- Superfluity 95% deleted.
- Heckling the umpire.
- Flash Mob! (No video. No news coverage. Nothing to see here. Move along now.)
- A Republican Moderate?
- Bad anthropology, timely politics.
- John R.W. Stott again.
- A pattern poem.
1
I was going to post something here titled “Dear President Obama: Quitcherbitchin” inspired by Robert Barro’s Monday Wall Street Journal column and by James Taranto’s Best of the Web. But many liberal columnists seem to have turned on The Anointed One, The Great Agent of Change We Can Believe In, so I’ll not burden you with carrying more coal to Newcastle.
2
James Howard Kunstler Kunstler misses the mark on S&P’s downgrading of U.S. debt, but hilariously:
Did you admire Standard and Poor’s sly, Friday night downgrade of the United States Treasury bond rating? I was probably the only one in the whole country besides Anderson Cooper not out eating something bigger than my own head at Applebees, or watching the “Footwear Clearance” show over on the Shopping Network. However, I’m not the only one in America asking where do these S and P punks get off downgrading US bonds when three years ago they wore out their Triple-A rubber stamps on the cartloads of stinking offal that Angelo Mozillo and other mortgage rustlers were pawning off as bond-fodder on every Frankenstein “investment opportunity” pumped out of the Wall Street CDO mills. Government officials were righteously seething over S and P’s chutzpah, but I suppose when they tried to ring-up Eric Holder over at the DOJ they got connected to some call center in Uttar Pradesh where a friendly fellow named “Dale” picked up. China’s government-run newspaper virtually spanked the US: “Learn (thwack) to live (thwack) within (thwack) your (thwack) means!”
Standard & Poor learned its lesson. It missed AAA Enron. It missed oodles and boodles of AAA mortgage-backed derivative crap. It’s not going to give the U.S. a free pass just because we can print money and “honor” our commitments with paper worth a fraction of what’s owed.
So go ahead and hoot at the umpire if you like. He’s calling ’em as he sees ’em.
So how do you like “(We started it but) he made it worse” as a GOP slogan for 2012?
I like Kunstler’s conclusion, too:
Nature is telling you to get local, get smaller, get finer, downscale, solidify your friendships, and drop your stupid grandiose fantasies about running WalMart on algae. This is change you don’t have to believe in, because it is about to jump up and bite you on the lips.
3
I caught wind of this earlier in the summer with a blog entry that appeared in my RSS feeder but was gone from the web by the time I clicked through.
I’ve enjoyed flash mob videos of the Hallelujah chorus at Macy’s (formerly Wannamaker’s) in Philly, or “Christ is Risen” in a middle-eastern mall on Pascha. But this kind of flash mob we can do without.
4
Once upon a time, it was possible to be a Republican Evangelical without being a snarly wingnut. Without, indeed, being a conservative (though the New York Times’ “liberal” is unearned).
Mark Hatfield, Requiescat in Pacem (or whatever’s an appropriate farewell for a Baptist these days).
5
When I was younger, there was a book titled “Today’s Isms.” I thought upon seeing the cover that ISMS was an International Society for something, but the author actually was writing about the suffix: Nazism, Fascism, Communism. Having since read the book, I’ve been forever leery of Isms, including the capital variety.
Libertarianism, too, and with vaguely-formed ideas that this Ism was intriguing, but deeply misguided as well.
James Matthew Wilson, riffing off of an R.R. Reno column, articulates what was inarticulate in me:
I believe that libertarianism grounds itself upon a naive, perverse, and frequently dangerous anthropology — one that lies to the human being about his political nature and may rob him of the vocabulary necessary to understand and find means of fulfilling that nature …
Monadic individualism is a modern heresy in which libertarians persist … As Russell Kirk was fond of observing in the nineteen-fifties, liberalism has long since ceased to promote freedom and has taken on the yoke of massive technocracy in the service of a centralized administrative state …
But I do not view the minority condition of libertarian thought merely as a bell-weather of centralization and the rationalizing bloat of liberal government. However much I may disagree with libertarian anthropology, most libertarian proposals strike me as precisely the solutions to the broken condition of American government in our day.
The ellipses eliminate some stuff that I heartily endorse to preserve the core of my uneasy flirtation with libertarianism: bad anthropology, timely politics.
I guess there’s a reason why the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We may some day need to rein it in, but for now, libertarianism has lots of allure.
Among what I elided is this, which I offer as a bonus, not my central point:
Kirk delighted in quoting Santayana, who once wrote that liberals have little interest in loosening men from any bond save that of marriage; … [T]he dissolving of the marriage bond is consistently the front line in the liberal war to conquer all of private life for centralized administration. It is easier to render every person a ward of the state, when one does not have cohesive and sovereign institutions like the family getting in the way, and rendering the family a nonspecific, merely affective, juridical fiction may quite effectively neutralize its social function and natural integrity altogether.
6
John R.W. Stott, whose death I remarked quite early, I think, probably didn’t deserve his “One of the 100 most influential” designation, though the world would have been better if he had been that influential. Stott came to be drowned out by voices who, in the name of Jesus, put their trust in princes, sons of men in whom there is (and ever was) no salvation.
7
From the current issue of Image:
See
Here at last
Is
Love
(Dunstan Thompson)
Let him who has eyes to see, see.
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 