.يا رب يسوع المسيح ابن اللّه الحيّ إرحمني أنا الخاطئ
Friday, January 27, 2012
Moving pictures
I like this casino commercial. Of course. Arty and old-style, down to the music.
I haven’t been to a movie in about three years but Red Tails looks worth paying to see on the big screen. (Skip the commercial before the trailer.) I’ve read the critics including the predictable stuff at Takimag, and they have a point. It’s not history. Propagandistic as the flag-waving films from the period and exactly the kind of pseudo-history that white liberals would make up or pass along. (Clint Eastwood on the current cartoon history of WWII: the Tuskegee Airmen and Go for Broke soldiers singlehandedly liberated the concentration camps, the reason we the good guys were fighting, while the white soldiers guarded Manzanar. Fact: we were supporting players who helped the Soviets win WWII.) That said, it’s got the ’40s, a good message about black individual rights (just know ahead that the movie’s not fact) and, worth the big-screen ticket: CGI Mustangs, Messerschmidts and Flying Fortresses.
Another one I’d like to see but worth waiting six months to see through Netflix: The Artist. The music in the trailer is 10 years ahead of the setting.
Obviously we do women a great disservice by forcing them into roles for which they are so manifestly unsuited, like being a riot cop. This is pure gnosticism: that the biological gender differences can be transcended through the force of correct, feminist ideology. Brian Mitchell’s Flirting with Disaster point: women in combat is dumb and dangerous.
Again, the feminized social-democratic elite relies on men with the capacity to do ugly things, and the corresponding reactionary attitudes, to protect them from barbarism. Then they exploit their cocooned existence by demeaning the very men who keep barbarism at bay, mocking their values and blaming them for every social ill. When such men decide that the current elite are no longer worth the pay to protect them, female government officials will become pretty scarce.
On entrepreneurship and file-sharing Takimag on the Kim Dotcom case. Reminds me of the Julian Assange and Bradley Manning cases: not necessarily the nicest guys but that doesn’t matter.
Have you noticed a strange undertone of snark on “60 Minutes” every time they feature an entrepreneur? Conversely, they grovel at the feet of pompous bureaucrats.
Standard lefty stuff. As Christian Lander wrote back when he was writing SWPL, the site, the way to shut them up is to bring up a corporation they like, like Ikea or Apple; the way somebody wrote on a photo of OWSers pointing out all the corporate-made gear on them. IIRC distributists/third-way-ers like neither big biz nor bureaucrats but you know my line: make a good product that benefits millions/that millions want to buy and we’ll talk.
This represents a deep divide in the American psyche. The right sees entrepreneurs as job machines who create wealth for everyone, and they view the government as a parasite thwarting both rich and poor. The left, in turn, portrays entrepreneurs as the parasites. In this instance, the left is wrong and I think it’s because they don’t understand the pie analogy. They think a rich person has taken more than his slice of the pie, which leaves less for the rest of us. They didn’t take math in college and don’t understand that “greedy” entrepreneurs keep creating more pies. While the left scoffs at the idea of more than one pie, they have no problem with Obama trying to synthesize the process by printing more money. They don’t mind the government having infinite cash, but when it comes to an individual having money to burn, they’d rather torch it all.
Big Business and Big Government, who still haven’t officially announced that they’re married, have been seeking to get even bigger lately.
Any Catholic who fails to recognize that the United States Government, and the Obama Administration in particular, is at war with the Church is a fool. Last Friday’s decree from the Department of Health and Human Services that the “religious exemption” from the federal mandate that employers cover contraception — including abortifacients — in their employee health-care plans will toll out in August 2013 is not, as some pundits will tell you, a “compromise” with religious liberty; it is, rather, a smokescreen intended to distract voters this November from the fact that our President, and a bulk of the political party which supports him, has no regard for conscience or Catholicism.
My guess: most of the laity in what’s left of the church (after Vatican II) will remain Democrats like Joe Biden.
Daniel Larison on SOTU Sign of a country running scared, or at least its government: a whiff of fascism
Like many others, I found the attempt to compare national unity to the discipline of a military unit to be unnerving and strange. Unfortunately, if the military is one of the very few institutions that the public trusts and respects, the idea that everything else should be more like the military might start to catch on, which would be a far worse mistake than the more common error of thinking that the government should function just like a business. The idea that “we” should all put aside our differences for the sake of “the mission” assumes that “we” all know what “the mission” is, and it also takes for granted that none of “us” can opt out of “the mission” but must simply do our part in making sure that “the mission” is successful.
Those sections of the speech were quite illiberal.
The convert approach to fasting is off-putting. Spiritual pride, or a hobby/boutique religion for well-off folk who can afford to shop at Whole Foods (Whole Paycheck) or at least, like the old-school ethnics, are good cooks.
My impression is in practice the ethnics balance their church’s impossibly strict rule with ‘economy’, sort of like dispensations in the Roman Rite but less formal. (They’re not all scrupulous/Ned Flandersy with their parish priest like the convertodox and their ‘spiritual father’, playing monk.) So the fish and mac and cheese in Lent aren’t a big deal to people born into it.
I didn’t know that most of the OCA’s bishops are converts. Nice church: Slavs, Ruthenians, who were pushed out of the Greek Catholic Church 100 years ago for no good reason (the Roman Rite bishops didn’t want married priests in the US), going under their Russian cousins. Still very ‘Catholicky’ (a good thing) like Johnstown but non-Novus Ordo thanks to their isolation and with that grassroots conservatism that’s good about the Eastern churches.
I’ve never met a Greek Catholic, ethnic or convert (born Roman Riter), who was fanatical about the fasts, which in their church are really the modern Roman Catholic rules (not a putdown, just an observation). The high-church non-latinized minority (almost always converts) including the OicwRs may do the Orthodox rules but again they’re a minority of Greek Catholics.
My impression: a really holy person who happens to do all the fasts doesn’t talk about it.
The church can lower the bar on fasts. It’s just a rule.
Which approach is better: impossibly strict rule rarely enforced, an Eastern way that looks hypocritical to many Westerners, or changing the rule as happened to Greek Catholics? I don’t know.
There was the libs’ game at Vatican II as happened to meatless Fridays: praise a practice, then make it optional, which in practice abolished it.
My likes: high-church, non-Novus Ordo liturgy but moderation about fasting. The Mass is for everyone; the office available to all. Super-strict fasting is something I think few are called to.
Refugee conservative (sometimes ex) Roman Riters after Vatican II have been a mainstay and lifesaver for a few Greek Catholic parishes.
IIRC at least one such parish, in the Southwest, not in the Slavic-American home base of the Northeast, has been majority born Roman Riters. I’ve been to one Southern city where the Greek Catholic parish was a conservative Catholic magnet, under a non-ethnic, Rome-trained, high-church (non-latinized) priest. Good folks.
My guess is the convertodox boomlet was a flash in the pan 20 years ago. The number-one reason the few converts switch is still marriage. The Orthodox and Greek Catholic numbers will keep going down as are the Roman Catholic real numbers (seemingly steady because of counting Mexican immigrants).
Prayer beads: older than the rosary and Christianity; the East were the first Christians to have them; no St Dominic in the Balkans or Russia so no native devotion of the rosary. Crossover where East and West meet? Sure. Rite controls what you do in church. Devotion is free.
A tribute to Byzantium, long the front in the war against Islam. Regular readers know I don’t Muslim-bait/bash (mainstream pols’ scare tactic/Two Minutes’ Hate – it’s not ‘they hate our freedom’ bullsh*t; stay the hell out of it in Palestine etc. and leave them alone) but it’s a false religion. (I think Binks and I are 180 on Israel.) Turkey is really Greece.
Leftard bullying, or the Niceness Police versus a schoolkid over nothing. The road to hell and all that, or from well-meant lefty charity (Christianity minus Christ or common sense it seems), good Lord, deliver us.
O tempora over the Costa Concordia. Don’t blame Italians (evviva Commandante Gregorio De Falco). The same cowardice happened aboard the Estonia.
Adolescence is only a marketing campaign as Frances McDormand wonderfully said at the start of Almost Famous. Something guys like Roger Sterling made up during the postwar economic and baby boom to sell stuff. Until the Victorian era and modern nanny-state, there were no teens. There were children, then young adults. Children might work in the household, farm, or family business. No extended immaturity via baby-sitting schools & party-hearty universities. Heck, these days some folks can even make it into their mid-thirties on the big baby plan.
Evil Google? For all the good it’s done, watch it. Big Brother.
Subsidiarity Right, the two Catholic candidates don’t get this at all. (And I don’t care that they’re Catholic. I’d never vote for them.) It reminds me of the ‘200% American’ super-patriotism of the immigrants’ kids especially during the early Cold War, around the same time mainstream America nearly fully accepted Catholics. The exceptionalism/national greatness/interventionism both candidates buy. A powerful cultural-national myth hard for Catholics to break free from and a temptation for well-meaning social conservatives. Mix that with Catholics’ residual working-class politics and the Catholic social-justice left (the secular left with Jesus talk) saying welfare is the corporal works of mercy and it’s even harder.
In “Our History” you ask if there’s “a potential wild card in an internal economic collapse of the empire”? Is America an empire? And if so, do you foresee the fall of the empire?
Yes. Yes, both. I don’t think it’s a wild card; I think it’s a given. There’s no way that we can continue this spending spree. In fact, I think in many ways the most interesting candidate – I’d even vote for him if he was running against Obama – is Ron Paul. Because he’s the only one of anybody who’s saying anything intelligent about the future of the world.
Why is it necessary for every candidate – except for Ron Paul – to pay obeisance to this hypocrisy that the U.S. is a good force in the world, and that it is the dominant force, and can be the policeman of the world? Since when? What gave us that right? The right of empire, the right of force?
They’re based on this idea, this myth, Woodrow Wilson passed on when we entered World War I that we’re exporting democracy and freedom.
I’m still rooting for some element of capitalism to come through and be fair...!
Of course Stone’s right about empire and not learning from history being wrong.
No sale: Henry Wallace was a Communist traitor. As, in practice, was his boss. Yalta. Want to prevent the Cold War? Stay out of WWII and let the Nazis and Soviets destroy each other. Imperial Japan = Red China today.
A literal coup for LBJ? I don’t rule it out.
Jim Morrison: Musical minimalist cool. Nothing more. Epitomizes the self-destruction in the culture he’s identified with. A romanticized bohemian; what else is new? Steve Sailer would have something to say about the son of well-bred folk (admiral father) being a natural leader of the artistic élite (looked it up: he had a 149 IQ, a literal genius).
Padre Tex on decisions and vocation/state of life. There is a romantic notion that Christians must always choose the road less traveled and then romantically mourn the loss of the other. It’s quite silly, of course, but there you are. Sometimes we must indeed take the road less traveled, but not usually.
They forgot corny, effective soft sell such as: ‘Ungh! Hot lady next to wheel! Make me want wheel!’ (Seth MacFarlane, ‘Family Guy’.)
A natural explanation for much of church:
You emotionally bond with people you sing with: Scientists have discovered that when we perform synchronized activities such as singing songs, reciting chants or even as simple an act as walking together, we end up feeling more connected to the people we’re performing these activities with. Because it turns out it’s not what you’re saying or singing or chanting that matters. It’s just the fact that you’re performing these activities in unison with other people.
Of course, dentists really can fill cavities, but teachers can’t actually make everybody equally smart so that, as the federal law demands, no child is left behind.
Judging from the small bits of modern Cuba I’ve seen in movies over the last decade, there’s an even greater irony here. Castro’s Cuba is something of a time capsule of mid-century America. As I wrote in a review of the 2004 movie-in-verse Yes by doctrinaire English leftist Sally Potter: “Ironically, Cuba turns out, due to Castro’s stultifying tyranny, to look like a well-preserved slice of the Eisenhower Era, full of ’57 Chevys and Hemingway-worshipers.” If Raymond Chandler, Robert Heinlein, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane decided to come back to life for one day in 2012 to take a taxi to a bar for a couple of drinks, they might well choose Havana as the place that most reminds them visually of the good old days.
Cruise-liner captains. Why the Costa Concordia story gave me déjà vu: the Oceanos. The John Jacob Astor story. This understated but memorable incident didn’t even make the 1997 movie Titanic, presumably because it didn’t fit the Celtic Good v. WASP Bad and Feminist (but Hot) Women v. Male Chauvinist Pigs dynamics that James Cameron suffused the movie with. Obviously, Cameron knows a lot about what contemporary audiences want to pay to see.
In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., in the first and most famous of the disparate impact theory cases, that the use of broad-based aptitude tests in hiring practices was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
Racial spoils instead of merit. So that’s when the rot set in.
The answer to busting the hyperinflationary tuition cost curve is to overturn the Griggs ruling.
Some jottings about the news
