The Sailor
-- by Geoff Hewitt:

In my movie the boat goes under
And he alone survives the night in the cold ocean,
Swimming he hopes in a shoreward direction.
Daylight and he's still afloat, pawing the water
And doesn't know he's only fifty feet from shore.
He goes under for what will be the last time
But only a few feet down scrapes bottom.
He's suddenly a changed man and half hops, half swims
The remaining distance, hauls himself waterlogged
Partway up the beach before collapsing into sleep.
As he dreams the tide rolls in
and rolls him back to sea.

Oil - Black Gold, Texas 'T'

Well, the heading says, Oil supply 'cannot match demand' but then they have this interesting bon mot buried within: "Nowhere near all of the apparently increased demand is connected with increased consumption."

Countries are stockpiling oil, which is the demand the title refers to.

Many are upset at the absence of strict CAFE regulations, but would it in fact keep oil prices down? I'm not sure it would. Last year China was responsible for 55% of the world's concrete consumption despite having only 20% of world population. In other words, China is going to start devouring oil bigtime and that is going to dwarf the oil savings of CAFE regulations.

Even if we stopped buying oil from the Middle East, it wouldn't affect the Saudis. We'd simply buy from a middleman like Mexico. Mexico would buy more from Saudis to sell to us in a regular 3-card monty game. As O'Reilly would say, "Where am I going wrong?"

No doubt fuel prices are a big drag on the economy, but I don't think fuel prices haven't outpaced inflation since the 70s, so we certainly due for this. Obviously there's no inherent right to reasonably priced oil, so we'll have to just take our lumps with $2 - $2.50 per gallon and hope the economy can weather the new reality.

We'll have to eventually get off the oil drug, but it seems like the way that would happen would be for gas to go to $3 or $4 a gallon, which would be highly motivating to say the least. At that point we'll start looking at alternatives -- but by that time it'll be too late, since the economy will be in shambles.

The Mystery of Dick Cheney

I've always liked Dick Cheney. He's a man's man, calm and resolute under pressure, the kind of guy who always seemed to be the "cooler head" in the phrase "cooler heads prevail".

Thus I'm kind of surprised that he was so unrestrained in his desire to prosecute this war. I think the war was a just one, but not prudent, although that remains to be seen. But what surprises me is how in Woodward's book Cheney is such an unalloyed hawk. Now Wolfowitz and the other neo-cons I can understand, but the VP always struck me as a the wisest of them all - of a higher quality of presidential timber than anyone in Bush's administration with the possible exception of Condi Rice (I might be biased).

So it's interesting to me that Dick Cheney seemed to rush into this thing ill-prepared, at least the post-war part of it. The basic misreading, I gather from news reports, is that he thought we would be hailed as liberators and be given much help by the Iraqis. This is a sort of Wilsonian optimism I'm unfamiliar with, a sort of denial of original sin. I suppose wisdom is a quality possessed only to the extent you are steeped in biblical and Magisterium teaching. The obligatory disclaimer applies: since I'm only partially steeped, take my posts with a grain of salt.

Wilsons, Jacksons

NRO categorizes the sides as Wilsonians versus Jacksonians. To tell the truth, I can't stand either Wilson or Jackson. A pox on both their houses. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we tried to go into this thing in a middle way, and ain't nuthin' in the middle but dead armadillos. The third way was to mind our own bidness as much as is possible.

The slaughter of Berg proves that they'll see our atrocities and raise them to the n^th degree. That's one bidding war we ain't gonna be able to win, and nor should we. We need to mind our own bidness with respect to the Middle East while responding ferociously when acts of terror occur. Easier said that done.

Various & Sundry

Interesting Touchstone review of Pearce's Literary Converts:

Is the English literature of the twentieth century demonic? The French poet Paul Claudel thought so. But most English critics would settle for calling it merely secular. Enter Joseph Pearce and his Literary Converts, turning upside down both the complacency of the secular English and the asperity of the pious French...

Insert tongue in cheek while reading blogger Richard "Don't Call Me Pebble" Beach's suggestion of voluntary taxes:

One way of showing your disgust with President Bush's tax cut is to pay a VOLUNTARY progressive tax with your tax return. Pay the additional amount that you wish he hadn't cut out of your taxes. Let's show the world that we are not hypocrites. We believe in TAXES!

Those be some mighty poor book covers.

    Spanning the Globe to Bring You the Constant Variety of Posts

It's a girl! - Kat of Lively Writer.

I didn't take my usual Lenten blog break this year and I'm feeling a little blog vacation coming on, mainly for the constant delicious feeling of neglecting something important, without really neglecting anything important. - Bill of Random Notes

Politics have been boring and no new episode of social decay has yet roused me from my cynical malaise. - Lee Ann of Literarium

May 4...Craving Log...Italian bread dunked in spaghetti sauce. - Davey's Mommy. (Gee, could I be pregnant too?)

Q: One of the things I appreciate about Catholicism is that it has reinforced a set of moral values and stuck with them throughout history. Issues such as abortion and homosexuality which seem to be "up for debate" in a lot of Protestant denominations are still solidly held in the Catholic church. Why do you think this is the case? A: This reminds me of a remark by John Paul II about the crisis in the Balkans. He said there were two possible solutions, the miraculous and the mundane. The mundane solution, he said, was for Jesus to send the Blessed Virgin with ten legions of angels and restore justice and harmony to the region. The miraculous solution, he said, was for the people living there to achieve justice and harmony. In a similar way there are two reasons for the Church's - relative - steadfastness on traditional moral teaching. The mundane reason is that the Holy Spirit guides the Catholic Church and so the gates of Hell will not prevail against her. The miraculous reason is that God has established the Church so that her legitimacy is inextricably bound up with the idea of an infallible and constant magisterium. Even if Bishops wanted to legitimize abortion and homosexual marriages (and it wouldn't surprise me if there were one or two who did), the act itself would indubitably expose the entire Catholic edifice as a sham. I realize that answer provokes many more questions, but that's it in a nutshell.-Secret Agent Man

So, let's recap: torture of prisoners=bad; women jailers of prideful men=feature, not a bug. -Robert of Hokie Pundit, on Muslim outrage at women guards at prison camps

AIDS victims in 1987: Philippines 135 / Thailand 112...In 1991 the WHO predicted the Philippines would have 80,000 to 90,000 cases and Thailand 60,000 to 80,000 AIDS victims. Thailand promoted the use of condoms in massive campaigns where Catholic Philippines promoted 'Abstinence' and 'Be faithful'.The prognosis of the WHO was wrong for both countries: 1999: Philippines 1,005 / Thailand 755,000 AIDS victims... The West's commitment to sexual promiscuity is a religion that people will both kill and die for." - Mark Shea

The last word is not “Cancer,” or “Absence;” it is not “Loss,” or “Death.” The final word is Christ crucified, that most foolish of words which is simply, as Paul says, the “power of God unto salvation.” Christ crucified is, to the ears of the faithful, the ultimate word of hope, for it is nothing less than the King of the Universe defeating death by death. Our beautiful King refused to meet the world of sin and death on its own terms, refused to fight in a tit for tat struggle for supremacy. Instead, he simply died bearing our iniquity, that deathliness of sin. No games, no struggle with death, for death is not worth the effort. Instead, he died with nothing but love for us and the whole of creation. And, having borne our sin and folly into hell itself, it is in the power of that love that he was raised on the third day, with death behind him. - Thomas of Endlessly Rocking

At your suggestion (for which many thanks!) I have ordered a copy of Orchard's 1953 Catholic Commentary; just now I feel rather like a kid before Christmas - reader on Jimmy Akin's blog

Sometimes this is how I see comments in some catholic blogs: "It begins with little things, Davy. Things that look harmless at first. Irritation, grumbling, resentment. Then gradually, like-minded individuals gratitate toward each other. They reinforce each other's criticisms, grow bolder, gain confidence. They tell each other that they have interpreted the Council correctly [...] After a while they convince themselves that they're saving the Church [...]" Father Elijah, Michael O'Brien -- Yann the Frenchman at dads.stblogs.orgs

I ask myself, "What's the difference between 'receiving the joy that Christ has won for me' and 'trying to experience joy because it's true that Christ has won joy for me?'" I'm not sure I know the answer, but I have a gut feeling there's a difference and that I settle too quickly into the second alternative.- Roz on Disputations' blog

In many ways, modern life has actually brought us back to the social environment of the stone age. We're mobile, even nomadic; our personal lives tend to be governed by relationships rather than rigid rules; we live in a sea of strangers, which socially speaking is almost like living in the unpeopled wilderness. It is this resemblance, perhaps, that Derbyshire and his friend are trying to get at. The social changes that industrialization brought about are as great as those that agriculture brought about, and they aren't finished yet. - Camassia

Whenever a person becomes the object of a media feeding-frenzy, look beneath the surface. More is going on. - Philip Blosser of "Musings of a Pertinacious Papist" on the calls for Rumsfeld's head.

Countless people have been restored to good health with the help of St. Philomena. Beyond physical ailments, she is one of the few saints who have been effective in facilitating recoveries from mental disorders. Because Our Lord rarely chooses to heal this type of condition through divine intercession, St. Philomena is honored as the patron of those suffering from mental illness. - Rick Medina

I constantly am surprised by people who are furious that their pro-choice stance is equated to being pro-abortion. Before I converted and began reading Church teachings, I also was pro-choice. I knew it meant supporting abortion but I didn't have any problem with that. I wasn't sure if God existed much less if that little cluster of cells had a soul. What was a soul anyway? How could anyone really know the truth? I saw it as support for personal freedom. - Julie of Happy Catholic

Path to Grove City

Prologue

I think it was Chrysostomos, frequent commenter on Thomas of ER’s blog, who said that the constant conversational writing of blogs was killing his muse, snuffing his creativity. “Video killed the radio star” you might say.

And while this may or may not be a great tragedy for the reading public, it does strike a minor key for those of us who dabble in our journals and enjoy the endorphin of an occasionally good line. In view of this I’ll try to make my blog less thoughtful and more eye-rollingly insufferable. It's summer after all. Least I can do.

As mentioned in a former post I’ll begin the travelogue concerning a trip from one Ohio suburb to another, recorded in as painstaking detail as can be produced from purely imaginative sources since I have no intention of actually walking it, for I like sleeping in my own bed.

Chapter 1

Deciding which books to bring took longer than expected, it coming down to a series of eleven hundred coin flips. Such packing decisions weighed heavy but were made lighter by the weather - a fine sparkling-wine sort of May day, the kind that makes you want to rise early to greet the 11am sun. I spent the next few hours buying things. A sturdy pair of hiking boots, a backpack, cans of Guinness Stout, a lighter and a compass all found their way into my cart. By 4pm I was ready for a “last meal”, carefully prepared and shared with my wife and daughter. Hugs and tears were exchanged; the three days I’d be gone would be hard but they were assuaged when I told them the insurance was paid up.

I began the long journey to Grove City in the glow of burnished sun assisted by a repast of Lambrusco, spaghetti, and Swiftian quantities of chocolate cake. Calories were my friend. Ham of Bone had made himself scarce; “a friend in need's a friend I don’t need” was his saying, alas. Here was a trip in which we could together fight off the dragons of fatigue and shoo the fleas of boredom. Three days…three long days. An eternity for the short-attention theatre crowd.

I chided myself for these thoughts of despair, for what were they but any other temptation? Some souls have unchaste thoughts, others tend toward avarice. Was it Tertullian who said that you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your temptations?

The twelve mile journey south began in a residential neighborhood with natural hazards like lawn sprinklers, barking dogs and statues of faux deer. I wasn't packing heat, at least not yet, but I'd be going by pawn shops and I had the cash. The long boulevard took me past an ancient auto body shop and the rusted cars and sharp division of sun and shade made by the garage brought back memories of Mexico, a place I'd never actually been but had seen on television many times. I was moved by it, and by the guy in the white T-shirt who moved in slow motion, opening the car hood as if it were the weight of the world. "Blue-collar dude in his native habitat", I thought to myself...

'Was Iraq the way it was because of Saddam, or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq?'

I listened today to the local Baptist minister's radio program and he said, "This shows what a poor judge of newsworthiness I am, but if you'd have told me a week ago that the pictures of Iraq prisoner abuse would still be the number one news story, I'd have said you were crazy." I thought it'd be a two-day story too. The pictures are abhorrent, as everyone is quick to point out as if to show their bona fides, but what can you do besides severely punish the people & supervisors involved and move on? If you're interested in deterence and not partisanship, what will deter future prisoner abuse is harsh punishment of those involved & their supervisors, not a media frenzy. (Although credit goes to the media for discovering the abuse and fulfilling their watchdog role.)

If the networks & the NY Times want to help Kerry, you'd think they'd have enough ammo as it is. The underlying point about the war is that it was iffy in the first place and the post-war "nation-building" exercise smells more and more of failure. (Liberal pundit Margaret Carlson made an interesting comment on CNN's Capital Gang: "Was Iraq the way it was because of Saddam or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq?")

It seems that the tissue-thin (or meters thick?) difference between this war being considered just and its current status is that the United Nations didn't approve it, and they had the right to since the agreement ending the Gulf War (and subsequently broken by Hussein ad nauseum) was a U.N. one. That the Gulf War fell mightily on U.S. shoulders and that key nations in the U.N. began doing business with Saddam (and thus have a financial incentive to oppose us) makes it more interesting.

In a way, the Bush Administration interpreted the years of resolutions as meaningful documents requiring serious consequences. But what Germany, France and Russia knew was that the vote matters, not the words. The Bush people were "strict constructionists" while the European nations knew that words could be massaged and interpreted and that the power lay in the vote, not the wording. President Bush decided that words in resolutions have meaning, but then voting has a meaning too so there's enough fault to go around.

David Mills on the easy corruption of jailors:

I had been thinking about the subject of today's Breakpoint column, Fallenness on Display, the famous psychological experiment in which students are divided into jailers and prisoners to find out how they respond to power and powerlessness. Predictably enough, to a Christian anyway, those who assigned to be jailers often become as brutal and sadistic as the experiment allows them to be.

I don't mean to suggest that many of us would have descended to the depths the criminal soldiers did, though as pride goes before a fall, no Christian should be entirely confident in his abilities to resist evil, however repellent is that evil. The pornographic element in the abuse is foreign to most educated, middle class Christians. It isn't, if you will, our style of depravity.

But except for the occasional saint, most educated, middle class Christians might in the same circumstances become abusers anyway. We'd begin by being nice and kind, but we'd also be thinking: the prisoners are the enemy, the bad guys, and besides, they might know something that would save the life of your comrades, only they won't tell us.

- Ralph Fabri exhibition.

Fiddler's Green- John Conolly

As I roved by the dockside one evening so fair
To view the salt waters and take in the salt air
I heard an old fisherman singing a song
Oh, take me away boys me time is not long

Wrap me up in me oilskin and blankets
No more on the docks I'll be seen
Just tell me old shipmates, I'm taking a trip mates
And I'll see you someday on Fiddler's Green

Now Fiddler's Green is a place I've heard tell
Where the fishermen go if they don't go to hell
Where the weather is fair and the dolphins do play
And the cold coast of Greenland is far, far away

Now when you're in dock and the long trip is through
There's pubs and there's clubs and there's lassies there too
And the girls are all pretty and the beer is all free
And there's bottles of rum growing on every tree.

Where the skies are all clear and there's never a gale
And the fish jump on board with one swish on their tail
Where you lie at your leisure, there's no work to do
And the skipper's below making tea for the crew

Now I don't want a harp nor a halo, not me
Just give me a breeze and a good rolling sea
I'll play me old squeeze-box as we sail along
With the wind in the riggin to sing me a song

Belloc 'Path to Rome' Excerpt

Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art of writing—

Can fix the high elusive hour
And stand in things divine.

*

It was the first part of the afternoon when I got to a place called Meiringen, and I thought that there I would eat and drink a little more. So I steered into the main street, but there I found such a yelling and roaring as I had never heard before, and very damnable it was; as though men were determined to do common evil wherever God has given them a chance of living in awe and worship.

For they were all bawling and howling, with great placards and tickets, and saying, 'This way to the Extraordinary Waterfall; that way to the Strange Cave. Come with me and you shall see the never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar,' and so forth. So that my illusion of being alone in the roots of the world dropped off me very quickly, and I wondered how people could be so helpless and foolish as to travel about in Switzerland as tourists and meet with all this vulgarity and beastliness.

If a man goes to drink good wine he does not say, 'So that the wine be good I do not mind eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I drink it,' and if a man goes to read a good verse, for instance, Jean Richepin, he does not say, 'Go on playing on the trombone, go on banging the cymbals; so long as I am reading good verse I am content.' Yet men now go into the vast hills and sleep and live in their recesses, and pretend to be indifferent to all the touts and shouters and hurry and hotels and high prices and abominations. Thank God, it goes in grooves! I say it again, thank God, the railways are trenches that drain our modern marsh, for you have but to avoid railways, even by five miles, and you can get more peace than would fill a nosebag. All the world is my garden since they built railways, and gave me leave to keep off them.

A Day in May

Summer, or the near approximation we are currently experiencing, tends to banish serious thoughts. I go kicking and screaming, wanting to hold on to heavy matters for reasons I can’t fathom once I’ve experienced a couple of brainless days. And so it goes as I bask in the weightlessness of the natural world. Count me in for prayer and lyricism; count me out of politics and abstractions:

Born a poor young country boy--Mother Nature's son
All day long I'm sitting singing songs for everyone.
Sit beside a mountain stream--see her waters rise
Listen to the pretty sound of music as she flies.
Do do do...
Find me in my field of grass--Mother Nature's son
Swaying daises sing a lazy song beneath the sun.
Do do do... yeah,yeah, yeah
mmm, mmm, ........
Mother Nature's son. --Lennon & McCartney

Is there anything so precious as a day rent of ruts, sans the smell of re-use and refuse, of a day clock-stoppingly gorgeous, of a May 10th gratuitously free of mischief, of music that tastes mystical, of bike rides hailed by maple helicopter seeds and effortless as carpet rides? One can scarce take in the flushness of nature after the seasonal depression. There is none of summer’s garishness, nothing but the kiss of gentle paths along translucent lakes and I stop and watch the fish flip their electric blue tailfins. I wonder at my wonder – they are magicians to pierce the hardness.
Putting it on paper is an exercise in stretching a minute at the cost of truth, for the truth is that the beauty can’t be captured. The seers of Medjugorje laughingly refused to describe Heaven because not everything is reducible to words, least of all the Word.

Request

I'd appreciate it if you'd say a Hail Mary for a young 16-year old we know who is pregnant and considering an abortion.

Four Years o' Blogging

Kathy Shaidle Relapsed Catholic is taking a well-deserved break. She sort of acts as the canary in the coalmine, as far as noting the longterm effects of blogging.