- Killing for Kelloggs.
- “Stupid” Worse than “Snob”?
- Free association illustration.
- The President’s new Titter account.
- Book smart, street smart.
- Seven Steps to humility.
- Wherein the author embeds some good, clean fun.
No categories today, but lots of tags.
1
Father Stephen Freeman cast caution to the winds to “think aloud” about some broadly political (but not partisan) things that had been puzzling him. His doing so, in my recollection, is unprecedented, and he acknowledges that he’s breaking two personal blogging rules.
Some quotable lines:
- Imagine for a moment, a world that was organized not into states, but into commercial providers and commercial consumers … Would you go to war and kill for … Kelloggs[?]
- I do not think that keeping somebody rich is a justifiable cause for killing someone.
- I am more afraid of being ruled by some Christians than I am of the current corporate class.
- I have carried a quote of [Stanley Hauerwas] with me for the past 20 years or so that seems to go to the heart of question of the State: “As soon as we agree that we are responsible for the outcome of history, we have agreed to do murder.”
- God has not placed human beings in the position of world-management. We should obey the authorities under which we live – so long as they do not ask us to break God’s commandments – but we should not become enamored of their power. They are chimeras – endowed with all the power of Pontius Pilate.
- Hauerwas, said once in class, “Because we are not in charge of history, we have nothing better to do than to have children and tell them the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
I fully appreciate Fr. Stephens usual avoidance of even a whiff of politics, but I am also most grateful for this thought-provoking exception.
2
Oh, my! What to do!? GOP social conservatives and Chamber of Commerce conservatives can’t agree on Gardasil, the HPV vaccination.
On the anti side there’s support for parental rights, fear (probably unjustified) that vaccinating 10-11 year olds for this particular disease will encourage teen sexual activity, and fear (totally unsupported by standard science) that the vaccine can cause autism.
On the pro side, there’s a transfer of government money into Merck corporate pockets – pockets from which Rick Perry reportedly got $28,000, not the $5,000 he claimed, but I digress, I think.
I suppose I could fly a flag for the anti- side, but a good argument would fall on deaf ears in today’s GOP because it would take more than sound bites. A bad argument would be carrying coals to Newcastle, and of bad arguments on this subject, there’s no shortage. A funny argument would take 4:19, including catcalls and cheers.
When I was in high school and college we conservatives were badly outnumbered but prided ourselves on being better informed than the lefties. Our heroes were the Buckleys and we read Russell Kirk, [Ludwig] von Mises, etc.
When I first got into electoral politics we all read [Arthur] Laffer, [Jude] Wanniski, Jean Baptiste Say, and everyone else who could help us win economic arguments. Same thing in foreign policy and social (properly defined) policy. This phony reverse elitism won’t work. People don’t like snobs but they like stupid even less.
(Anonymous “longtime conservative activist” e-mailing Washington Post’s putatively conservative Jennifer Rubin)
3
My son reminded me of the delightfully nihilistic demotivational posters at despair.com.
One provides a nice illustration on my free association after hearing that Liberty University (which Rick Perry visited this week) is now run by Jerry Falwell’s son, the old man having gone to his reward (or punishment as the case may be). Methinks this could equally well appear in Tulsa (Oral Roberts University), Greenville, SC (Bob Jones University), Pasadena (Crystal Cathedral), Siloam Springs, AR (John Brown University), Montreat, NC (Billy Graham’s home) and, if my memory’s not fooling me, Virginia Beach (Pat Robertson’s stinking empire).
Does James Dobson have a son?
I like the one on “Priorities,” too:
Hundreds of years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove… But the world may be different because I did something so bafflingly crazy that my ruins become a tourist attraction.
Omigosh! Look at this, wouldja! Do I hear a motion to declare despair.com the Website of the Decade?
4
The Obama Campaign set up a new website and Twitter account, @AttackWatch, which has elicited mocking responses (likely pay wall).
There’s got to be a cyberstaling law against that – I mean the part where people mock the President, not the Orwellian part where his campaign asks people to inform on their the thought crimes of friends and neighbors.
5
Kathleen Parker, a conservative with some contrarian deviations from Movement orthodoxy, thinks “dumb” GOP politicians have struck a responsive chord for good reason.
Before it got the Tipsy Teetotaler name, this blog got the “intellectualoid” in the URL. It’s there for a reason. I’ve been Bronx Cheering the dummies pretty regularly. E.g., see item 2, above.
But there’s book smart and street smart, and America is on a fairly long run now of preferring the latter. I can’t fault them one bit.
6
Pride is the fountainhead of many other sins, and humility is notoriously hard to achieve (whence lines like “proud of his humility”). Saint John of Sinai says, “Observe and you will find unholy vainglory abounding till the very grave in clothes, oils, servants, perfumes and the like….The sun shines on all alike, and vainglory beams on all activities.”
One of the Gospel readings for the day is Matthew 23:1-12, which concludes with “whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” The Dynamis devotional reading for the day discerns seven steps to humility in the Gospel reading.
Most people couldn’t care less, but maybe a few readers will.
7
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Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 