George Bush's Dilemma

The international community, from the Pope on down, thought the U.S. should've gotten the full cooperation of the U.N. before launching the Iraq War. Which would have been much preferable.

But now we know that France, Russia, Indonesia and others were receiving millions of judgment-clouding barrels of illicit Iraqi oil. Couldn't they have recused themselves? Even the Russian Orthodox church was on the take.

The phrase "it's hard to fly with eagles when you work with turkeys" well applies to the U.N.. It's pretty hard to be pure in an impure world. George Bush, if he'd obeyed the international community, could've waited a year (and possibly probably still wouldn't have gotten U.N. approval). If he did, this would put the war right in the wheelhouse of the 2004 election, meaning Bush would have had to sacrifice any chance of a second term. All because France, Russia, and Germany said 'no', as they rake in the moolah. And they say the oil bidness is dirty.

Poem from Modern Drunkard Magazine:

Foolish Drunk
He’s a fool who loves the liquor,
It softens the skinflint at once,
It urges the slow to walk quicker,
Gives spirit and brains to the dunce.
The man who is dumb as a rule
Discovers a great deal to say,
While he who is bashful since Yule
Will talk in an amorous way.
It’s drink that fulfills the hollow boast
To give battle in France and in Spain,
Now here is the end of my toast—
And fill me that glass again!
—Turlough O’Carolan

Modern Drunkard Magazine apparently solicits poems. Strangely, I have very few if any poems about drink. In praise of nature, yes. Hmm...if they just wanted spam poems...

From Mars

Fortunately, this writing test predicted my maleness. Blog entries and a fictional writing sample both came up y chromosomal.* (link via Annunciations).

Speaking of fictional writing, how cool is Ono's book cover? Self-publishing is frowned on by the elitists, but Ono's example is rather inspiring I think. Some climb mountains, some run marathons - writing a book seems no less foolish. My credo here at the blog is that I'd rather be read by two people intensely than a thousand people shallowly. Ono might not have a big market but contrary to what the spams say, bigger isn't always better.

Do blogs jump sharks? I think a blog will have a decreasing marginal utility for a given reader over time. We all have a limited perspective and once we've shared that perspective there's increasingly less we can bring to the table. Didn't someone once say that we all have one book in us? Of course, blogs are not books -- there are always links, quotes, prayer requests, book and movie reviews and the like, all of which suggest the half-life for the blogger might be long, should circumstances allow.


* - Is there a tendency for females to like female authors and males to prefer male writers? There are a couple female bloggers I especially like to read and just for grins I put some of their stuff in the ol' writing test and both came up male. Interesting.

Update: Looks like my utilitarian side was showing. :) Terry of Summa Momma's fame responded, making much sense: "I think in the more personal blogs that we mostly read, it becomes MORE like a friendship, less like a stranger whose opinions we are reading... I even question the sharp division between "real life" and the internet. It is part of "real life"! People in the past had longstanding correspondences with people--correspondences lasting decades and longer. How else would we be so graced by Flannery O'Connor's letters? We're doing the same thing--sending out letters to a group of friends. The analogy doesn't hold exactly, I'll grant you that. But I see no reason for a necessary half-life of a blog, any more than I see a necessary half-life for a friendship."

GK Chesterton Quote

"An element of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, in the same manner, through all the minor matters of morals, so that we cannot imagine courage existing except in conjunction with fear, or magnanimity existing except in conjunction with some temptation to meanness." - Chesterton's "Varied Types"

Pondering Cooperation

I've been thinking about different forms of cooperation. There is a temptation on the job to fill a customer's request rather than their need. I may know more than what I'm telling. This minimalist philosophy means that I'm only legalistically cooperating.

There are times when I'm on the other side of the equation. I'm at a dentist's office, getting my teeth drilled, scraped, needled or otherwise brutalized. Because I'm motivated for it to be over quickly, I may "over-cooperate" in trying to lend my help to the dentist by slightly moving my jaw into said instrument of torture and by anticipating his movements. In order to save the doc exertion and time in whatever mechanical action he is doing, I try to add my energy.

With God, it seems both forms of cooperation are useless. In the customer service example (obviously the more familiar error) I'm cooperating only with my lips and not my whole mind and body and soul. Catherine de Hueck Doherty, foundress of Madonna House, wrote:

"There are certain moments in your prayers or thinking - moments in your life with God - when suddenly you mean what you are saying or doing with all your heart and soul, with everything that you are. At those moments you are saying in effect, "Take my mind and my will, Lord, and cleanse them." At these times you really mean it. Do these moments last a minute, an hour, a day? You don't know. You only know that afterwards, your mind and your will have been returned to you cleansed. You are more alive."

In the dental example, life is meant to be lived, not to be Jansenistically "gotten over". The imperfect dentist is replaced by the perfect God, so impatience and anticipating His moves seem inappropriate.

Poem via Steven Riddle

Holy Sonnet 14
John Donne

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Imitation is...

....the sincerest form of flattery, so I'll steal/tweak Lee Ann's idea for my books. I'm sure I've forgotten some goodies.

24-Man Roster
Reveries of a Bachelor - Ik Marvel (Donald Grant Mitchell)
Varied Types - GK Chesterton
Pete Rose: My Prison without Bars - Pete Rose
The Christian and Anxiety - Hans Urs von Balthasar
Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture - Thomas Hibbs
Dark Star Safari - Paul Theroux

Invited to Spring Training
Haiti : a guide to the people, politics and culture - Charles Arthur
Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars - Robert V. Remini
If the South Had Won the Civil War - Harry Turtledove
God Rides a Yamaha: Musings on Pain, Poetry and Pop Culture - Kathy Shaidle

Recent Retirees
Sixpence House - Paul Collins
Turmoil and Truth - Philip Trower

HOF - Cal Ripken Division
The Jerusalem Bible

Hall of Fame
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
Habit of Being - Flannery O'Connor
Merchant of Venice - Shakespeare
The Thanatos Syndrome - Walker Percy
The Correspondence of Walker Percy and Shelby Foote - Jay Tolson, editor
Toward the End of Time - John Updike
Stonewall Jackson - James Robertson
Gladstone - Roy Jenkins

Most Valuable Coaches
Crossing the Threshold of Hope - Pope JPII
Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris
Rome Sweet Home - Scott Hahn
Lost in the Cosmos - Walker Percy
A Father Who Keeps His Promises - Scott Hahn
Case for Christ - Lee Strobel
Salt of the Earth - Cardinal Ratzinger

Fantasy League
Mark Lehner
Kinky Friedman
Florence King
Haruki Murakami

Mysteries

The seven sacraments in the Orthodox world are called "Divine Mysteries" and Fr. Groeschel mentions the difference between mystery and magic. A divine mystery, or sacrament, is a reality which you cannot see it. It is the opposite of magic, which an unreality that appears real. With magic, you see something that isn't there, with sacrament you don't see something that is.

Grazing the Glass Teat...

I wonder at what point an elaborate practical joke morphs into torturing one's family? This is way over that line.

Speaking of television, with the demise of Ballykissangel I've turned to Monarch of the Glen for my Celticphile needs.

Better him...

Poor sap is addicted to Bibliofind.. 'Scuse me, gotta do a find on bookfinder.com.

Theroux on Philanthropy

Africa has always been special to Paul Theroux. He's traveled there extensively, speaks the indigenous languages, and spent part of the 60s teaching in Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer. He went back in 2001 and the result is the very interesting book, "Dark Star Safari".

It is painful for him to see how everything has come to ruins; where there was hope in the 60s, he's reached the conclusion that only Africans can solve African problems and that foreign aid is probably only making things worse. He says Africans should either run their own businesses and become independent that way, or simply start from scratch and rely on subsistence farming. "'Save them', the agents of virtue said of such people, yet farmers like these had saved themselves. Subsistence farming was not a sad thing to me anymore."

He talks about the Indian businesses that once thrived in an African city - until a despotic leader asked the Indians to leave so that Africans could take control of their own financial destiny. But the businesses failed and when Theroux asked one of the city leaders why, the official said that all Indians did was count, count, count and that wasn't valued in African culture. Theroux pointed out that given the slim profit margins, small business owners had to constantly count inventory. But the city leader scoffed.

"I began to understand the futility of charity in Africa. It was generally fueled by the best of motives, but its worst aspect was that it was noninspirational. Aliens had been helping for so long and were so deeply entrenched that Africans lost interest - if indeed they ever had it - in doing the same work themselves."

Theroux quotes Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve."

I have mixed emotions. On the one hand I don't believe, as Theroux may, that any charitable effort is wasted. He ties the efforts he and others made to longterm visible results. There are surely many innocent people being helped, especially children. But on the other hand, it is leading me to fully realize that only God can direct charitable efforts, or even knows what charity is, because I no longer see it as an objective enterprise - i.e. give aid to those most in need. "Most in need" is a slippery concept; Theroux sees much of the aid projects as fueling longterm dependency and the encouragement of sloth.

(I haven't yet thought about the spiritual parallel, given that many of us, myself included, are charity cases ourselves.)

Songs of Innocence and Spam-erience

"You can hide 'neath your covers and study your spam..." - Springsteen's "Thunder Road"
___

How do you solve
A problem like a spammer?
How do you catch
A cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word
That describes a spammer?
A flibberti gibbet!
A willo' the wisp!
A pain!

Many a thing you know
You'd like to tell them,
Many a thing they ought
To understand.
But how do you make them stay,
And listen to all you say?
How do you keep a wave
Upon the sand?
Oh, how do you solve
A problem like a spammer?

-- with help from Rodgers and Hammerstein

____

Poem made up entirely of spam subject headers:

Domestic habituate pentagon
    couldn't bear the thought
hey
this really worked for me
RE: Proceed With Your Ordination
        confirmation
You can't survive on just a paycheck
    a date is waiting
perjury.

Passion Politics

It's been sort of interesting the way some evangelicals are reacting to the new movie "The Passion". Our local anti-Catholic minister has been of a 'wait and see' attitude, saying that the gospel accounts are sufficient but if this leads some to Christ, then so be it. On the other hand the author Lee Strobel is enthusiastically full-bore, prepared to maximize its evangelistic effect, not appearing to care in the least that Mel Gibson is a Catlicker. An evangelical acquaintance mentioned in regard to the movie: "I heard the actor who played Christ say that he was a Roman Catholic and that they had Mass on the set every morning." It sounds so formal to hear the "Roman" in front of Catholic, doesn't it?

The pounding Gibson is getting by secularist media types like Frank Rich eases intramural difficulties. All Christians have tremendously more in common than uncommon, and so there's a natural alliance formed when any of us are attacked by outsiders.

But even some Catholics are suspicious of the movie because they say Gibson isn't Catholic enough for them, that he's in schism. What resonates with me is the beauty of Mel Gibson's reply when asked why he wasn't in the movie. "I am in the movie - playing the only part I could. My hands pound the nails...".

Concert in the City

In the velvet seat I catch my breath
my home, this Ohio theatre,
a conductor full of poignancies
and of seeming superfluities
dressed in the required regalia
a romantic, an E. Lee type,
he breaks the spell by drinking Evian.

In the music, freedom and nostalgia intertwine
and afterwards trees twist in fantastic shapes
a sign attracts:
"Blood Oranges for Sale"
as do the barrister bookcases in a law firm window
like a page out of Dickens.

Quotables...

"Shouldn't we look to Bismarck as the beginning of the Third Reich?" - paraphrase (I was reading it in the bookstore) of opening line of book "Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans.

*
"To be content with Mystery is very difficult for us... We live in an age which analyzes, quantifies and measures constantly.... Canon law requires that the Tabernacle be opaque, a quality consistent with mystery and respect for God." - paraphrasing an assistant priest at Mass today.

*
Walker Percy writes Shelby Foote concerning Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch: "Poor Mr. Casaubon: pooped right out in his rose garden, sometimes I feel like him, but hornier."

Foote replies: "If I'd been Casaubon I wouldn't have much to do with that chick either. He had more life in his dead hand than she had in her twitchy little heart; which is not to say he wasn't the blot he was; he was."

*
"Russert called Iraq 'a pre-emptive war.' It really wasn't - and I say that as someone who strongly favors pre-emption as a policy." - Cliff May of NRO on Tim Russert's interview of George W. Bush. My opinion is that Bush really tanked the WMDs/intel portion of the interview. I'm sure there's a reason he's so protective of the CIA generally and George Tenet specifically, and I really hoped I'd learn it during this interview, but I still don't get it.