The Ur-text of AmChurch Hipsta Sistas' Drive towards Habit Liberation

"If you're in old habits,
Set in your old ways,
Changes are a'comin',
"Cause these are changin' days!
And if your head in is the sand
while things are going on,
What you need, What you need,
What you need...is a Change of Habit!"
-Elvis Presley, "Change of Habit"

There are narratives of liberation and then there are narratives of liberation that reek of the most insipid Whiggery imaginable. Elvis Presley's final film is certainly one of the latter. In 1969's "Change of Habit," Elvis plays a doctor at an inner-city medical clinic. Mary Tyler Moore plays the role of a nun who, with her two fellow sisters, is sent out from her convent "undercover," meaning in typical late '60s women's garb without a habit--hence the title. Bad Cliches I thought weren't even invented until the '70s ensue. Fortunately, Jabootu.com has watched the movie and catalogued its hilarity-inducing craptitude in detail so that nobody else has to. Here are some of Jabootu critic Ken Begg's comments, which I'll intersperse with my own:

"The Women head over to their new apartment, swarmed by the local Hispanic teenage girls, who all look like refugees from West Side Story. They all have crushes (of course) on Doc Elvis and are checking out the "competition" (hey, another zany result of the "undercover nuns" plot line!). The Women, attired in ridiculously modest dresses, are immediately taken for hookers (!) by their uptight old Irish busybody neighbors. Just to make sure we understand that these are the kind of people who are "the problem," one of them shouts out that Irene "is as black as the Ace of Spades!" And yet, if these old biddies only knew that they were nuns, they would have treated Our Heroines with respect (hey, another zany result...oh, never mind). Wow, it really makes you think, doesn't it?
After presumably putting their rooms in order, the Women go to check in with Father Gibbons at the local church. Michele is dismayed to find the doors of the church are locked, as the film provides us with another example of how the Old Establishment "Order" is out of touch with The People (wow!).
Of course, Father Gibbons is an old fuddy-duddy, who locks the church at night due to somebody having stolen some church property. Unsurprisingly, he can't "relate" to The Women's with-it mission. Gibbons is portrayed as an absolute jerk, in inverse ratio to our almost comically perfect nuns, who are not only socially conscious, but wise, respectful, and presumably thrifty, clean and kind to small animals. Gibbons, threatened by the "new order," stalks off in distaste as our pious nuns pray (wow!)."

[...]

Barbara, back at the apartment, is in a jam. The Women's furniture has arrived, but was dumped out on the sidewalk in a huge heap. How is she to get the furniture inside? To excruciating "comedy" music, she begins to carry the furniture inside piece by piece. Then, just to prove that, no matter how bad it is, it can always get worse, the music segues into that awful "la-la-la-la" kind of stuff that plays over Danish '70s sex flicks late-night on Cinemax. This is because Barbara has noticed that the loafing men across the street jump to help a "foxy lady" when she drops her purse. To the surprise of no one, Barbara has a zany light bulb moment. In a comic "highlight," Barbara prances around, using her body to get the horny, mindless males to help her out, as the busybody neighbors look on. Hey, I think those old biddies are actually hypocrites. I mean, they act offended and all, but really they're eating it up. Wow, what a subtle piece of characterization!

[...]

Anyway, on to plot #847. Barbara is at the local grocery, the Ajax Market, and doesn't like the prices. She calls the owner a "walking social injustice," and the women in front of her moans about how the high prices keep her from saving money to buy her kids toys (!). Of course, the owner is a big, rude White Guy who's exploiting The People for his own Evil Personal Gain. Hey! Just like the mobster guy! He even tries to cheat the woman out of her change, but the ever alert Barbara catches him out. The woman profusely thanks her. Thank goodness for the good white people who keep the bad white people from stealing from the poor minority people, who are too oppressed to ask for change. Maybe now that woman can buy her kids some toys.

Barbara announces her plans to hold a block party in honor of some patron saint or another, with Irene against the idea. Oddly, she states they're "here to do a job, not to get involved," which seems to contradict everything we've seen up to now. And of course, if you don't "get involved," well, you might as well be some White Guy exploiting The People for his own Evil Personal Gain. Barbara retorts that "Happy people are closer to God," which, not to get into a big theological debate or anything, seems to run counter to much of the Bible.

Walking home that night, Irene sees yet another guy getting beat up by the Banker's men. Meanwhile, as they arrive home, Michele informs Barbara that she intends to go consult with Father Gibbons, due to her inappropriately tender feelings for the hunky Elvis. Barbara, aware of how, well, stodgy and uptight Father Gibbons is, warns that he'll "burn you at the stake." When Michele agrees that Gibbons isn't exactly "an apostle of the Ecumenical movement," Barbara quips "No, more the Inquisition." And who can argue with her? Gibbons is the kind of priest who thinks it's his job to tell everybody what's right and what's wrong! Oh, wait, that is a priest's job, isn't it. Still, Barbara is no doubt correct in comparing a strict priest who yells with an organized movement that used torture to force people to act correctly. Certainly the filmmakers agree with her.

[...]

Next we travel to the office of the local Bishop. Father Gibbons is attempting to have the Sisters kicked out of his parish, and generally just acting like a jerk in as broad a fashion as possible. The mod nuns respond that maybe he could try "bringing more people back into the church" with masses in Spanish, or a (ugh!) "folk mass". Actually, in the twenty-five plus years since this movie came out, it's been established that it's the local churches that have done the least to "update" themselves that have best maintained their parishioner base. Apparently, the concept that people attend church to come into contact with something Eternal, something that transcends the here and now, that doesn't change to stay "relevant," is beyond the way-hip Sister Michele, as she goes babbling on about "new methods, innovations," yakada, yakada, yakada.

The Bishop (who reminds me of Phil Hartman) allows the Sisters to proceed with their work, and to go ahead with the Festival, but orders them to resume their habits. Michele worries that there's so much they haven't accomplished "as women," but is overruled. Our Heroines are devastated, as wearing their habits will somehow compromise their grand scheme to save the world from hatred, bigotry and being overcharged for peanut butter. Still, to lighten the mood, we see the Bishop's secretary flash Barbara the peace symbol as they leave the office.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! "Peace, Sista!"

Sister Barbara, despite orders, goes to the evil grocer's establishment. There, in a gesture so ironic, yet so apt, she buys a mop handle from him that she proceeds to make into a sign protesting that his store is "unfair to consumers" (wow!). Then she sits on the floor and obstructs traffic.

[...]

At the apartment, Barbara, who has found politics more important than religion, has decided to leave the church and become an activist. Strangely, one of the reasons she gives Michele was their "victory" at the evil Ajax Market, although just what they accomplished was never explained.

Next, in a scene of incredible poor taste, we see that Julio is hiding in Michele's closet as she undresses for bed. Julio jumps out with a knife and attempts to rape Michele. She screams, and Elvis, who just happens to be walking down the street, runs in and (accompanied by "action" music) manages to subdue Julio, who runs off. The is really repellent and sleazy stuff, and exactly what point the filmmakers were trying to make is anyone's guess. Yuck!!

At the end, we're back in the convent, sometime after the above events. Michele herself is considering whether to leave the order to be with Elvis.

The movie's last bit has Irene taking Michele back to Father Gibbon's church. The newly cool cleric has now introduced mod innovations, like letting Doc Elvis lead the parishioners in a rockin' gospel tune (Right on!). We also get one last dig in on old fashioned, non-"relevant" religion. The old biddy ladies, in the pews, remark "give me the old days when you would go to mass and not think about a blessed thing." Ha Ha, that nailed 'em.

Dialogue:

After dinner, our various hero(ine)s engage in a "serious" political discussion, making the modern viewer really, really, really glad the '70s are over with:
Barbara, to dinner guest Elvis: "Tell me. As a doctor do you diagnose what's happening today...the riots, the student unrest, as...not really the death throes of an old order, but the birth pangs of a new one?"
Doc E.: "I didn't know I was making a house call!"
Barbara, blathering on: "Well, I mean, don't we all, each in our own way, have to man the barricades..."

What?
Tough Black Radical No. 1, to Irene: "There's no room down here for innocent bystanders. You're either part of the problem, or you're part of the solution."
Tough Black Radical No. 2: "We've got a feeling you're neither!"

Cheering on the with-it Michele, we cry "Tell it, Sister," which can be taken in many groovy contexts:
Mean old Father Gibbons: "Don't instruct me, Sister. I've preached more sermons then you'll ever hear!"
Michele: "Yes, I'm sure we can rely on you to tell is as it was, Father!"

I can't believe an Elvis movie actually rips off the end of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where the novice(or was it postulant?) Isabella must choose whether to marry the aristocrat or stay a nun! Shakespeare doesn't answer the question either, but at least he has the decency to make Isabella a woman who hasn't made her final vows.

This movie should be classified as Traditionalist Top Secret. It must never be shown to any liturgist, the St. Louis Jesuits, or the Oregon Catholic Press hymnal compilers. Keep it away from whoever distributes songs for LifeTeen, too. It'll only give them ideas with which to persecute those who have more than miniscule capacities for liturgical and aesthetic judgement.

The Elvis Movie Database claims "The film was originally to have been directed by Evangelist Billy Graham but for some reason he pulled out of the picture." That has to be a joke masquerading as a fact, since it was in fact directed by a different William Graham. "Billy Graham to Direct Elvis in Nun Picture" is a headline right out of satire.

One of the writers of the film, Richard Morris, actually has minor musicals to his credit, having written both The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Thoroughly Modern Millie. The rest have been completely lost to the River Lethe of forgetability that is pop culture.

Despite its sixties mentality, the film does have one scene that provokes nostalgia as well as cringes: Elvis, mistaking the three nuns for wealthy suburban women who came to him for abortions, "informs them he won't do anything for them that he'd wouldn't do for his regular, poor clients, and instead offers nutritional advice." A sign of Innocence, or the semblance thereof, lost.

Call to Action has a survey on what the next pope should do. Muhaha!

Linky. Here's my comments:

Regarding only American concerns, I hope Papa Benedetto gets rid of the sodomites and fourth-rate heretics who infest Catholic chanceries, seminaries, and universities, not to mention the Jesuit Order.

Moving to restore the beauty of the Roman liturgy would no doubt help in the conversion of America and the world. As Keats says, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

I also hope he and the bishops can help turn around the effects of pornocratic capitalism, including consumerism in general and consumerism in religious matters, in particular. He shall certainly have to fight the love of death which manifests itself in the practice of exterminating the unwanted unborn.

Bioethics will also be a key issue, since it signals the revival of the eugenics movement.

Viva il Papa!

I fancy sending their headquarters things from the Ratzinger Fan Club store.

Regretfully, I am providing my actual e-mail, which might get me on all sorts of mailing lists I don't want to be on, like those clerical pronography lists I'm told exist among the pelvic dissenters. A small price for a bit of fun, and hopefully I'll get an angry letter from some minor CTA functionary denouncing my closed-mindedness that I can use to augment the Critique-O-Matic's advanced heuristics.

via the cant-ridden Catholics Against the Pope blog.

Neil Postman: Informing Ourselves to Death

via Zorak

I've been meaning to read some Postman for a while. I wonder what the techno-triumphalists at Wired magazine think of him? I've seen lots of techies deride Cliff Stoll for his Silicon Snake Oil essays, but maybe Postman is too academic for them.

Postman's remarks on believing just about anything if it is told by some learned person lead me to wonder whether he was playing a subtle joke by misattributing the date of Creation worked out by the Anglican Bishop Ussher to the medievals.

I see secret writing everywhere. Leo Strauss has ruined me!!!

Gimme that Old-time Humanism

In my mind, humanism has never had the pejorative connotations which it has among certain religious folk. For one, my first exposure to the word came in my teen years while reading the introduction to St. Thomas More's Utopia which no doubt described More as the quintessential humanist. For another, my parents and both my paternal grandparents were all beneficiaries of a Jesuit education, where humanistic concerns walked hand-in-hand with theological devotion. As one of the Church Fathers said, "The glory of God is a man fully alive," and it is one my greatest regrets that such a truly inspirational vision is severely weakened even on Jesuit university campuses.

It was just as saddening for me to discover that the connotations of the word "humanism" had taken on the trappings of explicitly secular humanism. There are various versions of "Humanist Manifestos" written over the course of the last century and signed by many rapidly forgotten people and many people rapidly being forgotten, including the quickly-fading star of John Dewey. I have not even glanced at one this millennium, which may say just as much about my irrelevance as that of the would-be humanists. However, I worry I may have found a far worse alternative to merely secular humanism.

Robinson Jeffers, one of the founders of Earth Day, holds the regrettable claim to be a promulgator of the ersatz philosophy that he names "Inhumanism." Of course, he tries to counter the term's obvious connection with inhumanity, but inhumanity itself appears to be the logical outcome of his reasoning. Jeffers declares that his goal is

"...to present a certain philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty."

I won't spend much time picking apart the blatant contradictions of this selection, such as whether a philosophy that emphasizes "not-man" really cares all that much about having human value. But I do think it provides some insight into another, more infamous teacher of philosophy, namely Princeton's Peter Singer. His favored term of disapprobation, the hideous neologism "speciesist", no doubt helps his ideas enjoy greater currency than if he had followed the lead of certain fundamentalists and bioethicists who use the word "humanism" as a pejorative. By the force of linguistic analogy, It helps conflate opponents of animal rights with racists and sexists who deny the equality of their equals.

But I think critical interviewers, who are usually inclined to ask about his views on infanticide and bestiality, have not pressed him with a fundamental question: if it is bigoted to treat animals differently than humans, why ought we not simply treat humans as we generally treat animals today? One can even write a short, tasteless joke based on this rarely-seen reversal:

A deer hunter was confronted in the forest by a lover of animals who berated his hobby, declaring "Animals are no different than people!"
The hunter replied: "Wow, you're right! I see the error of my ways now."
So then the hunter shot the animal-lover, gutted him, fried up his liver for dinner, and mounted his head in the living room.

One of course hopes that such a mockery of ethical reasoning is confined to jokes and satire, but alas that hope is a vain one. I am told that some of the Southern apologists for slavery justified their institutional brutality by reasoning that certain types of men were not fit to rule themselves, and thus were better off being ruled by their masters. When their opponents pointed out that incompetent self-rule was by no means limited to African slaves, the apologists granted that point. But then they simply followed their reasoning to its conclusion and suggested that poor white laborers should also be enslaved.

Such an error suggests that the reductio ad absurdum is an even weaker argument than the appeal to authority, especially when humanity is rhetorically reduced to universal insignificance.

He wishes himself to be loved more than the truth...

He, therefore, who sets himself to act evilly and yet wishes
others to be silent, is a witness against himself, for he wishes
himself to be loved more than the truth, which he does not wish to
be defended against himself. There is, of course, no man who so
lives as not sometimes to sin, but he wishes truth to be loved
more than himself, who wills to be spared by no one against the
truth. Wherefore, Peter willingly accepted the rebuke of Paul;
David willingly hearkened to the reproof of a subject. For good
rulers who pay no regard to self-love, , take as a homage to their
humility the free and sincere words of subjects. But in this
regard the office of ruling must be tempered with such great art
of moderation, that the minds of subjects, when demonstrating
themselves capable of taking right views in some matters, are
given freedom of expression, but freedom that does not issue into
pride, otherwise, when liberty of speech is granted too
generously, the humility of their own lives will be lost.
-St. Gregory The Great, Pastoral Care

In Christianity truth is not a philosophical concept nor is it a
theory, a teaching, or a system, but rather, it is the living
theanthropic hypostasis - the historical Jesus Christ (John 14:6).
Before Christ men could only conjecture about the Truth since they
did not possess it. With Christ as the incarnate divine Logos the
eternally complete divine Truth enters into the world. For this
reason the Gospel says: "Truth came by Jesus Christ" (John 1:17).
St. Justin Popovich(Orthodox)

I have recently noticed the terrible fact that, in its rejection of the old legal theory that "error has no rights," modern political philosophy has concluded that Christ, who is Truth, has no rights. He is a dead man to the laws, and it only lacks explicitly official status because no man has yet to press for the rights of Truth in a court of law. Have mercy on us, O Lord, for we are a profane people.

"The knowledge of the Cross is concealed in the sufferings of the
Cross."


"The man who follows Christ in solitary mourning is greater than he
who praises Christ amid the congregation of men."
-St. Isaac the Syrian

"But Adam did not wish to say, "I sinned," but said rather the
contrary of this and placed the blame for the transgression upon
God Who created everything "very good," saying to Him, "The woman
whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I
ate." And after him she also placed the blame upon the serpent,
and they did not wish at all to repent and, falling down before
the Lord God, beg forgiveness of Him."
St. Symeon the New Theologian

Introducing the Papal Critique-O-Matic 3000(tm)!

I hesitate to reveal a work in progress, but having been sickened by the know-it-all punditry, I've written a web-page that automatically composes short papal critiques that are just as factual and seventy-thousand nine hundred and two times more insightful than the religiously illiterate op-eds to which readers have been subject, especially since the conclave began. Behold, the Papal Critique-O-Matic!

Here is a sample of its superlative composition and analytical skills:

With the recent election of Pope Benedict XVI, formerly known as the kindly, shy Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the question foremost in the minds of the faithful is: in which direction will he lead the Catholic Church?
The libertine writer Dan Brown made an incoherent attack upon the Catholic Church's ignorance of the lame ideas of 1970s hipsters.

(insert some quote from Andrew 'Randy Andy' Sullivan)

One of the most pressing problems of world religions today is whether Catholicism can change to meet the demands of the Jesus Seminar, or fade into further irrelevancy. Only psychic stock-picking chickens will be able to judge if this papacy is a success.

I believe the Papal Critique-O-Matic is destined for greatness. As the supercomputer Deep Blue destroyed the lucrative and sybaritic careers of chess grandmasters across the globe, so too will my invention render redundant those unqualified journalists who pontificate on maters ecclesial and opinionators whose knowledge of Catholicism begins with "The Exorcist" and ends with "Dogma." The function of internet comment trolls, the very creations of Satan, King of the Losers Himself, will also be rendered obsolete, and we readers shall save so much time, server cycles, and bandwith that could be spent on better things, like reading and discussing articles and arguments by people who have some idea of what they are talking about.

The Critique-O-Matic requires a browser that supports Javascript. Hit refresh to see a new, entirely and completely original papal critique of the highest quality. Though I doubt it will be necessary, please make any suggestions for improvement, such as additional sentences and/or lists of adjectives, names, and opinions which will further refine the already advanced heuristics of my program. View the page source to see the current arrays of critique content options

Historical Ratzinger-Newman connection

Catholic Hierarchy Site shows that Cardinal Fransoni, who ordained John Henry Newman a Catholic priest, is in the episcopal lineage of Pope Benedict XVI. Looks like I beat Narwen in discovering this.

Only one tragedy...

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the more misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age ... and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. ... What they set themselves to achieve - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. ... This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another - and doubtless very different - St. Benedict.

-Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

It would surely be premature to canonize a man who hasn't been pope for a day. But it does bring to mind that saying of Charles Peguy: "life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint." May Benedict XVI avoid this one tragedy.

A former classmate quoted on the new pope

"The cardinals elected a good and holy man who was close to Pope John Paul II," said Mark Wunsch, 27, a religious philosophy student from Denver. "He'll be a wonderful and good leader in preaching the truth and love." -German Cardinal Becomes Pope Benedict XVI

I had a couple of classes with this guy during my stint at Regis. He was a seminarian at the time, but I heard he left the seminary soon afterward. Guess he's in Rome now. Lucky duck.

Well worth a read

"May he live a hundred years," a brief story by Dave Freddoso.

Augustine on Interpretation

"There is something to be gained from the obscurity of the inspired discourses of Scripture. The differing interpretations produce many truths and bring them to the light of knowledge; and the meaning of an obscure passage may be established either by the plain evidence of the facts, or by other passages of less difficulty. Sometimes the variety of suggestions leads to the discovery of the meaning of the writer; sometimes this meaning remains obscure, but the discussion of the difficulties is the occasion for the statement of some other truths."
-City of God, XI.19

A handy counter to certain irrationalist literary critics. It has great bearing on scientific inquiry, as well.

Elite Hacker totally wipes out localhost IP 127.0.0.1

Funny story on the misuse of computer hacking tools.

Jesuits Discover Most Overrated Poet Of 2004

Pay Him $1000 For Publishing Rights

I was surprised to discover that America magazine has a $1000 annual prize for poetry. But I was extremely surprised at how laughably bad I found the 2004 winner. I had thought that the decline of the Jesuit order was only obvious in its public dissent and its inability to generate interested novices, but this poem indicates that the rot is much deeper; even the Jesuits' academic excellence, which some contemporary Jesuit universities seem to treat as the only virtue, is endangered.

For now, the bad poem is located at this website but I reproduce it below:

The Mouse and the Human

By Tryfon Tolides

The mouse doesn't really bother anyone. It doesn't
go around holding up banks or shooting people
in the face or locking them up in dank jail cells
and sticking electric prods to their genitals. It doesn't
build jet fighters and bomb our cities in the name
of peace in the middle of the night while we are sleeping.
It doesn't plant toy mines to blow our children's arms off.
All the mouse wants is to share with us some shelter,
food, even the warmth of its nervous body. Yet we plug up
the cupboards so it can't eat, and we chase it around
the living room with a broom and remove all the chairs
till it has nowhere to hide; then we club it to death
as it squeals. Or we set up traps with something it likes
to lure it into strangulation and burst its eyes out
of its head. And against what? A few light scratchings
heard in the ceiling once in a while keeping us company
at night? Two or three crumbs of bread taken from
the kitchen floor? And after the mouse, there are the ants
to be poisoned, the bees to be gassed and burned.
Later, the dandelions to be choked by spraying. And after
that, after that, there must be something after that.

I think the last line is the best line in the poem, both in the mean sense that one is joyful it is finished, but also because it evokes a movement towards uncertainty that otherwise is not present in this moralizing mess of "prose-poetry." But of course the poem fails miserably there, too, since it doesn't take enough space to explore the uncertainty. This takes the saying "poetry does nothing" far too literally, since there is really no movement in it. It's just a simplified version of the old Sesame Street "one of these things is not like the other" game, which, needless to say, wasn't all that complex to begin with.

I passed this on to a doctoral student in English lit, and she wrote the following reply, off-the-cuff:

...this poem makes me want to cry. Or laugh. Or
beat my head against the wall. Hey, if I organize the lines properly,
that would count as poetry, wouldn't it?
"Poem on the poem that won the contest sponsored by America"

This stupid mouse poem, so naive
and unlyrical:
Moves me to despair
agony and self-torment. Only now do I understand
why hermits whipped themselves with thorns:
They had seen the future of poetry
and they saw that it was bad.

Note my 'clever' disregard for punctuation, capitalization, and
sentence structure. That's how you can tell it's a poem.

I've long wondered whether Maritain rightly defended the aesthete's saying ars gratia artis(art for art's sake) in Art and Scholasticism, but this poem makes me even more sympathetic to Maritain's analysis. I don't even know if this is blank verse. Some critic once said that writing blank verse was like playing tennis without a net. This "award-winning poet" isn't even playing with a stringed racket. One wonders if it is a joke, since the would-be poet's name looks like it could be a Hellenic pseudonym. A google search proves otherwise, alas. America indicates it received over 1,300 submission for its poetry contest, which suggest the following:

1) The poetry editor is incompetent.
2) The poetry editor is corrupt, granting the award out of personal or ideological favoritism.
3) The poetry contest itself is just an economic attempt to expand America's reader base by purchasing cultural cachet.
4) Any "poets" who read America are so bad that we need a superlative form of the superlative "most talentless."

In all honesty, I think my juvenalia was better written than this poem. Lots of it was on "poetic" things, too, like sleep, aging, and death. Considering the competition, perhaps I should shake the dust from my quill. Auberon Waugh, I believe, established the bad sex writing contest. Perhaps a bad poetry contest would do wonders towards the improvement of modern poetics.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, pray for us!

Addendum:

Not that it is terribly difficult to do, but I have found a mouse poem that easily bests Tryfon's attempt.

MICE
by Rose Fyleman

I think mice are rather nice;
Their tails are long, their faces small;
They haven't any chins at all.
Their ears are pink, their teeth are white,
They run about the house at night;
They nibble things they shouldn't touch,
and, no one seems to like them much,
but, I think mice are rather nice.

All it needs is another stanza beginning "I think war is quite a bore," and it'll even capture the award-winning poet's botched efforts at contrasting the differences between mice and men.

I should mention that I heard the better poem while enjoying the commercial-free radio provided by my ISP. What station? The children's channel, of course.

Addendum #2:
This is actually the second piece of evidence in a month that America is intellectually sub-par. One of their columnists copied part of his speech from the Rainbow Sash Coalition, without attribution.

Addendum #3:
William Luse is having a poetry contest inspired by our hapless prize-winner: make a better mouse poem!

“I have yet to meet a poetry-lover who was not an introvert, or an introvert who was not unhappy in adolescence. At school, particularly, maybe, if, as in my own case, it is a boarding school, he sees the extrovert successful, happy, and good and himself unpopular or neglected; and what is hardest to bear is not unpopularity, but the consciousness that it is deserved, that he is grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. Knowing no other kind of society than the contingent, he imagines that this arrangement is part of the eternal scheme of things, that he is doomed to a life of failure and envy. It is not till he grows up, till years later he runs across the heroes of his school days and finds them grown commonplace and sterile, that he realizes that the introvert is the lucky one, the best adapted to an industrial civilization, the collective values of which are so infantile that he alone can grow, who has educated his phantasies and learned how to draw upon the resources of his inner life. At the time however his adolescence is unpleasant enough. Unable to imagine a society in which he would feel at home, and warned by some mysterious instinct from running back for consolation to the gracious or terrifying figures of childhood, he turns away from the human to the non-human: homesick he will seek, not his mother, but mountains or autumn woods, friendless he will mutely observe the least shy of the wild animals, and the growing life within him will express itself in a devotion to music and thoughts upon mutability and death. Art for him will be something infinitely precious, pessimistic, and hostile to life. If it speaks of love, it must be love frustrated, for all success seems to him noisy and vulgar; if it moralizes, it must counsel a stoic resignation, for the world he knows is well content with itself and will not change.”
-W.H. Auden, “A Literary Transference” (Southern Review, Summer 1940)

ViaTerry Teachout

In addition to reading more in general, and reading poetry more specifically, I definitely need to read more Auden. I think I've only read his poem in memory of Yeats. "Time that is intolerant/Of the brave and innocent/And indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique/Worships language, and forgives/Every one by whom it lives." I quite enjoy the poetry of Joseph Brodsky, a devotee of both Auden and the ideas expressed in the eulogy to Yeats. Certainly language is mediated through history, but the best of it has a way of escaping all-aging, all-devouring time. Cf. Shakespeare's Sonnet 17 and, of course, the prologue to the Gospel of John.

I do question that part about introversion making one "hostile to life." Perhaps Auden's full essay would expand on that idea.

In Defense of Manly Men Songs

Via Relapsed Catholic, a Washington Post article that states men don't like Church because "...today's church culture favors, even expects, participation in intimate, nurturing behavior such as singing, hand-holding, sitting in circles and sharing feelings."

I have no idea why singing is classified as an intimate and nurturing behavior, but I deeply regret that singing has become associated almost entirely with the feminine or effeminate. Look at the classic movie "How Green Was My Valley." It depicts all these very masculine Welshmen singing on their way home from the coal mines, and in church, and in the bathtub. Needless to say, their songs sound great.

Part of the problem, I think, is that contemporary songs seem to be written for either women or high-voiced men. One of the male song leaders at my parish has a particularly nasal, airy, and, yes, effeminate voice. As a baritone who poorly sings along with the classically-trained male vocalists in his music collection, I simply can't bring myself to follow this man's lead unless a very good song comes up in which his amplified, though still puny voice is sure to be drowned out.

The only deep-voiced men in popular music I can recall are Elvis and Johnny Cash. The man who plays Jean Valjean in the musical Les Miserables sings so high it makes me wonder if he is a castrato, and truth be told I wonder the same thing about U2's Bono. Sadly, the ubiquity of boy bands and other metrosexual vocalists sets the tone for peoples' musical expectations, since the church has well nigh abdicated her role as the mother of culture. So I relish the deep-voiced cantores of opera, such as Don Giovanni, Leporello, and la statua gentilissima, not to mention Fidelio's Florestan and Rocco, and hope for a revival. The next time I am in a drinking establishment, perhaps I will try to revive the tradition of drinking songs. After all, I lost my self-consciousness months ago, and I ought to capitalize on my loss.

Sins Voluntary and Involuntary?

In Principio Erat Verbum was kind enough to have an open thread on the Eastern liturgical aspects of the papal funeral that Western Catholics generally don't know much about. I was puzzled about the prayer to forgive JPII's sins "Voluntary and Involuntary," so he pointed me to this article which explains a bit of the logic behind it. The writer, an Orthodox Christian, strikes me as entirely too dismissive of Western theology, but it is a start.

More from the Desert Fathers

"One day some old men came to see Abba Antony. In the midst of them was Abba Joseph. Wanting to test them, the old man suggested a text from the Scriptures and, beginning with the youngest, he asked them what it meant. Each gave his opinion as he was able. But to each one the old man said, 'You have not understood it.' Last of all he said to Abba Joseph, 'How would you explain this saying?' And he replied, 'I do not know.' Then Abba Antony said, 'Indeed, Abba Joseph has found the way, for he has said: 'I do not know.'''
Saying of St Antony the Great

One I had heard before, but forgotten:

Abba Antony said: A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’

The Vitae Patrum is on-line

The Soviet Ozymandias

Via ALDaily.com, a gallery of architect's proposals for Soviet buildings. I particularly like the Palace of Soviets proposal. Dedicated "to the imminent triumph of Communism," the proposal features a titanic building topped by a colossus of Lenin. "The chosen location was the site of the demolished Church of Christ the Saviour."

Speaking of commie atheism, Relapsed Catholic links to a an article on Soviet propaganda which discusses the forgotten Father Edmund Walsh, S.J., who brought so much of Sovietism to public attention.

The author, Mark Gauvreau Judge, notes that museums tend to be allergic to these kinds of exhibits. Really, a simple internet site would be more effective, reaching more people for less money. Some website would hold a photoshop contest based on the works, and the tasteless would sell them as posters, coffee mugs, mousepads, and so forth, since commie kitsch is hip in the eyes of some. I think Judge might not be pleased with all the consequences of studying Soviet propaganda; I remember one World War II poster depicting Uncle Joe Stalin and Uncle Sam in a handshake, captioned: "Democratic Brothers in Arms." It was the confrontation with Nazism that made many Americans soft on communism.

How Classics Majors Entertain Themselves in their Irrelevance

A guy I know once said that some charismatics were speaking in tongues, believing they were praising the Lord. Somebody was there who actually understood the language they were speaking, and informed them they were actually cursing Him.

The inference was that some demons were having a little fun with the pious, but such are the perils of the monoglot using another language that one finds less blasphemous and more humorous misuses of a foreign tongue all the time.

One such instance took place during a Microsoft advertisement campaign. An adman had the bright idea of using a selection from Mozart's Requiem Mass to play in the background. They chose these lines:

Confutatis maledictis
Flammis acribus addictis...

"When the cursed have been confounded
And given over to the bitter flames.."

Which played as the ad campaign's slogan "Where do you want to go today?" appeared.

There is another funny misuse of music in the introduction to the radio show of Sean ("Every day is a blustery one!") Hannity, which I hesitate to reveal because it's been running for the last three years without change and I still get a kick out of it when I happen across it. The announcer says something like

"From Coast to Coast
And into your living room
Sean Hannity is on the air!"

As the last lines of "O Fortuna" from Orff's Carmina Burana plays in the background.

"quod per sortem
sternit fortem
mecum omnes plangite!"

Which translate to something like

"Because through fate
Fortuna scatters the brave
Everyone weep with me!"

I especially like how the line "Everyone weep with me" coincides with the English of the announcer saying "Sean Hannity is on the air!"

Setting the World Ablaze Begins with Oneself

No, I am not talking about self-immolation. "Romulus," a true Catholic gentleman, has reminded me of the Apothegmata Patrum, the sayings of the Desert Fathers, with a brief, wonderful selection:

Abba Lot came to visit Abba Joseph and said: "Abba, when I am able, I recite a short office, I fast a little, I pray, I meditate, I stay recollected. As far as I can I try to keep my thought pure. What else should I do?"

Then Abba Joseph got up. He stretched out his hands to heaven and his fingers became like burning lamps.

He said to Abba Lot: "If you will, become all fire."

Come to think of it, the epiphany of the burning bush which Moses witnessed is a perfect image of grace at work: just as the bush was burning but not consumed, so too does grace transform and transfigure our nature.

And this is certain, since obedience is a holocaust in which the whole man without the slightest reserve is offered in the fire of charity to his Creator and Lord through the hands of His ministers.

-St. Ignatius Loyola, Letter "On Perfect Obedience" Rome, March 26, 1553

A Local Jesuit on the Pope

The pope, of happy memory, was in Denver in 1993 and visited the local Catholic university, Regis. The Jesuit President of Regis reflects on meeting JPII

Father Sheeran relates a nice story of a younger Chelsea Clinton enthusiastic about meeting the pope. It also contains this very interesting paragraph:

John Paul shook hands with everyone in the crowd and seemed to draw strength out of the encounters as he stood taller and walked with more confidence. A few minutes later, he greeted the President and they went into a private dining room for an hour’s conversation. Officially, it was protocol: The American head of state welcoming Vatican City’s head of state. But both men wanted a quiet place to get to know each other. Their hour of conversation reportedly involved practical issues like how the pope could encourage the Catholic Croats to seek peace with the Orthodox Serbs and how U.S. humanitarian relief to Muslim countries might be made more acceptable by placing Vatican seals on the boxes.

A couple of points:

US aid to Muslims via the Catholic Vatican might be more acceptable than directly from the US herself? Either this was a castle in the sky suggestion, or things are quite different in the Muslim world than one's first impressions suggest.

Wouldn't this raise all sorts of constitutional church-state issues?

And I wonder who first suggested it: Clinton or John Paul?

Hurray for the Governor! Viva Chaput!

Lost in the coverage of John Paul II's passing is Colorado Governor Owen's veto of a mandatory "emergency contraception" bill which would have required all hospitals to give out information about sometimes abortifacient medication to women who have been raped.

Just as the pro-lifers have used the hard case of partial-birth abortion to attempt to shift the debate, so too are other political groups using rape victims to justify their compulsion of conscience. See this Denver Post column, "Owens' veto, Chaput's voice" by Jim Spencer. Spencer actually argues that one wrong against one innocent justifies another wrong against another innocent. He even says right out that the governor and bishop-not the rapists-are responsible for their victims becoming pregnant.

If they end up pregnant by their rapists because the hospitals that treated them refused to make them aware of emergency contraception, they can thank their governor.

And the archbishop of Denver.

I used to think that I could write a newspaper column. Now I realize that not only would my natural prolixity in writing be a barrier, but I also do not have the discipline to continuously throw out complex thinking in favor of scoring rhetorical points. I can only manage it on occasion.

The Petrine Connection

I just realized that Raphael's Aristotle looks a lot like depictions of Saint Peter. Maybe I could base a poorly written best-selling novel on this.

A Papal Technocracy?

On Kevin Knight's NewAdvent.org, there is a list of past popes. One of the google ads currently links to a Foreign Policy article called "Job Description for the Next Pope" by a Professor Appelby of Notre Dame. It's an odd piece, repeatedly claiming that the next pope needs to pay more attention to political, economic, and scientific leaders. Now elites have their place in the world, and I'm not one to deny their need for religious conversion and ministry. But this author's insistence on the importance of technocrats in papal policy strikes me as very odd. Really, technocrats get enough attention in the press and corporate worlds; it may be a good mission for a religious order, but the papacy has a larger body of people to whom he must minister.

As I remember, the Jesuits used to have a special ministry for the elite, but their decline and their order's insistence on getting back to what St. Ignatius Loyola originally intended has seriously dampened their effectiveness. I have some impression that Opus Dei is trying to fill the Jesuits' niche, but that is perhaps because of Rev. McCloskey's many high-profile converts.

It finally hit me.

I've become terribly facetious lately. To my shame, the first thought I had on hearing of the pope's death was not "may he rest in peace," but "The sedevacantists are right for once, like that stopped clock that's right twice a day." But I made it to mass Sunday, and his name's absence during the part of the post-consecration liturgy where it is normally mentioned hit my heart. The words "Let us grow in love with John Paul our pope" have been in every single mass I have ever heard. Indeed, the pope has been in office longer than I've been a Christian; I was less than one month in my mother's womb when he was installed.

The gloomy elderly deacon, who I wasn't entirely sure would outlive the pope, gave a nice sermon on how, unlike our recent papa, he would never meet a president. But he went on to give a very nice particularist reflection on how we could get to know and love those around us.

I was sick of the news coverage even before he died, yet today I tried to catch a glimpse of the pope's body lying in state for the view of curial workers.(I have heard his corpse will be opened for general viewing soon.) But the news would only briefly show his body, then cut to some expert who didn't know what he was talking about; frankly, I would rather watch the corpse in silence. It strikes me that Reagan's body was not shown on television. Indeed, despite its love for showing fake corpses on crime shows and medical dramas, I am struck by how little we see a good memento mori on television. Perhaps we'll see the occasional anonymous body of a third worlder who has been struck down by war or natural disaster, but the sight of a famous old man's recently living body makes the producers cut to other, more "appealing" images.

The upcoming conclave engenders no small amount of trepidation in me. I tried to acclimate myself to the idea of a papal interregnum a few years back by reading Ralph McInerny's bad novel _The Red Hat_, which kills off several popes in quick succession. My attempt didn't work, since all of McInerny's popes were pretty solid men. My worry is that the widespread flakery that has so infested the Jesuits, various priests, and sometimes a few bishops has infected even the cardinals, and we'll end up with a really crummy pope, which might have meant very little in the pre-media, pre-internet age, but now could do a great deal of damage. So I have simply added prayers for another good pope to my infrequent petitions, remembing some of the first words of John Paul II's papacy: "Be Not Afraid."

John Paul II, rest in peace, pray for us.

Death Be Not Proud

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
-John Donne

A fitting reminder of the Resurrection following the passing of Mrs. Schiavo and John Paul II.

Not that I'm in imminent danger of death, but I've fancied having this read at my wake. I do worry that the second-to-last line adumbrates the Protestant doctrine of soul-sleep, though I can interpret it so as to mean that simply our body is asleep.

A reason to suspect "medical miracles"

"Even doctors and nurses who ordinarily disdain religion often call cases like Jack's "miracles". Of course, for many in healthcare, it's easier to believe in miracles than to accept that they were wrong and a life could have been unnecessarily or prematurely lost." -Nancy Valko, Futility Policies and the Duty to Die

How many cases of medical error or ineptitude have been papered over by declarations of miraculous recovery, with the rejoicing family and patient too happy to question the competence of their doctors?

Democracy at War

It is surely a curious characteristic of democracy: this amazing ability to shift gears overnight in one's ideological attitudes, depending on whether one considers one's self at war or at peace. Day before yesterday, let us say, the issues at stake between ourselves and another power were not worth the life of a single American boy. Today, nothing else counts at all; our cause is holy; the cost is no consideration; violence must know no limitations short of unconditional surrender.

Now I know the answer to this one. A democracy is peace-loving. It does not like to go to war. It is slow to rise to provocation. When it has once been provoked to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then becomes itself the issue. Democracy fights in anger—it fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it—to reach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end.

This is true enough, and, if nations could afford to operate in the moral climate of individual ethics, it would be understandable and acceptable. But I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath—in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could not have prevented some of these situations from arising instead of proceeding from an undiscriminating indifference to a holy wrath equally undiscriminating.
—George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy

via The Ambler

Alma Mater Adflicta and her College Republican Dunces

Well, my university has become a laughingstock for everybody, rather than just for most of its students. I babbled a bit about the situation here under the name Dumb_Ox. I actually used the phrase "virile whoremaster" there, a combination which might very well be a hapax legomenon in the whole body of the English language.

My tNP forum posts provides part of my take on the stories, which I might rewrite for this weblog if I feel up to it. To sum up: CU-Boulder athletic department used booze and girls to recruit football players. Some of these girls, not to mention others, were raped by the recruits and/or players at various parties, often funded by the alumni fundraising group the CU Foundation. President Libby Hoffman and Head Coach Barnett have been under fire. Throw in the revelation that CU professor Ward Churchill is a bullying kook, and President Hoffman, breaking under the pressure, joined the several other CU administrators who have resigned.

At my first and only College Republicans meeting, which I attended at the beginning of my last semester at CU during Winter of 2002, one of the "motivational speakers" asked the assembled group of forty or so kids who the only Republican in the CU administration was. Strangely enough, one girl knew the answer. He proudly repeated her answer, saying with a glow in his eyes that that one Republican was none other than president Elizabeth Hoffman.

Oh how fickle is the favor of a campus political group. Here's the CU College Republicans e-mail for March 7, the day Hoffman announced her resignation:

President Betsy Hoffman submitted her resignation to CU on March 7,
2005, and we fully support her decision to resign. Her inability to hold her
faculty accountable to reasonable working ethics and standards makes her
resignation long overdue. We have faith in our elected Regents to facilitate the
transition from the Hoffman reign to CU's next President.

We expect the Regents to take the reign of Betsy Hoffman's final two
years at CU as an example of how not to run a university. We urge the Regents to
continue their journey into CU's future with integrity, with a desire
to rebuild our reputation, and with the realization that we must regain
the trust of the public. Hoffman's resignation was a step in the right direction.
Churchill's departure will be the next great step.


We will host a gathering on Wednesday, March 9 from 12pm - 1:30pm on
the Fine Arts Lawn (between the UMC and the Euclid Parking Garage) to show our
support for Hoffman's decision. Comy by from some free food and good times!

http://www.cugop.org/events/media/resign.html

Our message to Hoffman: TAKE WARD WITH YOU

We'll see you at the party and then the meeting this Wednesday!

Humorously enough, the next day I received this e-mail from the CRs:

To act in the interest of a greater cause is an admirable quality. The
actions of President Hoffman to put the interests of the University of
Colorado above her own, is one appreciated by many in the student body.
It has been brought to our attention that tomorrow’s rally has been
interpreted as sending a message other than the previously stated. It is the
opinion of our organization that the decision made by President Hoffman should be
representative of a respectful step in building the CU community. We
ask that Ward Churchill take the same step. Meaning, he too should resign in
the interests of the University of Colorado, putting the community
interests above his own.

We fully support President Hoffman’s decision to resign as President of
CU and hold no ill will towards her.

In light of the concerns raised regarding this event, we are postponing
the activity originally planned for March 9.

Sadly, the College Republicans don't even mention the athletic department mess. (Indeed, they were rather unsound in other areas as well--their leadership thought homosexual marriage was a great idea, which doesn't bode well for the future of the Colorado GOP) It's almost a cliche now: the Right attacks Churchill, the Left attacks the Coach, and poor President Hoffman, who is good at fundraising and medieval lit but not at university administration or public relations, has to leave before the really bad boys do. Frankly I'm one alumnus of the Right who will be happy when both Coach and Prof are gone.

Words can mask as often as they reveal

"Corporations, government agencies and even consumers are tinkering with open-source software, which can be downloaded free from the Internet."
-Ross Wehner, "Linux, others are used behind the scenes" Denver Post, March 28, 2005

I've never liked the word consumer; it evinces mental images of passive bovine grazing. First of all, "customer" is far more respectful of the person with whom one does business. Secondly, it is somewhat misleading, since at the moment of economic transaction, it is hard to say whether the customer is consuming the fruits of the business' labor, or the business is consuming the fruits of the customer's labor.

Here we see how the word especially misleads. In open-source software, any tinkerers are not consumers but producers, innovators who will, if they are competent, actually add value to a thing.

I wonder whether the newspapers refer to their own subscribers as consumers? That's certainly not something one would do if one wishes to project the notion that newspaper readers are informed and active thinkers.

We (Heart) Death?

Nobody ever told me that Tolstoy's War and Peace contains a Masonic initiation scene. The passage that caught Google's eye:

Half an hour later, the Rhetor returned to inform the seeker of the seven virtues, corresponding to the seven steps of Solomon's temple, which every Freemason should cultivate in himself. These virtues were: 1. Discretion, the keeping of the secrets of the Order. 2. Obedience to those of higher ranks in the Order. 3. Morality. 4. Love of mankind. 5. Courage. 6. Generosity. 7. The love of death.

"In the seventh place, try, by the frequent thought of death," the Rhetor said, "to bring yourself to regard it not as a dreaded foe, but as a friend that frees the soul grown weary in the labors of virtue from this distressful life, and leads it to its place of recompense and peace."
-War and Peace, Book Five Chapter Two

Really, I myself have fought the love of death in the past, and its association with the masons doesn't really surprise me. Since Dostoevsky is the only Russian novelist I have studied in any detail, I do not know what Tolstoy makes of the drive towards Thanatos in his novel. Compare, however, the last lines of Proverbs 8:

"So now, O children, listen to me;
instruction and wisdom do not reject!
Happy the man who obeys me,
and happy those who keep my ways,
Happy the man watching daily at my gates, waiting at my doorposts;
For he who finds me finds life, and wins favor from the LORD;
But he who misses me harms himself; all who hate me love death."

"Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention.

If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples, it then openly arrogates to itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it by the eyes of the world, not by the renouncement of aggression but by the attainment of impunity."

-Augustine, City of God Book IV Chapter 4

Family History makes it into History Textbook

...but family history is more accurate.

On another note of local interest, my sister has sent me a link to one of her Colorado history class textbooks, Thomas Noel's The City and the Saloon: Denver, 1858-1916. My great-grandfather Michael Flaherty is the bartender on the far left of the cover photo. Professor Noel, a historian at CU-Denver, claims that Flaherty was owner of the bar along with his brother. This is a rather strange claim, since my family knows he was only the bartender and an orphan who didn't have a brother here. Noel is a friend of my cousin, who I would think could have set him straight on this.

Addendum: turns out my cousin was actually the source of the error. His memory tricked him.

A Jesuit Plagiarist?

The Rev. James Martin, S.J., a columnist at America magazine, has lifted verbatim part of a talking points memo from a lobbying group, incorporating its words into his own speech to the Los Angeles Religious Education conference. The lobbying group? The homosexual advocacy group Rainbow Sash. CWNews.com has the story.

The leadership of my alma mater adflicta had excused and ignored the petty bully of a professor Ward Churchill until it was revealed that he had plagiarized another academic. I wonder if Martin's Jesuit superiors, who care so much about academic respectability, might discipline him for plagiarism?

Not the Castle I was Thinking Of

I let out a howling "NO!" when I heard that the IRS had seized a Colorado castle from its owner and putting it up for auction. The only local castle I know of, Bishop Castle, was hand-built out of rocks by one man. It's now about 160 feet tall, whose height the aged builder still scales without the help of equipment or the safety of a harness, and it still gains additions yearly.

The castle for sale is in fact a bit older and was built by people hired by a coal baron. The first actually looks medieval and wonderfully gothic in its somewhat haphazard construction, while the second looks like a vanity mansion made for the wealthy. It is comforting to know that there are two nearby redoubts to which I may escape once the barbarian mutant cannibals and their robot overlords take power.

I knew a man once that was given to drinking, and I made up this rule for him to distinguish between Bacchus and the Devil. To wit: that he should never drink what has been made and sold since the Reformation—I mean especially spirits and champagne. Let him (said I) drink red wine and white, good beer and mead—if he could get it—liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those feeding, fortifying, and confirming beverages that our fathers drank in old time; but not whisky, nor brandy, nor sparkling wines, not absinthe, nor the kind of drink called gin. This he promised to do, and all went well. He became a merry companion, and began to write odes. His prose clarified and set, that had before been very mixed and cloudy. He slept well; he comprehended divine things; he was already half a republican, when one fatal day—it was the feast of the eleven thousand virgins, and they were too busy up in heaven to consider the needs of us poor hobbling, polyktonous and betempted wretches of men—I went with him to the Society for the Prevention of Annoyances to the Rich, where a certain usurer's son was to read a paper on the cruelty of Spaniards to their mules. As we were all seated there round a table with a staring green cloth on it, and a damnable gas pendant above, the host of that evening offered him whisky and water, and, my back being turned, he took it. Then when I would have taken it from him he used these words—

'After all, it is the intention of a pledge that matters;' and I saw that all was over, for he had abandoned definition, and was plunged back into the horrible mazes of Conscience and Natural Religion.

What do you think, then, was the consequence? Why, he had to take some nasty pledge or other to drink nothing whatever, and become a spectacle and a judgement, whereas if he had kept his exact word he might by this time have been a happy man.

-Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome

Cosmos Patrol: Star Trek for Communists

As if Star Trek weren't comsymp enough, somebody has imagined that the Soviet Union had a similar show with similar themes.

Then-top Kremlin boss Leonid Brezhnev was a big fan of the show, and was even rumored to be responsible for its creation. Brezhnev was known for his enthusiasm for show business and the Soviet space program (and graft and booze and mistresses and diamonds and expensive foreign cars, but that's another story). A Russian friend remembers seeing a news photo in Pravda of a drunk and ill-looking Brezhnev visiting the show's set dressed in his own custom-made "Cosmos Patrol" velour uniform. If you've ever seen a picture of Brezhnev, then you know that cannot have been a pretty sight.

The Hands of a Priest must not Shed Blood?

An aquaintance of mine, an army vet with a black belt in some Eastern school of martial arts, has mentioned that he has become interested in early Western martial arts. Apparently so are these people. They say:

We have centered our studies on two main documents. The first is based on a manuscript, owned by the Royal Armouries, named I.33. This document outlines different concepts of self defense as taught by a Priest to his Student. This document was written between 1280-1300.

The martial arts site says, "Please check our Sources section for more information." The Sources section says, alack, "under construction."

Interesting that a priest is the teacher. No creampuff clerics, here. I know the crusades had various armed priests, like Alleumes of Clari who single-handedly frightened most of the defenders of Constantinople to abandon their posts in the inexcusable misadventure that was the Fourth Crusade. Supposedly priests bearing arms has always been against canon law. (See this section of Aquinas' Summa.) I doubt teaching self-defense falls under this prohibition, especially since I have visions of a boxing priest from some black and white movie--Going My Way, perhaps--who teaches a boy how to fight. Speaking of movies, if these manuals lend themselves to well-choreographed fight scenes a film based on a medieval Western martial artist could make a good action flick.

The Exploding Head of Keanu Reeves

And everybody and his Mother is trying to kill me, IF, IF, my head doesn’t blow up first!"
-Keanu Reeves as Johnny Mnemonic

When Sci-Fi films are bad, like that little girl with the curl in the nursery rhyme, they are horrid. So it's nice to see that a whole web site has taken the time to examine just what makes bad sci-fi, and bad movies in general, fail miserably. From Jabootu.com, a scathing review of Johnny Mnemonic, an adaptation of a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. I pulled out some of the funniest quotes, which rather obscures the already poorly-thought-out storyline. Brief plot synopsis: In the year 2021, courier Johnny Mnemonic's brain has an implanted storage device that holds a whopping 160 gigabytes of data transferred from a computer.(How quickly storage technology has advanced since 1995!) He overloads his brain with 240 gigs of data that, in addition to wiping his memory, might get him killed. Let the funny begin!

"Now it’s time to meet the film’s most ludicrous character, which is saying something. Learning that Laser Whip Guy has again failed to capture Johnny, Takahashi contacts Street Preacher, a priest with the Church of the Retransfiguration. Since this is a Sci-Fi movie, religion must be played up as the occupation of nutbags."

"Man, you know you’re watching a Science Fiction film when someone implies that Keanu Reeves ‘has a lot of stuff in his head.’"

"Still hoping to attract the attention of the guards, Johnny picks up some garbage can lids and performs a one man ‘Stomp’ impression. Hmm. I wouldn’t really say that Keanu Reeves noisily bashing trashcan lids together in a desperate attempt to gain the notice of uninterested viewers is a metaphor for his career. Just that the thought kind of crossed my mind."

"Johnny relates how he almost had a memory."


"So, to cut an extremely stupid story short, Johnny meets Jones, who turns out to be, not a dolphin augmented by the Navy, but a really bad muppet of a dolphin who’s been augmented by the Navy. Yep. A dolphin. Because, you know, they’re so smart. And this one’s augmented, to boot. I mean, Flipper was so intelligent that "no one you see, is smarter than he." And he wasn’t even augmented.

You really have to be watching this to get the full effect of just what a fiasco it is. First, the ‘groovy’ idea of the super-intelligent dolphin seems like something that hippies would come up with after hours spent sucking on a bong. To actually see it in the flesh just makes concrete how stupid the concept really is.

And that’s if we were, in fact, seeing it in the flesh. Instead, we’re obviously seeing it in the latex. The comically inept ‘dolphin’ prop seen here just adds a level of low farce to what was already intellectually specious anyway. The fact that this is supposed to be the film’s ultimate blowout plot twist breaks the final straw. Imagine Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Now imagine watching the entire film, only to see them use one of Ed Wood’s pie-tins-on-a-string for the climatic Mothership sequence. That’s about how well ‘Jones’ delivers on his promise.

Johnny calls the dolphin a ‘fish’ and gets zapped with some sort of sonic beam by the touchy aquatic mammal. Boy, I hope it never reads my description of it."



"Squibs are wee explosives that are detonated under clothing to similate an actor being shot. They also are used to blow open sacs of stage blood to create a bleeding effect. Here, we see squibs detonated on actor Takeshi’s back.

Yet, for a ‘cool’ effect, we also see squibs detonated on his chest. These, clearly, must represent exit wounds - the initial squib indicates the bullet entering his back, followed by a chest squib to indicate the bullet having punched completely through his torso. Neat-o keen, huh!
The only problem is that Johnny is standing directly in front of him!"

"Sob. I’ll never forgot you, Electronic Ghost Woman!"

"And yes, this is all mighty confusing. Therefore, J-Bone is given a monitor on which to watch the VR field, which allows him to throw out nuggets of exposition to the audience. For instance, when the Virus makes its appearance, CGI Johnny produces a mirror image of itself. "He’s doubling himself," J-Bone notes. Thanks, Exposition Man!"

I do wonder how he can wish for Keanu Reeves' head to explode without reference to Scanners? And how can he blast hippie visions of talking dolphins without alluding to Day of the Dolphin? Perhaps he didn't want to sully their mediocrity with the truly craptacular.

Jabootu.com is somewhat uneven. Lately the Jabootu reviewers have turned their asperous gaze upon the impoverished children's cartoon of decades past, Superfriends. As another cartoon character has said, "Why would a man whose shirt says "Genius at Work" spend all of his time watching a children's cartoon show?" Still, all of the film reviews are by people who love movies and have a good sense of what makes a movie fail. What's more, since the Internet has no word limit, they are free to summarize and critique entire plots, subplots, dialogue and scenes in a way that your average newspaper film critic can't spare the space for. Sometimes the reviewers even rewrite scenes and entire movie plots that actually work. It's like an expanded version of The Onion's "Films that Time Forgot" section, or a shorter text version of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode. There are two excellent reviews of Battlefield "Travolta Unbound" Earth, as well as Star Trek V: Shatner at Work and the mind-numbingly atrocious Tom Green gross-out vehicle "Freddy got Fingered," the very mention of which still provokes a low-pitched shuddering groan from one of my sisters who was unfortunate enough to see it. Imagining "What would Jabootu.com say?" is an excellent way to purge one's speech of cant and one's plotting of cliche.

Folly, Sirrah, doth walk about the orb like the Sun: It shineth everywhere!

McCain-Feingold Strikes Again! Via Southern Appeal, an interview with Federal Election Commission, er, commissioner Bradley Smith, indicating that campaign finance "reform" may soon regulate the internet. Perhaps if it is disguised as "virtual" child pornography, it will be allowed. Or somebody can always resurrect FidoNet, or appropriate the file distribution technology used by MP3 traders.

Related Update:

McCain Group got Big Cable Donation(AP)

Nietzschean Jurisprudence?

What one finds on the internet! While searching to see if anyone had drawn paralells between Sir Thomas More's opposition to a royal divorce and remarriage and the opposition of Saint Plato, I come across a law review essay titled GAY SCIENCE AS LAW: AN OUTLINE FOR A NIETZSCHEAN JURISPRUDENCE. Say "Nietzschean" and jurisprudence isn't the first thing that comes to my mind, so I found it pleasantly surprising. At present I don't have the mental acuity to engage it, but here are a few selections I liked:


First, it refers to a short story of Jorge Luis Borges, The Lottery in Babylon. I think I really need to read Borges. Here's a selection from the story:

Like all the men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave. I have known omnipotence, ignominy, imprisonment. Look here—my right hand has no index finger. Look here—through this gash in my cape you can see on my
stomach a crimson tattoo—it is the second letter, Beth. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol gives me power over men with the mark of Gimel, but it subjects me to those with the Aleph, who on nights when there is no moon owe obedience to those marked with the Gimel. In the half-light of dawn, in a cellar, standing before a black altar, I have slit the throats of sacred bulls. Once, for an entire lunar year, I was declared invisible—I would cry out and no one would heed my call, I would steal bread and not be beheaded. I have known that thing the Greeks knew not—uncertainty.

The second selection I enjoyed is a description of how Nietzchean education would work:

While liberal education and indeed any form of collective education is geared toward the production of conformist students, Nietzschean education is about the self-discovery of power through what we may call “constructive repression”—a developing power’s encounter with a formidable one (the latter in Nietzschean, not social, terms). An autocratic mentor may be assigned to a student, gradually oppressing her through discourse. No reactive—i.e., conscious—forces are encouraged in the student to realize and act on her situation. The student may become subservient at first, but through her active powers she begins to emerge against the mentor’s manipulative power (again we encounter the theme of resistance discussed
above). The struggle is not about truth or falsehood—still decadent, reactive concepts—but about power; and the student begins her emancipation when she realizes and experiences it as a matter of will to power rather than of normativity. To this end the educator himself

never says what he himself thinks, but always what he thinks of a thing in relation to the requirements of those he educates. He must not be detected in this dissimulation; it is part of his mastery that one believes in his honesty. . . . Such an educator is beyond good and evil; but no one must know it.(The Will to Power, paragraph 980)

That makes me want to make a very ill-informed "Nietzschean" analysis of Allan Bloom's lament that Nietzschean "values-talk" has so permeated American society.

Professorial Urban Legends

Some 19th century wag, Twain I think, commented that it's not what you don't know that's so bad, it's what you do know that ain't so. A sociology professor I once had derisively proclaimed that a dispensationalist Secretary of the Interior during the Reagan years insisted that we should use up all our natural resources because Jesus was coming soon. Get Religion has the full story.

Oh the Perils of the Double Entendre!

"True worship is living a life that betrays a deep, inward belief in God and His promises."

My thanks for all the prayers and good wishes expressed below.

Merry Christmas!

THE WISE MEN

by G.K. Chesterton

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all the labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but truth.

We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And serve the made gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly…it has hailed and snowed…
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun
(…We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone…)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where trick of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly, humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain.
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.

One Year In

Amen, amen I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

-John 12:24

On December 17, 2003, my health took a turn for the worse, and has yet to recover. I've become habituated to the constant nausea and vomiting, but the fatigue is really getting to me. Fortunately, brain cancer has just been ruled out, but the doctor is otherwise stumped and it looks as though I am afflicted with an anti-miracle, a disease--and not a cure--with no known natural cause. If my doctor followed Paracelsus, perhaps he'd classify my affliction as an ens deale, an affliction sent by Providence.

Thankfully, I came to terms with human dependency long ago, and I know what to do with suffering. I'm fortunate enough to have the support of a caring family, though my future is quite uncertain. So much for law school.

Pray for me, all you saints.

Berdiaev on Dostoevsky

Berdiaev reads Dostoevsky's work in all its complexity as one continuous, spiritually intense struggle to answer Ivan's arguments. His novelistic version of theodicy, just like Berdiaev's own philosophical praxis, begins and ends with the attempt to justify the human personality in the light of Christ's mysterious gift of freedom. Berdiaev writes: "I would sum it up in a paradoxical form, thus: The existence of evil is proof of the existence of God. If the world consisted wholly and uniquely of goodness and righteousness there would be no need for God, for the world itself would be God. God is, because evil is. And that means that god is because freedom is."

Slanting the Debate

Amy Welborn notes how political television shows work:

I was once interviewed at length for an article profiling pro-life and abortions rights advocates for a 1/22 piece. My section of the article was cut in favor of an imprisoned direct-action protestor because, I was told, "They wanted someone who was more intensly committed." I once heard...I can't remember her name off the top of my head, but she's an African-American woman who was for several years the main PR person for National Right to Life. It got to the point, she said, at which the networks (this was really before cable) stopped asking her to represent the pro-life position - why? Because once they heard that she would be there, folks like Faye Wattleton and Kate Michelman would routinely cancel their end of the appearances, not wanting to argue their point with a young African-American woman, but preferring, as they ended up getting, to do so in opposition to a middle-aged white man.

Death is not the Solution, Death is the Problem

The first officially sanctioned infanticide in Germany occurred in 1939 after the father of a disabled baby, “Baby Knauer,” wrote to Chancellor Hitler seeking permission to have his son euthanized. Hitler, believing the time was ripe to begin eradicating the “defectives,” sent his physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, to inform Baby Knauer’s doctors that there would be no legal consequence for killing the infant. This was done, so pleasing Hitler that he issued a secret directive licensing doctors to kill disabled infants.

In The Nazi Doctors, Robert J. Lifton quotes a 1973 interview in which the father of Baby Knauer recalled the reasons Brandt and Hitler agreed to the killing of his son:

He [Brandt] explained to me that the Führer had personally sent him, and that my son’s case interested him very much. The Führer wanted to explore the problem of people who had no future—whose [lives were] worthless. From then on, we wouldn’t have to suffer from this terrible misfortune, because the Führer had granted us the mercy killing of our son. Later, we could have other children, handsome and healthy, of whom the Reich could be proud.

-Wesley J. Smith

The Netherlands now has the blood of four Baby Knauers on its hands. See Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies

For more, see Hugh Hewitt here and here and also Dawn Eden

Someone to check out

Robert P. Kraynak refers to Hungarian political philosopher and conservative critic of liberalism Aurel Kolnai in this review of John Hittinger's Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory.

In chapter ten, Hittinger gives further consideration to Kolnai's "metaphysics of political conservatism" and tilts in favor of this approach over Maritain's and Simon's democratic progressivism and defensive neo-Thomism. Kolnai contrasts conservative metaphysics, which views life in terms of "hierarchy, privilege, and liberty," to democratic metaphysics, which views life in terms of "identity, sameness, and rebellion." Kolnai defends conservative metaphysics against democratic metaphysics because the former is more noble than the latter and accords with the natural order of things. The problem with this judgment, of course, is that conservative metaphysics point toward an aristocratic order of politics while democratic metaphysics point to the mass culture of the common man, neither of which is entirely acceptable. Kolnai tries to solve the problem by combining the two orders in a view of "constitutionalism" that separates limitations on power from individual rights and connects "liberty under God" with dispersed centers of power based on privilege and corporate hierarchy. It is unclear, however, if Hittinger completely accepts this political solution because he senses that Kolnai's spirit is at odds with the Second Vatican Council and with the views of Pope John Paul II, a champion of the rights and dignity of the human person.

I'm sympathetic to dispersing centers of power, but the advocacy of privilege triggers egalitarian suspicions I didn't even know I had. Granted, this is a prejudice on my part; but as Edmund Burke has noted, there is something to be said for prejudices.

There's more informaton on Kolnai in this brief review: FindArticles.com - A neglected political thinker

The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy

The Liberty Fund has made Henrich Rommen's excellent natural law study available on-line.

From the introduction:

Heinrich Rommen is known in the United States primarily as the author of two widely read books on political philosophy, The State in Catholic Thought: A Treatise in Political Philosophy (1945) and The Natural Law (1947), and as a professor at Georgetown University (1953–67). Yet, before 1938, when he fled the Third Reich for the United States, Rommen was neither a scholar nor a university professor, but a professional lawyer—trained in civil and canon law—who had devoted considerable energies to Catholic social action during the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi Party. The two books that secured his academic reputation in the United States were written in Germany in the midst of his legal and political work, for which he was imprisoned by the Nazis.

Although The Natural Law displays erudition in a number of academic specialties (law, philosophy, history, theology), the reader will appreciate that the book was written by a lawyer in response to a political and legal crisis. As a practicing lawyer, Rommen watched with alarm as the Nazi party deftly used German legislative, administrative, and judicial institutions to impose totalitarian rule. “Our modern dictators,” he remarked, “are masters of legality.” “Hitler,” Rommen concluded, “aimed not a revolution, but at a legal grasp of power according to the formal democratic processes.”

Every generation, it is said, finds a new reason for the study of natural law. For Rommen and many others of his generation, totalitarianism provided that occasion.4 As he put it in his book on the state, “When one of the relativist theories is made the basis of a totalitarian state, man is stirred to free himself from the pessimistic resignation that characterizes these relativist theories and to return to his principles.” Rommen’s writings were prompted by the spectacle of German legal professionals, who, while trained in the technicalities of positive law, were at a loss in responding to what he called “Adolf Légalité.”

What caused this loss of nerve, if not loss of moral perspective? Rommen points to the illusion that legal institutions are a sufficient bulwark against government by raw power—as though a system of positive law takes care of itself, requiring only the superintendence of certified professionals. “Forgotten is the fact that legal institutions themselves can be made the object of the non-legal power struggle. Who does not know that in a nation the courts or the judges themselves are subject to the power strife, showing itself in the public propaganda of contradictory social ideals?”

The Constitution of Liberty within Christendom...

is the title of a brief essay by Paul Rahe on liberty in the middle ages. It's lifted in part from Volume I of his _Republics Ancient and Modern_, my current read. Rahe links the evolution of political liberty to the Canon Lawyers' reinterpretation of the Roman Law principle "What touches all must be approved by all."

Two Essays on War

Ecumenical Councils of War, reviewed by David B. Hart, outlining the just war tradition in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Hart raises a key problem in contemporary just war reasoning:

More importantly, by beginning his account of just war theory by bothering to recognize the legitimacy of a state not explicitly bound to divine law—however much he may urge that Christians must attempt to make the state conscious of that law—Cole puts himself in the odd position of having to argue that Christians must both obey the principles of just war and also resign themselves to fighting at the behest of a political order that has not necessarily placed itself under the sway of those principles. It is, after all, the liberal state that gave us total war in the modern age and that has often, precisely on account of its liberal utopian abhorrence of all war (as Cole himself quite acutely observes), forsaken even the pretense of justice in making war.

It is a curious thing indeed, then, for Cole to begin his defense of the just war tradition by arguing on behalf of a political system that is in its essence intractably post-Christian. If the most for which Christians can hope is that they have a “voice” in the political determinations of a government that does not otherwise acknowledge the spiritual and moral supremacy of the Church in worldly affairs, what remains of just war theory but a collection of axioms by which individual Christians must try to ascertain for themselves whether they may or may not consent to a particular war being waged by their government?

But surely just war theory is not supposed to function as a private calculus, but as a social and political rationality. In the age of the liberal state, what authority may Christians trust in times of war, if the state cannot—by its own constitutional logic—speak under the clear guidance of the Church?

Second, an essay by the Rev. Michael Baxter, CSC, Just War and Pacifism: A "Pacifist"
Perspective in Seven Points.

The Nation-State and the Common Good

Via Verbum Ipsum, we find the essay Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is not the Keeper of the Common Good,(PDF Format) in which William T. Cavanaugh makes a very contrarian argument. He holds that the nation-state never claimed to look after the common good, that "society," in its unitary sense, is actually a creation of the modern nation-state, and, echoing Simon Schama, claims that a potent state is the enemy of vibrant communities.

A few quotations:
"Globalization is, in part, the hyperextension of the triumph of the universal over the local on which the nation-state is founded."

"The nation-state may be understood theologically as a kind of parody of the Church, meant to save us from division."

He also has a revealing quotation from a political scientist named Michael Budde, on his encounter with the ecclessial bureaucracy:

Once upon a time, I was hired as a consultant for a public-policy arm of a state-level Catholic bishops’ conference. The bishops, according to the institution’s staff people, wanted to engage in rededicated efforts to confront the realities of poverty in their state.
What the church bureaucracy had in mind was something on the order of a new lobbying initiative in the state legislature or perhaps an expert conference on poverty in the state.
I told them that they should attempt to take every Catholic in their state on an intensive retreat, with follow-up programs upon their return. Nothing the Church could do would benefit poor people more, I argued, than to energize, inspire, and ignite the passion of larger numbers of the faithful. Without attempts to “convert the baptized,” in William O’Malley’s phrase, the stranglehold of self-interest, isolation, and religious indifference would continue to throttle the church’s attempts to deal seriously with poverty in a global capitalist order.
My advice, to put it gently, was unappreciated. I was fired. They had an experts conference. As far as I can tell, poverty in their state remained indifferent to their efforts.

Political Philosophy and Science Envy

"For just as Galileo could look at the path of a cannon ball and see it as the resultant of the force of gravity and linear velocity, or Priestley look at a chemical reaction and see it as an exchange of atoms, so the new social theorists looked at the state and saw it as the resultant of the actions of all the individuals who make it up. But note please that these individuals who are the primary constituents of the state and the elements of reductive analysis of society are not individual human beings. They are social atoms, totally denuded of individuality, of character, of emotion(except fear and greed) and ov value. The individual, in this mode of analysis, is not a real human being but an abstract quantity, comprehensible because of his abstract nature and ultimately manipulable by social controls. The relevance of the reductive mode of analysis for modern politics should be immediately obvious, for in the ideologies of modern totalitarian movements, we can see this method of perceiving human beings as abstract quantities in the full light of practice."
-John C. Caiazza, Modern Science and the Origins of Our Political Discontent(PDF File)
Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1977

I am beginning to better understand Chantal Delsol's suspicions of essentialism, since the "essentialism" of modern theory posits a reductive nature of man in order that man can be manipulated by a technocracy, in contradistinction to the essentialism of classical and Christian philosophy, where human nature is not a thing to be manipulated but a norm to be fulfilled.

Caiazza also notes how modern science follows the Cartesian route, moving away from experience and into abstraction. Modern political philosophy, in its envy of the promises and accomplishments of physical science, tries to follow suit: "Just as it becomes the mark of an educated man to say that the physical universe is not as it appears to be, so it becomes possible to say that the phenomena of politics are not what they appear to be; are not what our experience tells us they are." He critiques social contract theory as one such abstraction. "Hobbes based his idea of the state on the contract theory not because he was committed to the idea of individualism, but because he was modeling his analysis on the reductive method of science." Obviously, this preference for abstraction over experience engenders the rabid anti-traditionalism of modernity.

Truth and Freedom

A ruminative essay by Joseph Cardinal Raztinger on the relationship between truth and freedom. I read it years ago, but I only just now noticed that its critique anticipates that of Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallen. Delsol is more wary of "essentialist" philosophy than Ratzinger, but I think Ratzinger goes further in providing the anthropology that Delsol so pined for.

The Kleptocracy at Work

US Senators' stock portfolios routinely beat the market

Tumor growing in Democratic Party by Fran Maier, the chancellor of the Catholic Archiocese of Denver.

A bit of Capitalist Messianism

Former CEO of GE Jack Welch writes

Last but not least, the leader of the United States must love business, because a thriving economy is the free world’s last, best hope.

So much for "In God We Trust." Most money is digital now, anyway.

Something else they don't teach in schools

Social Darwinist excerpts from the book under question in the Scopes trial, via Eve Tushnet.

Addendum 7/22/05: More excerpts

The New Pantagruel, Winter Edition

I have a review essay covering Claes G. Ryn's _America The Virtuous_ in the latest issue of the New Pantagruel. I fear I'm a bit out of my league, being in the same issue as excerpts from Eric Voegelin and two superlative essays on place and locality. Still, one doesn't learn to swim by staying out of the water. My thanks to Caleb Stegall and the other TNP editors for the opportunity.

A few links on Voegelin

First, the essay What is the Metaxy? analyzing the concept in Plato and in Voegelin's interpretation of Plato. The author provides some useful guidelines for interpreting Plato.

Second, a handy Dictionary of Voegelinian Terminology, found via The New Pantagruel