Just My Cup of Tea

Now, don't get me wrong. I admire Danielle Bean tremendously. And I think the new "Faith and Family Live!" website is a terrific idea.

But when I read this post, which features a link to an article titled 50 Ways to Boost Your Energy Without Caffeine, all I could think was--sure, you could do that. But why would you want to?

Of course, intellectually I know why. The reason this blog is "And Sometimes Tea" (well, aside from the literary reference to my favorite poet) instead of "And Sometimes Coffee" is that there's just no "sometimes" about coffee. It's always, or never, at least for me. I've now reached the point where it is possible for me to have a rare treat cuppa joe and then not need one the next day, but it took a long time for me to wean myself off the stuff to get to that point--so I'm careful about it.

But that's coffee. Tea is my friend.

Tea seems to have moods and circadian rhythms all its own. There's morning tea, rich and black, a cup full of wakefulness; there's afternoon tea, perhaps a green tea or a flavored variety with a little less caffeine and a little more meditativeness; there's herbal tea for cold winter nights, all the delicious warmth and none of the instant wake-up chemical that my brain likes so very much but definitely doesn't need in the minutes before midnight.

A slow morning, a drowsy afternoon, and I'm much more likely to think of a cup of tea than a nap (ha!) or desk-variety yoga. A few minutes with a cheap electric kettle and a pottery mug, and I can be on the road to alertness in no time.

I'm not saying that there aren't some times and places where one of the things on the list of fifty caffeine-alternatives might come in handy, and I know not everybody tolerates caffeine even in small quantities. But for the most part, if my eyes are drooping and my head nodding at 4 p.m., I'm not going to "examine my emotions" (number 3 on the list) or "look at my accomplishments" (number 50)--at least, not until after I've had a cup of tea.

Turning Back the Clock

It's bad enough that we Americans are facing the prospect of a serious recession, a continued hike in gas prices, and other reminders of the not-so-recent past. But now, apparently, the Democrats in Congress would like to resurrect another relic from that era: the Fairness Doctrine:

A bill to permanently ban the “Fairness Doctrine” – a dormant FCC rule that says broadcasters, mainly talk radio, must grant equal air time to opposing viewpoints – probably will not be voted on this year in Congress, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told CNSNews.com on Wednesday.

Hoyer also joined House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in strongly suggesting that he would support reactivating the Fairness Doctrine, telling CNSNews.com that he is interested in “ensuring the availability of fair and balanced information to the American public.” [...]

“There is a real concern about the monopoly of information and the skewering of information that the American public gets,” said Hoyer. “First, is to the monopoly.

“Obviously, if one group, or a large group, controls information and only allows one perspective to be presented, that’s not good for democracy. That is not good for the American public. That is, of course, what the Fairness Doctrine is directed at, and it can have great merit. But there are obviously complications involved in that as well,” he said.

Now, you can say what you like about right-wing talk radio--and I'm not really a fan of very much of it. But you can hardly say that it's a monopoly controlling all the information that the American people receive--to do so is to ignore the huge amount of information available to the American public through television news, newspapers, and this nifty little thing called the Internet.

The truth of the matter is that Democrats--and liberals in general--aren't all that good at providing the kind of insightful opinion/commentary programming that conservatives have tended to excel at. You could come up with all sorts of explanations as to why, but it's true--liberal attempts to create liberal counterparts to conservative talk radio have tended not to do very well. Now, it's fair to suppose that liberals will eventually find their niche in these formats--but it's not fair, "Fairness Doctrine" notwithstanding, to force conservative broadcasters to offer "equal time" to less compelling liberal voices in the interim.

The Fairness Doctrine is one of the many examples of liberals seeking to apply a government solution to something that isn't even a problem, let alone a dire situation needing immediate relief from the government. There are no laws preventing liberals from starting and hosting their own talk shows, and no unfair or discriminatory efforts to exclude them from doing so. But they have to play by the same rules as everybody else, and come up with something interesting, insightful, compelling, and unique to say--and then draw in enough listeners to start attracting advertisers, as well. If they can't do this, then nobody owes them a platform or a microphone--least of all one provided by government mandate.

Plain Dumb Fun

It's really nice to have Roger Ebert writing movie reviews on the Internet. I hardly ever got to see his reviews on TV, and would thus only see the one nice sentence he might say about some otherwise terrible flick, carefully carved out of context and plastered across the back of the DVD case.

I hardly ever go to the movies anymore. Let's face it, homeschooling moms--by the time we arrange for a babysitter, arrange for an easy dinner for the kids, arrange for the house to be clean enough that we're not embarrassed for the babysitter (in my world, always a family member) to come over (and by "arrange" I of course mean clean it personally) and arrange to have something clean and relatively non-frumpy to wear, the last thing we want to do is waste all that effort on a two-hour "date" that lacks the one thing we can't get enough of: conversation.

My husband enjoys going to the movies, though, and looks forward to my being less tentative about doing so more often at some point in the future. The handful of movies we have seen at theaters since the girls were born have been carefully selected for maximum entertainment (with one exception) value, and have nearly always lived up to the hype--since one of the things I will do is ask lots of people if the movie's worth seeing in the theater before I'll even consider it.

Since one of those movies was, indeed, one of the "Mummy" franchise, I really enjoyed reading Roger Ebert's review--his superb writing ability and keen insights made the review glitter with passages like this:

The emperor is a shape-shifter, able to turn himself into a three-headed, fire-breathing dragon, which coils, twists, turns and somehow avoids scorching himself. He speaks in a low bass rumble, just like Imhotep, the mummy in the two earlier pictures (whose name continues to remind me of an Egyptian house of pancakes). But moving the action from Egypt to China allows a whole new set of images to be brought into play, and the movie ends by winking at us that the next stop will be Peru.

Now why did I like this movie? It was just plain dumb fun, is why. It is absurd and preposterous, and proud of it. The heroes maintain their ability to think of banal cliches even in the most strenuous situations. Brendan Fraser continues to play Rick as if he is taking a ride at Universal Studios, but Mario Bello has real pluck as she uses a handgun against the hordes of terra-cotta warriors. The sacrifice of the sorceress in relinquishing not only her own immortality but that of her daughter permits love to bloom, although would you really want a bride who was 4,000 years old, even if she was going to die?

I think I've figured out why I'd so much rather rent movies than go see them in theaters, most of the time: the movies I like to see in the theater are "plain dumb fun," and alas, that's a dying genre.

I can, and do, watch serious films at home. My husband (should I start calling him "Mr. M." now, or will that be confusing?) is a movie enthusiast, and he'll rent everything from documentaries to blockbuster hits to little-known indie flicks. I'll admit that I've seen a lot more challenging, interesting, meaningful and relevant films because of him.

But as a character in one of my favorite mystery novels says, "I don't go to the theater to be crushed by gloom." Given how rarely Mr. M and I go out alone together, and given how rarely those evenings out include a movie, I want to be sure that the ticket price is going to include some entertainment, some laughs, and some plain dumb fun. I'm all for movies that have social themes and conscious-raising efforts and literary qualities and moving stories based on real life and documentary/docudramas and so forth--but for those, we have Netflix.

So maybe we'll go see the third "Mummy" offering on a big screen with plenty of surround-sound and the full impact of all the special effects--though if we do, I'll probably still be chuckling over Mr. Ebert's "pancake" joke on the way into the theater.

Starring: Obama and McCain

The McCain campaign has decided how they want to cast Barack Obama--as an inexperienced young man attempting to garner celebrity status in order to avoid having to address, with any substance, the issues of the day:

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters Obama's overseas swing was "much more something you would expect from someone releasing a new movie than running for president."

He said the Obama strategy was to develop a fan base "that allows him to get a lot of media attention and avoids him having to address the important issues of our time." [...]

"Like most celebrities, he reacts to fair criticism with a mix of fussiness and hysteria," spokesman Tucker Bounds said. "In the face of an energy crisis, Barack Obama's plans to raise taxes on energy and opposition to offshore drilling show that he fundamentally lacks judgment and experience, and is not ready to lead."

While I think these are fair points to make, I have to question the wisdom of this approach. When one lives in a glass house, after all...

I'm not saying John McCain can't afford to question Obama's lack of experience. But judgment is a different matter, and McCain is giving voters the opportunity to remember that his hasn't always been all that sound--and that he has a long track record of making decisions in opposition to the general will of the average Republican voter.

Further, sniping at Obama for his star quality seems a bit ill-advised in a campaign where McCain has already spent quite a bit of time making the late-night television rounds. Any notion that the presidential candidates ought to be dignified, elevated, mature statesmen ended when the first of them decided to show up on late night TV; the addition of weepy daytime women's fare to the candidates' schedule pretty well put an end to the idea that presidential candidates aren't really just a different kind of celebrity than the sort that adorns the tabloids.

If the McCain campaign is really worried that Obama's going to get the plum four-year star contract (with a renewal option, of course) while their man is going to end up hawking less than dignified products on commercials that run during those same late-night programs--well, it's not paranoia; it's precedent.

But it's not really Obama's celebrity approach that worries the McCain campaign--it's that the vast majority of the country's voters will see McCain as the likable but unimportant elderly character actor who rounds out the scenes, instead of the leading man.

The Priestess Connection

Patrick Archbold at CMR is a genius. I'm just sayin'.

Here's my humble contribution:

The Priestess Connection (with apologies, sung to the tune of the Muppets' song, The Rainbow Connection)

Why are there so many
Stoles made of rainbows
And vestments that are tie-dyed?

Rainbows are symbols
Of womyn's confusion
And yet represent gay-pride

Get on the boat and wrap sheets all around you
Mu-mus and trinkets and sea
Someday they'll find it, the Priestess Connection
Athena and Isis and me.

Who said that only men
Could stand at the altar?
(God did. But we just don't care)

Somebody told us that
And some may believe it
We say it just isn't fair

We've gone as far as we can with star-gazing
Tarot cards, crystals, and tea
We want to find it, the Priestess Connection
Demeter and Freya and me...

(...all of us can cast a spell
Though mostly we're just comi-tragic...)

Have you dozed off at lunch
And heard mystic voices?
Calls to the priesthood for dames,

Was it the voice of fate
Or maybe the pizza?
Where can we place the blame?

I think Dan Brown is the one who began it
Or people who think God is "She"
Someday we'll find it, that Priestess Connection,
Minerva and Lilith and me...

....la, excommunication...
la la la I cannot hear youuuuuu......!

Warning: Technology Can Be Hazardous To Your Health

Hard on the heels of last week's warnings about cell phones and cancer comes this new report from USA Today on the dangers of texting while doing just about anything:

Obama aide Valerie Jarrett fell off a Chicago curb several weeks ago while her thumbs were flying on her Blackberry.

"I didn't see the sidewalk and I twisted my ankle," Jarrett said. "It was a nice wake-up call for me to be a lot more careful in the future, because I clearly wasn't paying attention and I should have."

Jarrett got off easy and didn't need medical attention. [...]

Still, ER doctors who responded to a recent informal query from the organization reported two deaths, both in California. A San Francisco woman was killed by a pickup earlier this year when she stepped off a curb while texting, and a Bakersfield man was killed last year by a car while crossing the street and texting.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has no national estimate on how common texting-related injuries are. But among the reports it has received: A 15-year-old girl fell off her horse while texting, suffering head and back injuries, and a 13-year-old girl suffered belly, leg and arm burns after texting her boyfriend while cooking noodles.

Our kids are going to grow up among the most wired generation ever to set foot on the face of the earth--that is, if they can set foot without being distracted by the ringing of the cell phone, the beep of the pager or text message device, or the blare of music from the tiny portable music player resting in their pocket. And while some of these devices are helpful or nice to have in certain circumstances, too much time and attention focused on them can do more than cause stress--it can actually be dangerous.

Abortion and Division

I don't know if you saw this Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece from last week, about the role abortion plays in national politics. It's interesting, if only for the tone of extreme detachment it takes throughout:

That abortion has such resonance in American politics is remarkable on several levels: It's not an issue of top-tier importance to voters, and very few elections anywhere have been determined by it. It's the province of a small clique -- devout believers and political opportunists -- on both sides of the debate. [...]

"Abortion is only of concern to the ends of the ideological scale," says Susan Pinkus, the polling director for the Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times survey.

It is striking that public attitudes about abortion have remained steady for three decades. A majority of Americans consider it a necessary evil, are uncomfortably pro-choice, and don't wish for abortions to be either difficult or easy to obtain. [...]

There are small groups of great conscience on both sides; those who believe life begins at conception and that, therefore, abortion is murder, and those who believe no one has a right to dictate to a woman what she may do with her own body.

More, however, use the issue as a fundraising or organizing device. Although the numbers are small, there is intensity that often provokes irrationality.

Some feminists are culpable, as are some of the conservative elements of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America. There are few instances of a Catholic politician being denied communion on the basis of his views on war, hunger or capital punishment. Yet a bishop in Erie, Pennsylvania, once denied Ridge, a Vietnam War veteran and devoted public servant, the right to speak at Catholic-sponsored events solely because of his pro-choice views.

I realize that to people who don't care much about the abortion issue, abortion must seem unnecessarily divisive. I'm sure people who didn't care much one way or the other about the morality of slavery wondered what all the fuss was about, in the decade or so before the Civil War. But that doesn't change the fact that the toleration of an unjust or evil law creates an untenable position for a nation, and whether it is abortion itself or all the other evils that have followed in its wake, at some point the evil must be addressed.

Until then, the issue will remain divisive in a way that other issues of lesser moral gravity will not. And no amount of chiding editorials that try to equate a politician's support with abortion with his views on "war, hunger, or capital punishment" will change that fact.

We Did It Really Well

Did you see this over the weekend? It's pretty amazing to read candidate Barack Obama's assessment of his World Tour concert--er, campaign initiative.

First we have some criticism by John McCain:

McCain also sought to turn Obama's trip against him, suggesting it was a slight to U.S. voters.

"With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to 'the people of the world,' I'm starting to feel a little left out. Maybe you are too," the Arizona senator said in a Saturday radio address. [...]

And then Barack Obama strikes back:

Obama told the journalists McCain had visited Mexico, Colombia and Canada recently.

"I was puzzled by this notion that somehow what we were doing was in any way different from what Senator McCain or a lot of presidential candidates have done in the past. Now, I admit we did it really well," he said.

"But that shouldn't be a strike against me. You know, if I was bumbling and fumbling through this thing, I would have been criticized for that," he said.

Where to begin?

In the first place, sure, some presidential candidates have visited foreign countries. Few have done so overtly as part of a campaign, though, addressing campaign speeches to people who can't actually vote for one.

In the second place, do you notice that Obama seems to think he's being criticized mainly for doing well? How odd is that? And then the justification--well, if I'd done a bad job I'd be the target of critics, too.

Obama seems not to notice that the reason he's being criticized at all has nothing to do with how "well" or how "badly" he campaigned in foreign countries, but that he is being criticized because he campaigned in foreign countries! As I said earlier, the only reason a candidate could possibly justify spending an important week abroad is because he either believes, or wishes to create the illusion, that he's already won the domestic election, that nothing remains but the formality of the actual vote.

And that takes a certain amount of--I almost said "audacity," but I'm getting a little tired of that word. We'll call it "bravado," instead--the persistent attempt to reframe the narrative so that the voters of this country are swept up in the tide of the story, and can't quite bring themselves to spoil the heroic and significant and quasi-messianic ending.

Obama knows, I believe, just how scripted and artificial this whole thing is. So the take-away line has to be, "We did it really well," not "We left people wondering what we were doing abroad in the first place," or "We gave lackluster speeches in front of historic settings we had no right to use as backdrops in the least." Let either, or both, of those ideas form the conclusion of even the slightest majority of American voters, and the whole dazzling hollow artifice comes crumbling down, like the airy nonsense of which it is constructed.

Massachusetts: The Las Vegas of Gay Marriage

Remember this post? Well, now the Massachusetts House of Representatives has voted likewise, which means that as soon as the Governor signs this change into law same-sex couples from all over the country can go to Massachusetts for their dream weddings. Doesn't matter if gay marriage is illegal in your home state, people! Come spend tons of money on a lavish gay Massachusetts wedding extravaganza!

When Mitt Romney was governor, he apparently thought, erroneously, that the 1913 law would be strong enough to guard against the eventual danger that this would happen. From the second link:

Romney ordered municipal clerks to enforce the 1913 law after gay marriages began in Massachusetts in May 2004.

Romney said the law was need to prevent Massachusetts from becoming "the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage." Former Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly also supported the 1913 law.

I feel a great deal of sympathy for heterosexual couples in Massachusetts: the phrase "Massachusetts marriage" has just become a national joke, on par with the "Las Vegas Wedding" and the "Reno Divorce."

(One wonders which county in Massachusetts will become the gay-marriage counterpart to Reno. They're going to need one, you know.)

In fact, if I were a citizen of Massachusetts, I'd be looking for a new home state right about now. Why wait around to become an employee of the gay wedding/gay honeymoon industry, which will be the biggest employer in the state before long? Why wait to have more freedoms and rights taken away by this new vocal group, which has already ended Catholic Charities' ability to place children for adoption, and will be seeking to shut down as much of the Catholic Church's ability to continue to oppose gay marriage as it possibly can? Why wait to have one's children forced to recite gay fairy tales like "King and King" from kindergarten on?

Massachusetts has declared war on the traditional understanding of marriage in every other state of the union with this decision of theirs. The gay rights activists are determined to redefine marriage in America and then redefine anyone who refuses to accept the new definition as a bigot. And in Massachusetts, they're not content with tampering with the lives of only their own citizens--they'd like to bring Massachusetts-style marriage to your state, too.

Obama and the Faith-Based Initiatives

I found this Amy Sullivan piece in USA Today to be an extremely interesting read, even though my politics are probably the polar opposite of Ms. Sullivan's. She argues that Democrats used to be the party of coalition between religion and politics; certainly many previous-generation Catholics thought that being a Democrat was part of the Catholic American's cultural identity (and while, sadly, some still do, they do so in spite of the Church's repeated discussions of issues the Democrats have made their own, like abortion-on-demand and gay marriage, which are counter to the Church's moral teachings).

From the article:

It's fair to say Democrats were expecting a presidential nominee who would vow to overturn the faith-based initiative once he reached the White House, not one who doubled down on the program. But there are a number of reasons for Obama to stray from the party line when it comes to faith-based politics.

For one, by embracing the idea of partnerships between government and faith-based institutions, Obama isn't moving to the right so much as reclaiming an issue Democrats used to support. For decades, religiously affiliated organizations like Lutheran Social Services and United Jewish Communities received, without a hint of controversy, government funds to provide social services. [...]

The Democratic Party made a key tactical error in 2000 by not rebutting Bush's attacks on Clinton as a secular liberal who discriminated against religious communities. Instead, Gore's supporters took the bait and charged that Bush's support for faith-based initiatives was an inappropriate mixing of religion and politics. At the same time, Gore's advisers persuaded him to back away from promoting partnerships between government and religious non-profits.

By the time Bush established a new White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in his second week after moving into the Oval Office, many liberals had forgotten the idea ever had bipartisan support. Bill Moyers decried the office as a tool to funnel money to Bush supporters — "slush funds." That was at least less frightening than the other popular liberal belief: that the faith-based initiative was evidence of a creeping theocracy.

In Obama's faith-based speech, he noted that his early work as a community organizer in Chicago was partly funded by a Catholic group called The Campaign for Human Development. That experience is another reason for his support of faith-based initiatives: He actually believes in them. (Emphasis added-EM).

So we have the Campaign for Human Development, an organization which really shouldn't be allowed to be even marginally associated with the Catholic Church, to thank for Obama. Why am I not surprised?

If you don't know about the CHD and its troubled history, especially its connection to the radical Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), you should read this expose written by the Catholic weekly The Wanderer. It's a few years old, but as far as I know none of the key points have changed: the CHD is still more interested in promoting liberal, Marxist-style politics than doing anything specifically Catholic.

Another interesting look at the "Catholic" Campaign for Human Development comes from this 2000 article by Kathryn Lopez: excerpt:

Every year, usually on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Roman Catholic parishes around the country take up a special collection to fund CCHD. A national office in Washington, D.C., awards grants to more than 250 projects each year. Most dioceses keep 25% of the collection to fund hundreds of smaller local projects.

Through CCHD, unwitting Catholic parishioners have often funded leftist groups and causes, some already amply blessed with federal funding. Despite CCHD's promise to "help people help themselves," grants never go to "direct service programs" but to "poverty groups which work toward systemic change, economic strength and political power," according to CCHD materials. CCHD says funded "projects" must concern "a distinct constituency (e.g., a neighborhood, seniors, Blacks, Hispanics, women, handicapped) and/or a distinct issue or series of issues (e.g, hazardous waste, housing, tribal recognition, community development)."

In the past, some CCHD grantees have been involved in projects that are clearly contrary to what Catholics believe. Yet every year Catholics give millions to CCHD.

If the Campaign for Human Development--sorry, I refuse to call it Catholic--is an example of the kind of faith-based initiative Obama likes, the kind that rakes in donations from unsuspecting religious believers and uses the money to fund Marxist, leftist organizing tactics and all manner of left-wing politics, then I'll pass. Such initiatives aren't faith-based at all; they're faithless exploitation of religion and religious believers for the good of the government.

The Blessing of Daughters

Well, the weird summer cold/flu virus that's been working its way around the country and around the blogosphere apparently decided that yesterday was my turn. You knew I had to be sick, right? I always post on weekdays, otherwise. :)

To be fair, I had some warning, in the form of mild cold symptoms that started late last week. My SIL warned me that my brother's bout with this thing started that way, too, and then ramped up to much worse after a few days. I took the warning seriously--I went out and bought actual juice! I even drank some of it. That's enough, isn't it?

Wrong. I woke up yesterday wondering how I'd gotten stuck to the bed, why my head was pounding and my back and neck aching, speculating on the origins of the waves of bitter metallic nausea that were taking all the fun out of being in bed, and wishing I knew who had packed my sinus cavities with C-4.

I decided to remain in bed, and by "decided" I of course mean, "accepted the inevitable after realizing that a mere trip across the room left the room spinning like a drunken sailor and made those waves of nausea threaten to crest in a most disturbing way." I'd love to tell you that I quickly remembered to offer the whole thing up, but I think it took a few of those dizzy weird dozes complete with strange sick-dreams before I was coherent enough to do so.

I did have a lot of time for reflection, and one of the things I reflected the most on is what a blessing it is to have daughters.

Now, I'm not saying sons aren't also a huge blessing, as I'm sure they are--I just don't have any, myself. And having three girls means having three born nurses, three natural nurturers, three sets of concerned eyes and helpful hands, which all comes in pretty handy when Mom is sick.

They brought me ice for the pounding head, and soda and crackers for the nausea. They made sure I took aspirin at appropriate intervals, and checked in on me often enough that I knew they were fine, but not so often that I couldn't sleep. They kept each other entertained and out of trouble, and when it was time to start making dinner they made, with minimal directions, a complete meal: Kitten made baked chicken with Cajun seasoning, Bookgirl used the vegetable steamer to make broccoli, and Hatchick manned the rice cooker to provide fluffy white rice for the meal. I was so proud, even though I couldn't join them in eating any of it.

During dinner Kitten came back in to make sure I didn't need anything. I tried to tell her that I was fine, but she gave me a knowing look, and walked over to the bookshelf next to my bed where the most recent glass of soda, mostly untouched, was standing.

"Mom," she said decisively, "this is warm. And flat. You can't possibly drink it." And she marched out to replace it with a fresh cold glass, glistening with condensation.

I murmured to them last night that they were wonderful helpers, and that I was proud of them. I said it again this morning, though I think they're all glad that I'm feeling well enough to be out of bed again. I'm glad I had the opportunity to get a sneak peek at just how well they're all going to do some day in their own vocations, whether they are moms or nuns or called to the single life. For now, though, I think they're equally glad that they only had to be mom for a day.

The Aura of Inevitability

I like Rod Dreher's take on the Obama/Berlin moment from this morning, and I especially enjoyed the link to this splendid bit of writing. Political satire at its finest; I've read it a couple of times to savor the brilliance.

If the mainstream media decides that there's too much derision surrounding Obama over this Grand Tour of his, they may turn on him yet; while many of them are fiercely partisan, their first and deepest loyalties lie not with any particular candidate or party, but with their own self-interests. This is why Dukakis was defeated, among others--the media will go to bat for a credible Democrat, but not an incredible one--and it's also why they've been so gosh-darned excited about Obama, who has thus far avoided the stamp of ridiculousness that has destroyed the dreams of dozens of Democrats.

So this trip, this jaunt about Europe and the Middle East, has been fraught with peril from the start. Away from the lapdog press in America, amid bickering over speech scenery and backdrops, unable to hide the two deepest realities that define him so far (that he's still just a candidate, and that he has nothing particularly important to say), Obama has been risking his campaign on a singularly chancy roll of the dice. Why, some have begun to wonder, would he choose to campaign outside the United States at all? Did he run out of aptronymic U.S. towns to visit? Was he tired of having his campaign stump speeches relegated to--well, not section B, the media's not that unbiased--but at least the relative obscurity of the inner front page, after all the news about mortgage failures and gas prices and grumbling discontent? Why not campaign in America, among people who can actually vote for him?

Unless you're seriously going to argue that he's after the expatriate vote--you remember, all those angry B-list celebs who vowed to shake the dust of Hollywood from their feet if Bush were re-elected, unless somebody hired them to do a feature film in which case All would be Forgiven--you have to ponder this a bit. Considering how much could go wrong, and how little the payoff would be even if all went right, why would Obama go overseas for an extended campaign session?

I think the answer may be that he's trying to create the aura of inevitability, that mystical mantle that envelopes the successful and makes people begin to speak of him as if the office he covets were already his.

Consider the "mock presidential seal" his campaign affixed to his podium not all that long ago. Surely they realized that such an audacious move would backfire, right? Perhaps they did--but perhaps they thought it was a risk worth taking, if even just a few people subliminally internalized the message: "President Obama."

And this tour seems part of the same strategy. Americans are quite used to their president flying overseas to meet with foreign dignitaries, give speeches, gather crowds. By doing this now, while still the candidate, I think Obama wants people to start thinking of him right now as their only possible future president, the one to whom the people of the world are flocking with interest and admiration.

His meeting with General Petraeus, which I blogged about earlier, was cut from the same cloth--Obama didn't meet with him as a candidate for President, but in a way that clearly left the message, "I will be your next boss." It was arrogant beyond belief, but I think Obama knew the American media would give him a pass on that, and the message would be sent not only to Petraeus but to millions of potential voters, as well.

His speech in Berlin was quite possibly the first event in this scripted and results-driven tour that didn't go quite as planned. Not only did he not get the location he had hoped for, but there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the speech was mediocre at best, words without an obvious purpose, mere fluff that said little and meant less. From Obama's perspective, though, as long as Joe and Jane Average Voter saw crowds of foreigners grouped eagerly around some historically significant cosmopolitan location, the speech may have been a success; if the point of this trip is to make it seem inevitable that our next president will be President Obama, it matters little what the people who heard the speech actually thought of it.

But it does matter what the media thinks of it; I think Obama's making the same miscalculation that led him to try the "Unity, N.H." trick more than once. The press is not nearly as much in his pocket as he thinks they are--they're always something of an unknown quantity, capable of conducting sympathetic puffery interviews one minute and morphing into journalistic Rottweilers the next. I think they know perfectly well what he's up to on this trip, that he wants, with their help, to create the illusion that it is quite simply inevitable for him to be elected president. And many of them may be quite willing to go along with that, too--but not if Joe and Jane Average Voter catch on, and start to laugh at the whole idea.

Because the media is willing to do a lot of things for someone like Barack Obama--but share the hysterical laugher, and the aura of ridicule, is not one of them. Let that mantle cross his shoulders for a moment, and the press Obama's been able to count on for the most part until now will display an entirely different face.

Chris Matthews' Plea

I wouldn't ordinarily link to the Huffington Post website, but theirs was the only one I found which had this story, which I'd heard about from my husband, in print.

As the link will illustrate, Chris Matthews begged older voters to lay aside their racism and vote--well, to be fair, he didn't come right out and tell them to vote for Obama. From the site above, these are Matthews' words:

I hope for one thing when people go to vote: that they look at [Obama's] background, that they look at the age of the two candidates, that they look at their abilities and really open up their hearts and say "what's really good for my kids," who don't have any color awareness.

Kids don't think about race. Think like your kids for once. Think the way they think. It would be great if the older people in the country, the 70 year olds, the 80 year olds who are suspicious of change to say, "you know, why don't I think the way my kids are thinking and think about the future."

Whatever they decide, just open up your heart to this prospect of something different. That's what I hope we do.

This is a pretty amazing thing to say. In effect, Matthews is assuming that anyone over a certain age will reject Obama for the presidency solely on the basis of race--and, by extension, Matthews is assuming that the only reason for anyone to reject Obama is going to be a racially motivated reason.

And there's even a subtle jab at McCain's age in Matthews' words--it's as if he's telling the octogenarian crowd that they should vote for someone closer to their children's ages than their own, for the sake of "the future."

One of the most frustrating things about liberals is that they really do assume that the only way people can disagree with them is by being irrational, biased, bigoted, uninformed or uneducated. It never seems to occur to people like Chris Matthews that some seventy and eighty-year-olds aren't racists at all, but won't vote for Obama because they are pro-life conservative Christians who find Obama's policies as obnoxious as they do his messianic complex.

Humanae Vitae Anniversary

Today, of course, is the fortieth anniversary of Humanae Vitae, and Joseph Bottum at First Things has a lovely piece on the subject. Excerpt:

It’s hard to remember all the joys we were told that contraception would bring, back in the day. For generations, from Victoria Woodhull all the way down to Margaret Sanger, birth-control activists had insisted that abortion would cease if we allowed access to contraception. In the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut, the U.S. Supreme Court placed decisions about birth control at the center of the marriage bond. The smutty theaters, the back-room racks of pornography, the venereal diseases, the crushing down of young women into a life of timidity, the out-of-wedlock births, the masturbatory shame—all the sicknesses of a repressed culture would be swept away in the free love that contraception allows.

Free love—forty years on, the phrase has a marvelously musty sound to it, like the fragile violets of a Victorian spinster’s girlhood, pressed in the fading pages of her remembrance book. Things didn’t work out quite the way we were promised. In fact, the results were pretty much what the pope had said they would be. A funny thing happened on the way to the orgy, and—as Mary Eberstadt notes in her superb essay in the current issue of First Things—if there’s a joke buried in Humanae Vitae, the joke is on us.

The Sexual Revolution was supposed to solve all of the world's problems, it seems, when one looks back at that period of history. "Make Love, Not War!" sloganeering, casual sterile relationships comprised of assorted people with no commitment beyond a temporary physical one, a nation finally free of "hang-ups" about sex in its various iterations--that was the dream, and the people dreaming it were, by and large, the baby boomers who now at sixty are in denial about their aging, and in another decade will be demanding free Viagra as clamorously as they once demanded free condoms.

As Mr. Bottum points out, all the things that Pope Paul VI warned us would be the result of contraception have been the result of contraception: disrespect for women, destruction of marriage, coercive population control, and the objectification of the body as if it were a mere possession. We can find evidence of the societal decay caused by widespread use and acceptance of artificial birth control everywhere we look--no other weapon of modernity has been so socially and culturally destructive as this one, leading to untold oceans of human pain, sorrow, suffering, emptiness and regret. Abortion on demand is a result of contraception; staggering divorce rates are a result of contraception; exhausted women trying to be rivals to their husbands in career fields while still 'handling' the chores of home and children are a result of contraception; men whose attitude towards women is that marriage isn't necessary, and that women who want to have children are selfish, and women who want to stay home and raise those children are lazy is a result of contraception; in fact, all the little fissures and fragmentations that have led to the shattering of the American family are the result of contraception, the result of the notion that love has nothing to do with marriage and that marriage has nothing to do with children and that children can be just as easily raised by unrelated, low paid strangers as by a family member, so long as Mom and Dad are free to be "sexually fulfilled" beings, not only in regard to each other but also in regard to anyone else they feel like "connecting" with.

And we see how that has worked out. We see how impossible it is to create stable, happy, healthy families comprised of fully autonomous individuals who insist on controlling every aspect of their lives, refusing ever to put family first, but always looking out for number one.

Prior to contraception, a young man and a young woman who were in love knew certain things. They knew that failing to respect the power of sex could lead to an out-of-wedlock pregnancy; they knew that being ready for marriage meant being ready for children; they knew that the division of labor in the home would ordinarily result in the husband assuming the role of provider-in-chief, while the wife became the nurturer-in-chief. Before they ever walked down the aisle at church, they had to be mature, responsible grown-ups, potential parents as well as soon-to-be spouses. They were younger in age than many of us were on their wedding days, but so much older in terms of the ability to make that commitment, to promise that for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death did they part they would be together, and be ready to handle all of the joys and sorrows, triumphs and failures, happiness and suffering that would be theirs--and to care for the children who would impact all of those potential realities.

I know that the past wasn't perfect, and unhappy and even disastrous marriages could be made. But there's a big difference between preparing for marriage as if it's a lifelong voyage together, and preparing for marriage as if it's a short plane trip, keeping one hand on the ripcord of the parachute the entire time just in case. Contraception encourages the latter view; many couples enter marriage determined to avoid having children for a few years, in case things don't work out--it's so much easier to divorce when children aren't involved. But what kind of commitment is that? What kind of marriage is that? Is it a marriage at all, or just an excuse to have the big lavish white-dress party that all one's friends have had?

So much of the sickness that infects our culture can be traced back to the wide acceptance of contraception, the view of sex that sees it as a random pleasurable act with no spiritual reality behind it, and the despair and loneliness both of these things have left in their wake. Pope Paul VI's prophetic wisdom continues to shine like a light on a hilltop, beckoning to its warmth and joy all who have eyes to see it. In the end, none of the political battles we fight will do us much good if we can't restore the integrity of the family--and the greatest enemy to that integrity is artificial contraception.

Before You Do Anything Else Today...

...read this post. Excerpt:

"I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen - a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world." Barack Obama 7-24-08.

Is anyone else completely sick and tired of this "citizen of the world" garbage. Look, I'm in the world but I'm certainly not a citizen of the world. If I was I wouldn't know who to root for in the Olympics next month.

Hey, at least he's a citizen of this world. We're still trying to figure out where Dennis Kucinich came from.

Read the whole thing: it's golden. (One minor point, though, Matthew--did you really mean biretta wearing snobs? I thought only clergy members wore those.)

Michael Savage and the Bob Newhart School of Psychology

I've been meaning for days now to get to the Michael Savage/autism story; I tend to agree with Rod Dreher about the matter, generally speaking:

What an embarrassment this troglodyte Savage is. But an appropriately named one. Poking fun at autistic children and their parents -- good grief! An old friend and reader of this blog is living with three young sons who are all autistic. It's either going to make him and his wife into saints, or drive them insane. The comments of a Michael Savage really are beneath contempt -- and I encourage all conservatives to say so.

Now, I'm not sure I'd call Savage a troglodyte, but it's pretty hard to justify this:

Michael Savage, the incendiary radio host who last week characterized nearly every child with autism as “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” said in a telephone interview on Monday that he stood by his remarks and had no intention of apologizing to those advocates and parents who have called for his firing over the matter.

“My main point remains true,” Mr. Savage, whose radio audience ranks in size behind only those of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, said in the interview. “It is an overdiagnosed medical condition. In my readings, there is no definitive medical diagnosis for autism.”

On the July 16 installment of his program, which is broadcast every weekday, Mr. Savage suggested that “99 percent of the cases” of autism were a result of lax parenting. He told his audience: “They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life.’ ” Among the other admonitions he felt children with autism should be hearing, he said, were: “ ‘Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ ”

Someone--I don't remember who--offered Savage the best possible lifeline on this, suggesting that maybe he'd confused autism with ADHD. Unfortunately Savage insisted he meant autism, which is frankly incredible.

Let's take a hypothetical example. Suppose at a family Thanksgiving meal your six-year-old nephew whines about sitting at the table, kicks the rungs of the chair, spills some water from his glass onto the tablecloth, and starts poking his fingers in the mashed potatoes. You might be forgiven for assuming general brattitude, even if the child has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; you might even be forgiven if you wonder whether ADHD is overdiagnosed, though from the small samples of your nephew's behavior you ever see there's no way for you to know if other behaviors and some learning disabilities combined have caused his doctor to diagnose ADHD.

But the parents of an autistic child, from everything I've read and from those parents I've encountered, would be pretty pleased with this level of behavior. A six-year-old autistic child might refuse to sit at the table altogether and peer out at the company from the floor beneath it; he might decide the mashed potatoes look like soap bubbles and smear them on his face, chin, and arms, or climb on the table to sit in them; he might insist that everyone's water glass ought to contain a salad fork for reasons he can't explain; he might leave his coat on and grow agitated when anyone tried to remove it or suggested he might be more comfortable without it; he might not speak a word, or might speak the same word seven hundred sixty three times in the course of the evening--and all of that would be relatively mild autistic behavior.

How anyone, let alone a grown and reasonably intelligent man, could believe for a second that this sort of behavior is an "act" that can be "cut out" with a little discipline, is beyond me. Clearly this man has no awareness whatsoever of psychological ailments, most of which also can't be "definitively medically diagnosed." What's the "definitive medical diagnosis" for depression, after all? We don't go around suggesting that clinically depressed people should just "snap out of it and lighten up," do we?

Clearly, Michael Savage must ascribe to the Bob Newhart school of psychological understanding. Autistic kids are just putting it all on, the repetitive behaviors and incapacity for speech and strange toilet habits and uncontrolled speech. They just want attention, and their parents are too busy shopping at trendy stores and voting for Democrats to give it to them.

Unfortunately, Savage's view was once the prevalent one: that autism was just bad parenting, particularly bad mothering. The "refrigerator mother" theory was one of the most egregiously insulting and traumatizing psychological theories ever invented as a way of blaming mothers for their children's problems, so it's pretty disheartening to see it resurface, even in a milder and more gender-neutral form. Parents of autistic children should take comfort, though--no intelligent person will give Mr. Savage's "Just Cut It Out" theory any more credibility than it deserves--which is none at all.

My Response To Myers' Claims of Desecration

Pange, lingua, gloriosi

Corporis mysterium,

Sanguinisque pretiosi,

quem in mundi pretium

fructus ventris generosi

Rex effudit Gentium.

Nobis datus, nobis natus

ex intacta Virgine,

et in mundo conversatus,

sparso verbi semine,

sui moras incolatus

miro clausit ordine.

In supremae nocte coenae

recumbens cum fratribus

observata lege plene

cibis in legalibus,

cibum turbae duodenae

se dat suis manibus.

Verbum caro, panem verum

verbo carnem efficit:

fitque sanguis Christi merum,

et si sensus deficit,

ad firmandum cor sincerum

sola fides sufficit.

Tantum ergo Sacramentum

veneremur cernui:

et antiquum documentum

novo cedat ritui:

praestet fides supplementum

sensuum defectui.

Genitori, Genitoque

laus et jubilatio,

salus, honor, virtus quoque

sit et benedictio:

Procedenti ab utroque

compar sit laudatio.

Amen. Alleluia.

Sing, my tongue, the Savior's glory,

of His flesh the mystery sing;

of the Blood, all price exceeding,

shed by our immortal King,

destined, for the world's redemption,

from a noble womb to spring.

Of a pure and spotless Virgin

born for us on earth below,

He, as Man, with man conversing,

stayed, the seeds of truth to sow;

then He closed in solemn order

wondrously His life of woe.

On the night of that Last Supper,

seated with His chosen band,

He the Pascal victim eating,

first fulfills the Law's command;

then as Food to His Apostles

gives Himself with His own hand.

Word-made-Flesh, the bread of nature

by His word to Flesh He turns;

wine into His Blood He changes;

what though sense no change discerns?

Only be the heart in earnest,

faith her lesson quickly learns.

Down in adoration falling,

Lo! the sacred Host we hail;

Lo! o'er ancient forms departing,

newer rites of grace prevail;

faith for all defects supplying,

where the feeble senses fail.

To the everlasting Father,

and the Son who reigns on high,

with the Holy Ghost proceeding

forth from Each eternally,

be salvation, honor, blessing,

might and endless majesty.

Amen. Alleluia.

The Church of the Hunting Lodge

Why don't American men go to church?

This article takes a look at the question:

Churches nationwide are fretting and sweating to reel men into their sanctuaries on Sundays.

Women outnumber men in attendance in every major Christian denomination, and they are 20% to 25% more likely to attend worship at least weekly.

Unfortunately, the solution that's being recommended is a little---well--:

Although every soul matters, many pastors say they need to power up on reaching men if the next generation of believers, the children, will find the way to faith. So hundreds of churches are going for a "guy church" vibe, programming for a stereotypical man's man. [...]

One church, 121 Community Church in Grapevine, Texas, outside Dallas, was even designed with dudes in mind, from the worship center's stone floor, hunter-green and amber decor and rustic-beam ceilings to woodsy scenes on the church website.

No pastels. No flowers. No sweet music. No sit-with-your-hands-folded mood. Women are welcome, but the tone is intentionally "guy church" for a reason, says Ross Sawyers, founder and pastor of 121. [...]

If you've got a minute, read the whole thing; it's interesting, to say the least.

Interesting, but ultimately misguided.

For one thing, the notion that men always used to go to church every Sunday with the family until the very recent past is not really accurate. For Catholics, where Sunday Mass attendance isn't optional, the percentage of men at Mass may have been a bit higher in the past than the percentage of non-Catholic Christian men at their services. But a psychological survey I once saw from about the 1930s or 40s gave a different appearance to the "men at church" notion, the idea that until practically yesterday men went with their families to Sunday worship as a matter of course.

The survey was designed for marriage counseling, and women were asked questions about whether they attended church and took the children to Sunday school--good qualities in a wife. But the women were also asked whether they understood their husband's need for rest on Sunday mornings, and let him sleep in while they attended to the family's spiritual needs on their own! A man's obligation was simply to arrange for his family to get to church, and not to stop them from attending--there was no particular notion that he needed to go, himself.

So the problem of men not going to church goes back farther into our nation's habits and practices than we like to think. The earliest Americans took worship obligations seriously, and even Pa Ingalls seemed to be involved with his family's Sunday services, whether a church was available to him or not--but just how soon after the late nineteenth or early twentieth century this cohesion started to fall apart might surprise us, accustomed as we are to thinking that the world was roughly perfect until sometime between 1949 and 1970, give or take.

But if the problem of men at church goes back as far as it does, we might want to rethink the notion that it's pastels and flowers and sweet music that drove them away (not that sweet music isn't a problem, but that's a subject for another day).

It is very true that men's spirituality is different from women's. Certain devotions and practices, even in Catholicism, have always appealed more to a woman's notion of spirituality than a man's. But sometimes I can't help but think that devotions which are perfectly manly in themselves end up being falsely labeled "girly" or looked at with suspicion by the man's man.

Take the rosary, for one. There's nothing especially feminine about praying the prayers and reflecting on the mysteries. There's nothing particularly girlish about the structure or arrangement of the beads, and if one can find pastel rosaries, one can also find wood or hematite or other manly materials being employed in their manufacture. (My sister who is a nun once met some religious brothers with truly awesome fifteen decade rosaries swinging from their habits; when asked, they enthusiastically shared that the beads were made from wooden dowel ends purchased at Home Depot.) The men fighting at Lepanto went into battle with their rosaries wrapped around their arms--so why do so many people think of the rosary as not only a woman's prayer, but the prayer of a rather elderly woman at that?

I think the problem goes way beyond what is or isn't feminine, and speaks to the heart of a deeper problem that gets in between men and God, sometimes, especially in America.

Prayer and worship, no matter what the church, are always acts of humility and submission.

I'm certainly not going to say that women have an easier time with either of these concepts, or are "better" at them (how can one be "better" at humility?). But what makes these concepts particularly difficult for men is that they are traditionally the ones who have the authority, not only in society and so forth, but also within the family. Even today a traditional family understands the role of the husband as being one of both authority and protection, and while I've written before on the difference between accepting one's husband's lawful authority and being a doormat, I'd still say that most healthy families have some agreement with the concept.

At one time, a man understood that his authority within the family worked in concert with his willingness to do two things: accept all of his responsibilities in regard to his family, and himself submit to those in authority over him. His failure to do either one of those things was going to lead to a breakdown of his authority over his family, and he knew it.

In a democratic society, especially one as broken as ours, the "submission to lawful authority" side of the equation begins to falter. It's not uncommon for some traditional men to see the government as an enemy and a rival for their authority in the family--and to be fair, in this day and age, they're often right about that. But the less a man has to accept any restraints on his behavior, whether those restraints come from law or culture or society or even religion, which demands less and less of him, the less he is comfortable in the need to enter into the proper spirit of humility and submission from which all true worship of God will flow.

In fact, he may start to see both humility and submission as essentially feminine qualities, which have nothing to do with him. After all, he's a man! Why should he do all that bowing and kneeling and hand-folding? He should be thumping his chest and chanting war-chants! Onward Christian Soldiers!

Real soldiers, though, tend to get the notion of authority. It's not demeaning to salute one's commanding officer, after all. It's not demeaning to march in parade or take orders without question. It's not demeaning to obey--and it can save your life. Or your soul.

Building some giant "Church of the Hunting Lodge" and equipping every seat with symbolic remotes, or hosting parking lot barbecues which give a wholly different meaning to "Game Night," might be a tempting idea to attract men back to church. But when the problem has its roots in the unfamiliarity for the modern man of submitting to the authority of God in all things, these methods will only work to the extent that they are novel, and will fail in that they are ultimately unsound.

Taking the Plunge

Okay, here goes.

First of all, I know that this decision to put my real name out on this blog is a way bigger deal to me than it is to any of you. There are, after all, lots of wonderful Catholic moms who write, who have used their real names on their various blogs from the get-go (and some of them have even made their own names a Shockingly Clever Title).

So for me to step out from behind the "Red Cardigan" mask is really not all that important. In fact, if you're not even remotely interested please feel free to skip the rest of this post and get to the (hopefully) more interesting stuff below.

I'm pretty sure that those of you who might still be interested in knowing my name fall into the following three categories:

One: people who've never encountered me elsewhere on the Internet under my real name.
Two: people who have encountered me elsewhere on the Internet under my real name, but who have already figured out who I am, or who know because I've told you (or you're related to me).
Three: people who have encountered me elsewhere on the Internet under my real name and have not realized that I'm also posting here (and anywhere where I have to use a Blogger account to comment) as Red Cardigan.

By "elsewhere on the Internet" I pretty much mean one place: Rod Dreher's Crunchy Con blog. Where I not only post under my real name, but have become such a regular participant that on two separate occasions (so far!) Rod has let me guest-blog for him while he and his lovely family have taken some much-needed vacation time.

Which means, of course, that I am Erin Manning.

And it's awfully nice to get to 'fess up to it!

:)

The Evil of IVF

Last week the world's first IVF baby, Louise Brown, celebrated her thirtieth birthday.

And since then, countless numbers of children have died, created as surplus embryos or found to be "defective" and eliminated or accidentally thawed before they could be implanted into a uterus or, perhaps most ghoulishly of all, selectively aborted so that "mom" wouldn't have to give birth to multiples.

It's one of the dilemmas of an increasingly illogical world: how do we oppose IVF without, in effect, telling Louise Brown and others like her that they really shouldn't be here at all?

For the person who has been formed in some sort of moral theology, there's really no problem. We can be happy that Louise Brown is here, and even wish her a happy birthday, without losing the moral ground to insist that IVF is always a grave moral evil. And there's an easy example to illustrate this--throughout history some children have always been conceived as a result of rape, but we can oppose the evil of rape with all the force of our laws without in effect telling those kids that they shouldn't be here.

God can, and does, bring good out of evil. Children whose parents used IVF to bring them into the world aren't at fault for the sins of their parents. We can welcome them and love them, while remaining clear in our opposition to this terrible practice.

And it is a terrible practice, in every respect. The injury possible to the mother whose ovaries must be forced to release eggs, the death toll for those embryos who fail to implant properly or who are unnecessary and unwanted once the desired number of pregnancies have resulted, the objectification and dehumanization of the unborn baby who is no longer an integral and expected result of his parents' marital embrace, but a laboratory product to be brought to birth or destroyed at the whim of others--there is no moral ground that can justify this practice, and no way that it ever ought to have been done.

That God does allow some children, like Louise Brown, to be born as a result of this evil is a sign of His great mercy--but for every child who comes into the world this way, how many more children must die?

A real respect for human life, for nature, for God's will is an intrinsically important element of any society. Once a society begins to commoditize and objectify human lives, manipulating them, creating and destroying them, removing from them their inherent mystery and dignity, that society is doomed to fail as surely as the family which no longer protects its members will be erased from the face of the earth.

They All Have the Same Thoughts

I thought this article about what the Arab world thinks of Barack Obama was a very interesting read. Excerpt:

From Baghdad to Beirut, people said in recent interviews that they are unfamiliar with his policies, except for his plan to move quickly to pull US troops out of Iraq.

In general, they said they prefer Obama over the likely Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, whom they view as unsympathetic to Arabs.

But even those who like Obama's personality are not expecting him to initiate major turnabouts on US Middle East policies, particularly on the most contentious one of all, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"The only way that Obama will be better for us is that he will try to suck the life out of the Arabs through diplomacy, while Bush tried to do it through war," says Fathy Tantawy as he inspects a small carburetor on the table next to his tea cup in a Cairo cafe.

"When they look at the Middle East they all have the same thoughts, whether it's Obama or Clinton's wife or Bush or … who is that other guy on TV?" He pauses to think. "Oh yeah, McCain."

An interesting observation, don't you think?

One of the widespread perceptions about Obama in this election is that he will do a better job than McCain in bringing peace to the Mideast (along with making the oceans recede, re-freezing the polar ice caps, singlehandedly solving our economic woes, raising the tone of network television, and rooting out corruption in New Orleans, though every sane person knows that last one is too silly to consider). So it's refreshing to hear people who live in that region express some skepticism and doubt about Obama, especially given the rather uncritical treatment he keeps getting from the press, despite the fact that his policies so far seem to be a jumble of vague generalities, wishful thinking, and oratorical flourishes.

Would McCain be any better in ensuring peace in the Mideast? Or is the man in Cairo right? Do all our elites, when they look at that troubled but oil-rich region, really have the same thoughts?

How Much Carbon Does it Take to Make Superglue?

Anybody can talk about climate change, but it takes a special sort of person to do something about it--especially when that "something" involves attempting to superglue yourself to the Prime Minister:

As Mr Glass, 24, was introduced to the Premier, he laid a glue-covered hand on his sleeve.

He also took the opportunity to urge Mr Brown to change his mind on the Heathrow airport expansion.

Mr Glass told the assembled guests: 'Do not worry - this is a non-violent protest. We cannot shake away climate change like you can just shake away my arm.'

Mr Glass, who had smuggled pouches of glue into the event in his underwear, added later that Mr Brown laughed off the protest.

'He was just grinning about it,' he said. 'He didn't seem to take me seriously.'

I'm not convinced that anthropogenic global warming is the threat some seem to believe it is, and I appear to be in some good company. I think we'll eventually have enough information to decide whether or not global warming is anthropogenic--but there's no question at all that stupidity is.

No Comment

From the Associated Press:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A Continental Airlines flight carrying former presidential candidate Ron Paul and six other members of Congress to Washington, D.C., made an emergency landing in New Orleans on Tuesday after a loss in cabin pressure.

The seven congressmen, all from Texas, were trying to get back in time for a Tuesday night vote on an aviation safety bill when the flight landed without incident, a spokesman for one of the representatives said. No injuries were reported among the 128 crew and passengers. (Emphasis added-RC).

Like I said in the title: no comment.

Arrogance, Abroad

What an odd headline Time.com chose to put on this story: "Obama Survives Iraq, Looks Ahead."

Before I get into the substance of the piece, can I just say that the strange, if subliminal, fixation the news media apparently has for the notion that somebody might try to assassinate Obama is in the worst of taste? Not only are they fueling a thriving conspiracy theory with these sorts of headlines--and yes, I know they intended the language to be symbolic, but still!--they're also showing rather plainly that they've cast Obama in the lead part of romantic hero in a story yet to be told--rather as if when these Serious Journalists go home at night, they're writing secret Obama fanfics on the Internet wherein the Great Leader 'o Change dons a cape, dodges bullets, saves the planet from Evil Republicans and global warming, and then flies home to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. It's a little embarrassing, don't you think?

But on to the Time article:

In his first news conference following his trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama acknowledged that General David Petraeus had argued in their private meeting against Obama's 16-month timeline for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. But Obama said that if elected, he would persist with that plan so that additional troops could be sent to Afghanistan, which he again called "the central front in the war against terrorism."

"As commander on the ground, not surprisingly, [Petraeus] wants to retain as much flexibility as possible in terms of accomplishing their goal," Obama said in a 52-min. question-and-answer session atop a mountain overlooking the Jordanian capital. "What I emphasized to him was that if I were in his shoes, I'd probably feel the same way. But my job as a candidate for President and a potential Commander in Chief extends beyond Iraq." Later in the press conference, Obama added, "The notion is that either I do exactly what my military commanders [say] or I'm ignoring their advice. No, I'm factoring in their advice, but placing it in the broader strategic framework that's required."

Let's take a look at that, shall we? Particularly at this sentence:

"But my job as a candidate for President and a potential Commander in Chief extends beyond Iraq."

What, exactly, does that mean?

My job as candidate? As potential Commander in Chief?

Forgive me, but isn't one's job as a candidate for President first and foremost to get elected? And isn't there a whole lot of difference between a "potential" Commander in Chief and an actual general who has lots and lots of practical on-the-ground experience in Iraq?

One would think so, unless one is so besotted by the candidate in question that one is off writing giggling paragraphs about how darn cute he is, and how you think he smiled particularly at you during the press conference. Real, grown-up journalists would have been all over the dripping arrogance and condescension on display here, directed toward a widely-respected, highly-intelligent and much decorated military leader, wouldn't they?

Alas, the cheerleaders at Time.com are far from being alone in this election. And every time it seems like some hard-hitting reporter is going to have a field day with the latest evidence of Obama's rather exalted opinion of himself, we get, instead, another sympathetic puff-piece that carefully avoids saying or doing anything to make their favorite candidate look bad.

Fortunately for those of us who aren't so enamored of the guy, he's starting to do a pretty good job of that all on his own.

Materialism

I know I'm late getting to this, but among the many wonderful things to come out of the most recent World Youth Day were Pope Benedict XVI's words challenging the impulse toward materialism that has become a feature of so much of the modern world:

He called on Roman Catholics to lead a "renewal of faith" against the secularism that was threatening the Church.

"In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair," he said.

He also issued a strong call to young Catholics to join the priesthood.

One of the lies of materialism is that all of our happiness can be found in tangible goods. If we just had a bigger house, a nicer car, a more dazzling wardrobe, better jewelry, more expensive shoes or handbags, more, more, more--why, then, we would truly be happy. Right?

There's a reason "As happy as a billionaire," has never been an acknowledged simile. "As happy as a king," maybe, but then kings were said to hold their office by divine right, and to have as much in the way of responsibility as they did in money. Though the super-rich may be philanthropists, it says something pretty sad about their interior lives when some of the charities they choose to enrich exist to stop the spread of humanity.

Pope Benedict didn't juxtapose the material paradise against the spiritual wasteland at random. The two often go side by side. Consider Christ's warnings about rich men entering the Kingdom, or His parable about the rich man and the beggar Lazarus. Consider St. Paul's stern warning that the love of money is the root of all evil. And then consider our materially prosperous society, and what Mother Teresa once said about it:

I was surprised in the West to see so many young boys and girls given to drugs. And I tried to find out why. Why is it like that, when those in the West have so many more things than those in the East? And the answer was: 'Because there is no one in the family to receive them.' Our children depend on us for everything - their health, their nutrition, their security, their coming to know and love God. For all of this, they look to us with trust, hope and expectation. But often father and mother are so busy they have no time for their children, or perhaps they are not even married or have given up on their marriage. So their children go to the streets and get involved in drugs or other things. We are talking of love of the child, which is were love and peace must begin. These are the things that break peace.

But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion? As always, we must persuade her with love and we remind ourselves that love means to be willing to give until it hurts. Jesus gave even His life to love us. So, the mother who is thinking of abortion, should be helped to love, that is, to give until it hurts her plans, or her free time, to respect the life of her child. The father of that child, whoever he is, must also give until it hurts. [...]

When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread. But a person who is shut out, who feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person who has been thrown out of society - that spiritual poverty is much harder to overcome. And abortion, which often follows from contraception, brings a people to be spiritually poor, and that is the worst poverty and the most difficult to overcome.

The things that give us the greatest happiness often require us to give up our notions about happiness, and start over. The things that give us the most joy are things that require from us the most sacrifice. The things that lead us to Christ will always lead us away from the world and its glittering toys and empty pleasures. These things are not, strictly speaking, "things" at all--they are truths beyond our experiences of the material, they are spiritual realities unseen and unknown except by the eyes and minds of faith.

No man who has this gift of faith, this pearl of great price, will ever be truly poor. And no man who lacks it has any riches that matter--for what is his today will be someone else's tomorrow, and when his name has faded from the ornate tombstone on which it was artistically chipped his wealth and possessions will show their true value: they are worth nothing at all.

The Irreligious Left

According to this Pew Forum survey, the less religious you are, the more likely you are to vote for a Democrat. Not that they put it that way, of course:

The Democratic leanings of the religiously unaffiliated population have become even more pronounced. In June 2000, 46% of the unaffiliated supported Gore while 40% favored Bush - a six-point advantage for the Democratic candidate. In June 2004, however, Democrat John Kerry had a 36-point lead over Bush among the unaffiliated (65% vs. 29%). Today, more than two-thirds (67%) of the unaffiliated favor Obama while 24% support McCain - a 43-point difference. By contrast, among those who are affiliated with a particular religion, the candidates are running virtually neck and neck, with 43% favoring McCain and 45% supporting Obama.

Did you get that? Sixty-seven percent of those who aren't affiliated with any religion are supporting Obama.

We hear an awful lot about the Religious Right in politics--some of the more hysterical or shrill voices in the political sphere have even used terms like "theocracy" and "Christianist" to describe their opponents.

So what I want to know is, why don't we hear more about the irreligious Left?

It's a valid question, isn't it? Why should a block of people who aren't affiliated with any church, synagogue, or other religious organization have so much clout and so much power to redefine the world according to their ideas about reality?

I think one of the reasons this question rarely gets asked is that many of those in the media who cover political stories actually share these irreligious views and tendencies. Certainly the way that religious matters are covered in the press tends to give the impression that many in the media are describing these things from the perspectives of outsiders looking in at strange and primitive rituals which don't relate in any way to the lives of actual twenty-first century people. So it is, perhaps, not all that surprising that the voices in our print or radio or television media are more likely to be warning us against the dangerous rise of a Christianist theocracy than to notice the cesspools of rot forming around the pillars of militant irreligious secularism propping up our morally faltering society.

Testing the Waters

My friends (and I do think of many of you in that way, believe me!) I've been considering something.

I love writing this blog, and I've been even more happy with it in the recent past. This new format is working well for me, which will probably make it possible for me to keep up the pace even when the kids start school again--and that's a good thing.

Change can be very beneficial, after all.

But one thing that hasn't changed is that my ultimate goal in writing at all is to get more of my writing published. It's been a while since I've talked about that particular ambition, but I've reached a point where I'm starting to get a manuscript together for submission to some publishers. The book is young-adult science fiction, so hopefully I'll be able to succeed in this goal, even if I have to amass several large shoe boxes full of rejection letters first.

So, like I said, I've been considering something.

Oh, I'm not considering ending my blogging days. I'm rather addicted to this form of writing, at this point. If anything, meeting my self-imposed daily goals and deadlines has been a good habit to form, one that has carried over into fiction writing and other pursuits.

But what I am considering is ending the anonymity of this blog, putting my real name out here, and eventually, hopefully, being able to share with you any news I might have about other writing projects, ventures, and adventures.

Now, I could wait until I've actually got news to share--but that seems rather opportunistic in some ways, waiting to tell you my name until it's printed on a book that I'll obviously hope people, including maybe some of you, might buy. And of course there's the reality that that day might never come--but in the meantime there are other things I sometimes end up keeping quiet about on the off chance that somebody I know is going to recognize me out here.

So one day soon you might see a post that tells you a little bit about me, including my name--and then a little after that I'll probably modify the blog slightly to include some of that information. I'll still post as "Red Cardigan" because I've become extremely fond of that nickname, and because it's my Blogger name and address.

Comments are closed on this one--but as always, please feel free to contact me via my "gmail" address if you'd like!

Sign of the Times

From the daily-must-read blog Creative Minority Report comes this post on a hideous act of vandalism directed at a pro-life poster. Click the link to read the post and to go to the original blog where it was first reported, SoCon or Bust:

When I saw the vandalism on the second sign below, it reminded me of my own experiences with the pro-abort thugs during my election campaign last September.

While elections signs are usually the target of vandals, the vandalism is directed at ideologies and not actual persons. In the case of my signs, it was not merely a matter of simply trashing them. On the contrary, in addition to spray painting and defacing the baby, one particular sign was subject to knifing. They knifed a picture of an innocent human baby.

As I stood there inspecting the sign, I just started to weep. What future, I wondered does this society have when it not only refuses to care for children but openly advocates for their destruction? We cannot be that far off from open infanticide. That kind of gives you an idea of where we are going.

Note the last two lines, in particular. Who could possibly disagree? After all, one of our two major presidential candidates in this election is on record supporting infanticide for babies who survive being aborted; the other is considered "pro-life" because he only supports embryonic stem cell research.

We will get to the point where it will be all but mandatory to abort babies known or suspected to have certain physical and/or mental disabilities. Once that happens, what are the odds that pressure will mount to allow some kind of "post-term abortion" for those babies whose illnesses are undiagnosed in utero, or who are more ill than was suspected, or who were "damaged" by some aspect of the birth process? Why, the argument will probably go, should some parents be "punished" with a less than perfect child just because their child's imperfections weren't caught early enough for "termination" to be offered as the most acceptable choice?

When a poster featuring an elderly man holding a precious baby and containing a quite gentle, non-confrontational message about the value of human life can be the target of such a vile and vicious attack, can anyone argue with the notion that real human babies will be the future targets of similar acts of violent hatred?

A Clanging Symbol

Poor Barack Obama. He just wanted a nice quiet pre-victory trip to Europe, where some new photo-ops could be carefully orchestrated to showcase his leadership posture, that noble head-toss in the face of Destiny, that solemn pose of excruciating thoughtfulness, made all the more poignant, of course, by some exquisite and meaningful scenery.

But it hasn't been that easy:

Obama is planning to address what organizers expect will be huge crowds at the Siegessäule, or Victory Column, which is located in the center of a long and busy intersection that straddles the lush, public Tiergarten gardens and stretches up to the Brandenburg Gate.

The choice of site was made after Chancellor Angela Merkel made it known to Obama's team that she did not approve of him campaigning at the Brandenburg Gate, both the symbol of the Cold War that divided the two Germanys and later, in 1989, the symbol of German reunification. Other conservative politicians said Obama had no business choosing a site before he was even elected president and using it for election purposes.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, in contrast, said he would welcome Obama speaking there.

After days of back and forth between the chancellery and the Obama campaign, the Victory Column was selected.

But Andreas Schockenhoff, deputy leader of the conservative bloc in Parliament, said Sunday that the choice of the Victory Column, also known as the Golden Angel, was an "unhappy symbol" since it represented so much of Germany's militaristic past.

Rainer Brüderle, deputy leader of the opposition Free Democrats, said Obama's advisers had little idea of the historical significance of the Victory Column. "It was the symbol of German superiority over Denmark, Austria and France," Brüderle told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

Not only are the Germans beginning to dislike the Obama campaign's rather transparent opportunism, which is as clunky as some of the photo-ops Bill Clinton arranged during his presidency, but add the insult of the audacity not of hope but of premature celebration, but last week Charles Krauthammer penned this exquisite evisceration on the subject (Excerpt:)

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush 41 — who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap — called “a Europe whole and free”?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It’s as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama’s elevated opinion of himself. There’s nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with the savvy use of symbols in one's presidential campaign. There is a problem, however, with the appropriation of symbols which do not even remotely connect to a person in terms of his achievements, successes, or even identity. The problem becomes acute when people start to pay attention to the disparity between one's more grandiloquent public gestures and one's relatively low level of experience or accomplishments.

Words, Words, Words

Satan is the father of lies, and a liar from the beginning.

Ordinarily, we read that sentence, nod, and move on. We know this from our earliest childhoods, even if we can't express it that way. Lies are wrong. It's bad to tell a lie.

But what if people started to lie more by omission than by commission? What if a whole generation of people began to lie, simply by believing that no such thing as truth existed, that everyone creates his or her own reality, that nothing is absolute, and that concepts such as "truth" and "falsehood" are outdated concepts which have nothing to do with anything that is empirically real?

We have reached that point in America: reached it, claimed it as our own, and worked toward perfecting it and elevating it to a near-art form.

How does this work? It's simple, actually. The process can be described in steps, which seem to me to be as follows:

Step One: Redefine some long-held truth to be a lie, or at least an opinion which can't bind anyone who doesn't agree with it.

Step Two: Declare that some lie, which is opposed to that long-held truth, is actually true, at least for more people at the present time (thus reinforcing the idea that "truths" are mutable culturally-conditioned concepts rather than timeless principles).

Step Three: Insist that everyone embrace this new "truth" and isolate those who don't, stigmatizing them as rigid, fundamentalist, closed-minded, or by some equally pejorative term.

We can see how this works by examples:

Example A:

Step One: It is not murder to kill a pre-born human.
Step Two: Abortion is a fundamental human right.
Step Three: Pro-life fanatics are all religious zealots who are opposed to reason.

Example B:

Step One: Two men or two women can marry. You don't have to have opposite genders for a marriage.
Step Two: Andrew Sullivan is married. (Or Rosie O'Donnell, etc.)
Step Three: Anyone who insists that same-sex couples can't marry, or aren't really married, is just a rigid, mean-spirited, religious zealot who refuses to accept the new reality.

Example C:

Step One: Women can be Catholic priests if they want, regardless of what the Church says.
Step Two: Any woman who says she's a Catholic priest should be considered one, written about as if she had really been ordained, and made to look like a heroine fighting a patriarchal backward institution.
Step Three: Anyone, including the official Catholic Church, who says the women in question are not priests now, have never been priests, can never be priests, and are in fact no longer even Catholics in good standing, are just a bunch of mean patriarchal people trying to force their rigid narrow view of the truth onto the rest of us.

Satan is the father of lies, and a liar from the beginning. And in the twenty-first century when anyone who believes that truth is absolute can be marginalized and defined as an undesirable, he barely even has to lift a finger to gain the souls not only of the wicked, but of their duped counterparts, the easily deluded who think that it's more important to be nicey-nice and give everybody whatever spiritual pabulum they want than to guard and defend the truth from the relentless assaults of error.

The Real Insult

Hillary Clinton attacked the Bush administration's plan to label accurately abortifacient contraceptives, which might then exclude these abortifacients from being included in health-care coverage plans:

But Democratic critics including Clinton warn that the Bush administration changes would have "damaging" consequences on women's ability to access birth control.

"The more I learn about these rules by the Bush administration, the more appalled I am and the more determined I am to stop them," Clinton said.

"This is a gratuitous, unnecessary insult to the women of the United States of America. These rules pose a dire threat to women's health, to health-care providers, and to uninsured and low-income Americans seeking care. It is a disgrace, but unfortunately it is not a surprise."

Setting aside that the last sentence could also be used to describe much of her husband's conduct, Hillary has once again showed just how rabidly pro-abortion she really is. The proposal at issue would simply point out that some drugs and methods of so-called "birth control" act to prevent the already-developing human life from implanting in his or her mother's womb, and are thus actually causing very early abortions. You would think that women like Hillary would support the notion of being honest with women about the fact that their supposed "family planning" method was actually killing off several members of their families, but you'd be wrong: before the god of abortion both Hillary and Obama bow low, making sure that no single unborn human life targeted for destruction escapes death, whether that death takes place the night after "mom's" wild partying with a man she doesn't know, or whether that death takes place as baby suffers and dies after a botched abortion, alone on a shelf, labeled "Medical Waste."

Their agenda is clear: from the moment of conception until a little while after birth, the child is his or her mother's property, and can be put to death by any combination of pills, potions, implements, poisons, or knives. Whatever element of the vile witches' brew is needed to do the deed must be allowed and even encouraged, or else women are being "insulted."

The biggest insult I see as a woman is that according to women like Hillary, I'm supposed to agree with this heinous and monstrous evil. Agitate for the death of the unborn all you want, Ms. Rodham--but I'm a woman, too, and I utterly reject the depths of your iniquity towards our unborn human sisters and brothers.

Language and License

One of the most dispiriting consequences of the rise of relativism is that words have failed to mean much of anything at all.

Take P.Z. Myers and his ilk's persistent and insulting use of the word "cracker" to describe the Eucharist. Now, any Catholic, and nearly any Christian whose church has any sort of communion service at all, knows that "cracker" doesn't even accurately describe the communion wafer, whether we are talking about the accidents of bread which remain after transubstantiation for Catholics, or about the properties of the wafer itself for other Christians for whom communion is a more symbolic ritual. A cracker is clearly different from a communion wafer, and Myers knows this, but he's using the word on purpose to advance his peculiar ideology.

Or take the word "marriage." Thanks to the actions of a couple of runaway judges in two liberal states, the word "marriage" really has little if any meaning at all anymore. If someone from California or Massachusetts says he or she is married, for instance, you have to pause and wait to find out if they are speaking of a putatively valid union between themselves and a member of the opposite sex, or a completely disordered and invalid union which may have been defined to equal "marriage" by judicial fiat but which bears no more resemblance to it than a communion Host bears to a Keebler Town House snack item.

Or consider the phrase "faith-based initiative," which meant one thing under a Republican administration, but which is likely to mean something completely opposite under a Democratic one (thanks to John Jensen for sending this along). When a "faith-based initiative" starts to mean a government-run program with government hiring rules and heavy government involvement, it's not really "faith-based" anymore, is it?

Writers like Lewis Carroll and George Orwell knew only too well how quickly language could cease to mean anything intelligible at all once it was divorced from any notion of truth. Carroll, of course, had fun with the concept, while Orwell recognized the sinister potential, but both were aware that communication pretty well ceases when Jones insists that "red" is a color made up of blue and yellow, while Smith declares that it is made up of yellow and orange. If Roberts is in the corner muttering that "red" is a primary color not made up of either of those things, he is shunted aside and disregarded as a madman; what is important is not what "red" actually is, but only what Smith or Jones feel it to be, or find meaningful about it, or have decided based on their personal experiences what it ought to be.

Such is the dictatorship of relativism, where communication rapidly disintegrates into meaningless babbling as words cease to have fixed definitions, become unmoored from such archaic notions as "truth," and are the victims of the endless manipulations of the chattering throng.

There's a Joke in Here Somewhere

In all seriousness, I'm glad the women are okay:

Several of Mary Kay’s pink ladies were injured at the Dallas Convention Center this afternoon when a contracted employee changed the direction of an escalator while they were still on it.

The women were heading to lunch on a downward escalator in area "D" near Lamar Street when the incident occurred, said Frank Poe, Dallas convention center and events director. Mary Kay spokesman Crayton Webb said a contracted security person reversed the escalator and the abrupt change surprised the women, causing them to fall on each other.

“From our perspective, this was an unfortunate accident that was preventable,” Mr. Webb said.

At least 10 people received minor injuries and five were transported to nearby hospitals, Mr. Poe said. Some women suffered scrapes, bruises and one may have sprained an ankle. The women taken to the hospital were treated and released.

Like I said, I'm glad they're all okay--but I admit to a little undignified giggling at the thought of the spectacle. And at the likelihood that a joke beginning "How many Mary Kay ladies does it take to ride an escalator?" is already being written somewhere in America.

From the "No, Really?" Files

This USA Today article reveals some completely unastonishing poll data, to the effect that Obama is a more exciting candidate than McCain:

The poll by The Associated Press and Yahoo News showed that 38% of Obama's supporters say the election is exciting compared with 9% of McCain's. The passion and interest shown by blocs of voters are important because they affect who will be motivated to vote.

Meanwhile, McCain sought on Friday to counter the perception in polls that he is not as strong as Obama on the economy — an issue that has largely dominated the White House race as Americans grapple with soaring energy costs and recession fears.

So Obama's more exciting, and he's more sound on the economy--even though his wife apparently thinks a $600 government rebate is chump change:

Mrs. Obama said in Pontiac, Michigan, Wednesday that if her husband is elected he will offer more than a "quick fix" on the economy.

"You're getting $600 - what can you do with that? Not to be ungrateful or anything, but maybe it pays down a bill, but it doesn't pay down every bill every month," she said. "The short-term quick fix kinda stuff sounds good, and it may even feel good that first month when you get that check, and then you go out and you buy a pair of earrings."

I think Michelle Obama is fighting with Phil Gramm over the coveted "Marie Antoinette 2008" title:

Playing the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Trump Card

Just when you thought it was safe to be a Democratic Political Candidate's wife again...

...dun......dun.....DA...DUNNNNNN........

...the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy to Annoy and Harass the Wives of Democrats Running for President rears its ugly head once again! From the ABC News blog:

Obama, who is vying for the support of women voters who flocked to Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign during the primaries, argued his wife and Clinton have been the target of similar conservative attacks.

"Hillary Clinton was subject to this, others have been subject to this in the past," Obama told Glamour editor -in-chief Cindi Leive Wednesday, "It is part of our political environment that I'd like to change."

Asked whether he blamed Sen. John McCain's campaign for the attacks, Obama said, "I wouldn't say the McCain campaign itself, but I would say that the apparatus of conservative columnists, blogs and the like. Talk shows, talk radio....When you see in the span of two or three or four weeks essentially the same talking points being used on a whole variety of shows or a whole variety of columns, over and over again."

Oh, come on, now. When a man runs for president he'd better expect that adult members of his family are going to be under scrutiny, and are occasionally going to be the subject of news stories or the fodder of late night television jokes. It goes with the territory, especially for spouses of candidates, especially when those spouses are actively campaigning on behalf of the candidate.

If you really want the tone of campaigns to improve, Obama, maybe you'd better quit blaming the mythical "vast right-wing conspiracy" for antagonizing your wife, and just realize that the media as a whole is one big equal-opportunity antagonist, when it comes to candidates and their spouses.

Playing this particular card smacks of desperation, you know. It did when Hillary played it, and it's no different now.

Weighty Questions

This is from last week, but I rather liked it: the New York Times' Health section looks at a doctor's blog, and particularly what the doctor has to say about weight loss and shame. From the Times:

But I was particularly moved by a recent post, which was written after Dr. Rob’s encounter with an overweight patient who was clearly accustomed to being lectured about obesity. As Dr. Rob was about to discuss whether the man needed surgery for sciatica and back pain, the patient interrupted him, hanging his head in shame and blaming his weight for the problem. Dr. Rob writes:

This whole episode really bothered me. He was so used to being lectured about his obesity that he wanted to get to the guilt trip before I brought it to him. He was living in shame. Everything was due to his obesity, and his obesity was due to his lack of self-control and poor character. After all, losing weight is as simple as exercise and dietary restraint, right?

Perhaps I am too easy on people, but I don’t like to lecture people on things they already know. I don’t like to say the obvious: “You need to lose weight.” Obese people are rarely under the impression that it is perfectly fine that they are overweight. They rarely are surprised to hear a person saying that their weight is at the root of many of their problems. Obese people are the new pariahs in our culture; it used to be smokers, but now it is the overweight.

Dr. Rob says obese patients don’t need lectures.

Instead of patronizing obese patients with a lecture, I try sympathizing with them. Just because something is simple doesn’t make it easy. How do you quit smoking? You just stop smoking. We should just pull out of Iraq. There should be peace in the middle east. People should stop hurting each other and start being nice. All of these are good ideas, but the devil is in the details. Losing weight is a struggle, and it really helps to have people giving you a hand rather than knocking you down.

I really appreciate what Dr. Rob writes here, even though I'm merely overweight, not obese. I've seen lots of diet books, lectures, plans and approaches take, even in a subtle way, the negative tack: weight gain is your fault. You're a glutton; you're greedy. If you could just exercise a little willpower all your weight problems would just melt away.

I guess I was pondering all of this because it hit me the other day that I weigh about the same as I did a little over 12 years ago, when Kitten was born. I've yo-yo'ed a bit, gaining and losing the same five pounds over and over; once I did manage to lose almost 12 pounds, but then gained it all back rather quickly. But prior to Kitten's birth I always, always, always weighed between 115 and 120, from the day I graduated from the eighth grade until the day I got married, in my late twenties. And once I gained the extra 25 pounds with Kitten, lost a bit, gained it back with Bookgirl, lost a bit again, and gained it back with Hatchick, I've tended to weigh almost exactly 20 to 25 pounds more than I did before I ever had children.

And I've tried about every diet under the sun (the 12-pound loss was my "Atkins phase;" I lost the most, but it came back on really fast when I stopped avoiding all bread. Who can eat like that long term, anyway?). And I've had some successes and failures in the exercise realm, too, as most long-term dieters can relate to. But what it really comes down to for me is the frustration that I didn't gain weight through some kind of sneaky glutinous habits of too much snacking and endless second helpings; I gained weight by having babies--only when the babies exited my body, the weight decided to stick around. And over a decade later it's still here.

So it helps to know that there's someone out there who doesn't think it's all that helpful to scold and chide and lecture those of us who need to lose weight. Between sighing in frustration over the numbers on the scale and grudging myself just about every mouthful of food I eat, I do a pretty good job of that part all on my own. I think Dr. Rob may be on to something good: maybe if the medical community could quit spending so much energy on the whole "pointing the fingers of blame" aspect of weight loss and start helping their patients tackle all that complicated data about diet types and body types and metabolic types in order to design individual plans that will really work for their patients, the right kind of "losing" could finally start to happen, without expensive surgeries, chancy drugs, or new habits of deprivation that can be almost as addictive as the behaviors that caused the weight gain in the first place.

For He is Gollum

P.Z. Myers is claiming to have obtained consecrated Hosts as part of his planned acts of desecration and sacrilege, which he still intends to carry out.

Of course, someone capable of this level of idiocy and groundless antagonism is also capable of lying through his teeth. I'm just saying.

But in pondering the whole Myers debacle, I've begun to consider something.

It's true that there is a time and a place for righteous anger, and that this anger is not a sin. But it's also true that the feelings someone like Myers provokes go way beyond righteous anger.

For some, these emotions could end up being just anger, plain and simple, or even wrath. We should guard against that possibility.

For me, though, I'm conscious of a growing awareness that what I really feel for Myers is not anger at all, but pity.

Imagine living your whole life under the illusion that the physical material universe is all that there is, or was, or ever will be. Imagine believing so much in the physical and chemical and biochemical nature of things that you look at a Rembrandt and see only flecks of random paint, which you agree have been arranged in a pattern which your mind has been socially conditioned to find harmonious. Imagine hearing a nineteen-year-old play a very difficult Beethoven piano sonata extraordinarily well and believing only that the action of the hammer on the strings inside the instrument have produced waves of sound which humans tend to find pleasant owing to untold ages of an evolutionary appreciation for the quality of rhythm, and that the phenomenon we call "talent" is really only an accident of genetics combined with sufficient time to practice.

Imagine living your whole life inside your coffin, a coffin of flesh that is quite literally killing you every minute, so that every now and again you erupt in acts of madness and terror no different from those of a man trapped inside a coffin of wood, who however resigned he has become to his fate cannot help moments and fits of scratching in desperation, and begging to be let out.

Such is the life of a man like Myers, and such is the motivation for his angry and hateful writings, his words of writhing imprecation at the God he can't quite allow himself to believe isn't really there.

Anyone who has read Tolkien remembers Gandalf's conversation with Frodo, about why Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance. It was pity that stayed his hand, Gandalf says; and later in the books when he, too, meets Gollum Frodo is given the chance to understand. Frodo has imagined Gollum as some relatively powerful agent of evil, some monster who ought to have been struck down when Bilbo had the chance; but he then sees Gollum as he really is: small, weak, fretful, debased, shriveled, empty, hopeless, conniving, petty and carnal. The tragedy is that Gollum thinks he is great, that he is strong, that he is wise, that he is admirable, that he is forceful, that he is a font of wisdom, that he is still capable of powerful actions, that he is highly intelligent, magnanimous, and truly noble.

We should pray in our hearts for P.Z. Myers. For he is Gollum, and the only gift we have left to give such a man is the gift of pity.

Ineffably delicious

A big thanks to the reader who sent me the link to this letter over at Father Z's blog (all emphasis added by Fr. Z.):

Dear Fr. Z,

First, thank you for your blog. I’ve been following it faithfully for about 2 years and I always find something interesting and informative. You are providing a great service to the church! [Thanks!]

I have a few parishioners with whom I meet once a month to talk about the liturgical reform and Benedict’s Papacy. Our fundamental question is whether the Mass we have today is the Mass intended by the Council Fathers. To keep it from descending to opinions, we are limiting our study primarily to magisterial documents. It is informative for them and edifying for me to see an interest in the Church and her liturgy.

This past week we decided to consider the USCCB Norms for distribution of Holy Communion under both kinds:

As a point of observation it is [NB] written by the American bishops [!] and received the recognitio in 2002.

When I reread the document is preparation for our meeting I about swallowed my teeth when I read paragraph 4, especially considering the failed vote to approve the most recent "Grey Book" based on some "high falutin’" word choices.

Here is the first sentence:

4. The eyes of faith enable the believer to recognize the ineffable depths of the mystery that is the Holy Eucharist.

Do you notice the irony? I simply had to stop and let out a good laugh.

I'm not sure if this irony is ineffable or merely sublime, but either way, it's pretty delicious.

Do you realize what it means? It means that the USCCB apparently thinks that John and Mary Catholic are way too stupid to use the exact same language they themselves routinely employ!

It also means that while the Mass ought, presumably, to be written in coarse everyday idiom, something as important as a bishops' document must be written in the highest and most elegant terms.

As a service to And Sometimes Tea readers, I'm providing the following experiment in translation, taking the exalted language in the Bishops' recent statement The Challenge of Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, which is listed here, and modifying some of it to be more accessible to John and Mary Catholic. A section of the document reads:

There are some things we must never do, as individuals or as a society, because they are always incompatible with love of God and neighbor. These intrinsically evil acts must always be rejected and never supported. A preeminent example is the intentional taking of human life through abortion. It is always morally wrong to destroy innocent human beings. A legal system that allows the right to life to be violated on the grounds of choice is fundamentally flawed.

Similarly, direct threats to the dignity of human life such as euthanasia, human cloning, and destructive research on human embryos are also intrinsically evil and must be opposed. Other assaults on human life and dignity, such as genocide, torture, racism, and the targeting of noncombatants in acts of terror or war, can never be justified. Disrespect for any human life diminishes respect for all human life.

Oh, but that's way too wordy and complex! What were the bishops thinking? "Intrinsically"? "Preeminent"? "Euthanasia"? Why, it's almost as if they thought they were writing for mature, adult, educated Catholics!

Let's fix it, shall we? My changes are in red.

There are some things we must never do, as by-ourself-people or as a big group of us, because they are always against love of God and neighbor. These really bad acts must always be said no to and never said yes to. A really big example is the on purpose taking of human life through abortion. It is always sin and bad wrong to destroy innocent human beings. A law type that allows the right to life to be hurt on the excuse of choice is way messed up.

Similarly, direct threats to the dignity of human life such as killing old or sick folks, human copying, and really bad experiments on tiny humans are also really bad and must be said no to. Other disses on human life and dignity, such as killing whole groups of people, hurting people really bad on purpose, hating people for who they are, and the aiming at regular people in acts of terror or war, are always bad things. Disrespect for any human life makes less the respect for all human life.

There, now, isn't that better? One could almost imagine that document being read aloud at Mass, during the homily.

Six Quirks Meme

The amazingly talented writer Maclin Horton of Light on Dark Water has tagged me for the "Six Quirks" meme. Like Maclin, I rarely do memes; the "chain letter" aspect of them has been something I've noticed as well. But this one seems to match Douglas Adams' description for the entry for Earth in Ford Prefect's copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so here goes:

1. Link the person(s) who tagged you
2. Mention the rules on your blog
3. Tell about 6 unspectacular quirks of yours
4. Tag 6 fellow bloggers by linking them
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.

My unspectacular quirks are as follows:

1. I don't have pierced ears, and can't stand to watch anyone put pierced earrings on or adjust them. It gives me the heebie jeebies.
2. I hate to eat a a table. I know, I know, it's bad for weight loss to eat elsewhere. If I could ever seriously stick to a "table or nowhere" rule I'd lose a lot of weight, but not because I'd be eating healthier--I'd just skip more meals. My exception is dinner, because I like to encourage family dinners--but I get antsy and want to start fidgeting about the kitchen getting a head start on the dishes when anybody's lingering. (Yes, Maclin, I was thinking of the quirk you listed about being a slow eater when I thought of this one!)
3. I'm still afraid of wasps, even though I think I was five the only time I was stung by one. I tell myself it's an irrational fear and that they're not really so bad, even as I reach for a can of wasp spray.
4. I hate to wear shoes indoors, and rarely do. In the summer I love being barefoot in the house; in the winter I give in and wear socks and slippers, but that's as close to indoor shoes as I'll get.
5. Speaking of socks, I have probably worn pantyhose or tights five times or less in the past five years. I think of Scott Adams' Dilbert character Alice, who fumes in an early comic strip something to the effect that it must have been an idiot who would invent a leg covering that could be destroyed by brushing against a twig.
6. This one may strain the bounds of "unspectacular" but I like it to be dark in my room at night. Really, really dark. Went out and bought heavy curtains dark. Sleep with a kitchen-sized towel over my eyes dark. (I've tried those sleep masks, but the elastic is uncomfortable and they're not as 'total darkness' producing as a simple towel.) When I was growing up I would sleep with my covers pulled completely over my head, so the towel is actually an improvement!

Now, whom to tag? Matilda, of course!

And Margaret, MommaLlama and Daddio, Nutmeg, and JP if any of you want to.

Thanks, Maclin! :)

Thrift, Thrift, Horatio!

In Shakespeare's Hamlet the following famous bit of dialog takes place in Act I, Scene II:

HORATIO
My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.
HAMLET
I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student;
I think it was to see my mother's wedding.
HORATIO
Indeed, my lord, it follow'd hard upon.
HAMLET
Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.(..)

One can't help but wonder, reading this report of the Massachusetts Senate vote repealing the 1913 state law which did not allow out-of-state couples to contract a marriage in MA that would be illegal in their own states, whether the same economic motives that Hamlet ascribes to his mother's hasty wedding are not looming large in the thoughts of Massachusetts lawmakers, as they salivate over the thousands of dollars in lavish gay wedding money that will presumably be oozing into California from so many other places in the USA, where gay marriage remains illegal, thanks to the knuckle-dragging Obama-hating Neanderthal McDonald's boycotters who just can't get with the gay marriage program.

As the first linked article points out, Massachusetts politicians are being pretty conservative in guessing that the average gay-marrying couple will spend a bit under $3,000 on a sodomy-certification ceremony; us heterosexual married people apparently tend to spend about $30,000 on our weddings, and nobody would say with a straight face (pun intended) that gays are known for their economic restraint. (In fact, if gay weddings have one positive effect at all it may be to stop some of the outrageous expenditure by heterosexual couples that has become synonymous with the very word "wedding"; as I've written before, it's going to be up to us to encourage our children not to give the wedding industry, which can't wait to get all that gay marriage money, a dime of ours, and to learn to substitute the homemade and subdued and simple for the deluxe and lavish and extravagant.)

Has anybody ever doubted that for corporate America and their marionettes in the government this whole gay marriage thing has always, always, always been about the money? From the corporate megalomaniacs' points of view, there is just so. much. money. to be made by forcing our country to marry Bill to Ted or Willa to Edith. Thirty grand weddings? Ha! Before long it will be the standard in the gay community to pay three times that price for the bash to end all bashes--and since so many of them will "marry" multiple times over the course of a lifestyle, that's just an endless stream of filthy lucre flowing into the coffers of cake-bakers, florists, honeymoon resort owners, and people who make embossed napkins for a living. And the lawyers! The lawyers must be trembling with excited anticipation over the prospect of gay prenups, gay divorces, gay property and alimony settlements, gay child custody battles, and all the myriad of other legal opportunities, including most especially the prospect of suing into heartbreak and oblivion any American who fails to bow and worship at the altar of Narcissus and his mirror-image "bride."

From the standpoint of the corporate giants, this is all a good thing; their brains have long been addled into mush by the whole idea of "corporate diversity" which can be translated as: we'll hire anybody of any skin color, gender, religion, or sexual preference, but we're suspicious of white males who are by definition 'not diverse,' in addition, while we really want you all to look different you're not entitled to think or act different, and any indication on your part that you really are a unique individual with unique thoughts, desires and opinions is insubordination and grounds for dismissal. So they really can't fathom why anybody would want to preserve the idea of the family; many of them are already on their third or fourth trophy wife or husband, and their 1.9 kids have already cost them a lot more money than they should have, considering the low return on investment. Marriage is nothing to these captains of--I almost said "industry," but that's rather a joke, isn't it?--except a consolidation of assets, and they can't imagine why anybody wouldn't want two men or two women to have the same chance to simplify their banking routines.

The governmental minions in Massachusetts have apparently gotten the memo. The Senate has already voted to repeal the law; the House will likely follow. With all that money up for grabs, the State of Massachusetts is looking toward California as if that state were a rival streetwalker on the same stretch of a disreputable street; why should California get all the cash?

Soon To Be a Made For TV Movie

Oh, not really. I hope. But that's what I thought of when I read this awful story:

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Wesley on Tuesday sentenced 77-year-old Helen Golay and 75-year-old Olga Rutterschmidt to two consecutive life terms each.

In April the women were convicted of a scheme in which they befriended homeless men, took out insurance policies on them and then killed them in murders staged to look like hit-and-run auto accidents. Prosecutors say the women collected $2.8 million before the scheme was uncovered.

The judge denounced the women, saying the men they killed needed only food, water and shelter and thought the women were going to help them.

"Instead, these unfortunate men were sacrificed on your altar of greed," Wesley said.

Both women were convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder for financial gain in the 1999 death of Paul Vados, 73, and the 2005 death of Kenneth McDavid, 50.

Both men were run over by cars in dark alleys. Police linked the cases when a detective investigating one overheard a colleague describe a similar case.

Arsenic and old lace, indeed.

The Grace of a Good Death

Last Friday there was a terrible accident on a stretch of highway in the area where I live. People I know were caught in the traffic mess caused by it, sitting for hours on what's usually a pretty quick-moving section of a local loop. Early reports from the accident said that a person was killed, but that was easy to tell from the piece of crushed and twisted metal that had been a Nissan sedan; you just knew looking at the images from the crash that the person in that car could never have survived.

And the early reports also confirmed early on that the accident wasn't the car driver's fault. When a Nissan becomes collateral damage in an accident that also involves a cement truck and an 18-wheeler it's a tragedy no matter whose fault it is, but even more so when the car is the equivalent of an innocent bystander.

Reading the report linked above, I found out a few more things about Jason Powell, the deceased driver of the Nissan. He was 25, but would have been 26 on Sunday. He and his wife were devout Baptists, involved in their church, married five years, the parents of a five-month-old. He was a pilot, and I couldn't help but wonder how often his wife worried intensely while he was aloft, but never dreamed his life would end in a completely different kind of accident. He seems to have been an admirable young man who will be greatly missed from the reports that have come out, and from his obituary.

There was another death in the news this weekend, a death that garnered a lot of attention, outpourings of sympathy and prayers. Tony Snow will also be missed; but Jason Powell's death caused me a bit more reflection. Mr. Snow, after all, had time. He knew his years were slipping away, and he had the chance to prepare, to let family know how much they were loved, to take advantage of the time to reflect on God and His mysteries, and to die at peace with God and man.

Jason Powell's life ended suddenly, in a moment of terror on a mundane daily journey. And though we all pray for the grace of a good death, a death with plenty of time for preparation, for the reception of the sacraments, for the opportunity to be on good terms with all of those in our lives, we know we're not guaranteed that.

Which is why the most poingnant thing I read in the article about Mr. Powell was this:

His friends made a tribute to him on MySpace.com and Fackbook.com, but it's Powell who may have left them the greatest tribute. On his own page, before he died, he told everyone how much he loved them.

What prompted him to do that we'll never really know, but there it is. Not knowing his life would be cut so short so soon, Powell took a minute, perhaps thinking of his upcoming birthday or of some similar thing, to express his love for the people in his life. And that minute became an unbelievable blessing to the grieving friends and family he left behind.

To all who have died, O Lord, grant eternal rest; and to all of us who remain, by the intercession of St. Joseph, the grace of a good death. Amen.

That New Yorker Cover

By now you've seen the New Yorker Cover, of course, and...

No? I don't blame you. It took me a while to see it myself. Frankly, the New Yorker is so far down on my list of things I'd rather not read that it was hard to get worked up over this tempest in a teabag. The last time I read the New Yorker was years ago outside a dentist's office; the extremely ill-written and unedifying fiction bit involving, as I recall, illicit love and the deceased husband of a realtor, made me sigh in pity over the tired corpse of Dorothy Parker, who must get sick of all the grave-spinning.

Still, by the various descriptions of the cover I thought perhaps the magazine had risen to some heights of cleverness; but if you've seen the thing you know as well as I do how the mighty have fallen.

ABC's Jake Tapper didn't like it much, and said so; then he said so some more:

I just interviewed New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick for World News with Charles Gibson about the controversial cover of this week's New Yorker.

"The intent of the cover is to satirize the vicious and racist attacks and rumors and misconceptions about the Obamas that have been floating around in the blogosphere and are reflected in public opinion polls," Remnick says. "What we set out to do was to throw all these images together, which are all over the top and to shine a kind of harsh light on them, to satirize them. That’s part of what we do."

But what about the fact that some folks see the images not as a satirical caricature but as an accurate portrait?

About one out of 10 Americans continue to believe that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, is a Muslim, after all.

"Satire always comes with some risk and the chance of people misunderstanding it, but if you’re going to satirize things only that there’s a 100% census on, there’s no satire," he said. "There’s maybe a certain percentage of the public that thinks there was no moon landing, should we not satirize that?"

Well, gee, Mr. Remnick, if you did a cover trashing people for being flat-earthers I think it would pretty much miss the mark about as much as this cover does.

Because the reason it doesn't work isn't because it's satire, or because some people continue to believe Obama's a secret Muslim with a hidden radical agenda (though given how little we still know about the man after all this time it's no wonder wild conspiracies flourish; on the one hand you have people thinking he's evil, and on the other, that he's practically a god). The reason that it doesn't work is because it's....well, forgive me, but it is!...lame.

The people who don't want to elect Obama aren't all, or even a majority, the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal-types from flyover country you think we are. Some of us are reasonably smart people; some of us have paid a lot of attention to this campaign, and some of us know quite well what we don't like about Obama. It's not his skin color or Muslim ancestry or acerbic wife or allegedly weak patriotism; it's his position on various issues, like abortion and gay marriage and foreign policy and education and health care.

The reason this cover backfires isn't because the loudmouths on right-wing radio are suddenly going to insist that your cover portrays the literal (if cliched and uninspiringly drawn) truth; it's because you tried to insult every American who isn't lining up for the Candidate of Change without asking the questions "Change what, exactly? And how, exactly?" as being knee-jerk bigots who hate anyone who doesn't Look Like Them.

In reality, the worst feature of this cover is that it betrays once and for all the deep-set prejudices of the liberal mind: anyone who disagrees with me must be a bigot, or stupid, or uneducated, or a backwoods-type, or maybe all of the above--because my way of looking at things is the only reasonable way, the liberal thinks; Obama may or may not win the election, but if he loses it will only be because all those worthless bits of evolved carbon that clutter the landscape between my magazine offices in New York and the other side of civilization in California were too stupid to see past the slurs and rumors about the man and realize that he's the greatest hope we've had since Bill Clinton of wresting control of this nation away from the evil Republicans.

I'd love to see a magazine cover illustrate that thought process. It might even be funny.

How Do You Say "Caveat Emptor" in French?

After being defeated in a couple of recent lawsuits about copyright infringement, Ebay has won a legal victory:

In a long-awaited decision in a four-year-old trademark lawsuit against eBay brought by the jeweler Tiffany and Company, Judge Richard Sullivan of the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled Monday that the online retailer does not bear a legal responsibility to prevent its users from selling counterfeit items on its marketplace.

The decision in the closely watched case, which will likely be appealed by Tiffany, reaffirms that Internet companies do not have to actively filter their sites for copyrighted or trademarked material. Rather, they can rely on intellectual property-holders to monitor the sites, as long as the retailers take material down when rights-holders complain.

The ruling marks a dramatic turn in eBay’s recent courtroom fortunes and comes a week after a French judge ordered eBay to pay $60 million to the French luxury goods maker LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the maker of Louis Vuitton handbags. In April, a German appeals court ruled that eBay must take preventative measures against the sale of counterfeit Rolex watches.

I don't condone the selling of counterfeit goods, of course. But I'm not sure how it can possibly be the duty of a third-party website to verify the nature of goods they never even physically see.

And besides, isn't there a notion out there that buyers ought to beware? If someone offers you a deal that's too good to be true on a brand-name item, then it probably is too good to be true.

My sympathies don't lie all that much with the flashy designer brands, anyway. Aren't they making enough money already? Do they really think they're losing the business of all those people unintelligent enough to purchase a fake at a fraction of the price, who probably can't afford the real goods in the first place?

At the Feet of Masters

A couple of you have concluded, from the post below, that I'm a bit opportunistic and that I have an agenda here, regarding the more traditional reception of Holy Communion, and a general return to reverence in the Catholic Church.

Well, yes.

As I told Irenaeus over at Catholidoxy, I learned these tricks at the feet of masters. As did nearly every adult Catholic of my generation.

Remember, those of you fifty and under, how the changes during and beyond the Second Vatican Council were made? I'm too young to remember the Tridentine Mass, but while the most radical changes came about then, lots of parishes discovered that if they employed the magical phrase "Spirit of Vatican II" they could get away with all sorts of liturgical hijinks, while the numbed parishioners, already traumatized by the forced removal of Latin, the ad orientem posture, the statues and art of the church, and lots of other good things, merely nodded, sighed, and braced themselves to endure.

So long after the Council was over, some earnest person with straight hair and a fluffy suit could approach the lectern after Mass to announce that in keeping with the Spirit of Vatican II, something they'd always been doing and never imagined changing was really all wrong, and had to be eradicated immediately. These changes ranged in scope from the dramatic and architectural (e.g. ripping out altar rails, putting the altar in the middle of the church and arranging the seating in a circle around it, removing the stained glass windows and replacing them either with clear glass or with geometric abstract patterns in place of the pictures of saints and heroes of the Church, hiding the Tabernacle in a small closet somewhere apart from the main church building, etc.) to the small and silly (insisting that the Tantum Ergo could only be sung in English from here on out, or eliminating the Sequences from the handful of Masses that still had one). No matter how disturbing or upsetting the change, some good, positive phrase was employed to justify it: "In keeping with the Second Vatican Council's directives..." "In order to conform our worship space to the Bishops' document Environment and Art in Catholic Worship..." "In order to be more inclusive..." or one of my personal favorites, "In keeping with our long-established local customs..." which was the excuse used first to mandate the use of altar girls, and then to railroad Rome into accepting them.

So if the tactics I'm employing in the call for greater reverence for the Blessed Sacrament while not actually admitting that what I'm after is greater reverence for the Blessed Sacrament seem familiar, I suppose there's a good reason. If I had to extrapolate from my experiences as a cradle Vatican II Catholic and come up with what the playbook for liturgical innovation must have been, I think what I'd come up with would follow this sort of pattern:

Step One: Announce that a change is necessary. Do not explain your real reason for the change, which is usually "In order to strip the recognizable Catholic elements of the Mass, parish, church life, and identity from our people to an even further degree..." Instead, come up with what you insist on calling a "pastoral reason" and link it back to some obscure Council document which you are fairly sure people haven't read, and which (since this was before the Internet) you can see to it is not widely available in your diocese anyway.

Step Two: Having forewarned the people that a change is going to happen, bundle several such changes together. For instance, don't just remove statues; remove statues while requiring the placement of felt banners and the implementation of other forms of new design and decoration. Live trees and plants are especially good, as they can be used to cover up niches, ornate pillars, and other objects that are expensive to remove (at least until you can justify building a newer, blander, not-recognizably-Catholic, Voskoesque multi-purpose worship and journey space).

Step Three: Be ready to implement these changes on the very Sunday they are announced. Do not, for instance, tell people you'll be changing out the hymnals a week or two ahead of time; announce it on Sunday, collect the old hymnals and burn them Sunday afternoon, and put the new hymnals in the church Sunday night. Otherwise, one of two things might happen: people might form a committee to protest the change, or people might save enough copies of the old hymnals to cause trouble when they compare such hymns as "Panis Angelicus" and "Shepherd of Souls" to "Bread For the Squirrels" (sorry, "For the World") and "Shepherd Me O God."

Step Four: Man the parish office with several volunteers who will be given the following script to use in handling the phone calls: "You see, the Church requires us to do this. The bishops are all agreed. Every single parish in America is doing the same thing, because it's what the Church wants. You are the only person who has called to complain about this." (That final line is the most important one: it must be repeated over and over to the hundreds of parishioners who do call to complain.)

Step Five: When the grumbling and complaining dies down to a dull roar, return to Step One, and repeat all steps until the goal of making the Catholic parish look, sound, smell, and feel exactly like the Protestant Megachurch down the road, or a Danish furniture store or Japanese tea room, or anything else at all so long as it doesn't look, sound, smell and feel like a Catholic parish is achieved.

So you see, my friends, I have indeed learned these sort of tricks at the feet of masters. And now, like many other more orthodox, traditional Catholics of my generation, I can't help but think that if these tactic could work to achieve the objective of de-Catholicizing the local parish, why shouldn't they work just as well to reverse the process?

And I'm only half-kidding.

A Modest Proposal

In reading elsewhere about the extremely hate-filled loon who is PZ Myers and his vile plans to desecrate the Blessed Sacrament, I am struck with the thought that we Catholics must take action now to prevent this and similar outrages from being committed against Our Eucharistic Lord and ourselves as Catholics.

Here is what must be done:

1. The bishops of America ought immediately to declare that in the face of these growing attacks upon our faith, the practice of receiving Communion in the hand must be suspended for an indefinite period of time. A month or so of instruction in the art of reverent reception by mouth will be followed by the implementation of this new directive.

2. In any church where there is more than one priest in attendance and where the distribution of the Blessed Sacrament will not be prolonged more than ten minutes, Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion will not be used except in special circumstances. In this way an EMHC will not have to determine whether someone is attempting to pocket the Sacrament immediately after receiving, something that should properly be the responsibility of ordained priests and deacons.

3. To facilitate the swift distribution of Holy Communion by fewer people, altar rails will be used where they exist, and installed where they do not. In churches where this is architecturally impossible a row of prie-dieux may suffice.

4. If it is necessary to keep the Communion distribution of a reasonable length, the distribution under both species will be reserved for special feasts, holy days, and occasions like First Communion or weddings. On those days if EMHCs are not required, Communion may be given by intinction by the ordained priests or deacons for those who wish to receive under both species, lessening the chance even further that someone will be able to pocket the Blessed Sacrament in a larger crowd.

5. To further prevent acts of desecration, the doors into the church will be guarded by ushers or extra altar girls from the time Communion begins to be distributed until the final blessing of the Mass. Anyone who needs to leave early will have to notify the ushers and explain their reasons (except for parents toting obviously distressed infants or toddlers, of course).

If you like these ideas, please feel free to forward them to your local bishop! Perhaps we should make the safety of the Blessed Sacrament a top priority in the current hostile environment here in the United States.

A Final Thought On the Public Nursing Controversy

The Unraveling Coalition

As I was writing the post below this one I started to think about one of the likely effects of this next election cycle, and perhaps one or two beyond it: the unraveling of the coalition, always an uneasy one, between the so-called Religious Right and the more traditional Stocks 'n Bonds Republicans.

It's funny for me to think that my Catholic ancestors mostly voted Democrat for their political lives; the Democratic party was seen as the party of the little guy, the party of the labor unions back when labor unions were still seen as a good and protective force in the lives of ordinary workers, the party of social justice and of respect for the decent hardworking values of the average American.

Catholics, by and large, were Democrats. Their best political home was in the Democratic party. But all of that changed when the Democrats became the party of abortion on demand.

For the first time not only Catholic voters but also others who took their religious belief seriously started to feel unwelcome in what had forever seemed to be the party of the little guy--because they decided to ignore the littlest guys of all, the unborn, instead lining up behind the notion that killing some humans was a good idea.

There was a time when voting Republican seemed like the morally correct thing to do, too. I remember being quite happy the first time I voted for a Republican in a presidential campaign. But somewhere between then and now, I fell for the sort of "Hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-X" logic that kept me voting for Republicans even when I was unsure about their values or actually opposed to some of them.

For me, personally, I've reached a breaking point with McCain. My poor nose won't put up with another election cycle squeeze, and I don't think I could keep the stench of his support for ESCR from reaching my nostrils anyway, no matter how tightly I grip the olfactory organ.

Of course, I'll never vote for Obama, so that leaves a third-party choice or no vote at all.

The question is, how many serious Catholic voters, deeply religious Christian voters, and others who formed the coalition that used to be called the "Religious Right" are starting to think the same way?

Phil Gramm's "Let Them Eat Cake" Moment

Over at Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher links to a piece by Kara Hopkins about Phil Gramm's unfortuante remarks re: the economy. From Hopkins:

I recently spoke with a TAC contributor from Maine. The sun is high, the days are long, and the population is enjoying its usual summer boost. But in his hometown, conversations keep circling back to an unseasonable subject: kerosene. In the middle of July, people are worried about winter. Even with demand low, heating oil prices are setting new records—topping $5/gallon in parts of a state where winter doesn’t loosen its grip until May. Nervous Mainers have done the math, and this year they can’t afford to keep the cold out.

Thankfully, John McCain’s top economic adviser has an answer. Former Sen. Phil Gramm tells the Washington Times that this “nation of whiners” is imagining its difficulties. Disregard all those downturned arrows: “this is a mental recession.”

Now as the vice chair of Swiss banking giant UBS, Mr. Gramm is probably too busy to shop for groceries or fill up his own gas tank. Maybe he hasn’t tried to sell a house in a stalled real-estate market or checked on his retirement account lately. He does, however, manage to watch the news and is convinced that grim reports are a media concoction. “Misery sells newspapers,” he says. “Thank God the economy is not as bad as you read in the newspaper every day.”

There are a lot of people who would agree with the former senator. If you look at all the various indicators and juggled statistics, our economy's great! Why, unemployment is low, stock prices are still doing well, and there's so much opportunity out there, right?

The problem with hedge-fund conservatives, Rush Limbaugh entrepreneurial types, and the smiling faces of many of the GOP's favorite board-of-directors-level sons, is that they often think that economic success really is just a matter of carpe diem, pull up your bootstraps, find a need and fill it, and too bad for you if you didn't have the foresight to be born into the right sort of family, go to the right Ivy-league school, or amass a private fortune before being silly enough to marry and start a family. Those were your bad economic choices, so now if heating fuel at $5/gallon and up is a bit of a pinch, you have no one but yourself to blame for lacking the kind of accounting expertise and savvy financial skills to make sure that you could easily weather all such blips in the economic radar.

But out in the real world, real people with real families and real lives are facing a totally different economic reality. Many of us worked our way through school, brought college debt into our marriages, and struggle to survive on one income in a world where our husbands may very well be punished for not being "diverse" enough to win the company points should they ever be promoted, removing all incentives for their employers to do so. Salaries have been flat for some time out here in Reality, America, and the cost of living keeps going up; providing for the needs of children gets more expensive all the time, too. Add rising fuel costs to the mix and you start to get a recipe for penury for many American families.

The supercilious Marie Antoinette-Republicans shrug and say, in effect, "So?" Because they really do think that it's our fault, for not remaining single long enough to get on career-success tracks, for wanting to stay at home and raise our own children instead of maximizing the economic potential of two incomes, for not joining them in their worship of Mammon instead of believing that there's more to life than a pair of Lexi in every McMansion.

For these people, economic woes reported on the evening news are likely to produced a raised eyebrow at cocktail hour: after all, nobody they know is suffering, so the media must be making the whole thing up. Still, if everybody thinks the economy is hurting, perhaps they can benefit from it all, they think, as they leave a scant ten percent tip on the restaurant table; nobody will expect a good tip when the TV news keeps telling everybody that times are so hard.

What's In A Name?

For those of you who've been waiting with bated breath, I'm pleased to be able to announce that Margaret in Minnesota has chosen her "blogging" name, and it is:

Margaret.

To some of us, of course, she's still "Minnesota Mom." No matter what name, sobriquet, nickname, appellation, aptronym or pseudonym she ever chooses.

Let's Send Matt

Mark Shea has a truly Chestertonian gift for stating what ought to be obvious, but, sadly, in an enlightened age is often disregarded:

Now, in the old days, when somebody declared war on us and killed a whole lot of our innocent citizens, as well as costing us billions in damages, we would fight right back against that attacker and destroy him. The term for this is "just war".

However, 9/11 changed everything. So instead of focusing our efforts on the people who actually attacked us, we've poured our efforts into a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and, as President Bush made clear, we sort of lost interest in the guy who attacked and murdered 3000 of our citizens. Instead of destroying him, we decided instead to say, "We don't even care about you. You're so gay! So there!"

That showed him.

Still, I think it would be really rather nice if we could like, finish what we set out to do in Afghanistan (that was, if you recall, the just war that we embarked on before we got side-tracked with Grand End to Evil plans in Iraq). Capturing or killing bin Laden and his henchmen would actually be a response to 9/11 that would be a response to 9/11.

He's right, you know. We really ought to have caught Osama bin Laden by now; it's rather embarrassing that we haven't.

I used to think it might be rank incompetence that was keeping Our Guys from locating and arresting the terror mastermind, but now I'm not sure that it isn't, instead, a matter of finance. We've spent so much of our good will capital, not to mention real dollars, in the growing nightmare that is Iraq that maybe our leaders are afraid that the American people won't finance a protracted search for the 9/11 plotter-in-chief. Granted, when your country is capable of misplacing 25 billion dollars just five years ago it's hard to argue that we can't afford to spend the cash to find bin Laden, but that's America: penny wise, billion foolish.

So if the politicians and powers-that-be are afraid to tell the American people that we could probably find bin Laden if we'd up the ante from a financial perspective, maybe we could take a different approach. I've got a suggestion: let's send this guy to Afghanistan and the surrounding countries (the axis of enablers). Sooner or later, I'll bet, bin Laden would be as unable to resist joining the on-camera dancers as a cartoon character is to resist the completion of the "Shave and a Haircut" shtick--and then the CIA could nab him.

I can just see the news reports now--breathless anchorpeople announcing a special news event: "And now, a CBS/NBC/ABC/PBS/Fox (etc.) News Special: The Capture of Osama bin Laden...brought to you by Stride (TM) Gum."

Fiddling

The Midwest Conservative Journal is the place to be these days for a front-row seat to witness the slow disintegration of the Anglican Communion. Excerpt:

Basically, the Lambeth Complete Waste of Time Conference is just going to talk about stuff for a couple of weeks, carefully avoiding actually coming to grips in any meaningful way with anything remotely resembling a contentious issue. It'll produce a final document that says nothing in particular about anything at all.

Then the bishops will go home, tell everyone how "spiritual" the experience was, drop the Real African Word a lot and try not to think about all the trees that died to produce the Waste of Time's Conference's worthless report and all the jet fuel the bishops wasted flying to England.

On the subject of the ordination of female bishops to the Anglican Church, however, the Curt Jester's question echoes mine: why is this the Rubicon? The Jester:

I must be dense, but I never understood how this was not anything but inevitable. After you swallow women priests and dump scripture, theology, sacred traditions, and the Church Fathers regarding this then what in the world would not allow women priests to become bishops. It seems to me that the only real reason at the time that they did not allow women bishops was political and just and effort to not bleed off even more members as a result. I mean what theology or tradition could separate priests from becoming bishops if gender was not part of the equation? I wonder if Anglicans who at that time were against women bishops if they really did not see the day when they would be approved? Though I guess all of us have ways to fool ourselves from seeing something. For Anglicans and really most Protestants what is controversial today will be approved and will become the norm tomorrow.

Now, I can see why the ordination of women to the priesthood would be controversial, but once you've crossed that bridge or opened that gate or spilled the contents of that particular Pandora's box, why would female bishops be such a sticking point? What, after all, are the reasons not to have female bishops: that Christ didn't choose women, that it's not historical or traditional, that the early Church didn't do things that way? Aren't those the same reasons not to ordain women to the priesthood in the first place?

I don't want to be unkind to any Anglicans out there, of course, but it's times like these that make me particularly glad to have people like Archbishop Raymond Burke out there; you have to nip this whole women priest thing in the bud if you don't want it to spread like a gaudy and glittering waterborne parasite throughout the Church. Hopefully Archbishop Burke will continue to provide such leadership in his new office.

A New Look

As you can see, I'm playing with a new look for this blog. I think I may be making some changes to the way I blog, anyway, such as posting a little more frequently and taking things in a slightly more "news and commentary" direction. That doesn't mean I won't still write some of the longer, more reflective posts--but I'd like to be able to broaden my blogging horizons, so to speak.

Your patience during this transitional time will be greatly appreciated!

Our Lady of La Leche, Pray for Us!

If you're a Catholic mom who has ever had to nurse during Mass, you'll enjoy this piece by Kate Wicker (HT: Mark Shea). And you probably won't believe some of the comments.

Why is it that so many Catholics are so uncomfortable with the idea of nursing mothers? We've come a long way--and not in a good way--from the days when shrines were erected to Mary under her title "Our Lady of La Leche," depicting her as a nursing mother with the infant Jesus at her breast.

There are probably many reasons why nursing mothers cause such furor. We could point to various Protestant or neo-Manichean attitudes about the physical body, especially about the female body; we could look at our culture's sick fascination with the female body and the tendency to view the breasts in a pornographic manner which is entirely divorced from their actual, and primary purpose; we could look at the influence of the Irish Jansenists on our Catholic culture, and its lingering effects on our Catholic identity. And all of these would probably play some part in the attitudes that range anywhere from discomfort to utter disgust at the notion that some nursing mothers might, sometimes, have to breastfeed in public--and even in church.

Take, for instance, the oft-repeated comment that nursing is fine--so long as the mother doesn't "force" others to witness it. While the cartoonish mental images this phrase can produce are amusing, I don't know of any woman who deliberately drags her infant out in public just to force others to endure her breastfeeding efforts. Most new moms, and especially first-time nursing moms, would much rather not have to nurse in a public setting. But unless they're willing to remain at home for at least the baby's first six months of life, chances are that sooner or later they're going to have to nurse in a public setting.

And nearly all the moms I know who've done this have wanted to be discreet, and have gone to great lengths in search of that discretion. But unless you're going to equip moms with those black shields that S.W.A.T. teams use, chances are that, if you're staring at her closely, you may see a tiny bit of skin as she desperately tries to maneuver baby, blanket, shirt, nursing bra, nursing pads, etc. into position so baby can eat. Remember, she's trying to do this all one-handed because her other hand is supporting the baby, and she's also keenly aware that you, the censorious critic, are staring at her with a look of horror and disgust the whole time. And all she wants to do is feed her crying, wiggly, fussy baby; the last thing on her mind is the notion that she's "forcing" you to witness anything at all.

Now, some critics at this point say that Mom should have brought a bottle instead. But nursing moms know that getting a nursing baby to take a bottle is a chancy business--the breast isn't just a food dispenser, and the baby who is used to being close to Mommy while he or she eats isn't all that inclined to accept a plastic substitute.

Other critics say Mom should have timed things better. But breasts, alas, don't come with little ounce markings, so you never know quite how much baby had to eat at his or her last feeding--so even if you try to nurse baby in the parking lot five minutes before Mass begins there's no guarantee that baby will eat.

Still other critics say Mom should leave the church pew and take baby either to the crying room or the bathroom to nurse. Bathrooms aren't usually designed for this purpose, however--would you want to eat a meal in one? And cry rooms can be so noisy and chaotic that even the most placid baby will go into full-blown meltdown instead of settling down calmly to eat. If the church provides a special room for nursing mothers, that's great! And if Mom can leave with baby to get to that room without having to climb over the knees of a large group of determined end-of-the-pew-sitters, equally great. Unfortunately, many such rooms end up being full of dads with bouncy toddlers, making it even harder for Mom to nurse quietly and discretely than it would have been in the bench in the first place.

I have heard some Catholics actually suggest that Mom should just stay home with the baby and any toddlers who are too young to "get anything" out of the Mass. Mom isn't sinning by missing Mass, they point out, as the care of small children is one of the valid reasons to miss Mass on Sunday. So Mom shouldn't bother--there'll be plenty of time to go to church when baby is older.

But that's such a negative view of the graces we can get from attending Sunday Mass with our families that I reject it entirely. The family that prays together stays together, and the family that patiently and kindly teaches its children from earliest infancy to come to Jesus on at least a weekly basis is a family that will stay close, and strong in the faith. If Mom or Dad or both have to scoot to the back of the church with a teething infant or cranky toddler, they should get smiles of understanding from the other attendees, not frowns and scowls of cold and bitter dislike. Where is the future of the Body of Christ, if not in those infant forms and wiggly, sometimes disruptive little bodies?

I'd be willing to bet that no mother sets out planning to nurse her infant at Mass, or even in the church at all--but she has to be prepared for the possibility. And just as her infant receives his nourishment and sustenance from her, so do we receive ours from the bosom of Holy Mother Church, who feeds us on heavenly fare, and strengthens our souls for the trials yet to come.

The Lost Monday

Most of the time, the migraine headaches I tend to get are able to be managed. A good combination of ice, pain medicine, and caffeine applied at the first, unmistakable signs that a migraine is coming on will do wonders in keeping me both vertical and functioning. So I tend to think of my headaches as more of a nuisance than a disability of any sort.

Every now and again I'll get what I once, in frustration, termed a "vampire headache." This is a migraine that has already started by the time I wake up in the morning, and that doesn't respond as well to the usual measures as the more garden-variety headaches do. The reason for the name "vampire" is that these headaches often seem to follow a sunrise-sunset schedule, keeping me out of things from dawn until dusk; but usually, more often than not, somewhere between late afternoon and early evening I will begin to experience the bliss of alleviation, a slow subsiding of the pounding pain, and a return to a more normal, if somewhat drained, feeling. It's frustrating to lose most of one's daylight hours on a given day, but it's not all that bad, and I know, as I lay in bed watching the shadows grow on the walls, that the pain will be gone soon.

But once in a great, great while I'll have a migraine that makes the vampire headaches seem like nothing at all. It will start just like a vampire headache, in that I'll wake up in the morning already in the full throes of a migraine; and it will linger throughout the daylight hours, as I keep applying ice, medicine, and caffeine at regular intervals. But whenever I stand up for any purpose at all, the room will spin just enough to produce nausea, and the part of my head that hurts the most, often the left side or the back of my neck, will pulse like a bad stereo system installed in the sort of car that has improbable tires and loud paint. The sun will set, and the pain will continue; midnight will come and go, and the pain will still be with me, and even when I last look at the clock, around 2 a.m., before finally going to sleep in spite of the pain, the pain is still there, still pounding, still swirling, taking on a surreal reality all its own.

When the sun goes down and the pain doesn't disappear, I start to feel especially restless and cranky. Why me? Why this? Why now? I'll think, tossing and turning, and trying to position the ice cubes behind my neck to achieve the maximum numbness. But there aren't any answers, and after a while, I'll realize that this isn't a huge burden, or even a significant cross, compared to what other people face, and handle, and suffer on a daily basis.

And with that thought comes calm, as I remember to offer up the pain for those others, the ones I don't know and probably never will, who suffer from hunger and thirst, from war, from painful diseases in places where life is cheap and pain is just a facet of reality, from the mental and emotional suffering that accompanies a loss of faith, from the inner darkness that makes my darkened bedroom seem like a garden of light and peace.

Somehow, the very act of uniting my little suffering with all of that, and most of all with His suffering and dying for us all; somehow, thinking of Him, and imagining His pierced hands momentarily on my head as I offer to Him so small a drop of pain in the ocean of human sorrow, brings to me a kind of alleviation that without lessening the physical pain at all makes it in some mysterious way much more endurable. I am able to be still, to rest, to stop fighting to capture that elusive sleep that I hope so much will help; and because I'm not fighting to capture it any more, it steals up around me, and folds me in soft arms, wrapping me in painless dreams.

And I wake, and it's Tuesday. And there is still a little pain, but so little it seems like nothing, easily managed, easily controlled. I feel shaky and disconnected; light seems like a palpable, physical force, and my eyes are blurry even when I put my contacts in--but the pulsing, pounding, piercing sensations of yesterday are only a memory. And I know, from past experiences, that the headache that stole my Monday is the rarest kind I ever have, the kind that occurs only a handful of times in a given decade, though that doesn't entirely stop me from being afraid it will return or recur before the echoes of it have entirely faded. I can see it as a grace, even while I fear it; I can be thankful for the opportunity to grow in spirit, even though my weak flesh hopes it will be a long time before I lose a whole day to such a thing again.

Liberty and License

There are quite a few good blog posts out there about why we should celebrate what we are celebrating today, and even a thoughtful one about whether we should be celebrating at all.

I'm proud to be an American, and I do love this country, though I sometimes worry quite a bit about the direction we are heading. I don't see any real contradiction in this, as many ancient patriots of many different nations were among the first to sound the alarms about the death and decline of their own nations or empires. Those who love a country are often quite realistic about her flaws, and can praise the good while acknowledging the bad; jingoism or overdrawn nationalism are often more self-serving that real patriotism.

Our country was founded on principles of liberty, and it is on those principles that it will stand or fall. But we've become confused in recent times between liberty and license, between the freedom to do whatever is just, and right, and good, and the freedom to do whatever we wish, regardless of the consequences to those around us.

Liberty is properly ordered first toward God, then toward family, and then toward country; liberty seeks the path of righteousness and avoids evil, freely choosing good. But license is ordered first, last, and always toward the self: provided the self is free to choose whatever of pleasure or hedonism it seeks, God is degraded to mere "spirituality" which is only an emotional exercise in the game of creating good feelings about whatever one desires; family is redefined to mean whatever group of related or unrelated people one surrounds oneself with, with whom one is randomly likely to share sexual favors on the grounds that those are worthless, but avoid sharing one's stuff, on the grounds that that is priceless and irreplaceable; and country means primarily the courts, by whose instrumentality one hopes to reshape society and coerce it to approve of whatever depths of depravity one wishes to define as both normal and a fundamental right which one should always be free to enjoy, and to force others to accept.

Liberty and license are concepts which are not related to each other; rather, they are opposed at the deepest level. True freedom is always the freedom to do what is right and just, not to define as right and just whatever it is that one desires to do.

And in recent times our nation has had that exactly backwards: what is natural and ordered towards goodness is deemed too narrow, too prejudicial, too extreme to have anything to say to our modern society, while disorders of every sort are upheld as good things, as the sort of things that are right and proper to man.

So it is that our society first approved contraception, and now all but mandates it; approved abortion, and still fights against the repulsion most ordinary good people instinctively feel towards the whole concept; has begun to approve gay marriage, and wishes to stifle and silence the voices which are raised against it; approves divorce and serial marriage, and sees as abnormal those few religions which still oppose it--and on and on. An admirable bent toward liberty has been reshaped into the most twisted form of licentiousness imaginable, and our society continues to approve it all, as if the price of liberty is not sacrifice, but the embrace of perversion in whatever form it presents itself.

Our founding fathers would, for the most part, have had no trouble condemning all of our society's various immoralities and wickedness, because most of our founding fathers understood that the principle of liberty does not operate at all in a moral vacuum, when freedom to do what is right becomes freedom to do anything at all. If our liberty is not based in a proper understanding of man and his place in the universe, then it is not liberty--it is, or will shortly become, the worst sort of tyranny: the tyranny of profligacy, where the only things condemned are those which in their innate goodness illustrate clearly the multiplicity of evil that surrounds them.

An Apology

It seems to me that I've been giving this blog the short end of the stick lately, in terms of my focus, energy, and attention.

Don't get me wrong--this isn't going to be one of those posts where I announce a decision to scale back the blogging only to come back in a week or so and admit that I liked things better the old way, etc. I like this blog, and it's very worth it to me to keep it running, even when doing so gets a little complicated.

But I've got to admit that Summer, 2008 has been much busier so far than I anticipated.

Now, it's been busy in a mostly good way (except for the roof replacement, which I could have done without, but which when all was said and done was far less of an inconvenience than it could have been). And I'm getting to work on some of those other writing projects that I can't do as well during the school year, particularly my re-entry into the world of fiction writing, which is starting to take up more and more of my attention as we move into July. But somehow I've managed on several recent occasions to get to the end of the day (or nearly the end) and realize that I haven't come over here and written anything--at which point I do, but without having given it as much thought or composition as I usually like to give my blog posts.

And as I looked around my house this afternoon, enlisting the girls' help with some chores, I realized that I've been approaching the housework in much the same spirit--too much procrastination followed by an intense burst of effort, which is targeted only at doing the minimum.

Some of that is just summer, of course. In the heat of a Texas afternoon both cleaning and thinking start to seem like entirely too arduous tasks, which would be better put off until the cool of the morning--if only there were such a thing. Then, too, many of the things I decide to write about are initially triggered by some aspect of our life as homeschoolers, but that, too, is absent during these warm months of sleepy inactivity.

But some of it relates back to a paradox I noticed long ago, when I was looking for a job right after college, which was this: the more time you have to do something like blog or keep a diary or journal or write letters to friends or family, etc., the less inspiration you seem to have to do those things. There are only so many times you can open the blank pages of a journal to confess yet again that not much of interest is happening--and even if you're busy, as busy as searching for a job after college or handling several different things during a busy summer at home with children, the fact of the "busyness" doesn't seem to matter much in terms of intellectual productivity.

In reality, though, that's only an excuse. I'm not really lacking in things to write about, or think about; what I've been lacking is discipline. And the built-in discipline that accompanies our school days seems to keep me going long enough to handle chores and blogging and other obligations without the constant feeling that I'm running in place on a slow treadmill, trying to feel some sense of accomplishment in the midst of many ongoing tasks, and only a few completed ones.

So I want to apologize for my recent lack of focus and discipline, and to promise to do better. Yes, it's summer, and I'm enjoying it very much--but that's no more reason for me to let things slide in the writing department than it is for me to get lazy with the housework.

Modesty and the FLDS Women

I've written before on this website about modesty and dress, especially as it impacts Catholics and in particular Catholic women.

My view of the subject can be summed up as follows:

-Catholics have an obligation to be modest in their clothing choices.
-This means that Catholics should never wear clothing that is clearly and purposefully too revealing of what ought not be revealed.
-This does not mean that women may never wear pants or slacks, short-sleeved shirts, or skirts or dresses that fall just below the knee; there are modest clothing options for women that do not require her wrists or ankles to remain covered at all times.
-The question of what constitutes suitable attire for certain times and places is a different question from the question of modesty. Suitability will involve many personal reflections which go beyond questions of modesty
-In general, encouraging Catholics to wear nice clothes for Sunday Mass is a good idea. Judging people for not wearing clothes nice enough to satisfy our standards is a bad idea.
-It is never right to judge others for the sin of immodesty in dress; they may be ignorant of the matter or be unaware of the effect of their clothing.

There are Catholics who would disagree with one or several of the principles I've outlined. I know of some Catholic women who insist that women ought never to wear slacks, or that only wrist-length shirts and ankle-length skirts are ever appropriate attire for a Catholic woman. To discussions about practicality, hot weather, etc. they tend to say, "Well, but look at the prairie women, who spent all day in long underwear and long sleeved, ankle length dresses, when there wasn't even any air conditioning!"

Dresses like these, and underwear like this.

Those links come from a new website designed to help members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints support themselves while they continue to live away from the ranch; since the CPS investigation is continuing, the women have been advised not to return home. From a Salt Lake Tribune article:

Cynthia Martinez, a spokeswoman for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, said that many of the 48 mothers her firm represents face financial challenges that didn't exist when they lived at the ranch in a communal lifestyle.

"Now they are renting homes and apartments and have to figure out how to pay for that," she said.

Although the children are back with their parents, legal counsel advised many FLDS mothers to stay away from the ranch until the CPS investigation and action is over. The sewing enterprise allows the mothers to care for their children and support themselves.

Now, I don't blame the FLDS women for trying to earn some money while they are away from the ranch. There is always hope that some of them may decide to leave the polygamy lifestyle and seek help in doing so, and the greater their contact with the outside world, the greater the chance of that happening.

But I have to wonder whether it would be at all advisable to support this enterprise by purchasing these wares, if one should happen to be of the mindset that clothes like these are more modest and appropriate for today's children than the vast majority of the clothing that is available in the stores.

In other words, could a long-dresses-only Catholic make purchases from the FLDS sect, knowing how deeply at odds their religious beliefs and practices are with our own? Does it matter, considering that most of our other clothing options also come from countries, regimes, and value systems we dislike and would rather not support? Does the goal of wearing a certain type of clothing which one sees as eminently superior from a modesty perspective outweigh any negative aspects of possibly aiding these women to return to their polygamous homes with their sister-wives, children, and the children's many half-siblings?

My own view of modesty doesn't require that I wrestle with this question on a personal level; I believe that it is quite possible to wear modest and suitable clothing by selecting from among the choices offered by more widely available clothing sources. It may take a little extra shopping ingenuity to find clothes that are not too revealing, and it may mean avoiding certain fashionable styles which are clearly not modest, but I think it can be done.

But there are women who will only wear clothing that is not all that dissimilar from what the FLDS offers, and who would very much like to see these styles on their daughters; I imagine that for them the decision about whether or not to buy some of these items will be less simple to resolve.

The Prominent Catholic Fan Club (TM)

Technically, Mark Shea Appreciation Month here at And Sometimes Tea ended yesterday, but I'm going to keep the little links up on the sidebar through the end of this week. If you feel moved to click Mark's Paypal button or buy some books or tapes, please do so!

The reason I'm bringing Mark up again is because of this post he wrote on his blog today, and especially his link to this article he wrote last year. In the article, he mentions a worried note he has received from a reader, and says:

A number of things concern me about this note. But the first and foremost is that somebody's faith could be disturbed by the fact that a Catholic apologist has erred. Sadly, it's not the first time I've encountered the tendency to anoint me or some other apologist as a sort of Alternative Magisterium to the real Magisterium by a "fan base" that is somewhere between a school of disciples and a cheer squad. Indeed, I have found that, in an era where laity have been taught to mistrust their bishops--not only by the media and the culture, but by the shocking incompetence and perfidy of the bishops in the abuse scandal--it's very easy for laity to hive off and anoint new ersatz Magisteria in the form of whatever faction they happen to fancy. For some, the New Magisterium is the advocates for women priests. For others, it's Catholics for a Free Choice. For still others, it's whatever Richard McBrien says is the consensus of Thinking Catholics in the Academy. For some, it's Dan Brown.

But for not a few in the apologetics subculture, it's what I or Scott Hahn or [insert favorite apologist] thinks about X, Y and Z. And that's a very dangerous thing to do, because we apologists are not protected by the charism of infallibility in the slightest. In the case cited by my correspondent above, for instance, the crisis of faith was precipitated by the fact that I misread St. Jerome in an article I wrote years ago for Envoy. (I thought Jerome was defending the Septuagint and the inclusion of deuterocanonical books like Tobit, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees in the canon of Scripture.) I did not misread Jerome wilfully, as Mr. X suggested on his blog, but I nonetheless did make a blunder. That's the breaks. I make mistakes.

I think that some people collect Prominent Catholic Thinkers, Speakers or Writers (TM) the way that others collect baseball cards or antique art glass. That's not an entirely bad thing, certainly not from the standpoint of those Prominent Catholics who in many cases are trying either to earn a living entirely from such works, or else supplement the kind of salary one can be paid in the academic world for being a Prominent Catholic--and in case anyone is under the impression that these sorts of careers lead to fame and fortune, let's just say that there have been periods in the Church when an indulgence might cost you more than these guys (and gals) get paid in a year (adjusting for inflation, and overlooking the fact that payment in that era often came in the form of livestock).

Okay, I'm kidding. But only about the indulgences.

So while people like Mark Shea or Amy Welborn or Dawn Eden or Scott Hahn or countless others are probably quite pleased when people buy their books or tapes, visit their conferences, hire them to speak, or otherwise show some financial appreciation for their labors, I am fairly positive that not one of them would ever want to be mistaken for the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church. To the extent that their teachings or writings are ever authoritative, it is to the degree to which their writings conform to the Magisterium--that is, they teach and write well, when what they teach and write can be demonstrated to agree with various official Church documents, such as the Catechism, the writings of the early Church fathers, the encyclicals of the popes, and other such iterations of authentic Catholic truth.

But, as Mark points out above, it is possible for him, or for any of them, to be wrong about something. It may be some small historical detail, or it may be an entirely erroneous conclusion about an issue, or it may be anything in between. When Catholic scholars or writers or teachers or thinkers find themselves at odds with the ordinary Magisterium of the Church, it is the job of these Prominent Catholics to make a correction--it is not the job of the Church to correct herself for their sakes.

For the fans of the Prominent Catholics, it may be extremely disconcerting to catch an error, or find a point of disagreement, or see one's favorite Prominent Catholic failing to care sufficiently about one of one's own side issues or matters of concern. But falling into that attitude is a clear indication that the fans have, themselves, mistaken the Prominent Catholic for the Church, and not in the "Mystical Body" sense, but in the sense that they really do substitute the thinking, speaking, writing et. al. of this Catholic or these Catholics for authoritative Catholic teaching.

And that's a problem, one which the Prominent Catholics themselves must be acutely aware of. It's a problem for two reasons--one, because it elevates the Prominent Catholics to an office they do not aspire to and cannot hold, and two, because it creates in the mind of the various fans out there the temptation to see one's favorite Prominent Catholic as opposed to the Church--and then to choose the Prominent Catholic over the Church.

We've seen that happen much more on the more liberal side of things, where groups of fans of various progressive Catholic writers, speakers, teachers, etc. have taken their Prominent Catholics words and run with them--all the way to various boats for "women's ordinations," or all the way to Barack Obama for "consistent ethic" misunderstandings, or even in some cases all the way out of the Church, which they come to see as far too deeply flawed to be worth fixing.

But lest anyone think that this is a problem only on the left, that Catholics who veer more towards small "o" orthodoxy or small "t" traditionalism will be immune to it--human and Church history would suggest otherwise, wouldn't they?