Paglia - I just don't get it

A broken clock is right two times a day:

... who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy ...

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it. More>>>

On this Feast Day of St. Clare let us look at ourselves in the light of faith

The Magnificat today had a snippet from Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, Vatican Homilist from his book, Life in Christ: The Spiritual Message of the Letter to the Romans. I found the homily from which the snippet was used for a chapter in the book at this LINK.

The following are just teasers that I hope get you to go to the link and read his great homily.

We Possess (Are Possessed by) God Through Grace
A wonderful new sentiment, the sentiment of” possession,” grows in us where God’s love is concerned; we possess God’s love or, better still, we are possessed by it.
...

We find ourselves mysteriously caught up in the vortex of the work of the Trinity. We are involved in the incessant motion of reciprocal giving and receiving between the Father and the Son from whose jubilant embrace the Holy Spirit springs, who then brings down to us a spark of this fire of love.
...

A child doesn’t want to be loved separately, with a different and independent love, but he wants to partake in the love, which unites his parents knowing that this has been the source of his life.

And this is the great revelation: the persons of the Trinity love each other with an infinite love and they allow us to partake in this love! They admit us to the banquet of life; the children of men “feast on the abundance of his house,” he gives them to drink “from the river of his delights” (cf. Psalms 36:9). The theological principle that “grace is the beginning of glory” means precisely that we already possess by faith and as “first fruits” what we shall one day possess, face-to-face and fully, in eternal life: namely, God’s love!
...
Therefore I do not need to look outside myself for proof that God loves me; I, myself, am the proof; my being is, in itself, a gift. Looking at ourselves in the light of faith we can say, I exist, therefore I am loved! “Being is being loved” (G. Marcel).


This is awesome, isn't it? Oh, just one thing, hardness of heart will turn your possession in and with God into a possession of the spirit of THIS fallen world. Ah, the consequences of ignoring or trivializing God even in the smallest of life choices can amount to being thrown into a vortex of the work of Satan.


What Is There In Life That Is Working To Overpower Us?
...
St. Paul teaches us how to apply to our everyday life the light of God’s love contemplated so far. The perils and enemies against God’s love that he lists are those he actually experienced himself in his own life: distress, persecution, the sword (cf. 2 Corinthians 11:23 ff.).

He is inviting me to ask myself: what is there in my life that is working to overpower me?
...
(The Apostle Paul) observes his world with the powers that threatened it at the time: death and its mystery, life as it was then, with all its allurements, the astral powers and the infernal ones which struck such terror into ancient man…We too are invited to do the same: to look at our surrounding and frightening world with the new eyes given us by the revelation of God’s love.
...
When God wants to give someone an important message for his life, he usually accompanies this with a certain emotion to help the person embrace his word, and this deep feeling is, in its turn, the sign that it is God who is speaking to the soul. Let us therefore ask the Holy Spirit to help us feel deeply moved; let us ask him to grant us feeling that is not superficial.

There is more to a good story...maybe it's time we go deeper

DISCLAIMER: I was going to post a bit shorter version of this in the comment section of the post but decided otherwise, I pray you find it (at least somewhat) on target.

Read the wonderful post by Athos Munson-I'm Not Buying It

I would point out a couple things that may be missed in a quick read. First of all Munson's non-response upon being shocked by her husband can be seen in a mimetic way where she refused to be placed in rivalry and becoming a mimetic double. In fact all the way through she was practicing excellent skills at avoiding the usual human instinct to succumb to doubling. (Learn more about mimesis, mimetic rivalry, doubles and more by checking out one of our many links to René Girard in articles and books in our side bar.)

Second I throw out a question: could this scenario happen if it were not grounded in a Christian influence even though the author of the article mentions no connection and in fact Munson and her family may not be Christians, we do not know. But it is time we stopped and observed the structure of things, particularly when the things we are observing have potential for conflict, rivalry and violence (and certainly a time like a separation and/or divorce is a prime example). Though the author may have some of the indicators in error and self-pride can never (at least in the way the article presents pride as self constituted) be listed as a true ingredient for love and peace, we may however read into Laura Munson and her relationship with her husband and family God’s grace. As in Step 2 of AA we must acknowledge that there is something greater here and allow that Power (that "influence" - that Christian influence) to work.

My third remark is from the outside looking in - does it still benefit society, marriage, culture and life to NOT identify the markings of Christianity? Many generations have been raised on some such version of ‘LITE’ where they simply have no clue to the religious significance to their life and consequently their numbness to violence is growing at an alarming rate. As our mentor and friend Gil Bailie wrote: We must "discover or re-discover the deeper anthropological, moral, and religious significance of the New Testament, and to assess its staggering historical ramifications - - - - - " - - - NOT only in the global but in particular our personal lives. Laura Munson gives us a great version of one person who didn't succumb to the impulse of human rivalry, conflict and violence at a very intimate setting.

Munson - I'm Not Buying It

If you or any one you know is thinking of separation or divorce, slip him (or her) Laura Munson's superb Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear.

Saint Oswald of Northumbria

For the record: besides being the feast day of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), it is that of the ideal Christian king, St. Oswald of Northumbria.

Inquire Within

Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful

And you were beginning to think that the tide of human hubris could rise no higher, eh? Well, as we say in the Midwest, take a gander at the following:

London, England (LifeNews.com) -- Women from around the world are traveling to clinics in various locations that are now offering face lifts and cosmetic surgery using tissue from babies who have been killed by abortions.

Pro-life advocates are strongly condemning the practice and saying the taking of human life is never warranted -- especially for such a self-serving purpose.

Women like Susan Barrington, a 52-year-old housewife from England, are heading to places such as Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Moscow and Rotterdam to obtain the treatments.

She has been given the final go-ahead form a local clinic to travel abroad for the treatment that promises to make her look 10 years younger and doesn't mind that lives have been sacrificed to enhance her beauty.

To produce the treatments, clinics are using tissue from babies killed in abortions from 6 to 12 weeks into pregnancy and stem cells obtained from destroying human embryos to inject into a client's face. The fetal cells then begin a supposed rejuvenation process that makes the skin look younger.

To obtain the cells, women in underdeveloped nations are paid up to $200 dollars to carry a baby up to the optimum eight to 12 week period when the fetuses are “harvested” for their stem cells which are then sold to exclusive cosmetic clinics. More>>

What Terry Gilliam's 1985 film, Brazil, so precociously foresaw was our present mimetic swirl of terrorism, bureaucracy run amok, human hubris, alchemical fusion of paganism and western rationalism, and a suffocating attempt of nearly everybody to get out of it (unsuccessfully).

Want to know how to find peace, joy, and holiness? Inquire within..

Western rationalism operates like a myth: We always work harder to avoid seeing the catastrophe.

To seek to comfort is always to contribute to the worst.

On War and Apocalypse
by René Girard

Nuff Said

You've seen it elsewhere, wondered why 4Ms hadn't ripped it off before now. Blessings on those CMR boys!

Teaching Chivalry in the Daily Grind

Lydia McGrew at What's Wrong with the World asks, Will we be allowed to do anything for boys and men? The Franciscans of the Immaculate with their Summer Encampments and the year-round 24/7/365 work of Youth Apostles are seeking to answer her question in the strong, manly work and spirit of Saint John Bosco. (The priest pictured at the Youth Apostles Institute website is Fr John "Jack" Peterson, Director of YA and my personal catechist prior to my conversion.)

Chivalry isn't the clashing of broad swords and memorizing a code of chivalry alone; it is "doing the right thing," lovingly and cheerfully, in the daily grind. As, of course the Four Mass'keteers know.

Girard - First Things

If you have not done so, read Girard's essential On War and Apocalypse. It will make inimitable sense of recent "trend toward extremes" at Town Hall meetings and concomitant Last Self-Help Administration strong-arm tactics. But not only that. If there is a clearer, honest, and heads-up examination of terrorism and Islamism and the mythological thinking of western rationalism, I don't know of it.

Longenecker - Father of Lies

For the record, Father Dwight Longenecker on the Father of Lies (and this isn't just because he gave a sterling celebrity blurb for my book).

Okay for Us, Not for You

And now for something entirely different: M. M. on How to dress like an daggone, authentic grass-roots activist. (Language alert.)

In other words, if you disagree, just shut up and take what's good for you (idiots). What to expect for here on. Victor Davis Hanson weighs in. BTW, Meet the “Mob”.

Laity and Politics

Nicoletta MacKenzie writes,

Some years ago, a young Frenchman who was staying with a neighbor while studying at the School of Mines in Golden, walked over to my house as I worked in the yard. He was proud of his country. Health care was nationalized; education was free; women had the right to abortion; France, he proudly announced, was not a slave to religion: in his enlightened homeland, faith had nothing to do with politics.

The poor young man did not know that he had walked into a buzz saw. I asked him: “So, religion has no role in society?” “Not in the public square, no. God has no place in politics.” I continued: “And what are your laws based upon?” “Upon justice.” I insisted: “Who says what is just? Who decides what is right and what is wrong?” The young man looked down at me from his superior height and proudly announced: “The philosophers.” I’m not so easily silenced, so I persisted: “Which philosopher?”

Exactly. Who defines the terms of discourse in the public sphere? Philosophers? Me thinks not. Hollywood and pop culture? Today - yes, largely. But the Catechism of the Church teaches otherwise. I.e., watch:

Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao

Have you heard of Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao, (R-New Orleans), the first Vietnamese-American congressman and a Catholic?

“At the end of the day if the health care reform bill does not have strong language prohibiting the use of federal funding for abortion, then the bill is really a no-go for me,” said Cao, who spent time in formation to be a Jesuit priest.

“Being a Jesuit, I very much adhere to the notion of social justice,” Cao said. “I do fully understand the need of providing everyone with access to health care, but to me personally, I cannot be privy to a law that will allow the potential of destroying thousands of innocent lives,” he explained to the Louisiana newspaper.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced that Cao will be one of seven Republican members of Congress targeted with radio ads that will play on radio stations with largely African-American audiences, urging him to support Obama's health reform efforts.

“I know that voting against the health care bill will probably be the death of my political career,” Cao said, “but I have to live with myself, and I always reflect on the phrase of the New Testament, ‘How does it profit a man's life to gain the world but to lose his soul.’”

Cao is the first native of Vietnam to serve in Congress and the first Republican to serve in his district since 1890. He won in a district that usually votes overwhelmingly Democratic.

The poorest member of Louisiana's delegation, and a devout Roman Catholic, Cao served as a board member for Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church's Community Development Corporation which assists Vietnamese-Americans with hurricane relief, and is a member of the National Advisory Council of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. More>>>

Cao's viewpoint is something that cafeteria Catholics will not understand. But the early martyrs, our faithful brothers and sisters who died rather than avow Caesar's divinity, most certainly would.

Keep to the Code

As I expressed sometime back, it seems to me that the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy of films does a smack-dab job of expressing what's wrong with the world.

People today are by and large profligate, promiscuous, and debauched. You may be thinking, "Wait a moment, Athos. You are trying to tell me that most folk are suffering from what the Roaming Catholic, Gil Bailie has said:

Promiscuity means the lack of standards by which to judge or sort out things. Psychological promiscuity ... is the kind of involvement in mimetic contagion and mimetic desire which reaches the point [that] the self becomes unstable, because of the multitude of its influences.

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. People are psychological promiscuous, profligate, and debauched for the epistemological reason that they have no "code" by which to live. Or, rather, they are done away with all such codex sources of certainty for a variety of reasons, usually all bad ones. ("I did it myyyy wayyy," "All paths are pathology," etc.)

In the ultimate film of Pirates of the Caribbean, "At World's End," we discover that there is, in reality, a "Pirates' Code" to which all the Pirate Lords subscribe. (If you have not watched it, too bad for you.) It is what binds the brethren together in a normative way.

Today, as our sad state of politics and economics declares, the only "code" adhered to is All for Me and Who cares about Thee. The Democrats, leaning as far left as I have ever seen, are taking government into a La-la Land of fiscal insolvency, Romantic utopianism, and power-mongering doubling rivalry with the Right. And the Republicans before them? No better: tight-gripped control of wealth in a tiny minority and ignoring of all problems caused by Capitalism run amok ... and doubling rivalry with the Left.

THEREFORE, be it resolved that there is indeed a "Code" - truly and not merely in cinematic tomfoolery. And any and all can and may find epistemological, anthropological, ontological, and soteriological certainty therein, me hearties. (Yo ho!)

You may find this Code here. And good company there is to be found there, too. It may feel like a beseiged Tortuga, but 'tain't - 'tis a place of great truth, goodness, and beauty. And one may actually learn how to navigate the ugly swells and squalls of the spirit of the age.

Two-Stepping to Hell

From Verum Serum, via Gil Bailie:

Now I realize that the editors at these MSM institutions are probably following some style-guide which tells them that a baby inside a mother is fetus and a fetus in the hospital is a baby. What this case points out so clearly is that it’s a distinction without a difference. If we wanted to lay aside the style-guide we’d have to admit it was a baby when it was kidnapped and it was a baby when it was discovered alive in the hospital. Calling it a fetus didn’t change anything about it except its implied location. So why do it? I think the answer is obvious. You don’t have to look any further than yesterday’s NY Times hagiography of George Tiller for an answer. From the Times story:

[T]he other 2,800 abortions involved viable fetuses. Some had serious but survivable abnormalities, like Down syndrome. Many were perfectly healthy.

Those were healthy babies Tiller dismembered. Babies. More >>

I would love simply to call the prevarication by the MSM on abortuarial murder cowardice: merely fear of losing advertizers, or readership, or viewers, or the like. But at heart it stems from a baser motive: fear of the rising tide of the primitive Sacred. That is, it is hypocritical turning away from human sacrifice, lest all of us face the horror of cultural collusion that became a staple of United States cohesion since Roe v. Wade. Or, perhaps it is one and the same after all.

If our country, like so many other western nations formerly informed by the Judeo-Christian ethos, faces cultural meltdown it will be because we turned our collective back on that Judeo-Christian ethos for a heinous, softcore, "professional" - even suburban - version of human sacrifice: an antiseptic, stainless steel and latex medical "procedure".

But is it hypocritical? I fear that our collective consciousness about abortion has truly changed. It is no longer horrible. It is now "routine" for a vast majority of Americans. It is clearly a political chit in the Washington "two-step" for all but a very small minority on either side of the aisle. And if we are so blinded to the abomination of abortion, what others have become "normalized"? (Fill in the blank.)

And so I say, batten down the hatches. I fully believe in the consequential judgment of God against idolatry and paganism. Particularly when those who knew better reject what once was espoused and cherished as God's revelation and truth.

I don't know who this guy is, but ...

... that road he described sounded way too similar to a road I've trodden down.

I wonder just how many of us have had such denial in our past (whether with booze but maybe not with booze - with some other addition) ... how many of us still speak in a dialogue that contains such denial in telling our current life story?

Who said comedy had to be dumb?

Boy, I think he's getting a good reading off the CRAP-o-meter, don't you?

stolen from Old World Swine

Picking up on all the indirect to direct references to mimesis and scapegoating we know that this comedy act is revealing some major crap.

Cool Reality Adaptation Presentation (CRAP)

Crap-o-meter - I gotta get me one of them! Ht: Karen Hall

Michael Barber - Liturgy Reflection

Ht: Mark Shea - Weekly Sunday Gospel lessons from JP Catholic University.

Liturgy Reflection: Sunday, August 2, 2009 from JP Catholic University on Vimeo.