December 2006 Archives

Just got in from Louisiana. Somebody should invent the perfect cocktail to slurp to decompress after 7 1/2 hours in a minivan with two little boys. Maybe that somebody should be me.

We made sandwiches and stuff for the road, so we didn't have to stop for food, but we did have to stop to go to the bathroom. I've come to realize why chain restaurants (e.g., Cracker Barrel, Burger King) are the place to stop for roadtrip tee-tee breaks involving little kids. Because unlike the French Market gas station/mini-mart in Natchitoches, La., just off the exit 138 from I-49, they don't put trashy French tickler machines above the urinals, forcing dad to order his seven-year-old to keep his head down and not look up. And unlike the management of that Chevron gas station/mini-mart on the south loop exit in Shreveport, Cracker Barrel managers tend to paint over or scrape off obscene graffiti on the men's room walls, which put dad in a bad spot vis-a-vis the seven-year-old.

So there.

Two days ago, I stood in a winter garden with an onion sack full of turnip roots and greens, and a grocery bag full of mustard greens, all of which I'd just pulled or picked, and talked with the farmer about the time the UFO chased him and his wife. It didn't occur to me until later that this was an odd conversation to have. Louisiana can seem so hopeless and beat-up and dismal much of the time, but there sure are a lot of wonderful people there. I drove through Avoyelles Parish this morning listening to Cajun music on the radio, with the DJ speaking Cajun French in an accent so thick I could hardly make it out, and I thought, "Nowhere else but here, baby." It was a happy feeling.

Well, we're worn out from all the traveling, so it's a quiet New Year's Eve here. The boys are in bed, the baby is in her bassinet, and Julie and I just popped open a bottle of ice-cold Veuve Clicquot, because we know that we're too tired to make it till midnight. We're going to sit down by the fire in a few minutes and chill. Just so you know what a fashion plate I am, I'm wearing the Nesting Uniform, a.k.a. a Crunchy-Con shalwar kameez (a faded L.L. Bean tartan nightshirt, with clashing plaid pajama pants). I'm telling you, it doesn't get more sophisticated than that around here. Woo.

The best thing that happened to me this year was the birth of my daughter, Nora Lucia. The second-best thing that happened was the publication of "Crunchy Cons," which has helped me make a lot of new friends. Funny, but the bad stuff escapes me right this moment. Happy New Year to you all, and thanks for reading. As Miss Ella once asked, "What are you doing New Year's Eve?" Let us know below.

This will be my last post for a day or so. I'm still down in Louisiana, but there are terrible thunderstorms, and a tornado warning has been issued for a nearby town. Probably time to shut down the laptop until I get back to Dallas tomorrow night. But before I sign off, I wanted to take a moment to mention how terrific the new Mars Hill Audio Journal is. MHAJ is now available in MP3 format, so subscribers can download it straight into their iPods (it's also available in older formats). Once you get into Mars Hill, it quickly becomes indispensable for serious Christians who need to understand the intersection of faith and culture. I e-mailed a friend last night to tell him how terrific the new MHAJ is, and he responded by saying that he's been a subscriber since the beginning, "and it keeps getting better and better." (For a free downloadable sampling of the bimonthly MHAJ, go here.)

I've listened twice to host Ken Myers' 25-minute piece on Philip Rieff, which includes extensive quotes from philosopher Stephen Gardner, and I expect to listen to it three or four more times to fully mine its riches. Here, in short, is its message. Rieff first made his name as an interpreter of Sigmund Freud, and you first have to understand how revolutionary Freud was to grasp how deep Rieff's insights into the culture of modernity were. Freud grasped that the power of religion and tradition to bind human behavior had fatally weakened. Generally speaking, he posited as its replacement the gratification of desire, especially sexual desire, as the telos, the highest goal, of society. What Freud, who was fairly conservative by the standards of the day, didn't foresee was that he was laying the basis for what Rieff labeled "anti-culture." If culture is that systems of symbols and values that serve to bind human action and channel savage passions and impulses into socially constructive ends, then a culture that prizes the fulfillment of desires -- and not merely socially approved desires, but individual desires -- is destructive of the idea of culture in principle.

Moreover, in a culture (anti-culture) that locates human identity and dignity in an individual's desires, to disapprove of those desires is in some deeply felt way to negate the dignity of that individual. People in such a culture will tend to take it personally if their desires are criticized. Rieff predicted decades ago that the culture of the future -- the one we're living in now, as a matter of fact -- would be marked by non-judgmentalism, emotionalism, and a cultural imperative to help people live as they wish to live (versus how they "ought," which is a meaningless concept in such a culture) without feeling bad about it. The therapeutic culture.

I listened twice to the Rieff presentation on my iPod on the drive down here, and it's been much on my mind since. Rieff's insights dovetail perfectly with Alasdair MacIntyre's diagnosis of our cultural fragmentation and the possibly terminal nature of it (how, MacIntyre asks, can we hope to live in a coherent and strong culture when we have come to comprehend the world emotionally, thereby denying an objective, commonly held authority to bind and loose?). Have we gone past a situation in which "the best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with passionate intensity," into a situation in which even if the best had conviction, it is very, very difficult to appeal to the masses on the basis of those conditions. I mean, we live in a media and commercial culture in which the fulfillment of individual desire is considered the highest possible goal. The propaganda that comes at people every single day seeks to detach them from any tradition and authority save for the Almighty Self (I am reminded of what a teacher I know who is an audiophile said recently about how his experience in a public school classroom has caused him to despise rap music: the aggressive sexuality, the violence, the valorization of the self and its own lawless desires that are celebrated in rap music are destroying the civilized community within the school, making learning -- key to the civilizing process -- impossible). MacIntyre believes that we might well be into a new Dark Age, in which people who believe in the virtues withdraw into communities within which those virtues make sense, and can be lived. I incline to his view. A gloomy thought, but it's a gloomy day outside.

Anyway, insofar as the problem of morality, culture and the common good is a central one in our time, MHAJ helps you think deeply about it, and is therefore an indispensable tool. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

Well, he certainly had it coming. I can't pity him. Though I'm generally opposed to the death penalty, there was absolutely no doubt of his guilt, nor of the enormity of his crimes. The Catholic Church teaches that the death penalty is permissible if there are no bloodless ways of protecting society from the criminal. Given Saddam's notoriety, one doubts that anything short of execution would have been sufficient to protect Iraqi society from his living presence (though it should be noted that the Vatican denounced the execution)tnr.. I remember reading lots of accounts of ordinary Iraqis being terrified, even after Saddam's capture, that he would return. The monster is now dead.

If being opposed to the death penalty but blase about the hanging of Saddam makes me a hypocrite, that's a hypocristy I can live with. I think Marty Peretz, in successive posts has some apt words from the prissiness of the Vatican, the UN and others, showing such concerns about Saddam's execution.

That said, it is cruelly poignant to reflect on the abused child who grew up to become one of the 20th century's most infamous mass murderers. Read this long post. As the poet wrote, "Man hands on misery to man..."

Went to a fun party at a hunting camp down by the creek tonight. Met a woman there who makes pinatas. She made one this year of the Baby Jesus.

People were startled. Can you imagine, someone said, beating the Baby Jesus at a Christmas party till he bursts?

"Well," she explained, "people love Dora the Explorer, but they like their Dora the Explorer pinatas too."

Hmm.

I also heard a story about an impromptu field hysterectomy of a cow whose uterus had fallen out, and a story about a difficult sex change at the local nuclear plant. I ate a bowl of something called "Sex in a Pot" that involved mustard greens and crowder peas. And drank two Abita Christmas ales. Ah, Louisiana...

Greetings from St. Francisville, Louisiana, my hometown. I'm down here visiting my family for a few days. I haven't been here for seven or eight months, so my folks warned me not to be too shocked when I saw the...

(That was the title of a novel by Updike, which I didn't read, but given the title, who did?)I have very few memories of the Ford Administration, because I was six years old when he became president. I remember watching...

Well, the boys are in front of the fire playing with their loot, Julie and Nora went back to bed, and I'd be there too if there weren't a danger that we'd sleep straight through church later this morning. Oh,...

Somebody needs to work on their irony-detecting chops. I was agreeing with VDH, man....

Ha ha ha! Thank you, James Urbaniak....

Though I agree with Rep. Virgil Goode that it's a smart idea to sharply reduce immigration from Islamic countries, at least at the present difficult time, I find appalling his behavior toward Muslim convert Keith Ellison's intention to use the...

The other day I blogged about a meeting the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News had with leaders in the local Muslim community. I described the Muslims as defensive and evasive. Mohamed Elmougy, who led the group, wrote a...

For those who feel enlightened or interested by this week's long combox exchange with Mohamed "Abu Humaid" Elibiary, I invite you to take a look at this epistolary back and forth between ME and me. See which of us makes...

[Warning: Spoilers follow.]Well, I finally got to see "Apocalypto" yesterday, and let me start by saying that I was wrong about the movie in my earlier comments here. It is a stunning film, and I heartily recommend it to those...

If this doesn't beat all: Hispanic groups are calling the handful of US raids on workplaces capturing illegal immigrants engaged in ID theft and other document fraud reminiscent of Nazi Germany:"This unfortunately reminds me of when Hitler began rounding up...

Just had a fascinating hour-long interview with Texas oil magnate T. Boone Pickens, who has been active for years in Republican politics (he's backing Rudolph Giuliani's presidential run in 2008). Among the things we discussed was global warming. He said...

I'm sitting here at my desk just now. Phone rings. It's my wife. She's at the bookstore buying Christmas presents."I'm embarrassed to admit this, but what's the name of the guy who wrote 'A Confederacy of Dunces'?"You see what I...

Victor Davis Hanson today:There is still another reason for the rise of Islamists: They sense a new hesitation in the West. We appear to them paralyzed over oil prices and supplies and fears of terrorism. And so they have also...

Turns out that George W. Bush was wrong: there are, in fact, jobs that Americans will do ... if you pay them a decent wage. Seems that Swift & Co., after having been popped by the feds and having much...

Daniel Finkelstein of the Times of London is running a "Chuck Colson Award" contest, so named because he once passed Chuck Colson in the street. He writes:I am looking for all contact - spotting in the street yesterday, autograph collected...

NR's Rich Lowry, on how conservatives believing our own biases regarding the mainstream media only hurt ourselves:The “good news” that conservatives have accused the media of not reporting has generally been pretty weak. The Iraqi elections were indeed major accomplishments....

Via Mark Shea, here's a chilling account by Tom Hoopes, who writes:When I agreed to do a story about demonic activity, possession, and exorcism for Crisis, I thought it would be fun—a spooky thrill. I’d write the article, warn about...

This is a pretty neat animated video about Intelligent Design. Still, you think about Blake's tyger, and you wonder...(In case you wonder, I believe God created life on earth, but it doesn't bother me to think He did it through...

Mohamed Elmougy, the longtime Dallas Muslim leader who headed the delegation that came into see us at the paper the other day, did not like my blog recollection of that meeting. He e-mails:One would have hoped that you would at...

Read this. Savor it. Pass it on to everyone you know....

Heard about the "Body Worlds" exhibit, in which actual eviscerated and dissected human bodies are turned into a plastic-like substance, then posed and exhibited for museum crowds? It's here in Dallas now, and I asked two smart guys to go...

I love the Despair.com guys -- and their DIY Demotivator poster has got to be one of the best time-wasters ever!...

This year marks my first Christmas season as an Orthodox Christian. That means it's the first year I've observed the Nativity fast, and boy oh boy, have I ever whimpered through it (and backslidden too). Orthodox Christians deny themselves the...

Regarding the burgeoning civil war among the Palestinians, Shmuel Rosner notes that the West, in backing the elected PA president Mahmoud Abbas over the elected Hamas parliamentary government, the West is having to pretend to believe that the "moderates" of...

Ross has some thoughts about that Margery Eagan column I posted the other day, talking about how the Needham, Mass., school quit publishing the honor roll for the sake of lessening pressure on kids to succeed. The fear there was...

SNAP is asking the Baptist General Convention of Texas to make public information from its files related to clergy sexual abuse. The Baptist organization is declining. Excerpt:Emily Row, coordinator of leader communication with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, said...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes about the time as a refugee in Holland, that she learned about the Holocaust. She told her sister, also a Somali refugee, what had been done to the Jews of Europe by the Nazis and their...

Lawrence Auster notes this blog's discussion of his idea that the West must separate itself from Islam, for its own self-defense. Earlier, I'd written that I more or less accept his first four premises:1. Islam is a mortal threat to...

A new NPR poll of likely voters conducted by Democrat Stan Greenberg and Republican Glen Bolger finds the country still really cheesed off at the Republican Party, with numbers that look particularly daunting for the 2008 GOP presidential nominee (46...

Who is gullible enough to believe the word of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth? Yesterday the diocese announced the suspension of a priest it had left on duty despite his having admitted to abusing a child in the...

It's good to know that the National Council of Churches has its priorities straight. Ha.This is the kind of thing that gives environmental awareness and activism among Christians a bad name. I do believe that proper stewardship of the natural...

I said if somebody had current news of clerical sex crimes in a church other than the Roman Catholic one, I'd blog it. Here it is. The insurers of a Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia monastery in Blanco, Texas...

Fifteen years ago, I went to midnight Christmas Eve mass in the Netherlands. I don't speak Dutch, so I don't know what precisely was said. But the music -- anti-war pop songs (the world was on the verge of the...

Over at the Catholic World News blog, Diogenes discovers that Bishop Richard Sklba of Milwaukee is dancing with wolves. Good grief. Those poor Canadian martyrs. Like St. Yogi of Berra said, if they were alive, they'd be spinning in their...

Well, this cinematic abortion would NEVER play at the Prytania! Check out what Hollywood once tried to do to the Fifth Gospel:Throughout Dunces' history, studio chiefs have been reluctant to bet on a colloquial story involving an overweight intellectual who...

ISI has issued a 40th anniversary edition of Philip Rieff's landmark book "The Triumph of the Therapeutic." I recently received a copy, and began it last night. Amusingly, I almost instantly regretted it, because I can tell this is an...

Minkoff sends along this Margery Eagan column from the Boston Herald, arguing that we're so afraid that our kids are going to feel bad for failing at something that we're making them crazy. Seems that a high school in Needham,...

This week, Spengler reviews Philip Jenkins's new book about Christianity and the Global South. Excerpt from the review:Westerners have spent the past 400 years in a grand effort to make the world seem orderly and reasonable without, however, quite suppressing...

Writing in the WSJ today, Danielle Crittenden reviews a memoir written by a campus health professional that examines the psychological and biological suffering of young college women who partake of all the liberty that the Sexual Revolution has won for...

Click here to read the full text of that Margaret Talbot article in the New Yorker, re: the hydrocephalic hoochies Bratz, that we were talking about last week. Excerpt:For [Bratz manufacturer] M.G.A., holding on to the six-to-twelve-year-old market -- a...

This time, in Chappaqua, NY. From the NYTimes report:WHEN the New Castle Town Board was brainstorming ways to attract holiday shoppers to downtown Chappaqua, a local merchant suggested lining the two main streets with flags, as is done for Memorial...

UNICEF says India is killing 7,000 unborn female children a day in sex-selective abortion. Pro-lifers rightly see this for the moral horror that it is, but I don't want to hear a single pro-choice feminist or fellow traveler complain about...

Charlotte Allen praises "Apocalypto" -- and tells me that it's nowhere near as violent as the critics say. I have a feeling that on the violence thing, I might well have been had, for reasons that Ross identifies:There are a...

Just to clarify my earlier post, it's not that I opposed a menorah at the airport. Not at all! I would have welcomed one. What I didn't like was the Chabad Lubavitch rabbi threatening to haul the airport into federal...

Like I said the other day when certain readers groused about the attention this blog gives to homosexuality, it is one of the central issues of our time, and the response to it is cleaving the Christian churches. People who...

Religion columnist Cary McMullen has written a generous column about approaching Christmas the crunchy-con way. Thanks, Cary. They need some crunchy-con Christmas right this very minute in Britain, where a new study finds that Childhood is under threat from a...

OK, two bloggers whose opinions on most anything I take seriously have seen "Apocalypto," and really liked it. Here's an excerpt from Daniel Larison's review:Another one of these points, and this is the moral of the story, is pretty clearly...

You're not going to believe this. Turns out that Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the Texas Democrat tapped to head the House Select Intelligence Committee, doesn't know the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and doesn't even know that Hezbollah is. I'm...

The Waco Tribune-Herald, which has the reputation of being an anti-Sloan newspaper, published a very long story over the weekend purporting to tell the story of the quashed book publication -- but did not even mention the fact that the...

Today I arranged for a Muslim writer who contributes sometimes to my section to write a piece about what he teaches his kids about Santa and American Christmas traditions, given that they don't observe the Christian faith. To my surprise,...

A journalist friend passes on this column from today's Washington Post, knowing that it's the kind of thing that drives me nuts about my profession. Deborah Howell, the paper's ombudsman, writes:The Post needs more opinion writers and columnists who are...

I was talking not long ago to a friend down in New Orleans. I asked him what he thought the prospects for the city's comeback were. Grim, he said, and sounded like he believed it. He's probably ready to jump...

We had a friend to dinner last night, and were talking with him about the differences between life in Texas and life in the Northeast, from which both our families moved a few years ago. T. and I agreed that...

Well, well, well. Seems that a Turkish government ministry got caught directly interfering in recent Dutch elections. Brussels Journal has the story:In an e-mail sent to thousands of ethnic Turks in the Netherlands the Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs called...

"Apocalypto" opens today. As I've said, I don't intend to see it. I haven't the stomach or the heart for the kind of graphic savagery that every review has said is front and center in this film. I believe it...

Rachel Balducci, who's in "Crunchy Cons," has a neat blog about family life with boys called Testosterhome -- and it's a finalist in the Best Parenting Blog category on the 2006 Weblog Awards. Go vote for Rachel. Not only is...

Had a drink with Virginia Postrel last night, and in a conversation about media, she said I should check out the link on her blog to this Jay Rosen interview. Rosen talks with John Harris, who left the WaPo (along...

"Dreamgirls" star Jennifer Hudson is being buzzed about for what they say is an incredible performance in the upcoming film version of the musical. She might get a Best Actress Oscar, they say. Don't be too sure: in an interview...

Lawrence Auster has a controversial suggestion on how to deal with Islam: build a metaphorical wall and disengage. He calls this "separationism." Details:We separationists affirm the following: 1. Islam is a mortal threat to our civilization.2. But we cannot destroy...

Not a few conservative Christians are having a fit over the fact that the Vice President's lesbian daughter Mary is preggers. I don't like it any more than most conservative Christians, I'd wager, but what do people want from Dick...

A Protestant friend who saw the video of Father Plushy giving his Barney blessing -- and truly, I don't know what is more irritating, the priest or the full house of ninnies who sat there singing and clapping -- writes...

Well, I've read as much of it as I can manage this afternoon, and it's pretty depressing stuff. The best thing about it is that it shifts the debate away from the administration's blue-sky, open-ended commitment to the Maliki government,...

Meanwhile, in a Slate piece today, Michael Kinsley praises George W. and Laura Bush for keeping their twin girls, Jenna and Barbara, out of the media spotlight, and he agrees that now that the girls are adults, you can't blame...

Here's the full text of the e-mail former Baylor president and chancellor Herbert "Paladin of the Progressive Baptists" Reynolds sent to the editors of book about the Baylor 2012 plan that was to be published by the university, but now...

If there is a children's toy more odious than the slutty Bratz dolls, I don't want to know about it (here's the Wiki entry on them, and here's the official website). They, and their Baby Bratz spinoffs, are hugely popular...

Here's another priest who really would do better moving on to a new career as a massage therapist, or something touchier-and-feelier. Really, if you show up at the end of mass in Barney drag to give your parishioners a "Barney...

Benny Hinn is tired of flying commercial. Benny Hinn wants a Gulfstream jet. Benny Hinn has already taken delivery on a new Gulfstream jet, and wants you to pay for it, because "it is the only we Pastor Benny can...

A couple of years ago here in the Dallas area, a suburban priest named Fr. Bill Richard got caught up in a huge mess. Seems that a group of his parishioners got fed up with his defending the employment of...

David Brooks's column yesterday (firewalled) writes about the mind. Consider, says Brooks, borrowing a metaphor, that the human mind is like a boy riding atop an elephant. The boy is the conscious, rational mind, but the elephant is the instinct....

Via Amy, this from the Orthodox blogger Joshua Trevino's account of the Divine Liturgy at which Pope Benedict was present:Finally, it comes time for Communion. My father asks me if I will go, and I reply that I probably should...

Nora Ephron doesn't think Jim Webb's guilty of bad manners, as G.F. Will does. She thinks it's actually refreshing that someone's not willing to play the Washington game. Excerpt:[Will's sniffy reaction] is truly Washington, in case you wonder what Washington...

As I mentioned on the DMN blog, according to a Waco TV station, former Baylor president Herbert Reynolds is so mad about a forthcoming book having to do with Baylor's 2012 plan that he allegedly sent a smokin' e-mail to...

I'm late to the kerfuffle between Sen.-elect Jim Webb and President Bush. According to the WaPo, this is the exchange they had at a White House event:At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator...

A lesbian reader of the New York Times Magazine, chagrined at a recent cover story exploring the complexities of two gay couples, their children, their turkey baster, and all the resulting foofarah, composed an epistle to the editors to draw...

An Anglophilic RC priest friend writes:"I started reading this with great interest, thinking, "The old Church of England ariseth!" Then I read further...""This" is an account from the Sunday Times of London about how Britain's oldest chain of church bookstores...

I could look at Josh Trevino's photo of Pope Benedict and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew holding hands in triumph for a long time. What an image of hope! As I argued several years ago in a Wall Street Journal essay, when...

Since I announced that I'd become Orthodox, I hear from people here and there who are interested in Orthodoxy. One Dallas-area Evangelical man about my age wrote, and I invited him and his family to join us for worship at...

That's the question Julie Lyons takes up in her two most recent Bible Girl columns. Before we get to the columns, I remind you that Julie, a Pentecostal, is editor of the Dallas Observer, the alt-weekly here in Big D,...