars and decadence.

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Everybody on earth is your cousin.

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From National Review:

From the medieval university through the colonial colleges, institutions of higher education aimed to teach “the best which has been thought and said,”in Matthew Arnold’s phrase. This vocation was political as well as intellectual. In studying masterpieces of Western civilization, students could cultivate virtues necessary to limited government.

Next, conservatives argued that influxes of students and subsidies after World War II diverted universities from this mission. Rather than educating citizens for self-rule, they prepared students for lives as workers and consumers.

“Educate me so that I may be a virtuous citizen and then a good job will follow as byproduct” reminds me of, from a religious perspective, “make me virtuous for your sake O Lord and then I shall be saved as byproduct”.

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Hey I made it through this post Trump-free,  er, ....doh!

Ross Douthat Nails It

Yes, yes. A cathartic howl. From here:

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In that quest for understanding, which politicians of both parties should pursue, I recommend lingering over one particular moment from last night, when Trump returned to his frequent theme of elite foreign-policy failure, and produced a rather-eloquent monologue on America’s recent misadventures in the Middle East:

In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.

Then, when Fiorina interrupted to first accuse him of echoing Obama and then went on a riff attacking Hillary Clinton over Benghazi, Trump responded:

Well, there’s nothing to respond to … the fact is Benghazi was a disaster because of Libya, everything just fell into place. It could not have been worse.

What do we have now? We have nothing. We’ve spent $3 trillion and probably much more – I have no idea what we’ve spent. Thousands and thousands of lives, we have nothing. Wounded warriors all over the place who I love, we have nothing for it.

This is not the kind of thing that Republican politicians can easily say, because after all the Iraq invasion was the last Republican administration’s signature idea. But it’s also not the kind of thing that Democratic politicians can easily say — and not only, as Matt Yglesias suggests, because they’re afraid of sounding unpatriotic. It’s also that much of the waste Trump is condemning happened on the watch of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: Disastrous as the invasion was, George W. Bush did hand on a mostly stabilized Iraq to his successor, and it was under Obama that our troops pulled out, under Obama that Syria went to hell, under Obama that ISIS took over the Sunni Triangle, and under Obama that Qaddafi was toppled and ISIS rushed into the Libyan vacuum.

Of course one can dispute how much of this was actually Obama’s fault, and argue over what might have been done differently. But he has been the president during these multiplying disasters, which means that his would-be successor simply cannot go on the campaign trail and issue a sweeping indictment of the last twelve years of U.S. foreign policy; she has to reach back in time and keep blaming it all on Bush. Only Trump — the freest man in politics, the third-party candidate running inside the G.O.P. tent — can just say a plague on both your houses. And that line resonates because on the evidence of everything that’s happened under the last two presidents, a plague is what both houses eminently deserve.

Which, of course, tells us nothing about what the next president should do, and there Trump’s current ideas range from the absurd (“take all the oil”) to the monstrous (kill terrorists’ families). And over the course of the actual primaries, as opposed to these preliminaries, I persist in believing that most Republican voters will end up choosing between the genuinely-different foreign policy visions that Rubio and Cruz are offering rather than taking a flyer on Trump’s Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore approach.

But for now support for Trump on foreign policy isn’t an endorsement of his policy vision. It’s more of a cathartic howl against twelve years of failure, which neither political party can quite call by its deserved name.

And though I’ve called him a proto-fascist, I’m not immune to its appeal. What do we have now? We have nothing. Watching at home, that was only line in two hours of debating that made me want to stand up and applaud.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Donald?

I bow to no man in my ability to say "what the f--k!', which is pretty much what Republicans have decided to do this election so far.  But I haven't decided to chuck it all yet, not with Hillary as the Dem candidate. The base responds, "we patiently offered moderates like McCain and Romney and look what it got us? So we just don't care anymore."

There's irony in how the reason for the dismay over the establishment is due to unfulfilled promises, given that Trump has upped the ante by making promises close to the level of "if I'm elected, I'll turn water into wine!"

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I'm transfixed that an Orthodox priest I know here in Columbus is supporting Trump and spoke before 15,000 people at a recent Trump rally. Pretty interesting to see a man of the cloth so into politics, and Trumpian politics at that.  "The Other" lives. People are complicated. It seems a cult of personality. People seem very susceptible to that, witness Pope Francis's popularity.

Jeb Bush said the Donald is a great politician and I'm beginning to believe it. One definition of a gifted pol is someone who can get away with stuff no one else could. Bill Clinton won despite a myriad of lies, bimbo eruptions and shady land deals. Obama won despite (what I considered at the time) fatal flaws of  the “cling to God and guns” comment (is that any better than Romney's 47% comment?), as well as the Rev Wright and Bill Ayers connections. And Trump has survived birtherism, flip-flops and a dust-up with Republican powerhouse Fox News. I think it comes down to all three being liked so much. You can't trump likability, no pun intended.

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On the subject of Muslim immigration, I've read of a proposal that gets at the heart of the problem: not religion but a need to vet our values. George W Bush famously went to free Iraq and remake the Middle East in his image -- into a freedom-loving paradise -- and the same problem seems to be present in our immigration policy in which we assume everybody is the same, all cultures equal, and nobody really wants Sharia law except for a few terrorists.

It's hard to get any sort of impartial narrative on something like Muslim immigration. People on the right are subject to prejudice. People on the left are subject to debilitating liberal guilt. So it's hard to get purchase on it.

One real-life experiment: Lewiston, Maine, a 99% white town until Somali immigrants came in huge waves beginning in 2001.

I found an article on Huffington Post that suggested this was the model for the country of beautiful integration and multiculturalism. While Ann Coulter pointed to increased crime and how the mayor said back in 2002 “no more, please! We can't take any more Somalis”.

So what's the truth?

The mayor did say that and has since retired.

Crime rate hasn't gone up. So in that sense the statistics, impartially, don't bear out the complaints of some whites there. Of course since second generation Muslims tend to be a bigger problem, so it's still way early.

A white, Republican anti-welfare mayor of the town just won a third term despite the place being mostly Democratic. This speaks louder than words: for all the pretend peacefulness, there's a whole lot of white Democrat voters there who are crossing the aisle because they like what they're hearing on the other side. Mostly they are sick, it seems, of Somalis gaming the welfare state. Is this a prejudice? Who knows, but it sure suggests ain't everything all hunky-dory.

Then I looked at the Minneapolis Somalis.  Nicht gut. The best intentions lead to Hell. A lot of Somalis were brought here by Lutheran Social Service back in the 90s and now even NPR has a piece about ISIS recruitment in Minneapolis. Our own little hotbed of potential extremism, which "has legs" since extremists generally come in the second generation of immigrants, not first.  Is it fair to laden our grandchildren not only with crushing debt but jihadists? Even Angela Merkel, no Donald Trump, says multiculturalism is a sham and a lie.

At war within me: safety versus generosity. It seems zero-sum. Taking in refugees is a noble and generous thing. I think of how life is not the greatest value, that God is, and that God chose love over life (in the short run). The Second Person of the Trinity was a migrant from Heaven, a migrant into a death-dealing world as vicious - at least to Jesus - as Yemen or Syria. And yet he chose to mingle with us.

I was musing on this as my grandson was lulling me to sleep with his cuddling next to me on the recliner, him watching YouTube videos of superheroes and me reading about one of my superheros, St. Francis, and in particular how he dealt with the Muslim Sultan when he famously ambled through the DMZ during one crusade talked to the Islamic chieftain. While history is different it rhymes, and so perhaps the key to the current predicament of how to deal with the Muslim headache can be answered by that saint of yore.

I see two promising books on the subject, one from a conservative side (mentioning immediately Pope John Paul's comment to Mother Teresa, "watch out for the Muslims!") and one from the liberal.  I'll probably end up more confused than ever.  Making it even worse is how the US bishops seem definitely on the liberal end of things.

Friday Quick Takes (ala Jennfer Fulwiler)

A few "why is my bookbag so heavy" entries:

Mark Ward on the Bible:

I have found that motivation for Bible study is circular: You can’t get excited about the Bible until you do some serious study in it. You can’t do serious study unless your excitement about Scripture motivates you to do so. Sometimes my circle breaks down. I don’t maintain a constant excitement (or study) level. I get tired. I get sick. I get busy. I drift. But because I have a new heart, good teachers, and the continuing grace of God, I can never stop trying to enter the circle again.

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Quote and interesting comment from Cath blogger Eric Scheske:

Professor Morson puts it: “Dostoyevsky believed that lives are decided at critical moments, and he therefore described the world as driven by sudden eruptions from the unconscious. By contrast, Tolstoy insisted that although we may imagine our lives are decided at important and intense moments of choice, in fact our choices are shaped by the whole climate of our minds, which themselves result from countless small decisions at ordinary moments.” At some point in life, I think, one has to decide if one is, in one’s belief in the shape of his or her life, a Dostoyevskian or a Tolstoyian. …I would think any person who has given it much thought is a Tolstoyian, whether one comes to such a worldview via the spirituality of St. Therese Lisieux or modern scientific studies about the cumulative effects of the ordinary on a person’s personality, spirituality, disposition, attitude, etc.

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From a 1921 Herman Melville bio:

With [America's] outstanding symptoms of materialism and conformity it drove Emerson to pray for an epidemic of madness: “O Celestial Bacchus! drive them mad.—This multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalise this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, of money.”

Throughout Melville’s long life his warring and untamed desires were in violent conflict with his physical and spiritual environment. His whole history is the record of an attempt to escape from an inexorable and intolerable world of reality: a quenchless and essentially tragic Odyssey away from home, out in search of “the unpeopled world behind the sun.”
     
“Ah, muskets the gods have made to carry infinite combustion,” he wrote in Pierre , “and yet made them of clay.”

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This FB comment is exactly what I was musing on the other day. Not specifically torture, but how God hates sin because of what it does to self:

“I sincerely believe that the greatest victim of every evil act is the person committing it–which is one argument against torture, that it turns men and women into torturers, which is a deep and serious injury.”

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This, found via Verbum.com, was cool;

This is a difficult message to accept, for it means accepting not only the real humanity of Christ, but also our own humanity. And many of us do not wish to be human. Perhaps we would like our religion to be more “mysterious,” more other-worldly, less attached to the messy, complex realities of everyday life. Perhaps we would prefer a more majestic God, who becomes manifest in supernatural wonders and triumphal manifestations. But the Christian message—the message of Advent—directs our hearts toward humble humanity.

This does not mean that there is no glory, no mystery; but it means that we must seek them not in an external divine intrusion into the world, a triumphal interruption of human history, but rather in the transformation of that history from within by God’s presence in human hearts.

It seems to me that to have a visible or sensory experience of God, is not a cure-all: You still have to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. St. Paul received visions of Jesus but also went on to be beaten, shipwrecked, almost stoned, rejected and laughed at, etc… Surely he must've had some low moments when the experience of God seems like a hallucination. Similar Mary, who had a sword or sorrow pierce her heart despite receiving a visit from an angel thirty-three years prior. Jesus had the Transfiguration but still sweat blood on Holy Thursday night. So a vision can't seem to take away the harshness of life and human memory could erode even these visions to some extent. Perhaps it's like how you can't store up warm summer sun for a day when it's ten below. You may remember how great that 80-degree day was, but it can't really change the fact that you're freezing.

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I like Advent more in recent years for the most materialistic of reasons: Logos Bible website offers a free electronic book every day of Advent and the affiliated Verbum site offers a free one every week. Thus every day I hurry-scurry to the website and see what I'm offered, and 7 times out of 10 it's something I want. It's sort of like the 12 days of Christmas only there's a lot more days in Advent. I could wish they'd do something like this during Lent in order to make that season more palatable, ha.

Today I got The Word In and Out of Season, a collection of homilies for all the Sundays of Advent and Lent.  The other day The Blessings of Christmas by Pope Benedict.

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I'd always wondered why “Behold the Man” in the passion account seemed to be disproportionately emphasized. A google search helped illustrate a pleasing symmetry between Old and New Testaments:

John 19:5 Behold the man. Pilate, evidently trying to show the crowd that Jesus was a pitiable shell rather than a king (thus demonstrating the absurdity of their charge), urged them to behold Him in this forlorn state and ridiculous caricature of kingly apparel, thinking thereby to displace their hatred with pity. But when he said, sarcastically, no doubt, “Behold the man,” he was unwittingly using prophetic language. Through the prophet Isaiah, God had said concerning the coming Messiah, “Behold your God!” and “Behold my Servant” (Isaiah 40:9; 42:1). Through the prophet Zechariah, God said concerning Him, “Behold the Man” and “Behold, thy King” (Zechariah 6:12; 9:9). Note how these four scenes we are urged to behold correspond to the respective pictures of Christ in the four gospels—“King” in Matthew, “Servant” in Mark, “Man” in Luke, “God” in John. Pilate sarcastically used two of these titles: “Behold the Man” in John 19:5, and “Behold your King” in John 19:14.

Also like the one word pictures of gospels. Does it say anything about a person if their favorite gospel is Jesus as servant instead of King, or God instead of man? Be interesting if someone studied the correspondence of favorite gospels to Myers-Briggs personality results.

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The iPad-ization of the nation is turning kids into introverts, or at least poor conversationalists inadequately socialized says a 3rd grade teacher in the WaPo.

I can certainly see the truth of that both intuitively and experientially, but I wonder if reading does the same. Reading tends to get a pass merely because it's seen as a much higher value than, say, playing computer games on iPad. But in both cases the result would seem the same socialization-wise.

“Sherry Turkle, the author of 'Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,' writes about how we are sacrificing connections, one quick check of our screens at a time. Her research finds that college students, with their ubiquitous phones, 'are having a hard time with the give-and-take of face-to-face conversation.'

It can be hard for kids to sustain their attention in a small group discussion when their own personal portal beckons from the back of the room…Later, when I allowed their devices to hum to glowing life, conversation shut down altogether.

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Saw a coyote along the fence-line. Our dogs were barking at it like crazy but like Cool Hand Luke he just sauntered along looking attractive and majestic. When I went back he made himself scarce. They generally eat rats, mice, rabbits, cats. Not dogs fortunately.

We've seen now seen in the field behind our house at one time or another: coyote, red fox, deer, possum, groundhog, Coopers hawk, mallard ducks, geese.

Isaiah Variations

It's fascinating how the Church seeks to console us. For example, the first reading from Isaiah 30 the other day is textbook Christ:

    “The Lord will give you the bread you need and the water for which you thirst.”

But other translations are less, shall we say, generous, from the Jerusalem's “The Lord has given you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction.”  Knox has it: “Bread he will grant, though it be sparingly.”

So it's kind of a buzzkill to go to the other translations although the Church's generous translation I take as more definitive given the prerogatives she enjoys.

And Pope Benedict gave me permission tonight when I read this in his Blessings of Christmas:

Perhaps the right way to celebrate Advent is to let the signs of God’s love that we receive in this period penetrate our soul, without resistance, without questions and quibbling. Warmed by these signs, we can then receive in full confidence the immeasurable kindness of this child who alone had the power to make the mountains sing and to transform the trees of the wood into a praise of God.

(The preface to that was this:

It may be difficult for us to accept this joyful music when we are tormented by questions, when we are afflicted both by bodily illness and psychological problems, and these would tend to make us rebel against the God whom we cannot understand. But this child is a sign of hope precisely for those who are oppressed. And this is why he has awakened an echo so pure that its consoling power can touch the hearts even of unbelievers.)

I've come to see Isaiah as a primer for Jesus - it seems like it's what he read and memorized and understood to apply to him. Thus when the prophet says: “he will hear and immediately answer”, Jesus took that as gospel, such that when he heard someone crying out to him (the lame, the sick, the blind) he should immediately cure them.

It's always interesting to me to turn the Scriptures around and see them as God condescending to us to have them apply to him as well. It's more of a “we're all in this together” type of feeling.

To the Donald: Run Third Party?

I'm starting to see a real value in Trump running third party, if it should come to that. Because there's only one thing worse than Hillary as POTUS:  Hillary with a Democrat house and senate.  Which will happen if either Trump or Cruz heads the ticket. But if Donald runs third party, then more Republican choices = more Republican voters = more Republican seats saved in house & senate.

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What's fascinating to me is to watch talk show hosts like Limbaugh, Ingraham, Buchanan march to Trump's tune without going so far as to endorse him. (At least that I've been able to glean - would love to be corrected if this is not true!)

These three are sharp enough to know Trump's a RINO (Trump's flip-flops make Mitt Romney look like the “severe conservative” he claimed in '12 to be).  But they make their living on popularity with grassroots, everyday joes, and the grassroots (especially anti-illegal immigration folks) love Trump to death so it looks like these entertainers are wanting it both ways: wanting to live off Trump's popularity without sticking their necks out. (Kudos to National Review for being forthrightly against Trump from the start.)

As much as I loved Fox News when it first came into being I wonder now if it's not a mixed blessing. The inexorable domino effect has taken hold: mainstream media went left creating backlash. Fox News nourishes what is already a big chip on the shoulder of conservatives. Creates an opening for candidate Trump to blow up Republican party, securing Hillary as president and possibly a Democrat house.

“The enemy of the enemy is my friend,” goes the saying, and the mainstream media has become such an enemy that its enemy (Trump) now becomes our friend. It's as if the first plank of the Republican platform is not of limited government but “We are a party that is anti-mainstream media”.  The problem is even a broken clock is right....

Seems likely that Republicans in the future will serve not any sort of visionary or agenda-setting role (not that they are any good at either of late), but as foot soldiers on the ground, doing the dirty work of mayors and state governors, picking up in places where the default (Democrats) have made a mess of things. We've seen it in Ohio where Gov Strickland (D) was absolutely abysmal, leading to John Kasich to mend the state. Which, I suppose, is not a terrible role.

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Trumpbait: it's where we are.