(Display Name not set)January 2007 Archives

I was talking last night to a new friend and co-worker, a black woman, about my secret love of Moon Pies, which is a Southern thing (she is not a native Southerner, but rather a Midwesterner). When I mentioned how much I adore greens -- mustards, turnips, collards -- she gasped. She said she had no idea white people ate them.

Really? , I said. I had never heard of greens being strictly a black thing. Then again, I grew up in the rural South. She was genuinely taken aback to hear this. She asked me, "How do you cook them?" I said I cook them down with salt pork, and eat them with cornbread. She was visibly startled, and kept saying, very sweetly, how she'd never in all her life heard of white people eating greens.

When I got home and mentioned this to my wife (who doesn't eat greens), she said that it might be a Texas vs. the South thing. My wife, a Texas native who grew up in Dallas, said white people around here really don't eat greens. I can't help wondering if that's true in rural Texas. Or are greens strictly something that poor and working-class Southerners, black and white, eat? I will say that when I was growing up in Louisiana, greens were something our parents (most of whom had grown up in the Depression or just after it) ate, but that we -- white kids, I mean -- thought were awful. I didn't start eating them until I was an adult, and now a mess of turnips is one of my favorite things. So I'm wondering if greens-eating is a legacy of the culture of the poor rural South, and it was taken north by African-Americans who migrated there, whose descendants may not realize that down South, eating greens is not a racial thing, but a class thing. Or was. Who knows? Do you?

Man, I'm hungry now.

No, says Mickey Kaus, merely opportunistic.

UPDATE: It doesn't matter to me if Hagel is being opportunistic. So what? He's saying the right things now, and frankly, he's the only Republican I have the least interest in voting for in 2008 (there are no Democrats). I'd bet that the Iraq situation, and the general international situation, is going to be so bad by year's end that we'll be looking for a man like Hagel to get us out of it and to set a new course in US foreign policy. Thing is, absent a profound change of heart on the part of the GOP rank-and-file primary voters -- and it could happen -- he's got a ghost of a chance for the Republican nomination. Jim Pinkerton suggests that Hagel would be a big hit with independents, and might consider an independent run for the White House. I think a Hagel-Webb ticket could pull enough disaffected Republicans, conservative Democrats and independents to whip anybody the GOP or the Dems are likely to nominate.

Julie "Bible Girl" Lyons, at it again:

One of us has got to be crazy.

One of us has got to be deluded, dumb and blind.

It is so very daring to examine the delicate matter of bestiality, to apply one’s filmic aesthetic to the subject of men having sex with Arabian stallions.

Or, it’s another example of being drawn to depravity like flies to rot.

The human body is an exquisitely beautiful machine, so let’s peel back the layers of cadavers acquired through mysterious means and celebrate the glory of animal flesh.

Or, it’s yet another way to defile, degrade and dehumanize the crowning achievement of creation — man.

Rape is real, it’s awful and it even happens to kids. So let’s use a 12-year-old girl to tastefully convey the terrible reality of sexual violence.

Or, it’s foolish parents and greedy studios exploiting a child and unwittingly tapping into spiritual forces of evil that will forever haunt everyone who took part in this misbegotten project.

Most pornography is harmless; it’s just pictures of the stuff we fantasize about anyway. Plus, I’ve heard of marriages that were saved through porn.

Or, it’s evidence that we’re monumentally bored with sex, that it takes more and more provocation to stir the faintest arousal. And equating one’s spouse with a piece of meat? Now that’s what I call romance.

One day our children will be thrust into a harsh and ugly world. Better to expose them gradually to all the varieties of degradation through books, film and the Internet so they’ll be prepared for what awaits them.

Or, teach them they can’t handle certain kinds of knowledge without being degraded themselves and give them the tools to make intelligent choices that preserve the purity of conscience.

Enough.

I know I’ve had enough.

One of us has got to be crazy.

Read the whole thing. Julie Lyons is not crazy. She's a voice of sanity in a culture that has lost its mind. This is a powerful column about the fragility of the human conscience, and especially the sacred responsibility parents have to nurture and protect and build up the consciences of their children. Julie has a seven-year-old son:

In certain moments of melancholy, I say to myself that if I accomplish nothing else in this world, I can take comfort in knowing that I played a role in giving life to this little boy, and that my husband and I did our very best to nurture and protect this single human soul.

Funny how the presence of a child instantly and irreversibly strips away layers of selfishness.

Amen and amen.

Did you know that Johnny Cash once upon a time recorded a children's album? Sure did. We got it for Christmas. My wife just phoned as she was driving with Lucas, who turned three last week, in the back seat. She called to say ixnay on the ohhnycashja around Lucas. One of the songs was about a bear hunter, and it sparked the following exchange from the back seat:

"Did he kill the Daddy bear?"

"No."

"Did he kill the Mommy bear?"

"No."

"Did he kill the baby bears?"

"No, honey."

"Did the bears he killed have babies in their tummy?"

On and on like this. Raffi, anyone?

For his next trick, Gunther von Hagens, creator of the Body Worlds traveling exhibit, is contemplating a doozy: displaying flayed corpses having sex. They'll call this necrophilic display "education" and "science," and they'll call anybody who objects a "prude" and a "fundamentalist."

Polls consistently show that two-thirds of Americans oppose the war in Iraq. That number would have to include a significant number of independents and a lesser but still significant number of conservatives. Let's say you and your comrades were putting...

Peggy Noonan today pens a paean to Sen. Chuck Hagel for having the guts to take a difficult stand on the Iraq War. Excerpt:We all complain, and with justice, about the falseness of much that is said in Washington, and...

In his discussion of the D'Souza book, Mark Shea throws a bomb that no Christian can fail to take seriously:The question I find myself asking, in light of biblical revelation, is this: which side of the conflict between the post-Christian...

I recently changed jobs within the editorial department of my newspaper, chiefly to get more time for myself to spend with family in the evenings, and so I could finally have the time for activities at church and elsewhere --...

A reader just wrote to say that he liked my book and identified with a lot of the ideas there, but he was so sick and tired of me criticizing President Bush over the war that he no longer thought...

David Brooks's column today (behind Times firewall) is a hard slap. Excerpt:Iraq is at the beginning of a civil war fought using the tactics of genocide, and it has all the conditions to get much worse. As a Newsweek correspondent,...

Your Working Boy will be a panel guest on Fox News Channel's "Live Desk," round about 1:30 Eastern/12:30 central. Tune in to see how funny lookin' I am when my lips are moving. Watch for me to work in an...

"Why were you elected? If you want a safe job, go sell shoes." -- Sen. Chuck Hagel, lighting into his fellow GOP members of the Foreign Relations committee for opposing the president's war plan, but not being willing to vote...

What'd you htink of the president's speech? He was clearly subdued, but not fatigued, as he appeared in his recent televised Iraq address. What a long, long way he's come from his first SOTU, in 2002, with 84 percent approval...

I hate this convention of SOTU addresses in which the president has to put heroes and other worthies in the audience to call the public's attention to their goodness, as part of the speech. Good grief, could you imagine Churchill...

Part Two of Bible Girl's report on how anti-Christian hysteria instigated in part by the state attorney general drove a public controversy in Wisconsin. Whenever anyone in this country compares Evangelicals to the Taliban, they reveal themselves to be completely...

In a New York Sun essay today, Israeli historian Benny Morris recalls this scene from the Nazi Holocaust, in a quote from Daniel Mendelsohn's recent book. It took place in Poland:"A terrible episode happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and...

Britain's Telegraph reports on a leaked document from the Burmese military junta in which the junta proposes to wipe out Christianity in Burma. Excerpt:The military regime in Burma is intent on wiping out Christianity in the country, according to claims...

Finally succumbed to the buzz and watched "24" the other night. I'm with Clark Stooksbury: there's not much to it. I was startled and intrigued that there is actually a TV show in which Muslims are depicted as terrorists (but...

Last night at bedtime, I pulled off my bookshelf "Things Worth Fighting For," a collection of Michael Kelly's journalism, published after he died in a Humvee crash in Baghdad. He was the first American journalist killed in the Iraq War....

Pat Buchanan sympathizes with Maliki, for an entirely understandable reason:And consider what it is we are asking Maliki to do. We want him to use Sunni and Kurdish brigades of the Iraqi Army, in concert with the U.S. Army, to...

Writing in the Times of London, Simon Jenkins says that as we slip further and further into our individual pods, we're risking more than we know. Excerpt:People who hog their screens and no longer practise de Tocqueville’s “habit of association”...

I was reading one of the threads below, and couldn't believe how pleasant it was. Then it hit me: we'd posted about eight or nine posts without anyone making a personal attack or throwing some sort of bomb. It's a...

This could hardly be a timelier book. More and more people are coming to the realization that the materialism, the rootlessness, and the hedonism of this consumer's paradise we've built for ourselves are taking America down a dead-end road. E.F....

Thoughts from an L.A. Times blogger on "American Idol":If there is one message to take away from the audition episodes of the most powerful show in the history of television, it is this: Do not trust your friends!The thrill of...

I must be the only person left in America who has never seen "American Idol." Last night I caught a few minutes of it. I watched some schlub in the tryouts talking about how great she was, and how her...

When I was in college, I noticed something annoying: that the writers and thinkers throughout history that seemed wisest about life and how to live it were men who believed in God. They didn't believe in God in the same...

I'm working on an essay about wealth and happiness now, which I'll post a link to later after it's published in the Dallas Morning News. The most interesting thing about recent social science findings is how they empirically vindicate the...

Bruce Bartlett, who initially supported the Iraq War, but later showed himself to be a BIG OL' STINKIN' FAKE CONSERVATIVE by writing a book calling the Bush Administration out for betraying conservative principles with its stewardship of the economy, says...

Andrew Sullivan publishes a powerful poem he received from a US Marine in Anbar. It's about how impossible it is to escape the dehumanizing effect of war. Paul Fussell writes about this with anger undimmed by the passage of time...

Howard Fineman in Newsweek says Iraq is realigning US politics , with the momentum moving in Washington to the antiwar left. I'm hoping that the antiwar Right can get its act together, because this country does not need MoveOn.org and...

And now for something completely different.Back in November, chef Mark Bittmann wrote a column in the NYT about how someone at the Sullivan Street Bakery had stumbled upon an insanely simple recipe for baking bread at home that solved the...

I can't quite get out of my head the problem of Authority in the contemporary age. As Rieff and others have explained, for various reasons we live in a place and time in which authority has devolved to the individual....

Peggy Noonan was prepared to support the surge ... until she heard Bush's speech.The most interesting part of her column is not her critique of the president, but her observing that a collapse of our authority and policy in Baghdad...

Pat Buchanan says that it doesn't make sense that Bush would describe, as he did in his speech the other night, the apocalyptic consequences if the US failed in Iraq, and then commit only a paltry number of new troops...

Here's an audio link to the commentary I delivered yesterday on NPR's "All Things Considered." After coming home late Wednesday night from the office, where the editorial board watched the Bush speech, I found I was so restless over the...

Here's the latest from the scandal rocking the Catholic Church in Poland.The good news: the Polish bishops have voted to undertake a full investigation of the role clergy may have played in collaborating with the communist authorities.The bad news: they're...

Bruce Bartlett blogs behind the Times Select firewall, so I hope you can read this item in its entirety. If you can't, here's an excerpt:One of the most frustrating things about being a conservative these days is suffering from both...

This is funny, but it's not ha-ha funny: Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich say New York City's recovery has lessons for fixing Baghdad. Daniel Larison addressed this point a day or so ago, writing:Yes, I think we all remember when...

From a piece in today's NYTimes:He put it far more bluntly when leaders of Congress visited the White House earlier on Wednesday. “I said to Maliki this has to work or you’re out,” the president told the Congressional leaders, according...

Steve Sailer's cover story in The American Conservative raises some provocative questions. He notes that we prize "diversity" in this culture, but the more diverse a neighborhood is, the less real community it has. He quotes Robert Putnam, the Harvard...

Writing in the L.A. Times, neocon war supporter Max Boot says that if we lose the war in Iraq (which he says seems "likely, though not inevitable"), there will be a mythology arising on the Right that blames the media...

Just did a conference call with Dan Bartlett of the White House, who was advancing Bush's speech tonight. He told us, basically, that Bush is going to get real tough with Prime Minister Maliki, and that the president would be...

Powerful stuff on the First Things blog regarding the Wielgus scandal. I had not realized that Abp Wielgus, in his resignation, told the congregation that he had come clean to the Pope before -- before -- he accepted the promotion...

This is the only thing I remember from this morning's paper, this story that makes you want to scream with rage:Eight people have been found dead since Jan. 1, seven of them shooting victims, with the most recent being a...

Next week President Bush will announce plans to deploy 20,000 additional troops to Baghdad. I hope he walks right into a buzzsaw. Even neocon Charles Krauthammer, who has backed the Iraq war to the hilt, sees the uselessness of this...

Did you watch Saddam's hanging on video? I did. It meant nothing to me, not really. But then again, I'm not an Iraqi Shiite. I'm not an Iraqi Sunni. I'm not an Arab Muslim. But insofar as their reaction(s) affect...

A reader writes:Can a crunchy con love Louis Vuitton? Are luxury goods consistent with a crunchy con lifestyle? I am a future homeschooling, NFP-using, farmers' market-going SAHM and self-professed crunchy con who was the recipient of a very nice Louis...

The January issue of Chronicles turned up in my office over the holiday break, and in it I found an appreciative review of Roger Scruton's new memoir. The review's author, Derek Turner, penned a paragraph that stayed with me:Scruton is...

The Rev. Pat Robertson says God told him there would be mass killings in the US at the hands of terrorists this year:"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700...

I can't tell if this NYT op-ed piece is behind the TimesSelect firewall or not, but I sure hope you can read it. It's by a man writing about the pre-Columbian tribes of what is now Mexico and the United...

Reading the lively thread below on the "End is Near" post -- which starts by noting how shocked a NYTimes editorialist was to go to a middle-school pageant recently and see the little girls simulating intercourse while dancing -- I...

It must be. Someone on the New York Times editorial board has discovered that the sexual revolution the Times ballyhooes at every possible turn has some disconcerting effects on kids today. Excerpt:It’s hard to write this without sounding like a...