Boilermaker Greg at Zillas, who was forthright today about right and wrong and the duty to uphold right and to discourage wrong, has reminded me of pleasanter days -- days of moral clarity.
Last weekend I climbed out of the hermit cave, and paid a visit to an old friend. During the conversation, he brought up the topic of a neighbor of his, nicknamed Boo (don't ask me why), "Boo is a nice guy when he's not on booze and drugs."
I stopped him there and told him I wasn't buying that load of crap. Booze and drugs is not an excuse for evil. He said he understood, but just wanted to point out that Boo was a nice guy when not on booze or drugs. I refused to let it pass; I wasn't going to cut Boo any slack; no sentence that contained "Boo is a nice guy" went unanswered.
That apple didn't fall far from the tree. My friend's old man, may he rest in peace, was a liberal of WWII vintage. My friend's old man and I used to get into philosophical/political debates, and one time he observed that I tended to see issues in black and white. He encouraged me to see shades of gray.
I've just remembered that I had a counterpoint. During that time, our parish priest was Father McAndrew. I recall that my parents considered him cranky, but he is the last priest that I can remember who strikingly spoke of the possiblity of going to hell. Sin was the path toward hell and hell is unpleasant. Very clearly, and very loudly.
Shades of gray my ass. That crap has ever led to no-good.
Thanks for the memory, boilermaker.
I'm reading Bill Bennett's Why We Fight. He notes that the media went overboard in order to be fair to Muslims and Arabs. They allowed targets of their stories to review the stories before publication.
Leave aside the telltale omission of the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, or any other gang with leftist rather than rightist credentials from the society's list of "groups with a history of [terrorist] activity." Leave aside the fastidious distancing even from conventional Western spellings of Muslim terms lest they smack of ethnocentrism. Leave aside the appeal to the American Muslim Council, a political organization with a documented history of support for terrorist groups, as if it were some objective arbiter of orthographic purity. Leave aside all that. What must be unprecendented is the spectacle of professional journalists actively soliciting supervision, even censorship, from the very objects of their journalistic investigations.I doubt a Catholic priest would ever be given an opportunity to edit any story any time soon."Imagine the outcry," wrote Stephen Hayes in reporting on the Society's [Society of Professional Journalists] guidelines in the Weekly Standard, "if a newspaper editor permitted a Catholic priest to revise -- before publication -- a reporter's story about a pro-life rally. Or if a columnist called in a tobacco executive to edit an article about the hazards of smoking."
When the financial council of the Boston Diocese retracted the sex abuse settlement, the typical media response has been that this will be a further black mark for Cardinal Law. While the cardinal may not be winning any popularity contests, we forget that most hate shyster lawyers more. Here's a sample from Howie Carr:
It's one thing to mess around with altar boys, or allow your pervert priests to, but never, ever screw around with an ambulance chaser.Or this from Joe Fitzgerald:Mitchell Garabedian has 10 million reasons to be angry with His Eminence, and all of them have George Washington's picture on them. And so this morning, unless he and his red hat fled under the cover of darkness, the ``embattled'' Bernard Cardinal Law will face the music or, at least, Garabedian.
Whenever someone says, ``It's not the money, it's the principle,'' watch for reaction to the money. When he learned his clients might not receive all of an anticipated $30 million windfall, attorney Mitchell Garabedian responded by calling Law ``a despicable human being.''Not about the money? Please.
Stanley Kurtz makes the interesting observation that liberals have no understanding of conservatives while they make the false charge that conservatives ignore liberal views.
At Zillas, Dan Dickinson notes Michael Novak's piece about the media hostility toward the Church in The New (York Times) Catholic Church.
Jonah Goldberg, Jonathan Adler, and Virginia Postrel clash over the use of the word eugenics. I see that there is a possible consequence in cloning and private genetic engineering that should be inserted into the discussion. There is much made over the fact that the frontier is largely becoming explored through private means. But in our litigious society it is extremely unlikely that this will hold. We demand perfection from just about everyone except lawyers. Medical doctors are supposed to be perfect. What will happen when a cloned child doesn't come out right? That's right, a lawsuit and eventual government intervention.
Francis Fukuyama points out the demise of libertarianism in The Fall of the Libertarians. Earlier, George F. Will in Cranky Conservatives claims that minimal government conservatism is dead. Methinks there is an appropriate Mark Twain quote here.
"The real enemies of the Faith are NOT the attorneys, the reporters covering the stories, the pundits weighing in. Indeed, even Jimmy Breslin, much as I personally dislike his punditry, can't be counted as the real enemy. He's bush league, compared to the real enemy -- the enemy within. The enemy whose failure to oversee and govern, to guide and rebuke and foster the good has permitted over two generations that, within the house of God, dissenters could teach under Catholic auspices, preach with faculties and undermine the Catholic Faith and Liturgy; could administer seminaries in which every kind of aberration was tolerated; could bring things to a point where the Catholic father of his family has to fret over whether his son can be an altar boy, whether his children can be entrusted to the diocesan catechetical program."
What we do not need, and can no longer afford, are Catholics who wish to defer automatically to the bishops' judgment in the matter of the child sex-abuse scandal. In dioceses and parishes across America today, individual Catholics are being forced to choose how they will respond to this crisis of moral leadership in the Church. The American bishops have, through their worldly calculations, put the Catholic people in the painful position of resisting their shepherds, in whom an increasing number no longer have much faith.
He later spoke of renewing the Catholic Church.
I sent off an e-mail, but let's be honest here. Rod probably has a ton of stuff in his mailbox, and I cannot be considered top shelf material. Here are the highlights...
I think the idea for renewal is an idea whose time has come. I've found this Chesterton quote that I've an urge to tell everyone about, "a revolution is a restoration." A very orthodox statement from his work Orthodoxy.
I've put a political slant on this... the American Revolution is a restorative revolution, while the French Revolution is a progressive revolution (meaning tear up the old, replace with the new -- modern scientific over traditional). I bring it back to religion and ask myself is Vatican II progressive or restorative. I came to the conclusion that it is progressive. The current scandal is proof for me.
Orthodoxy demands restoration. Not a surrender to Modernity (giving up on celibacy, or ordaining women), but a return to Tradition. Here's the Chesterton quote in context:
When I had written this down, I felt once again the presence of something else in the discussion: as a man hears a church bell above the sound of the street. Something seemed to be saying, "My ideal at least is fixed; for it was fixed before the foundations of the world. My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is called Eden. You may alter the place to which you are going; but you cannot alter the place from which you have come. To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. For the orthodox there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration. At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no man has seen since Adam.
Some additional thoughts...
One of the reasons I'm having trouble in starting this blog (see post below) is that I've got no throttle. I've either got writer's block or I'm in continual stream of conscious mode. Most of the time I'm worried about structure rather than dumping my ideas out.
I'm probably not suited for writing this stuff.
Case in point: Last Saturday, I was thinking, "What can I do to start this blog?"
The answer came as I noticed a local radio contest in naming Clinton's proposed talk show. Before I knew it, I was writing a Soapbox for GIGO. Here it is:
You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you
-- Carly SimonIn ancient Greek mythology, Narcissus was the handsome son of the river god Cephissus. So beautiful was he that everyone would fall in love with him. Unwilling to return the love of others, the Greek goddess Nemesis cursed him so that he would fall in love with his own image. When he came upon a pond, he saw his reflection and he was unable to turn away. Eventually, he withered away and a flower, which now bears his name, sprouted at his final resting place.
The Modern Narcissus instead seeks the approval of the crowd. A litany of extra-marital affairs provided a salve to insecurities. He sought to fill the void in his psyche, apparently because he does not receive the quota of attention he craves. For the modern model, it is not that he has extraordinary good looks, but that he has a political charisma. He also has the appeal of the lost soul, the irrepressible rapscallion, a Tom Sawyer-type of skullduggery that attracted the Aunt Polly in unwed mothers and soccer-moms. They swooned. They voted.
The attention of the presidency was a sweet nectar. As George Will was to frequently remind us, he was a daily guest in our living rooms -- whether welcome or uninvited -- by the power of television. This is a boon to the Modern Narcissus, because now he is no longer tied to nature's reflecting pool. He is able to see his reflection by way of the modern media: television, radio, and print.
He internalized the notions spoken by fawning sycophants that he was a great president. But through the cruel machinations of the Constitution, he was unable to seek another term. The cruelest blow was to come on September 11. Not possessed by self-doubts whether he might have been to blame for the lapse of security or for his pale efforts to punish terrorism, he ruefully regretted that he was not given the opportunity, the crisis, to test his mettle. He was reduced to the lamentable lament that he almost got bin Laden.
Alas, the interest in him waned. His successor was able to handle the first crisis of the twenty-first century. The successor was able to obtain high approval in polls though his skills in crisis rather than the split polls during scandals that divided approval of job performance and approval of Narcissus as a man. How much did the people really love this fallen angel? He appears not to have noticed that they may have loved his office despite the man.
But the need for the spotlight is too great. Such is the vainglory of the Modern Narcissus, that he believes that he could be the next Oprah Winfrey. Yet the event of September 11 was an unwelcome dose of reality for a generation of narcissism. No longer could the charms hide the fact that his was a frivolous presidency, dangerously frivolous. Contests sprouted throughout the fruited plain. From Rush Limbaugh to local radio, from the Washington Post and NRO to blogdom, the question was asked, "What should his TV talk show be called?" Not befitting the dignity of a former president, the answers played on his foibles and sins.
Perhaps even the cruel jokes provide nourishment. It may be a feeble sustenance, but at least he is able to see his reflection in the modern reflecting pool. Even pity is a form of attention. The cruelest punishment would be to forget this pathetic creature, to stop broadcasting his image, to stop chattering about him in gossip columns and blogs.
Ironically, he probably thinks this essay is about him.
Whew! All I really wanted to say was: Hey Guys! You all said that you were tired of Clinton. You all said that he craved attention. Well shuddap already!
As I always do, I did research for this piece. Readers of the blog will get a little extra. I found this page from an Australian psychology magazine. I don't know how long the page will last... the site seems to be undergoing a re-organization where the archived pages (such as this) are paid for. The article is Narcissism: A Nine Headed Hydra? Exploring Types of Narcissism. Also, I found the Nebula Award nominated short story by Lisa Goldstein The Narcissus Plague. It's worth a read.
Oh, and you'll find the complete lyrics to Carly Simon's song at her official website.
I suppose I should start doing this on a regular basis.
The purpose of this blog is to
It is not the purpose of this blog to entertain anyone who might be reading this. If it happens, it's okay.