Quote of the Week

"Old gum has hidden flavors."  (Sgt. Frog)

Now that's deep.

Long Quote of the Month

I recently found Crisis Magazine's archived articles by John Zmirak (of the Bad Catholic guides fame) and have been enjoying them one or a few at a time. A longish bit from one of them--"Satan: A Tapeworm"--leapt off the screen and right for my brain. Zmirak was saying that it bothered him how many supposedly uplifting Christian movies "are not really “spiritual,” much less Christian; they’re simply bland and inoffensive."

The Catholic faith is neither. In fact, like really authentic Mexican food
(think habeneros and fried crickets), it is at once both pungent and offensive.
It offends me all the time, with the outrageous demands it makes of my fallen
nature and the sheer weirdness of its claims. It asserts that, behind the veil
of day-to-day schlepping, of work and laundry and television and microwaved
burritos, we live on the front lines of a savage spiritual war waged by
invisible entities (deathless malevolent demons and benevolent dead saints)
whose winners will enjoy eternal happiness with a resurrected rabbi, and whose
losers will writhe forever in unquenchable fire. Sometimes I step back and find
myself saying in Jerry Seinfeld’s voice: What’s with all the craziness? Why
can’t I just enjoy my soup?

The Church’s heroes, seen from a worldly
point of view, are a pack of self-destructive zealots who embark on crackpot
projects like lifelong celibacy, voluntary poverty, and (worst of all)
obedience; who leave perfectly serviceable chateaus in France to go preach the
Beatitudes to scalp-collecting Indians in freezing Canada; who volunteer to
sneak into Stalin’s Russia precisely because he has imprisoned so many priests,
then spend decades saying secret Masses in labor camps; who open up pro-life
pregnancy centers in crappy neighborhoods so they can talk welfare queens into
having still more babies we’ll have to pay for . . .

And so on. A
religion like this doesn’t need after-school specials; it needs science fiction
and fantasy, horror films and surrealism to convey the fundamental strangeness
that it believes lies just beneath the surface of day-to-day “reality.”

And that, my friends, goes a long way toward explaining why I am Catholic. The weirdness is palpable and the stakes are high (the highest) and the witness of those who have gone before is amazing.

Quote of the Month

I've been rereading Lord of the Rings, something I wish I'd done years ago (I did listen to a big chunk of the Fellowship audiobook a while back ), as it seems better than it did when I was in high school. Despite the annoying tendency of movie images to invade my mind from time to time, it's been really enjoyable so far. The Two Towers especially so, as it seemed to tear along at a surprisingly fast pace compared to the other two books. Here's my quote of the month, taken from it:


'...How shall a man judge what to do in such times?'

'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.'

Some Bits and Pieces to Think About

Last Wednesday I talked to my sister, who is a nurse, on the phone. We only had a short time to talk, but before we rang off, I asked her what the mood on the ground was re the health care "reform" Congress had thrust upon us the previous Sunday night. "People are freaking out," she said. She repeated it for emphasis. She said that everything she hears suggests old people will just "be hung out to dry" and that she has patients asking her worriedly if they will still be able to get health care. As to health care workers, which was what I was most curious about, she said they are very worried. She said some of the doctors she knows were saying they were going to stop taking Medicare patients and that a few of the older doctors were talking about taking early retirement. Everyone was worried about hospitals having to make cutbacks, and the nurses especially were worried about having their wages cut.

I've been meaning ever since to get her on the phone for a longer talk about this, but I haven't yet. For one thing, she's overworked at the moment, and I hate to risk disturbing her rest.

But I find myself thinking of another phone conversation or two we had back in 2008. A few days before Election Day and then again after the election we talked on the phone. My sister, who was then working in Miami, has never really been interested in politics, but with all the hoopla of that election we got on the subject. On the call before the election, she told me that there was a lot of opposition to Obama. I was very surprised and told her that didn't fit in with my expectations of Miami (rich Yankees retiring there, for example). "Oh, it's mostly just the Cubans," she said. "Ah, that would explain it," I said.

It was either that conversation or the one right after the election, where she asked me, "It's not true what they keep saying about Obama being a socialist, is it?" I replied with some mealy-mouthed, wishy-washy thing to the effect that no, he wasn't a socialist, certainly not officially, probably not at all, but he seemed to maybe have some ideas that were kind of socialist-leaning, as did a lot of people in his party today, but he's not actually a socialist really.

(Yeah, not my finest hour with regard to either concision or prescience. To my credit I could be a lot more concise on why I didn't want him to be President: Obama had zero executive experience, he was so pro-abortion he couldn't find it within himself to condemn partial birth abortion or to say that would-be abortions who were born alive should be given medical care, and I had no confidence at all that he got the need for national defense. He also seemed clearly to favor big government, and I feared the kind of appointees he might make to the Supreme Court. That was more than enough to make me vote for McCain, who I was far from thrilled with but who at least seemed to get the need for defense. But I could have gone on. Right or wrong, I did not believe Obama shared my love of America, nor did I think he would be a friend of our military personnel, nor did I think he was concerned about much else in this country other than his own career--admittedly a common enough trait among politicians. I couldn't decide if he was a True Believer in progressive ideology or if he espoused it as trendy things to help his career; I hoped for the latter, but worried it might be the former.)

Anyhoo, this week I happened to listen to the archived episode of EWTN Live from the same evening I was talking to my sister. Johnette Benkovic was the guest, and I only put it on for some background noise. She happened to read aloud some quotes that struck me and, as I'm rambling anyway I might as well share them:

"First we will take eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia. We will encircle the last bastion of capitalism, the United States of America. We will not need to fight; it will fall as a ripe fruit into our hands." (Lenin)
　
"We can not expect Americans to jump from capitalism to communism. But we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find out they have communism." (Khrueschev)
　
"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without knowing how it happened." (Norman Thomas, whose name I did not recognize but whom she said was a former Socialist candidate for US president)


Those are the quotes as I heard them; if you want to listen to the episode yourself go to the Audio Library search page and type "ewtn live" into the series search box. I thought of my sister's Miami comment "Oh, it's mostly just the Cubans" when Benkovic said she'd read those quotes in a recent speech and had a Cuban woman come up to her afterward and say she was glad someone was telling the truth, that she'd come to America to escape and there was nowhere else for her to go.

You know, I've heard that back in the '50s American Catholics used to pray regularly for an end to communism. (I may be mixing this up a bit with the St. Michael prayer that used to be said at the end of mass for the Church and the world in general.) I don't think it would be a bad idea for Christians of all stripes to take this up again. I know socialism is not as bad as communism, but how well did Orthodox Christians fare in the Soviet Union? Is Christianity thriving in countries with more socialist leanings than the United States has heretofore had? At any rate, I have since 3/21 made a point of remembering to pray daily for the future of America. I urge everyone, but especially practicing Christians and Jews, to do the same.

This being the Bible Belt, I sometimes see bumperstickers or yard signs that say "God Bless America", but lately what I'd like to see is "God Have Mercy on America" or just plain "Pray for America".

Quote of the Past Month

It's been a long time since I've made one of my irregularly scheduled "Quote of the Varying Time Period" posts, so here is my favorite quote from the month of January:

...I could whisper, ‘Turn,’ and 6,000 tons of aircraft carrier, four acres of
U.S. sovereign territory, thousands of people, enough aircraft to make a nice
air force for a small country, and billions of dollars of equipment and training turned.

And I traded it for a toddler who giggled and ran the
other way when I yelled, “Would you come here?!?“ [source]

It's from The Political Housewyf, whose blog I found by accident last week.

Quote of the Past Week

Last weekend I was finishing up The Return of Don Quixote and found this:

It seems to be a sign of education first to take a thing for granted and then to
forget to see if it is still there. Weapons are a very good working example. The
man says he won't go on wearing a sword because it is no longer any good against
a gun. Then he throws away all the guns as relics of barbarism; and then he is
surprised when a barbarian sticks him through with a sword.

The whole rest of the paragraph this is taken from is interesting, but I'll stop there.


Religion would be another good working example of what the character I've quoted was saying. The educated modern long ago threw out religion as a relic of a superstitious past, and he is now surprised when people within his own culture still claim to hold to it and when people in other cultures do things that seem actually to be motivated by it. (Including running him through with a sword.) The idea of there really being such a thing as good and evil is something else some of our more enlightened moderns have thrown out, along with sexual morality and notions of honor, sexual chivalry, and reserve.

Oh, and let's not forget the idea of there being differences in the sexes: the educated modern has for a generation taken it for granted that the only sex differences are ones inculcated by oppressive cultures and so they must be falling away rapidly as we all grow more educated. Then is surprised when the little boys around him like knocking over block towers as much as building them, the college girls are more likely to respond poorly to binge drinking and one-night stands than their male counterparts, and the women he knows often wish they could stay home to raise their babies while the men he knows may not take paternity leave even if their employers offer it. What on earth could be going on?


But back to the book. The Return of Don Quixote is a short novel with an interesting premise: Some young people on an English estate are putting on a play set in the Middle Ages and come up one actor short. They ask the slightly obsessive, otherworldly librarian, an expert on some obscure Hittite subgroup, to fill in. He sets to by first researching the Middle Ages with scholarly zeal, then plays the part, and afterward refuses to take his costume off, because he's realized how much better medieval clothes were, in many respects, to modern ones. It all leads improbably to a return of the Middle Ages movement in England, which clashes with a trades union uprising (or sitting down), and to both the creation of romantic interests and their entanglements. I don't think I'm giving away too much if I say that all the Jacks shall have their Jills and, even if things do go ill in some wise, all shall be well.


It's all very Chestertonian and the only problem is I kind of wish someone else had written it, even though I don't know who else could have. Much as I love Chesterton's sprightly essays, I just don't like his fiction much. I know Father Brown is much beloved and for a writer to make any character that is still around after a century is an achievement not to be sniffed at, but I'm still not a fan. Father Brown makes good points in his stories, but I don't enjoy the stories. Innocent Smith (Manalive) is a great idea for a character, yet he remains more idea than character. The Flying Inn is a good idea for a story and I am sometimes reminded of part of it while reading the newspaper, but it never really came alive for me. The fictional work of his I like the best, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, has a proto-gamer as a minor character, a good idea for a book at its heart, and actually made me laugh out loud once--and yet I wouldn't call it a great novel. All of his fiction seems to suffer from a carelessness about details, and the characters often don't seem to live.

Somewhere in her Misanthrope's Corner columns, Florence King said she finally realized she couldn't write fiction because she cared more about what her characters thought than what they did. Reading The Return of Don Quixote, I found myself wondering if that was Chesterton's problem. He cared very much about what people think and spent a lot of time arguing in his essays and newspaper columns that what people think about the big subjects--God, life, death, love, war, sex, marriage, family, religion--is important and can't be dismissed with a bland, "Oh, well, it doesn't really matter, we all think the same" or never talked about because it's both vulgar and not really of as much consequence as having the correct opinion of "lawn art" or Andrew Lloyd Webber. This mindset may have helped his delightful essays, but I don't think it helped his fiction.

Most good fiction has a moral component so what a character thinks about the big things does matter and of course it goes without saying that, in even the most frivolous fiction, what the character thinks about other characters or the silly mess he's gotten himself into matters, but we don't go to fiction for philosophy, we go for a story. Things have to happen, it's better if they happen to well-rounded people we can remember afterward, and the things should mostly make sense. If an author is more interested in his characters' philosophies than in anything else about them, he's probably not going to flesh them out as much for the reader. If an author is mostly interested in contrasting how different characters think or in the interesting idea he had about a social situation or some such, he may get careless about details in his rush to get to the parts that interest him. In that flesh-out and in some of those details lie much of the appeal of the story we came for; in other of the details are the shots of realism necessary for us to buy the improbable bits. You can't use hand-wavium to explain away a major social revolution happening in a matter of a few weeks; it's not even a good way to go from no romance to romance.

But I'm just thinking out loud here. I don't really know why I find Chesterton's fiction less satisfying than you'd think I would. He had some good ideas, but the execution left something to be desired, which I can't pin down.

Never mind, I still have his nonfiction to love and, having joined the Church he loved, I can picture him in Heaven (or speeding his way through purgatory to get there, but I like to think he's St. Gilbert, however unofficially), and ready to pray for me or you if we ask. And if any Chesterton fans want to defend his fiction to me by pointing to the endurance of Father Brown or saying that The Man Who Was Thursday has never been out of print (as I think I heard was the case) or even demanding whether I can do better, I shall only take off my hat to that person and bow with a flourish. Or so I would do if I were male. Ladies do not remove their hats for such reason; perhaps I'll curtsy and say "touch'e", which sexually confused response [sings "I'm a happy fella-girly"] should give the speaker enough pause that I can wander off and find a book to read.

Incidentally, if this notion that caring more about what characters think than what they do causes trouble in fiction-writing is correct and if that was a problem of Chesterton's, then the Chesterton book I'm currently reading, The Ball and the Cross, may prove an exception. The two main characters are a committed atheist and a believing Catholic who keep trying to have a duel and keep getting interrupted. I'm not far in, but I think caring more about what the characters think than what they do may work for him in this one, since the whole point of the story is the clash of genuine beliefs.

Apropos of Nothing

Here's a quote from that loveable old atheist, Florence King:

Now, a word to Catholics who would follow the dictates of their consciences instead of the dictates of the Vatican.

Congratulations, you're Protestant.

She remarks elsewhere that she's been irritable ever since Vatican II.

Chesterton on Hobbies

I read G. K. Chesterton's autobiography a few weeks ago and was struck by, among other things (it is Chesterton after all), his comments early in the book on hobbies.

Chesterton talks about his father, who was known outside the home as a reliable, ordinary businessmen but wh was at home a man of many talents and loads of hobbies. ("It was a very good first lesson in what is also the last lesson of life; that in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside.") This leads him to talk about hobbies:

"A hobby is not a holiday. It is not merely a momentary relaxation
necessary to the renewal of work; and in this respect it must be sharply
distinguished from much that is called sport....It is not merely taking
exercise; it is doing work. It is not merely exercising the body instead of the
mind, an excellent but now largely a recognised thing. It is exercising the rest of the mind; now an almost neglected thing."

[emphasis in that last sentence mine]

The outside world limits us; our hobbies expand us. Our hobbies let us use the rest of our mind, the parts that our job usually doesn't, that the world--perhaps especially the modern world--doesn't care if we have or not.

Chesterton also says that seeing his father at work on his hobbies, and especially on Chesterton's beloved toy theater, made a great difference in his life--not least that he learned to love seeing human hands engaged in doing and making. If the father had been only a businessman, he would have seemed smaller in his son's eyes.

"And this experience has made me profoundly sceptical of all the modern talk
about the necessary dullness of domesticity; and the degrading drudgery that
only has to make puddings and pies. Only to make things! There is no greater
thing to be said of God Himself than that He makes things."

And being Chesterton, of course he has more to say and it is interesting. The next few pages move into buying things versus making them, how children play, moral/moralizing literature and adult cynicism, wondrous reality and imaginative play, and a great deal more. This is the second chapter of the autobiography and quite the best one in it; read it for yourself if you have the chance. Some craftster types might like another line: "I wish we did not have to fritter away on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting coloured tinsel upon them." I've loved books and stories too much to quite agree, but I'm on board with the general point; considering Chesterton was himself a great reader, I don't think he'd have wholly given up literature for his cardboard figures, although I can't say for the production of literature.


Anyhow, can there be any doubt that if Chesterton were writing today he'd have something to say about this news item on a new surgical technique which "whittles" thumbs down to better fit i-Phones and other handheld devices. We do not fit the machines that are supposed to serve us, so we alter ourselves to fit the machine, rather than altering the machine. It's like women who, rather than having clothes made to fit their bodies, agonize year after year, trying to make their bodies fit the clothes. Or worse, and more precisely, the women we read about a year or so ago who were having surgery on their toes so they could wear fashionable pointy-toed high heels. Oh what a brave new world we are making.

Update: The news item I linked above is apparently false. I was not familiar with the source and was taken in. My apologies. However, as the other examples I mentioned are true, I believe my larger point stands.

(Catholic) Quote of the Quarter

"Milque-toast Catholicism does not produce milque-toast Catholics, it produces non-Catholics."

(Thomas E. Woods, EWTN Live, May 2007)



Oh so true. But never let it be said that I'm friendly only to Catholics. Here's a secular quote everyone can enjoy:

"Lemme tell ya something, Webster. Grammar am for people who can't think for myself. Understanded me?" (Bucky Katt, Get Fuzzy)

A Little More Food for Thought, Offered Almost Without Comment

Looking for something else, I came across EWTN's Christ in the City, 2006, a series of talks by Father George Rutler. One of the episodes is about art and here's a bit that struck me:

"Every inspiration that is blocked by pride is an offense
against God. There are incalculable numbers of great works of art that never
were produced because of human pride--fear of criticism, the domination of the
ego which wanted to impose one's own desires rather than serve a higher truth."
(Father George Rutler)

Katherine Patterson, a novelist who deserves to be better known among adult readers, has an interesting line in her book Come Sing, Jimmy Jo. The eponymous protagonist comes from a family that performs mountain music and, although he has the family gift in spades, he will only sing at home because of his shyness. Early in the book his grandmother tries to convince him he should sing for others, because (I don't own the book, so this is from my middle-aged brain's memory)

"God doesn't give private gifts."

Quote of the Day

In truth, there is often more independence of mind to be found among those who care most for tradition and have conservative views about society, than among professional progressives adhering to their 'line'. (A. L. Rowse, William Shakespeare: A Biography)

Best Quote and Strangest Thing

Best Quote I've Seen Lately:

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were
faced with the practice of "suttee" - the tradition of burning widows on the
funeral pyres of their husbands. Gen. Sir Charles Napier was impeccably
multicultural:
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We
also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their
necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will
build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow
ours."

(Mark Steyn column 3/25/06)

Strangest Thing I've Seen Today:

McCall's 4103. It's a children's pattern for a gi, basic pull-on pants, and what looks for all the world like a scrub top. The gi I understand--lots of children take karate or other martial arts classes--and a child could wear the pants just about anywhere, but how many children need scrubs? And why is McCall's catering to the niche market of children hospital workers when the company doesn't currently carry so much as one pattern for men's basic fly-front, zippered pants?

Some Good Lines I've Heard Or Read This Past Month Or So

"The conservative man knows our society needs good mothers way more than it needs hot movie stars who don't sag in their thirties." (Tim Graham)


"... f***ing with the PTA in Japan is like f***ing with The Sopranos." (Azrael, of I Am a Japanese Schoolteacher)


"If I am truly unbiased [as a journalist], then I need to get used to this one simple fact; that the untold story, might in fact, be a positive one." (Margaret Freidenauer, embedded reporter)


"If you don't look good on wood, you shouldn't become a Christian. This [pointing to crucifix] is not for sissies." (Michael Cumbie, Catholic evangelist)


"While he needed a sophisticated basic education to be Shakespeare, the author of the plays, a university training, at least with regard to medicine, would have diminished rather than enhanced his work....As Orwell pointed out, it takes effort and determination to see what is in front of one’s face. Among the efforts required is the discarding of the lenses of excessive or bogus theorizing. When it comes to our attempts to understand the phenomena of our own society, I cannot help but wonder how many of us are in the grip of theories that are the equivalent of Hall’s Galenical theory, and whether as a result we do not prescribe the legislative equivalents of human skull, mummy dust, and jaw of pike." (Theodore Dalrymple--if this doesn't make sense, here's the rest for context )


"Money can do a lot of things - but it cannot help reconcile you to your own death." (Umberto Eco)

Also Seen Around The Corner

"We are in danger of forgetting that waiting comes before wanting"

An excellent little essay about our cultural disconnectedness and "me,me,me,now,now,now" attitude (my term, not the author's). Here's a quote:

States exist by reason of power. Societies exist through a
shared moral code and a sense of collective responsibility. The symbols of
states are palaces and parliaments. The institutions of society are families,
neighbourhoods, communities and schools.

For some years now we have been living under the illusion
that you can have a state without a society, politics without politeness,
civilisation without civility. You can’t.

Read the rest for yourself.

*** *** ***

"The Party of Sam's Club"

Probably only worth reading if you have an interest in the future of the Republican party. As for me, I vote Republican these days, but I'm not particularly attached to it and might well join a Conservative party should the Republicans split. This article has a lot--almost too much--to think about, though, and I might read it again.

*** *** ***

Homemade Flamethrower.

Cool, yes, but using my authorities as a civilizer of mankind (I believe women are the civilizers of the species and exist to keep men and children from having fun), I have already declared that Uncle Pookie is not allowed to build one. Actually, I believe there was some incident involving hose, a sprinkler, and gasoline once, but that was before I knew him and had wifely powers.

*** *** ***

Who was Che?

This link is not to a complete article, but only to a teaser portion for the print magazine. But here's how it answers the above question:

He was an Argentinian revolutionary who served as Castro's primary
thug. He was especially infamous for presiding over summary executions at La
Cabaña, the fortress that was his abattoir. He liked to administer the coup de
grâce, the bullet to the back of the neck. And he loved to parade people past El
Paredón, the reddened wall against which so many innocents were killed.
Furthermore, he established the labor-camp system in which countless citizens —
dissidents, democrats, artists, homosexuals — would suffer and die. This is the
Cuban gulag.

That's worth remembering every time you see a Che tee-shirt or poster. (It's also worth posting twice.)

Quote of the Day

"Any time you catch yourself thinking that your life might be empty and
pointless, just meditate for a minute or two on the concept "Paris Hilton fan."
That should set you straight." (John Derbyshire)

A Moment with Chesterton (Who Was Married)

"...the wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and the princess lived happily ever afterwards: and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other." (G. K. Chesterton)

Today's Chesterton Quote

There's not enough Chesterton around here, so I've dug into my collection of quotes and come up with this:

Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and
more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes
called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of
the equality of men.

(G. K. Chesterton, Heretics)

Quote of Today

It is from Jonah Goldberg's column (available at NRO):

'Even if the new Spartanism of Peter Singer constituted the better argument,
for example, I’d still rather live in a society of unsophisticated people who
dogmatically believe that leaving defective babies on a hillside is wrong than
in an "enlightened" society that constantly revisits the issue given "new
facts."'

Something to Keep in Mind

Jonah Goldberg made a comment on The Corner this morning that bears repeating:

"Feeling passionately about something -- contrary to the popular culture's version of politics -- doesn't prove you have principles. It proves you're excitable and leaves open the possibility you have principles."

Quote of the Day--Or Week Or Month

"Abandon self-control and you will soon be controlled by someone or something else."
(Mark Shea)