The Anchoress

From Deacon Greg, from whom I shamelessly crib the photo.

“St. Bernard and German Shepherd” (from PackerBronco)

And Buster in a Fez, about a million years ago. Why? Because he calls me from school at 2AM (he knows I’m reacquainting with my old friend, insomnia) and announces, among other things, that he is walking the campus enjoying a cigar, and wearing an anti-Che tee shirt and a fez.

“Where’d you get the fez?” I asked.

“A friend was wearing it and I took it off him.”

It sometimes amazes me that Buster has friends.

“You just took it? You shouldn’t steal fezes.”

“Yeah. He knows I’ll give it back. It’s been a long time since I wore a fez, and I’m liking it.”

My children are ever-eccentric. Elder Son once wore a fez to the sixth grade. Picked up at Epcot, of course. Buster - about age 6, here, appears not to have lost the taste for them, either. And who’d have thought it? He has friends who wear fezes. I feel very old and boring.

:::I was supposed to be out of town today, taking a mental-health break, but instead my furnace went acting all wonky and since my husband is not even in the same hemisphere as I am right now, I’m the furnace girl. Fortunately my new shipment of Mystic Monk Coffee has arrived, so I am happier about this than I normally would be. While I await help, please enjoy (I hope) this post from a while back, which I find gets pulled up frequently from people googling information about whether dogs can eat bananas. Is there nothing google can’t help us with?:::

MY DOG LIKES BANANAS; BUSTER IS CONFOUNDED BY GIRLS
(originally posted December, 2006)

So, I did a stupid thing today and decided I would make “something delicious” for supper instead of the same old, same old. I would fry chicken!

Buster, who mostly doesn’t like my cooking unless it’s hamburgers or steak, was thrilled.

Stupid, stupid. Now I know why I never make fried chicken. The house reeked of oil. Thank goodness for a fair-weather snap, because I had to open the windows and turn on the ceiling fans to get the ghastly smell out of the place. And the cleanup…no supper is worth the clean up.

Finally done chasing grease, I sat at the kitchen table waiting for the return of the man of the house and I ate a banana, because since childhood I have had a habit of “spoiling my appetite,” probably because I disliked my mother’s cooking as much as Buster dislikes mine.

I’m sitting there, eating the banana, and the dog plants herself before me and says, “Ma,” (I swear, she says “Ma”) “Ma, what you eating?”

Border Collies are very smart dogs. They’re like having another teenager in the house, and once they get an idea in their head, they pester you. In the past this dog got after me for a burned-out lightbulb in the ceiling fan which bothered her because it messed with her light-and-shadows and kept making her jump. When I didn’t fix it fast enough to please her, she followed me around all day, saying, “I could fix that lightbulb for you…You’re going to fix it, right? Because if you’re not, I could probably do it…do you have a ladder? Please fix the light…”

Tonight, I got, “Ma, what you eating?”

“Go away,” I said. “You’ve had your supper and this is a banana. I know you don’t believe this, but you’re a dog; you don’t eat bananas.”

“I could eat bananas,” she said defensively, cocking her head. “You’ve never let me try.”

“It’s fruit.” I explained. “You won’t like it and you’ll spit it all over the floor and then I’ll have to clean it up.”

“I am quite certain that I will like it,” she argued, “you’re being mean and lazy. You always keep me from growing and learning because you don’t want to do a little cleaning…”

Because I am weak-willed, I broke off a bit of banana and tossed it her way. She grabbed it neatly and chewed it with determined expression on her face. The mushiness seemed to surprise her, but she swallowed and defiantly planted herself before me. “More, Ma.” She demanded.

“I can’t believe you ate that,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “You didn’t really like it, did you? You’re just trying to make a point.”

“The point being I love bananas,” she narrowed back. “They’re now my favorite food. Gimmee.”

I tossed her the last bit of my banana and she chewed it with that careful expression and then, finally, walked away - tossing one last look at me. “Told you,” she said.

Snot nose. Then Buster walks in. “Ma, you used to be a girl, right?”

With a sigh of long-suffering, I nodded. “Yes. I used to be a girl.”

“What does it mean, when you ask a girl to hand you a pencil, and when she hands it to you, her hand lingers on yours for a minute?”

“What, like this?” I demonstrated the way I used to do it, a wispy touch of fingers across the palm.

“No, more like this.” His demonstration seemed much more forward, to me - a definite full-palm lingering, with a pat.

“Ummm…she likes you a lot,” I explained.

“Well, what the hell? What is it with women, anyway?”

Turns out the pencil-lending-lingerer was his latest break-up - a girl he really likes, has liked since elementary school. They’ve been good friends for a while and started “dating” - briefly, it turned out - over the Thanksgiving holiday.

“I think she’s confused,” I said. “You were pals for a long time, then you got pretty hot pretty fast…I think she fears risking your friendship by being your g/f.”

“This crap sucks,” he announced. “Dating sucks and why can’t girls just say what they mean? Later this afternoon, in lab, I handed her her wristwatch so she wouldn’t forget it and she did it again.”

“Be patient,” I advised.

“Maybe offer her biscuit,” the dog panted with banana breath.

“And you shut up, also,” said Buster. “You’re no help.”

The dog, 9 years old and past caring about teenage angst, decided “chump don’t want good advice, chump don’t get good advice,” and went to sleep.

I miss when they were all little.

My son Buster is away at school and he only rarely opens up emails from home because he knows if I have anything important to say (!) I’d call. So, I am not surprised that he only just got around to noting that I’d sent him a link to this post featuring scenes from “Battle of Fallen Angels,” the last episode of Cowboy Bebop, set to Johnny Cash singing “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.”

God’s Gonna Cut You Down

After watching the thing in the wee small hours of a morning, Buster wrote:

There have been so many stories about a hero who enters a situation believing that he is going to die. It is a common theme in westerns, and you want the protagonist cowboy to win and usually he does. But thats not where Cowboy Bebop takes it. One cannot just shrug off Spike’s death - it makes you mourn harder than with any other cowboy story. Why does Spike’s death hurt so much?

Obviously it hurts because Spike’s death means the end of the story. The show wouldn’t be the same if it was just Jet and Fey (if you remember Ein and Ed left a few episodes earlier) and there’s just something about about Fey that is too cold and unforgiving, something about Jet that is too good natured and mild to keep him interesting. Writers could try to build a good cop/ bad cop story between them, but without Spike there would be no heart. It may be safe to say that Spike rubbed off on Fey enough to change her, a little, but I’ll come back to that.

What makes Spike’s death different from the movie cowboys is that there’s always hope that the movie cowboy will survive, but you always knew Spike had to die. In a film, if the cowboy is fighting for a woman, he will have more of a chance of winning. But Julia was dead. Neither Spike nor Vicious could have her anymore. There was nothing more to fight.

Also if a cowboy has friends or family that he can return to, that can leave you hopeful, too. Not as much, mind you, because after the cowboy has his adventure its impossible for him to settle down. After you’ve done what you’re meant to do, how can you keep on living without purpose? That’s why they always ride into the sunset, it signifies the end of their lives, the end of their worth, and now they either die or try to start over and find new meaning. This is reflected too, in the end of Bebop, where the sun is rising after Spike’s death.

Remember, Spike had already died once and was revived and given a fake eye, signifying that now he has a new way to see the world. The whole series finale is Spike’s sunset. The Bebop is his horse, and he’s riding to find new meaning. And this is why they very rarely show you his past, because in the movies the cowboy never looks back.

But I’m ahead of myself, this is not why Spikes death is so sad. As we already said, his death is hard because the show ends, and - in the same way that we mourned the end of Firefly - we know we can no longer visit this magnificent world that they’ve created, this intensely interesting future is wrested from us when we all want to see more and more (maybe because we’re so clueless about our own futures).

The thing is, despite the fact that Spike is not the good guy, you like him. He’s real, he’s not just the heroic cowboy, he’s a person, a real person, he can be charming, embarrassing, disgraceful, heroic, cowardly, all the traits that you can find in a man.

This is what is so tantalizing; throughout the show they tell you that Spike and Vicious cannot coincide. Neither can live while the other lives, nor can they die without destroying the other. One sees that Vicious is simply a ruthless murderer, so he is more purely evil and from that perspective, Spike automatically becomes “the good,” even though he is very dark, himself - in fact Spike is in a sort of Purgatory. So, we have a study in degrees of darkness. Vicious is mostly evil but he has to have a little good. Spike is “troubled” good but he has a little evil in him, too. But the story makes it clear that they are also equals. When the equal good and bad clash, they cancel each other out.

Or maybe, that means that Vicious has the same potential to do good as Spike does. We start to see it in I believe “Jupiter Jazz I + II” when we see Vicious is somewhat kind to a comrade. But we never see Vicious enough to truly see what kind of man he is. We take it on faith that because Vicious and Spike are friends, Vicious must have some good in him, that perhaps the only reason that he wasn’t that good was because he did not have a new eye, or a new way to see the world. Or because he had not died and did not need a new reason for living.

And I think the thing that makes it so touching is Fey, the damsel that the cowboy cannot stay with; he needs to leave because he can’t settle down. Throughout the entire show there is an amount of romantic tension between Spike and Fey, even though Spike is still waiting for Julia. You see Spike having an effect on Fey, you see her start to loosen up, let her guard down, fall in love a little. And you see Spike forget about Julia once in a while too, when they do their shtick. I believe that in the end Spike did love Fey, but he couldn’t be hers while the remnants of his old life were still there.

I think that one of the many reasons that Spike went, knowing that he was going to die, was because he knew that he couldn’t settle down while the cowboy was still in him. He began to like his new eye, his new way of viewing the world. But he knew that it could never be really him until the fake eye was his real eye, and to do that, he needed to destroy the rest of him.

Also, Spike did realize that he still had a cowboy job to do; his sunset finally went under the mountains and he had to face the darkness of his past. Because in the end, even if you don’t look back at your past, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t following you. He knew it was there and he finished it.

The show ended with a sunrise, again. So much symbolism. His cowboy died in the darkness. When the sun rose again he was the man who could settle down. He no longer had that past lurking behind him. He was a new person and innocent. And that is why it is so sad to see this man die. He wasn’t the bad man that was capable of good, or the good man capable of bad. He was an innocent man.

And then he died. And we know that life just moved on when they panned out to the city. We know that Jet either returned to the force or heading into retirement, and Fey, with a broken heart probably closed herself off to feeling, after learning that if you open yourself up too much, it hurts.

There are all sorts of great themes in Cowboy Bebop, redemption being a big one. I could (and do) take Bebop into theological flights, but I enjoyed Buster’s take on it, too.

Having resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die.
— Malachy McCourt

A few days ago I got an email from a presumably “left wing” (I’m so tired of these inadequate labels) visitor who took exception to my demonstrated dislike of the junior Senator from New York. After suggesting that I am the unthinking, misogynistic prisoner of the patriarchy, the correspondent wrote:

[Hillary] is competitive and power hungry and you can’t stand it, but I don’t think you would ever criticize a man for behaving in the exact same way. Also, I’ve noticed that you keep taking that poison hoping she will die. I hope it doesn’t kill you.

Well…I am happy to note the writer’s assessment of Mrs. Clinton as “power hungry,” so at least we can agree on something, but I disagree that I don’t criticize men who behave the same way, and I do not hope Mrs. Clinton will die. Nor do I resent her. I believe the reader confused dislike with resentment, and they are very different things.

I know they are very different things because I have actually been struggling with resentment, recently, for the first time in my life, and I can attest to the poison-power of it.

The mild aggravation and eye-rolling impatience I have for Mrs. Clinton are nothing like the feelings and fantasies that are attached to the object of my resentment. Not even close. I do not lie awake at night simmering about her. I do not have fantasies of meeting Mrs. Clinton and landing her a facer. I have never considered calling a rather intimidating (with good reason) relation and asking him to go knock on her door and introduce himself and his little friend.

I wish Mrs. Clinton and her husband - and their minions - would take their money and go away, somewhere, and leave us all alone, but I do not wish any of them ill.

Not so, the other.

When I was little, I recall asking a priest about Jesus’ revolutionary (and counter-intuitive) command that we love everyone, even our “enemies.” I thought it was intriguing that Jesus said we could and would have “enemies,” and in my devious 9-year old brain, I figured, that meant that “enemies” were alright.

“No,” the priest said, “Jesus tells us this because he knows that in life there will always be people who hurt us, or betray us, or who we just for some reason don’t like - that’s a natural thing - so, think of ‘enemy’ in this case, as just someone you don’t especially take to, or want to be good friends with, someone you know better than to trust. When Jesus says ‘love them,’ he means, basically, “pray for them, for their good, and never wish them ill. It doesn’t mean you have to kiss them…you just can’t want to kill them.”

I found that to be an acceptable and reasonable answer - we don’t have to really love the people we don’t like, we just have to not hate them, not wish bad things for them. We have to give them the respect due all created creatures and let God do the rest.

Those instructions, it turned out, were easy to follow. My personality had always been a little on the naive side, and bashful, but my instincts had always been to take people at their word - or by how they presented themselves - until their actions told me otherwise. So, I took the good father’s advice easily, and for the next forty years was fairly content. While I am no saint and no great lover of mankind, I’ve been a basically peaceable (if impressionable) sort with a willingness to quickly forgive (and to ask forgiveness) and a reputation for never, ever holding a grudge.

Until recently.

The details are not especially important. The bottom line is that six months ago an injustice was perpetrated against a member of my family. Lies were told which had a negative effect on this family member, in a meaningful way.

And I discovered that while I can be easy about what someone has done to me, I am…well…quite the freaking lunatic when someone does dirt to someone I love.

Over the course of the last few months, waiting for some resolution of this situation, I have found myself doing all of those things I described above. I’ve been losing sleep, grinding my teeth, imagining violence - those face planters, that call to my distant cousin - and simply simmering and festering and yes, poisoning myself as I seethed. And the poison was affecting my physical body; at one point, I got shingles.

Other family members have been indignant and upset about the situation, and angry, and resentful here and there, but they’ve also managed to be amused by some of it, to find ironic laughter. When I told my Elder Son about one incident by this “enemy” he started laughing and said, “isn’t he just darling, though? You have to love someone that sick and obsessed.”

I was too sunk into my molasses-thick resentment to see the humor at the time.

I’ve been struggling with it. Some days I knew I was in no fit state to receive Holy Communion with all this bubbling inside me. Some days I would remind myself that “all things work to God’s purposes,” and tell myself “there is something we need to learn from this - pay attention,” but those brief attempts at reasonable faith would soon be drowned out by my rage.

What upset me more than anything is that for the first time in my life, I was actively hating someone. I’ve never hated anyone - not even people who have done me physical and spiritual harm. But I was hating this fellow. And hating him even more for “making me” hate him.

Which, of course, he could not do. No one can “make” you hate; I simply allowed hate in; I welcomed it in, gave it an honored chair and fed it. And fed it. And it was incredibly destructive and oppressive - to me, mostly - but it did nothing good for anyone who had to be around me if the subject had my head. My whole family, and a few friends, have had to endure watching me give myself over to this resentment, allowing it to have its way with me, and to own me, body and soul.

When my son Buster - who has been struggling with his own issues (because who among us does not struggle from time-to-time) went back to school for the spring semester he hugged me at the car and then whispered, “Mom, Matthew 5:46. It’s for me with mine, it’s for you with yours.”

I got home and broke out the bible and found:

For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?

The little bastard! As he had once before, Buster “stopped me right in my tracks, like a wise and elderly monk who has no time for circuitous council and goes right to the heart of the matter.”

Matthew 5:46 is for the Christian where the rubber meets the road. You either believe all that stuff you say you believe, and you act accordingly, or it’s all a lot of hooey and you’re the hoo-er.

I stared at the verse for a while, read those lines preceding it and following, and I curled my lip and muttered, “but I don’t want to love this person!”

But a little voice inside said, “ah, but you don’t want to be hating and resenting anymore, it’s doing you no good, girl.”

My little voice sounds a great deal like my Auntie Lillie.

I began to pray. Not the way Christ wanted me to. It was more along the lines of, “Lord, you’re the God who is Just, who loves Justice, and this putz is getting away with a monstrous injustice…”

There was some ranting after that. For some reason I make a habit of trying the Almighty’s patience with my need to re-state the obvious ad nauseam. He seems to bear it well. Finally, sick of myself, sick of my rage, sick of my willingness to hate, I said, “help me out here, would you? Give me a word or a sign or something - anything - to pull me out of this muck and give me some peace. You promised us peace, remember? Peace beyond understanding, ‘my peace I give to you…’ Can’t you help me, down here?

I fell on my bed feeling pissed off and lost. I kept looking at Buster’s verse and remembering what a priest had told me 40 years earlier, and I felt like I was standing over an abyss, balanced upon a taut, thin wire and trying to cross to safety, and at that moment I really wondered if I would make it.

And then the phone rang, and it was my Elder Son, the perpetually pleasant, wise, gifted and laid-back firstborn whose mind routinely goes where mine cannot follow. I don’t know what he called for - I never gave him a chance to say - when he observed that I didn’t sound right I immediately treated him to serving #2376 of Mom’s Seething Resentment and Madness, and it was one serving too many.

“You know,” he sighed in his gentle way, “this thing has worn out its welcome. You’re making yourself sick over something while the object of all of this sleeps well at night. You give him every single yard; he owns you. And he may not even know he owns you, but that doesn’t matter - he still does. You’ve lost this fight because you’ve lost yourself. Even if you win, you’ve lost. He wins because he’s gone about his business while you’ve allowed your soul to rot. And this may never be resolved to your satisfaction; sometimes things are not. And that scripture verse was also right, you know.”

I listened to my son’s calm-but-firm pronouncement and knew that everything he said was correct. A hard thing to hear - a harder thing to acknowledge - that you’ve lost yourself in hate and resentment, and that the bullies of the world, whatever their issues, don’t do half the damage that you do to yourself, in your reactions, and in what you hold on to.

I had to let it go.

Elder Son said a few other things, things I needed to hear - that I had not been willing to acknowledge before - and he was right.

“You’re right,” I said to him, feeling - incredibly - with those two words the first peace I’d felt in six months, a surreal peace, a peace beyond my understanding. “You’re absolutely right. I needed to hear all of that.”

“Well, good,” he said, a little surprised at the abrupt wicking away of my abundant wrath. “What are you going to do about it?”

I sighed the surrender.

“I’m going to pray this verse for a while and then go back to being myself. And…I’m going to pray for this guy’s good, too. My heart is not in it, but I know it will be, once I start, because God’s like that. And I’m going to say ‘thank you,’ too, for these awful six months, because I guess I needed to learn something. And I’m going to say ‘thank you’ for you, too. You really helped.”

My Elder Son is a “believer” in the most casual sense of the word. He likes and believes the Christian narrative but he’s in a very cerebral place just now, and so he’s keeping all options open and rather at a distance. This is not unusual behavior in young Catholics, so I’m not especially concerned. I know that my husband and I have taught our kids to swim, so we entrust them to the Almighty Life Guard, in that respect. But he was in that instant, in the Providence of his phone call, the very voice of Christ, who scripture says “shall be peace.” Here was Emmanuel - God With Us - answering the prayer I had silently screamed up, and with perfect promptness and wisdom.

Sr. Mary Alice used to say, “pay attention to all the people speaking to you; God is trying to talk to you, through them. The Holy Spirit uses what is handy to get the message to you that you need to hear.”

I was so grateful to my son that I called him back a little later, to thank him again, for telling it to me straight. And too, I wanted to let him know what had happened.

“I know you think of these things differently than I do, right now,” I told him, “but I just wanted you to be aware of how God used you - that you were a vessel of grace.”

“Well, that’s fine,” he hummed along, a serene spirit. “I’m glad to be of use, then.”

Then I remembered something. “What was it you were calling me about, earlier, by the way? What was on your mind?”

There was a silence. I could almost hear him frowning and thinking through the phone. “Do you know,” he said, “I have absolutely no idea.”

From Compline, tonight: If you are angry, let it be without sin. The sun must not go down on your wrath; do not give the devil a chance to work on you. - Ephesians 4:26-27

Peace be within your walls,
and security within your towers!
For my family and friends’ sake
I will say “Peace be within you!”
For the sake of the house of the Lord our God,
I will seek your good.
- Psalm 122

Julie at Happy Catholic, shares a similar nudge.

First Buster sent us Joe Cocker (linked here). Now he sends…college humor.

First up: Tim Blair has cancer. GM Roper has a moving message for him. Godspeed with the treatment, Tim, hopefully you’ll be back at it very soon.

President Bush meets with Kuwaiti women in politics. Consider how unthinkable that sentence would have been a decade ago. And imagine what the press would have made of it, had a Democrat president whose vision had shifted the Middle East, taken this meeting.

AJ says Bush has a few more hat-tricks.

Three examples of solid, good, insightful and entertaining writing:

1) David Brooks thinks Hillary did herself no favors on Meet the Press. That seems to be the general opinion.

Clinton refused to admit any real errors. She implied that Barack Obama is unfit to be president, without ever honestly taking responsibility for what she actually believes.

She broadcast her own humility: “You know, I’m very other-directed. I don’t like talking about myself.” She also described the central role she plays in the lives of all living creatures in the universe: “The Iraqi government, they watch us, they listen to us. I know very well that they follow everything that I say.”

But Clinton’s real problem is that she is caught in a trap, which you might call The Identity Trap.
[…]
All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Indeed. And I think the Democrat candidates rushing to play victim and the GOP candidates rushing to play preacher will encourage the left and right extremes to step center. So let it play out!

2) Christopher Hitchens nails Candidate Clinton to the wall, and her husband, too.

In the New Hampshire primary in 1992, she knowingly lied about her husband’s uncontainable sex life and put him eternally in her debt. This is now thought of, and referred to in print, purely as a smart move on her part. In the Iowa caucuses of 2008, he returns the favor by telling a huge lie about his own record on the war in Iraq, falsely asserting that he was opposed to the intervention from the very start. This is thought of, and referred to in print, as purely a tactical mistake on his part: trying too hard to help the spouse. The happy couple has now united on an equally mendacious account of what they thought about Iraq and when they thought it. What would it take to break this cheap little spell and make us wake up and inquire what on earth we are doing when we make the Clinton family drama—yet again—a central part of our own politics?

That’s the mild part of his piece. Read it all. Hitchens has quit smoking, by the way. It doesn’t seem to have dulled his pen.

3) And what a great lede, by John Dickerson:

Hillary Clinton has a fair point about Barack Obama. He should be vetted more thoroughly than he has been so far during the primary process. He has not gotten the scrutiny she has. But every time she opens her mouth to make this point, a brass band starts playing, an 18-wheeler backfires, and the water heater explodes. This might create sympathy for Clinton—except that her campaign is causing the ruckus.

As my Li’l Bro Thom would say, “Gawd, that’s good!”

Maybe being the only guy on the ballot is not always a good thing. Jim Geraghty explains what it means to the Hillary campaign in Michigan.

Perhaps the Clinton campaign should rethink endorsing an idea to disenfranchise voters. Or, if not endorsing…certainly not condemning. Over at Ace the question is asked: This is the stuff presidents are made of?

Betsy says Hillary needs a better hiding place.

Meanwhile this book sounds interesting: A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Election of 1800 by Edward J. Larson. Might be worth picking up, if for no other reason than to read something that is not about Hillary and Obama.

Ann Althouse on the Michigan Shenanigans in play. And yes, I linked that mostly so I could write Michigan Shenanigans, because a good Irish word like shenanigans can’t be used enough.

Tom Maguire looks at the recession that has been looming for five years, according to the “experts”.

Captain Ed has Rush Limbaugh having too much fun. (Via Hot Air). I’m not a regular Rush listener, and I missed that one, but my goodness, no wonder the left wants him off the air…he dares to laugh at them. They should buck it up. The right gets laughed at all the time.

Zoe Romanowsky at Inside Catholic, cleans her fridge and finds newspaper clipping worth re-reading.

Remember when Al Gore and Joy Behar got mad at President Bush for - among other things - ignoring the Iran Study Group? Seems he understood something they did not. Cooked.

Are you interested in UFO’s? Wired Magazine says Lake Erie is apparently a hotspot and links to entertaining video. Dude!

This is Fred Thompson’s wife? Wowee. Pretty and articulate. And he’s pretty clear-speaking, too.

President Bush should never have signed McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. Although, it does sound like this film crosses a line, to me.

Siggy has Stem Cell News that ought to make everyone glad, even if they hate Bush.

The Koran undergoes Da Vinci Code-ish scrutinies.

Flopping Aces says commerce fears a Democrat win? (Now I can’t get that damn song out of my head: Come on, Mary, don’t fear the reaper…)

Cutting through the Katrina Krapola. With a knife. I kind of liked some of the things Vanderleun grouses about, here, but I take his point.

A new year seems like a good time to consider cultural and moral relativism, doesn’t it? Neo-neocon thinks about it here and here, in pieces that strike me as excellent conversation pieces for the workroom lunch area. Or, maybe not. Depends on how you go about it, I guess. Neo also wonders why so many clever writers consent to be so useful to others, in such an idiotic way.

Has anyone tried this coffee yet, and if so, could you tell me what you thought of it? I talked about picking it up at Christmas, but never got around to it. The Rosary bracelets I gave were big hits, though, particularly the tree agate (green) and the obsidian (black). I see they have newer, better pictures of the bracelets up, and I’m tempted to buy more.

Greetings from Buster, back at school and unable to sleep due to a loud, rowdy neighbor. He sends this your way - Joe Cocker singing “Unchain My Heart” - damn, it’s good:

On being home-schooled. From the student.

Catholic Media Review has hit the ground running - they’ve got lots posted - most recently, Julie introduces a review Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism (my own review of it is here - and Fr. Thomas Berg has a review and interview with the author here) and Christine talks about the Islamic Jesus film.

Speaking of film, Greg Kandra makes me want to see Sweeney Todd, and to fear it!

Speaking of books, a friend who is coming back to church tells me this is a good’un: The Catholicism Answer Book

My Li’l Bro Thom sent this Maureen Dowd piece my way with the observation: She does her best writing when it’s about the Clintons.

I’ll say! Today’s column is a stunningly good.

At the Portsmouth cafe on Monday, talking to a group of mostly women, she blinked back her misty dread of where Obama’s “false hopes” will lead us — “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards,” she said tremulously — in time to smack her rival: “But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not.”

There was a poignancy about the moment, seeing Hillary crack with exhaustion from decades of yearning to be the principal rather than the plus-one. But there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us. But it was grimly typical of her that what finally made her break down was the prospect of losing.

As Spencer Tracy said to Katharine Hepburn in “Adam’s Rib,” “Here we go again, the old juice. Guaranteed heart melter. A few female tears, stronger than any acid.”

That’s good writing - penetrating, insightful and well-voiced.

Dowd won a Pulitzer in the 1990’s by writing about the Clintons with wit and stinging, remorseless exposure. Then with the election of Dubya, and 9/11, she seemed to lose her voice. For the last 6-7 years, all Dowd could do was namecall, sneer, shriek and stumble through her columns, which read like the weak prattle of a bitter woman in a smoky bar, who - stood up by her date - falls back on bitching about her hated ex-husband, and all men in general. She hit her nadir with her book, Are Men Really Necessary, after which she had nowhere to go but up, and up she has come.

“If you get too emotional, that undercuts you,” Hillary said. “A man can cry; we know that. Lots of our leaders have cried. But a woman, it’s a different kind of dynamic.”

It was a peculiar tactic. Here she was attacking Obama for spreading gauzy emotion by spreading gauzy emotion. When Hillary hecklers yelled “Iron my shirt!” at her in Salem on Monday, it stirred sisterhood.

Compare this column to the ones I’ve linked to above. There is such a difference in writing, in tone, voice, cerebral engagement and energy.

Her argument against Obama now boils down to an argument against idealism, which is probably the lowest and most unlikely point to which any Clinton could sink. The people from Hope are arguing against hope.

At her victory party, Hillary was like the heroine of a Lifetime movie, a woman in peril who manages to triumph. Saying that her heart was full, she sounded the feminist anthem: “I found my own voice.”

She’s not the only one.

The abject and seething hate for the Bushes did not serve Maureen Dowd well - it made her shrill and incoherent. I don’t think she ever fully understood Bush; she never wrote about him in a focused and linear manner. But the Clintons - she has their numbers, and here she is as focused and linear as a laser beam.

Welcome back from the wilderness, Ms. Dowd.

UPDATE: Buster wonders, “thirty-five years of ‘change’ and ‘experience’ and she’s only just now finding her voice? That doesn’t really make her sound formidable.”

Actually, now that I think of it, it makes her sound a lot like the woman I heard at a performance of The Vagina Monologues, who remarked to another audience member that she was 35 years old and had never seen her cervix. I only pray the Hillary campaign does not morph into a gooey voyage of “discovery, affirmation and self-actualization.” We’re never going to get out of the 60’s.

Can you believe it? The boy wasn’t even driving when I started the blog and now we’re taking him off to school, and yes, this leave-taking is tough. It was hard to leave our Elder Son a few years ago, but at least I still had “one at home…” Now…well, the house is already feeling kind of empty and we feel it keenly.

Will likely post something tonight after we get him settled in. Please pray for us, especially that this infection does not come back. It feels like the antibiotics and the infection are battling it out and I’m terrified of that pain coming back. No kidding, I’m no wimp but I never want to feel that again. Thanks. Off we go.

Continuing our discussion of last night, Buster and I wondered at the fact that, while some classrooms managed to barricade doors against the Virginia Tech shooter, there seemed to be no class ready to ambush the shooter by having heavy textbooks (or desks) ready to throw at him - “if they’d just gotten him to flinch, just distracted him, they might have taken him down,” Buster said, “and when you’ve got someone down, it’s so easy to kill him.”

“Well, to restrain him,” I corrected, “until he could be taken into custody.”

“No, to kill him,” Buster said. “Why keep him alive, so he can become someone’s hero and spend 70 years on the public dole, running one appeal after another?”

Since the 17 year old was clearly not of a mind to discuss the finer points of John Paul II’s thoughts on the death penalty, and I do understand that it takes the passing of some time, in the face of such a terrible story, to let go of anger and think another way, the conversation quickly drifted into the fact that the entire student body was unarmed. I mentioned this piece to Buster, written by a law-abiding gun owner who is unable to bring his weapon to the campus, for fear of expulsion.

“So,” Buster mused, “as ever, the shooter is not a licensed gun owner, but the licensed gun owner is too busy being respectful of the law to be of any use. A responsible gun owner who is trained to use his weapon is rendered impotent. The law might stop a good guy from making a bad choice, but it’s never stopped a bad guy from being a bad guy.”

“One of life’s many paradoxes,” I said, wishing he’d let me get back to dozing.

He wouldn’t. Now that his mind was engaged once again in the idea of fighting back against a random shooter he wanted to discuss the various means by which a shooter may be taken down, and the relative benefits of refining one’s touch with a purposeful blade, even when going up against a Glock.

A quick confession: I was not always clumsily arthritic girl; for reasons that are not worth getting into, I have some expertise in the field of blade-wielding (take your best guess, maybe I was a carnival girl who got knives thrown at her in a past life). Once, answering a question on a long car ride, I had occasion to explain to Buster how vital it was for a short woman like me to have a spring-loaded blade delivered quickly to my hand so that I could then thrust it into a pericardium from below the ribcage. I showed him where the sternum extends and I advised him that it’s always dicey to attack from above (unless you’re taller than your opponent, and going for the jugular) as the ribcage would get in the way of the blade and the resulting shock up the arm can cost you your life. [Edited upon reconsideration; I’m not comfortable thinking I may be giving anyone ideas - admin] Finally, I described how one cleanly slit brachial artery (and a severing of the brachial nerve) can render an arm useless while bringing things to a fairly quick, if bloody, conclusion…[another edit - on second thought, maybe I don’t want to write all of these things out.]

Buster’s initial reaction was that Mom was kind of a scary broad, but a few minutes later he said, “teach me that stuff…”

No, I don’t intend to train my son to the blade, nor do I recommend anyone else do it. But, this all has me thinking…in a perfect world, we should not need weapons, nor fighting science…and yet as we see, daily, the world is an imperfect place, and all of our best impulses toward peace may be thwarted at any time by someone with another idea. My son is not exactly a kid who wanders around wondering how he can kill people with the tools at hand, and I’d certainly prefer that he bring his mind around to “restraining and detaining” a bad guy rather than taking his or her life, but sometimes I wonder if we have gone too far in teaching our children that “fighting is bad.”

I did that. I taught my children, when they were small, that fighting was bad, that there were better ways to achieve peace and understanding than through fisticuffs. I remember being appalled one day to learn that a neighbor had taught my Elder Son - who was being bothered by an older, bullying, boy - how to punch someone in the solar plexus. “You make sure you hurt him and get him down on the first punch,” she had instructed him, “because you don’t want him getting up.”

I was appalled until the day my son needed to use exactly that technique to save himself, and he did well. After that we invested in a punching bag, and training gloves, to good effect. And curiously, the day of the bully never again did dawn. But had it…we all would have been ready.

Maybe we can never be completely ready for what comes at us. But we shouldn’t tra-la through life mindlessly unprepared, either.

Meanwhile, Gateway Pundit has a moving round-up of the victims and Pajamas Media has continuing coverage.

And do read Gagdad Bob on the nihilistic “martyr” mentality and the overturning of the order of the soul. You might also call it diabolical disorientation.

Also, Dennis Prager rightly points out that to talk of “healing” on the very day one has encountered evil is not healing at all, but an obscene suppression - it is trying to shove the inconvenient fact of evil under a rug. Personally, I’m thinking it’s more like trying to induce social amnesia in order to keep the populace mooing and chewing.

Dymphna dares to recall history while some would suggest that - here’s a surprise - this all happened because of Iraq. And what do you know, Keith Olbermann is blaming it all on Bush. Really, how pathetic is that? And seemingly mistaken, too.

Cobb, to whom I do not link enough, has a typically thoughtful and provocative post on being a protector, and holding one’s manhood cheap. Excellent read.

Lastly, Theodore Dalrymple writes that things are not hunky dory in gun-controlled England.

“I’ll tell them some of the hard truths we don’t always like to teach, but sometimes must. That life is not fair, and it turns on a dime. That the world is not a safe place and it never has been, and that’s why when we are looking out for each other, we are doing the best we can to keep ourselves safe, as well.”

Okay, maybe not the wisdom of the ages, but for heaven’s sake…it’s so much better than the trembling lip and the waving hankie.

- Anchoress, 10-03-06

The Virginia Tech massacre has delivered unto us piles of bodies, one genuine and tragic hero, (we may learn of more) too many immediate critics and poseurs, and the usual media orgy that begins with a stupid, self-indulgent question and will continue until every possible position and technique has been tried.

We will watch the whole pageant play out - a parade of interviews with stunned students, the grieving parents, the hapless school officials, the “grief” counselors” the speeches, the “hurry up and heal, hurry up and forgive” advice, the first funerals, the hurried legislation to ban firearms (as though the world could somehow ever be made safe) the memorial plantings and tribute walls, the talking heads who know only what they know, which is never much, and who spew it endlessly, endlessly, in an effort to promote their fervent opinions on to the rest of us. There will be “investigations.” There will be finger pointing. There will be lawsuits. Sound and fury signifying very little beyond what we have always known of the world: it is a rough and dangerous place where horrible things happen, and when they do - when these catastrophic horrors conceived in man’s own hearts occur - we have little to cling to beyond each other, and that in which we have chosen to believe.

Eventually we’ll stop clinging to each other and move back into our lives. Most of us will hold even faster to our beliefs, be they natural, supernatural, political or cynical. We’ll dig in, and the disobedient world - as mysterious and unknowable as the human heart - will continue to resist taming, will simply get that much more mysterious, and that much more difficult to navigate.

The simple truth is that despite what the world via your television is saying to you right now…there is no solution to the problem of human unpredictability. There is no “fixing” this so that it never happens again; it will. Auschwitz happened. Stalinist Slaughter happened. The Killing Fields happened. Sarajevo happened. Somalia happened. Columbine happened. 9/11 happened. The murder of Amish School children happened. This has happened. Something else will happen in the future, and everyone will be shocked and horrified and say “who is to blame, where may we direct our helplessness into productive or self-rightelous rage, and what’s my cut of the lawsuit?”

Last night I noted that my son and his friends were paying only passing attention to the story. It’s not that they’re unfeeling, but they know that they needn’t remain glued to the television - a press that can find thousands of ways to discuss Anna Nicole Smith can do a slaughter of this magnitude on their heads, and they will. But as I remained parked on my convalescent couch last night I talked to Buster and his friends about how seamlessly they were able to move from watching the distressing images from Virginia to clicking on a re-run of Scrubs. “There is nothing I can do for those people,” one young man said. “I can feel bad for them because they’re in a world of hurt, and if I were there, I’d have done something, or if I were a cop, an EMT worker or something, I could do something. But I can’t. All I can do is sit here and feel bad for them, which I do, but I can’t wallow in it. That would be like making porn of it.”

“Yeah,” another one said, “the truth is, these people, it’s horrible, but all you can do is kiss them up to God and then hope when it’s you turn to face something horrible, you can deal with it.”

When it’s your turn to face something horrible…

These kids are all about 17 years of age, and they’ve already figured out that we all get our dose of horror, that no one escapes life unscathed.

I thought about that for a long time while I watched 5 young men process unthinkable information and images in precisely the way society has more or less trained them to process it - by clicking the well-named “remote” to another channel, and thinking of something else.

It sounds unfeeling, doesn’t it? For hundreds of parents, thousands of family members, the world has just stopped spinning aright, and they will never be whole again…but for a generation, the story has only a little more emotional impact on their lives than your basic television drama, and since it plays on an endless loop, they know they can click to a ballgame, a sitcom, a wrestling match, and then click back at any time, to watch the story in progress.

The temptation is to judge them as cold and uncaring - don’t they know that a world has ended for many people, don’t they understand that evil is alive and all around?

Why yes, they do. They do know it, but thanks to “nightly news” broadcasts that have trained them to segue from one story (a tragedy) to another (a surfing parrot) without consideration for appropriateness, and thanks to a modern parenting style that over-emphasizes feeling “good” and attempts the banishment of feeling “bad”…they seemed to have moved beyond “appropriate” responsiveness into a strange pragmaticism that says, “life is dangerous, and eventually I’ll get mine, but if I can’t do something about this particular problem, I don’t have to think about it right now. Right now, I’d rather laugh and feel good.”

I talked to Buster about it later that evening. I asked him what he thought of it all - the shootings, the instinct to move from that story to a sitcom rerun. He said, “Mom, I’ve run the Columbine scenario a million times in my head. I’ve thought about what I would do, depending on where in the building such an attack were to take place. I’ve sat in class thinking about how the windows open, what structures would make the best barricades and how to go about taking the bastard down rather than simply cowering in fear while people are shot to death. I’ve thought of it. We’ve all thought of it, my friends and I, we’ve devoted hours to thinking about it. If you think we’re being cold or cavalier, I think we’re simply aware of the fact that this is what the world is, that no one can ever guarantee our safety - not schools, not governments - nothing is going to absolutely and 100% protect us from what is out there, what can come into our lives in an instant, and change everything. All we can hope is that when stuff like this comes our way, we can do the courageous thing.”

Then again, Buster always was a pragmatist.

Perhaps the secret that has spilled forth from Virginia Tech is that a bucolic illusion of created, assured safety has been burst. In an era where captured British soldiers take home goodie bags and have their irresolution applauded, we can only look at Professor Liviu Librescu’s determined heroism as an awesome aberration - he did the courageous thing.

Professor Librescu came from a different generation - part of “the greatest generation” which has been both honored and reviled by the de-constructionist know-it-alls they raised. I don’t know if his generational sensibilities had anything to do with his willingness to lay down his life so that his students might escape with their own. But after observing and talking to the young men of my acquaintance last night, I tend to think that the generation coming up behind us may surprise us and reject the goody bag. I think they’ll consider playing dead if they think it might fool a predator, but if action is required I believe they will act. They’ll do whatever it takes to get through a thing so they can pick up the remote and move on as quickly as possible, because wallowing feels to them too self-serving, too much like porn.

NOTE: I know this is not much of a post, messy and disjointed, sorry, but I really don’t know what to make of the world, myself, and am still functioning at half-steam. I am on the mend after a surprisingly tough exacerbation which had me laid very low, indeed. Please bear with me as I am nowhere near ready to get back to work full-time. I thank you most heartfully for all of the prayers (is there anything more humbling that to note - as the president did today, when addressing a stricken student body - that “people you don’t even know are praying for you”…I am humbled, indeed, and more grateful than I can say) and for the much-too-kind notes that have come my way. I will try to respond to all of them,