Day 1 was really hard on us...Every time he would get going, he would just stop pedaling, for some reason, and then fall over, not seeming to grasp the concept that Feet Off Pedals = Fall Over. Day 2 was a little better and Day 3 was magic... It’s all about their little inner selves being okay with the prospect of this new thing and believing that it can be done and that really - not only is it better than the status quo, it’s for the best. Hmm. Life does not change so much, I’m thinking. - Amy Welborn on teaching her son how to ride a bike.

The phenomenon of our need - whatever it may be - calls us back to our dependence, and this is the cue for deepening our awareness of our dependence on God [and so we beg!] - Don Giussani via Fred of "Deep Furrows"

Glory be to God for breaded things—
Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh,
Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim
With french fries, fritters, life-float onion rings,
Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye,
That in all oils, corn or canola, swim - R.S. Gywnn via "For Keats' Sake"

I'm... Hilary, no, not Hillary of "It Takes A Village" I'm Hilary who MADE a village!!! - blogger at "Long-Skirts" and mother of ten

What is the most overrated social custom? Shaking hands at the Kiss of Peace. Like, either kiss, or leave me alone! LOL BOURGEOIS CHRISTIANITY. - Eve Tushnet

Senator [Obama] then went on to tell reporters that he is currently in the hunt for a new church to attend. "I am currently leaning towards an Amish or any Anabapist congregation. I really like the idea of them not using electricity, especially in their churches. No cell phone cameras, no live streaming of church services and events, no greatest sermons DVDs, and no possibility of something showing up on YouTube seems to be a definite plus for me. Though I am open to other options. So if you are a pastor of a totally non-controversial church please contact my staff." - parody from Jeff of "Curt Jester"

Traducianism, as you know, is the false doctrine that the human soul is produced through generation by the parents rather than directly by God...Almost all of us posit a kind of absence of God where God is indeed present. Whatever we think God is indifferent to, whenever we say, "God doesn't care," whatever we pretend He won't notice -- all that says, "God is not here. God is not involved." All that savors of Traducianism. - Tom of Disputations

Because power corrupts. First of all, get it out of your system: Insert snark about current administration here. I'll likely agree. But this is one basis of my remaining feathers of libertarianism. I see people on the Left correctly identifying various loci of power in the private sector, like corporations, and attempting to use the government to limit that power. First off, I hope we can all keep in mind that corporations give us butter and disco, and for this we should be grateful. But also, isn’t this strategy a bit like the old woman who swallowed the fly? It’s not great to have a fly inside you, but that doesn't mean swallowing a spider is the right response…[And]…because traditions give meaning and beauty to necessary suffering... Tradition, like constraint, is based in relationship. So it should come as no surprise that ideologies of choice and reflexive suspicion of tradition dissolve the social forms that sustain relationships, and leave freedom, relief from the previous form of suffering, banality, and alienation in their place. It's also one of the really insightful points in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which is my current reading--I'm on chapter three. The guy's critique of modern alienation is about four hundred times better than his proposed fluffy, "Believe in whatever!" solution, but I still really appreciate that he understands that meaninglessness is worse than pain. - Eve Tushnet, on why she's a conservative

I turn office water coolers into happy hour wine. I actually used that line in a cover letter. - blogger at "Church of Baseball", who lacks not chutzpah

I’d like to see UST’s side of the argument (”We’ve had a lot of problems with these ACS people. Why, last year Dale Ahlquist stripped down into a Speedo, jumped on a table, sang “Mack the Knife,” then smash dishes like he was Johnny Cash circa 1967″). - an unfortunate image from Eric of "The Daily Eudemon", on the University of St. Thomas's decision to crack down on the festivities at a GK Chesterton conference

As I got older, I was never embarrassed to go down the age group ladder. A new Dr. Seuss title? I'm checking it out! A new Beverly Cleary? I'm on it! I think my parents might have been embarrassed, or perhaps just puzzled. "But you're a good reader!" they'd say. "You shouldn't be reading children's books. You could go on the adult side of the library." The problem was that I'd already been there. And the books in the general fiction area seemed pretty uninteresting. Judging from their novels, it seemed that adults were only interested in sex and money. Boring! (I realize now that I was probably just unlucky in my selections.) - Catholic Bibliophagist

Four Days till Vacation

Buzzwords & bossman's givin',
we're almost on our own,
short timer's can hear the drummin'
Four days till vacation.

Gotta get out of it
Work is cuttin' us down
Should've been done long ago
Sky is shinin'
brighter than diamonds
bluebird sings in the meadow...

Four days till vacation
Four days till vacation
Four days till vacation
Four days till vacation

Parody is Therapy Updated...

Concerning presidential elections, the Democrats have offered us Gore, Kerry and now Obama, each increasingly liberal. Based on the trend, if they lose in '08 look for a member of the Communist Party in '12. I've parodied it here.

No Pain, No Gain?

True or False: St. Thomas Aquinas wrote this:

Where there is more effort for good, there seems to be more merit, since "every man shall receive his own reward according to his own labor" (1 Corinthians 3:8). Now a man has to make a greater effort to love his enemy than to love his friend, because it is more difficult. Therefore it seems more meritorious to love one's enemy than to love one's friend.

Indeed, it sounds like St. Thomas.

But actually this was an objection he'd raised. He refuted it with:

The "good" has, more than the "difficult," to do with the reason of merit and virtue. Therefore it does not follow that whatever is more difficult is more meritorious, but only what is more difficult, and at the same time better.

Which makes sense. To extend it to a ridiculous extreme, it was surely difficult for Hitler to wage war and kill millions, but that obviously doesn't make it meritorious.

This was sparked by coming across the quote: "Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious." from St. Thomas, and I wanted to see it in context. Elsewhere in the Summa he wrote: "A work can be toilsome and difficult in two ways: first, from the greatness of the work, and thus the greatness of the work pertains to the increase of merit."

From this Google Book

Victorian-era British woman writes:

The Italians are very fond of music, and of painting, and of statues. They do not care so much for useful things as the English do. Italians care most for beautiful things; English people care most for useful things.

She doesn't mean the description of Italians as a compliment.

Her story is also interesting in that she briefly dated a man named Manning when both were devout evangelicals. He converted to Roman Catholicism, became a priest, and eventually became known as Cardinal Manning.

According to Todd Pruzan's book, Manning's conversion was harder to take than her husband's death.

Nature Stream o' Consciousness

And so the sun regales us, the manifold fingers filet us, from the red beat tree, the barricuda florentine, the messianic rock of ground-covering stones absorbing heat. All the senses are sharpened in the pleasantly humid air. There are oxygen-giving herbs & willows, stodgy pines and whispering oaks – oh oak, croak, am I suffering from toxic shock cubical syndrome? Only babe from breast is more unnaturally separated as human from earth and sky.

The sun is equatorial, the flowers propulsive, the landscape lush. A large bush-like tree has needle up-thrusts, protruding spines from the mass of large green leaves and it reminds me of those moments in Florida, or more specifically, Busch Gardens. Pine away, pine away, pine away all!

A Saint in the City

Sometimes I think there’s a case to be made that Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” was the best song ever written though maybe that's just nostalgia talking. Other times I think it’s Frizzell & West’s “You're The Reason God Made Oklahoma”.

Springsteen was a gift from my sister, passed down from her girlfriend Susan. Usually older siblings pass down their musical tastes but mine were passed up – at the time I hadn’t heard of Springsteen from Fallsteen and I was surprised how open I was to a rocker who was pretty far from John Denver.

There was some latent spirituality in Springsteen’s music, a recognition that magic underlay the ordinary. Maybe there was a “savior beneath that dirty hood” after all, even in New Jersey of all places. It was a music of hope, even if it be of a secular variety.

What was funny is that in 1985 I thought everything and everybody were stationary objects. Change was merely a rumor that happened when you did bad things, like Elvis, who ate too much and so there was the sharp demarcation between his Hound Dog years and his Las Vegas years. Later, sadly, there were drugs and death at a relatively young age. Springsteen idolized Elvis and climbed over the gates of Graceland to try to see his hero. The lesson he learned was: “I will not allow this to happen to me.” He would take care of himself; he ran six to ten miles a day, as if he could indefinitely hold back the clock with them. As if what happened to Elvis, that is death, would not happen to him some day.

But in ‘85 I thought Springsteen's career would not change, the E-Street band would always be with us, not realizing that that’s not the way life works because to mature is to change. The natural terminus of the romantic impulse – and Springsteen is/was nothing but the romantic (“Man, there's an opera out on the Turnpike / There's a ballet being fought out in the alley”) is marriage. Chesterton wrote that the only thing romantic is the permanent. “We got one last chance to make it real,” sang Bruce and nothing is more real than marriage or less real than an infatuation.

So he married an actress (ironically, they who specialize in artifice) and the marriage didn’t work out and afterwards was the youthful exuberance and maybe even innocence of “Jungleland” or “Thunder Road” ever really repeated? Could “Candy’s World” have been written by the 40-year old Bruce?

Watching a video from Passaic, NJ, circa 1978, he seems devoid of artifice. He sings a couple verses almost sotto voce, as if singing to himself, or for himself, the opposite of a utilitarian effort. The lack of self-consciousness reminds me of the early Tom Jones’ videos. Is it that the era of the ‘70s was less self-conscious, before everything and everyone was recorded and everything for sale, or that simply youth can seem less self-conscious simply due to innocence? I think youth today are attracted to the ‘60s era primarily for the perceived authenticity of the era but now I wonder how much was simply innocence, an innocence kids today seek to regain.

Even if Bruce didn’t re-capture the magic of a “Thunder Road”, which I certainly can’t say, our worth is not tied to our production and to every time there is a season. You don’t need it to be repeated if it’s not scarce, and it’s not scarce if there’s an afterlife. Could the wholesome desire to not follow Elvis’s path be fed at least in part by a distrust of a happy afterlife?

Bruce is a saint in the small ‘s’ sense of completely rejecting any mediocrity. (“She knows that I’ll give, all that I have to give.”) The disdain he feels for poets (and we’re all poets) who don’t write is palpable:

Between flesh and what's fantasy and the poets down here
Don't write nothing at all, they just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even dead

If there’s a tension between how the young have passion and passion is required to resist mediocrity it sometimes seems mirrored in the spiritual life. St. Therese of Liseux, St. Bernadette, Jesus Himself and countless others prove a kind of truth to the line that “only the good die young” although we see counter examples all the time including John Paul II's heroic life.

Springsteen comes by his political liberalism honestly, having been a rebel almost out of the womb, but liberalism is likely the natural next step after marriage in the search for meaning. Salvation-seeking often goes from the individual to the collective to...God, who is often the hope of last resort. We often seek salvation from the inside out, from ourselves, then in another person, then in leaders of groups of people, before looking "outside the system". For non-believers, if the only salvation is earthly then the only salvation is political, which translates to liberal politics since it would make no sense to seek salvation in conserving what is past. After all, the past has already proved itself incapable of salvation, so why return to it?

But to borrow a Springsteen song title, to try to create heaven on earth without God is harder than being a saint in the city. And to borrow from a saint in Heaven: "Oh Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life."

Of Dogs and Men

"German Shepherds love having jobs"
so my wife says
and so I can attest
especially breaking up fights
between the cats.
(Some jobs he relishes
more than others.)

* * *

Sometimes at Adoration
I'm the only one there besides Him
And I love when that happens
because then I have the job
of guarding the Eucharist.
(Maybe I have a little
German Shepherd in me.)

Graphs U Can Use

This explores the ratio of dumb questions and status updates to cubical locale (as always, click picture for enlargement purposes; no viagra required):

The Bride in the Park

It's always nice to see something different if only to break the preoccupation that is pandemic to readers, who are often more mindful of what they've just read than the surroundings.

I was running around a city park that was mostly empty at 1:20pm on a sunny, 90-degree weekday, when suddenly I see a young girl alone, dressed in a wedding dress as bright as the sun.

This I hadn't seen before. Usually girls in wedding dresses are never alone but are like queen bees surrounded by bridesmaids fussying here and there, making minute adjustments to hair or gown. There's nothing more beautiful than a bride, let alone a June bride, but she looked distraught, pacing in the hot sun, not remaining still under the shade but pacing pensively.

After slowly making my way around the half-mile perimeter loop I saw she was still there, looking as forlorn as the waving girl statue who looks at the waves on the Savannah pier.

Her auburn hair clung against the sweat that lay between her shoulder blades and above her white bra - her one concession to the heat being to unzip the dress in the back down to just above her waist.

The mind creates drama where perhaps none exists for perhaps this was nothing more than an actress waiting for a ride to the venue of the play. But I imagined instead this to be a desperate elopement gone awry, the groom taking the advice of bachelor uncles in New England who'd counseled, "run, son. Run like the wind!"

Dickens Description

There's a little patch of land in the foothills of southeastern Ohio with a field surrounded by trees with an up-cupped lip of earth beckoning, with an arched passageway to a field beyond. I thought it would've been the perfect place to sit, with a glimpse of the meadow beyond.

So I was pleased to come across this description in Bleak House yesterday, as it mimics the sensation:

We had one favourite spot, deep in moss and last year's leaves, where there were some felled trees from which the bark was all stripped off. Seated among these, we looked through a green vista supported by thousands of natural columns, the whitened stems of trees, upon a distant prospect made so radiant by its contrast with the shade in which we sat and made so precious by the arched perspective through which we saw it that it was like a glimpse of the better land.

Atlantic Clip

Douthat on Obama and abortion:

Doug Kmiec would do well to admit that he has backed a ticket that will be absolutely uncompromising in its support for abortion rights. There is no chance whatsoever that Obama will make the slightest gesture in the direction of moderation on this question, and there is no chance that any appointments to the court will not be litmus tested on this question...

In terms of the (thin) hope that the Democratic Party might move toward the center on abortion, I don't think there's any question that Hillary Clinton would have been a better bet than Obama.

E Pluribus Unum, or Something in the Ballpark

Was listening to a Christian radio show and a caller who happened to be black mentioned that "every time a black man is put up as a candidate, white conservative Americans demonize him as they have throughout history by either locking him up in jail or killing him."

The host mentioned that he supported black gubernatorial candidate (a conservative) Ken Blackwell and the caller said that whites support candidates who are "weak black men" who "don't know the history of their people", etc.

And so it goes.

And I got to thinking how there are racists out there, both black and white, and how people believe utter falsehoods, like H.I.V. being spread by the government, and how some think Obama is Muslim - but - and here's where the cheery note begins - but overall it seems to not have a negative impact!

For decades we've been believing stupid things and yet the nation muddles through. I'm sure some blacks and many liberals believe I say crazy things, but again even though we both think the other semi-insane, there seems to be little bad effect. We keep motoring along reasonably peacefully. I'm cheered by the fact that we can be so diametrically opposed to each others' ideas and yet not have it erupt in any kind of violence or outright hatred (although there is violence against babies in the womb).

It seems knowledge is overrated compared to the virtues.

And on a different note, even as the family is collapsing around us, with higher and higher rates of out-of-wedlock births, the surprising thing is that things aren't worse than they are. That's not to say it won't happen; it seems like societies in the short run tend to track closely to economics. The house built on sand can survive for awhile in good economies. Nazi Germany, for example, was probably made possible in part by the terrible economy there in the '20s (not to begin to excuse Nazism of course). I suppose weak societies can shuffle along in good economies, but only the strong societies can weather true economic downturns.

Pflegermania II & "Last Chance to Schadenfreude"

I tend to forget that nothing I write regarding politics is original; if I look hard enough I can find what I'm thinking elsewhere. In this case Tim of First Things mirrors my wistful sentiments about Fr. Pfleger:

Pfleger, a white Catholic priest, was speaking in an ethno-emotional idiom not native to him. Successfully, too, it seemed. No small feat. What makes that especially impressive is that in my experience many Catholic priests seem daunted by the commission to speak in the emotional idiom of their own backgrounds, let alone someone else’s. Let’s be honest—it’s just rare to hear a good homily in a typical Catholic church unless you’ve done some advance scouting. I make this observation with regret and hope.

Well that's a bit too rough on our priests for my taste but I'll affirm the first part.

With the advent of 24/7 scandal-rich cable television, sooner or later every group gets their turn to get embarrassed, and we did with this Chicago priest-turned-Rich Little or something. Cringe-inducing television but then it's the cost of doing business in the YouTube age.

* * *
A bloggish equivalent to the phrase "last call for alcohol" is "last chance for schadenfreude" and I think that's pretty much the case with our dearly departed Democratic primary. It's time for conservatives to look back and smile at all the ironies and schadenfreudic moments with which we were gifted. Let's list them, shall we?

Republicans felt great solidarity with Hillary during this campaign because, as Mark Steyn recently wrote, Hillary now knows what being a Republican feels like. The great love and affection given to her opponent by the media is something conservatives routinely feel. For one, brief, shining moment Hillary felt our pain!

Conventional wisdom says that Republicans, not Democrats, are racist, sexist, and nameyourist-ist. So only in a Democratic primary could we experience the pleasure of Democrats, in real-time, being either racist or sexist. (Nothingwithstanding the idiocy of that; Henry explains for slow-witted MSM types.) The party of Affirmative Action has felt the bite of the hand that fed it.

Democrats are supposedly the party of the common man, Joe Sixpack, the direct vote and democracy writ-large. But then it turns out the party has superdelegates whose job is apparently to correct Joe Sixpack if he gets it wrong.

The party that generally eschews laws and dislikes disciplinary actions made a rule warning Michigan and Florida that if they moved their primary dates up, their votes wouldn't count. Michigan and Florida, being good Democratic anarchists, moved their primaries up. But now it turns out the national party is sticking to its guns kinda/sorta, for MI & FL look like they'll count for the square root of half of their normal delegates, or something like that - apparently some sort of random number was generated, much like the Democrat-party delegate-apportionating process which no one except a few political wonks would care to understand. Now that's the Democratic party we know (think the proposed complicated health care plan in '93).

Books

This Rare Book room is pretty amazing. (HT: Elena) A couple of offerings from it: