Month: May 2010

Why Sarah Palin has no political future

Daniel Larison, my kind of conservative, trenchantly reviews why Sarah Palin is a dead end:

* * *

“… Palin admirers have the strangest habit of finding new and demeaning ways to insult the object of their admiration. Here is Lee again:

In attacking Obama, conservatives get the sense that Palin is punching fearlessly up in her weight class and they find her more endearing because of it [bold mine-DL].

In other words, everyone including her admirers acknowledges that Palin is outclassed by Obama in every area of actual policy knowledge and understanding, but her admirers like that she doesn’t let this get in the way of launching her attacks. She may be a lightweight, but at least she punches above her weight! She is completely out of her depth, but she’s scrappy! This is supposed to be a compliment?…”

* * *

I have voted in every Presidential election of my adult life. Were the Republicans to nominate Palin, I would surely cast my vote for a Third Party candidate.

God bless the child

Sometimes a song is more than a song:

Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

Yes, the strong gets more
While the weak ones fade
Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

Money, you’ve got lots of friends
Crowding round the door
When you’re gone, spending ends
They don’t come no more
Rich relations give
Crust of bread and such
You can help yourself
But don’t take too much
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own

Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own
He just worry ’bout nothin’
Cause he’s got his own

God Bless the Child, Billie Holliday and Arthur Herzog, Jr.

Nothing much has changed, has it? Ross Douthat’s Monday column at the New York Times, “The Great Consolidation,” surveys the events of the past few years and concludes:

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable to the next national-security surprise, the next natural disaster, the next economic crisis. Which is why, despite all the populist backlash and all the promises from Washington, this isn’t the end of the “too big to fail” era. It’s the beginning.

If it doesn’t ring true to you, I’m surprised you’re reading this blog at all.

Is this the result of a conspiracy? Are there some bastards we can shoot to end it? I rather think of it as tragedy, not conspiracy. And, having grown up as I did, I sometimes think of it as misadventure (looks sorta like tragedy, but the reversal of fortune is brought about by an external cause, says Aristotle).

Even in tragedy, there can be comic moments, as when POTUS (President of the United States) rationalizes a Supreme Court Appointment:

In the past week, I’ve read two news stories about Kagan in my local paper that featured absurd language.  The first was an AP story by Ben Feller on May 10.  The second was an AP story by Julie Hirschfeld Davis on May 12.

The second story quotes Harry Reid as saying Kagan “has fresh ideas” because she’s been “out in the real world recently.”  Reid is trying to turn a negative into a positive. Kagan’s lack of judicial experience means she has been doing other things instead of being cloistered among black robes.  But are the other things she’s been doing part of “the real world”?  For the past decade, she has been professor and then dean of Harvard Law School, followed by a year as U.S. solicitor general.  That’s pretty rarefied living.  In the ‘90s, she was a White House counsel and policy advisor.  Is there anything “fresh” about a retread from the corrupt and sleazy Clinton years?

The first story reports, “The president has grown vocal in his concern that the conservative-tilting court is giving too little voice to average people.”  Obama—he of the famed analysis regarding bitterness and clinging—has now condescended to express a tender regard for the vox populi.  In between his policy talks with Bernanke, Geithner, and Blankfein; his strategy sessions with Chicago machine cogs; and his social visits with the Beverly Hills and Martha’s Vineyard set.  Somehow he finds time to worry about the little guys and gals and then express that worry while the press dutifully notes the expression.

We are told that Kagan is a manifestation of Obama’s concern that the common people are not being heard by the Supreme Court.  So he appoints a person who attended an exclusive high school, then Princeton, then Oxford, and then Harvard.  Just the sort of person who is most likely to be in touch with the struggles and aspirations, the stances and aims of We the People.  Ain’t democracy grand?

(Jeff Taylor, Few v. Many: The Topsy-Turvy World of Judicial Demographics, at Front Porch Republic)

Rima Fakih is soooo yesterday. Where’s my bread? Where’s the next circus?

Yes, Jeff: Democracy is grand.

Red Tories | Front Porch Republic

I haven’t decided yet whether I like The American Conservative enough to renew my subscription, but the June issue is excellent, and I’d recommend that you pick it up before the next issue rolls around.

The feature article of the June issue is “Shattered Society,” an essay by Brittish philosopher and politics wonk Phillip Blond, who styles himself a “Red Tory.” The subhead is “Liberalism, Right and Left,  has made lonely serfs of us all,” and asks “Does the Red Tory tradition offer a remedy?”

The article is powerful. The responses (e.g., Daniel McCarthy, Nicholas Capalidi) are provocative. Like Daniel Larison at Front Porch Republic, I thought Capaldi’s response was badly misguided. I even though it was condescending psychobabble, probably a calculated hatchet-job commissioned by corporate interests. That’s why I blog while Daniel Larison blogs and can actually get a job writing professionally. He insinutes the same sort of thing but does it more nicely.

Porn on my mind

I have pornography on the mind lately.

You might say “tell us something surprising” or “aren’t you a little old for that?” But that would miss the point of why I have it on the mind. One obituary and a news mailing from my Law School did it to me.

Until just a few years ago, my hometown still had an independent bookstore and magazine stand downtown, City News. It was mostly magazines, frankly, and about 15% of it, as I recall, was pornography. One of the brothers who owned it until it finally closed died May 11.

City News and I had some history together. As a young adolescent, I was keenly interested in the — ahem! — “adult” material they had, and they were lax about underage browsers (this was before the brothers owned it). As a professional working half a block away decades later, I resented the pornography, but I realized that City News probably wasn’t viable without it. And I see that the brother who died, of complications of ALS, was pretty darned smart (Duke, magna cum laud) and had a pretty admirable life that I didn’t know about.

As I mused aloud on this, my wife reminded me that as a journalism major, she interviewed the female owner of a similar news stand in Peoria. Asking about the porn (which as I recall was “harder” by the standards of that day than what City News ever carried), she got the answer “I have a disabled son who is very costly to raise. Without pornography, the store dies and I’m out of work.”

Even Barnes & Noble and Borders have a small stash of what today qualifies as soft core, prudently wrapped in plastic bags.

I write this from a Marriott Hotel in L.A. Marriott is under Mormon ownership, as I recall. There was no Gideon Bible for my morning devotions, but I could have viewed pornography on the TV had I wished. I know offhand of no exceptions to “pay-per-view” porn in major hotel chains. The market apparently demands it.

I thought of this, too, as I saw a photo of my law school classmate, Scott Flanders, arm-in-arm with the Dean, with the caption declaring that he is CEO at Playboy. Scott was a libertarian-type conservative. Perhaps he still is. How wide the gulf between cultural conservatives and others of the “conservative” label!

Porn is everywhere. Yesterday before leaving for L.A., I attended a Daybreak Rotary meeting to receive a grant check for Matrix Lifeline, a pregnancy resource center I’ve been affiliated with for nearly three decades. Another grant recipient was the PEERS Project in Lafayette. It and all similar programs are losing their federal funding (elections have consequences). Mike Boston, the leader in Lafayette, trying to convey what they’re up against, said “just watch MTV for seven minutes if you can stomach it. No, just three minutes is enough.”

My wife just told me, as she leafed through an L.A. travel guide, that there’s a Porno Hall of Fame on Santa Monica Boulevard not too far from where we sit.

I hate it. We have lost all sense of shame seemliness. Some things are meant to be kept in private. Time was, not long ago, that the Dean of a good law school would have hesitated to be photographed with the CEO or a porn empire. Time was that a news stand could have survived without trafficking in porn.

I don’t accept market demand as an excuse. There are some things the market should not provide, demand be damned. And there are some trades less honorable than ditch-digging, even if they’re more remunerative.

Brother Jim, requiescat in pacem. I can’t really approve of the choice you made, but your Judge knows exactly how to factor in the spirit of the age.

Ascension Day

We observed Ascension Day “by anticipation” yesterday evening. (Our liturgical day begins at sunset, and we sometimes stretch it a bit, as an evening liturgy is better attended weekdays than a liturgy at, say, 6:30 a.m.)

My former Church, the Christian Reformed, took Ascension Day seriously, as did others in the Reformed tradition. That was on paper, at least. On the ground, the three Reformed Churches of generally Dutch background would typically pool resources, as not one of them could get a credible showing on its own for an Ascension Day service. (I assume it was otherwise a century or so ago.) That puzzles me now, more than ever.

I have noticed for decades the tendency of people to say things like “I grew up in X Church, but I never heard the gospel until my lovely wife Boopsie, then my fiancé, invited me to Y Church.” I may blog on that notion some day, because I have heard it said of the Orthodox Church — of which Church I know such a claim is false. The reason I know it is false is what may be worth blogging.

But as for Ascension, I can say that I grew up evangelical, then spent 2 decades in the Christian Reformed Church, but never apprehended until I was Orthodox that our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ not only sits at the right hand of the Father, from where he intercedes for us, but that He sits there in glorified human flesh!

The incarnation was no mere temporary expedient, so that the Son could take on crucifixion and death for us and thus placate the anger of the great sky bully (His Father) and get us (who actually deserved and were destined for such treatment) off the hook. That view of the Atonement is troubling on many levels.

But perhaps the most decisive proof of its inadequacy is that 40 days after the Resurrection, Christ did not go to the mountain and there shed his body, rising wraithlike to the Father before his disciples’ eyes. No, He rose in the body, taking it with Him.

So the Atonement — frequently broken down into separate word, “at one -ment”— has to do with reconciling humanity, flesh and blood as well as spirit, with the Holy Trinity.

This was the original plan. This was the eventuality of God’s little chats and walks with Adam and Eve in the Garden.  And this original plan is what our Blessed Second Adam has restored.

No wonder we have sacraments and relics as well as prayers and meditations. Salvation is for the whole person, and all persons. Reconciliation at all levels is so important that the Eternal Son, being fully God, humbled and emptied Himself and joined our race for eternity.

A Church that can’t spark interest in Ascension Day must be missing something huge about that.

Alternate energy follies – and a cold slap in the face about current cars

The Wall Street Journal must have an imp running around the office tying knots in knickers.

First, in The Price of Wind, the Editorial Board (I assume; it’s unsigned) inveighs about wind power at Nantucket Sound. It’s not because they’re NIMBY liberals, who have ferociously opposed it (seemingly for selfish aesthetic reasons), but because of the intricate subsidies and the cost of the power produced – double power from conventional sources.

There’s comic irony in this clean energy revolution getting devoured by the archaic regulations of previous clean energy revolutions. But given that taxpayers will be required to pay to build Cape Wind and then required to buy its product at prices twice normal rates, opponents might have more success if they simply pointed out what a lousy deal it is.

Then Homan Jenkins greets the reader with “Congratulations. You’re about to buy a fancy new Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt . . . for someone else.” He is shocked that the first wave of electric cars won’t cost $40,000 after all, but roughly 70% of that, because of – gasp! – subsidies!

And so a boondoggle is born. Last month, after a meeting with White House Car Czar Ron Bloom, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers produced a multipoint proposal for how the handouts can be made to flow more or less in perpetuity.

“In perpetuity“? Can you think of another transportation subsidy that’s perpetual (until the collapse that’s surely coming)? No, not Amtrak. Bigger than that.

How about roads, highways, streets, block after block of lovely downtown buildings leveled to make room for public surface parking or parking garages, and such? Do you think that our auto-centric communities happened naturally and spontaneously? Gimme a break!

More on Red and Blue families

Ross Douthat writes today some further analysis of the provocative new book and Red and Blue families in America, on which I wrote last week.

Read it if interested, because what follows is not (with one exception) a summary.

Notable to me is that the Blue state approach does not produce lower teen pregnancy rates, just lower birth rates. In other words, the price of the “new equilibrium” of the professional classes is widespread abortion.

Some years back I read an arresting summary. Part of America thinks everything would be hunky-dory if every teenager in America was sexually active if they were all faithfully contracepting (and aborting when contraception failed). Another part thinks teens shouldn’t be sexually active and refuses to acquiesce (e.g., “don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, but if you do, here’s a condom – wink! wink!”).

That may be an exaggeration, but it often seems only slight. The tacit assumption of the “pro choice” side is that the new economic arrangements, and the contraception and abortion that keep us competitive in that millieu, are good or at least neutral.

Bach Chorale Mexican Baroque – Maestrao Gray’s final BCS concert

MEXICAN BAROQUE
Music of 17th and 18th Century
Sunday, May 23, 2010
4:00 p.m.
St. Boniface Catholic Church
318 North Ninth Street, Lafayette

“Mexican Baroque” is not an oxymoron like “Jumbo Shrimp.”

This vivid program features little-known sacred music composers of the Mexican high baroque — and that is very high indeed  — sung in Latin with Baroque strings, trumpets, and timpani. Also, 18th century popular villancicos, guarachas and negrillas, sung in Spanish set to popular dance rhythms, and accompanied by guitars and percussion. The Mexican villancicos, described as “sacred entertainment for the masses,” have texts that are sometimes playfully humorous and sometimes profoundly spiritual. The alternation of the popular and sacred music of the Mexican high baroque reveals the deep reverence and the joy of living of the Mexican Baroque.

We’re two weeks out in rehearsal now, and I can say this is going to be a very memorable concert, and not merely because we bid vaya con Dios to Maestro William Jon Gray.