“I’ve seen more straight talk and balance in Viagra commercials.” Theron Bowers, M.D., on a 60 Minutes story about Adderal and Ritalin use among college students that began with perky Katie Couric asking “If there were a drug that would make you smarter, would you take it?”
I may be influenced in this by Errol Beumel, whose mental problems, exacerbated by Adderal addiction, ended with him systematically unloading a clip into his school teacher father.
I could call it “Haikuly yours III,” but I’ll save that because (a) this one’s public domain now and (b) I know this poem and can sing it rousingly:
Amo, Amas
by John O’Keefe
Amo, Amas, I love a lass
As a cedar tall and slender;
Sweet cowslip’s grace is her nominative case,
And she’s of the feminine gender.Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.Can I decline a Nymph divine?
Her voice as a flute is dulcis.
Her oculus bright, her manus white,
And soft, when I tacto, her pulse is.Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.Oh, how bella my puella,
I’ll kiss secula seculorum.
If I’ve luck, sir, she’s my uxor,
O dies benedictorum.Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.
(“Amo, Amas” by John O’Keefe. Public domain.)
For what it’s worth, I can still sing the Portugese national anthem from memory, 42 years after the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club learned it for our European tour. Rote memorization is odd.
Michael Gerson challenges not only libertarianism (which I’ve never been able to embrace), but constitutional conservatism, which I have embraced:
The Tea Party movement, being resistant to systemization, is resistant to characterization. But in its simplest form (and there seems to be no other form), it might be called “constitutional conservatism.” It adopts a rigorous hermeneutic: If the Constitution does not specifically mention it, the federal government isn’t allowed to do it. This represents a kind of 10th Amendment fundamentalism — a muscular form of states’ rights that would undo much of the federal role since Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps since Abraham Lincoln.
This philosophy has the virtue of being easily explainable — and the drawback of being impossible. The current federal role did not grow primarily because of the statist ambitions of liberals; it grew in response to democratic choices and global challenges. Federal power advanced to rescue the elderly from penury, to enforce civil rights laws, to establish a stable regulatory framework for a modern economy, to conduct a global Cold War. The “establishment” that advanced and maintained this federal role included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. In many areas, the federal government has gone too far, becoming bloated and burdensome. But the federal role cannot be abandoned.
So I guess the principle is “if it’s ‘necessary,’ tough luck that the constitution doesn’t allow it.”
Easily explainable, possible – and to my ears, still intolerable.
It puts us in permanent servility to court judgments of whether something “goes too far” or is “bloated and burdensome.” I’d really like a brighter line than that.
There’s a bill in France proposing that “no one can wear a garment intended to hide the face in the public space”.
Unless it’s a fashion show, I guess:
The good folks over at Mercator.net ask if what’s going on really has to do the dignity of women as persons:
[I]t is difficult to escape the impression that the real issue at stake for the French is not the oppression of Muslim women but the visibility of Muslim culture and the way it challenges feminist and secularist assumptions.
Those assumptions also produce blind spots when it comes to the dignity of women. A person who takes that dignity seriously is more likely to be offended by the dress sense of the crowd rather than of an isolated Muslim in a burqa, for the typical European/American/Australian woman today also goes about with something that obscures her face: the exposed breast cleavage just below it.
As western women cling to fashions that aim to reveal everything about the body, they too are depersonalised. The stranger’s eye is not drawn to the face where they might encounter the person, but to the body as a sexual object. And this leads also to oppression, even if the woman, just like the one in the burqa, does not understand that she is oppressed.
Oppressed or not, Muslim women are fighting back. Some who wear the face veil told a group of reporters in France this week that they would not obey the ban (which is expected to come into force next year) and they would not leave the country. They say it is tantamount to denying freedom to practice one’s religion. They talked about having recourse to the European Court of Human Rights if arrested.
As for their dignity, they say it cannot be dictated by the state. The secularism of the state should guarantee religious freedom, they argue. Also, they ask, if the French are such feminists, why do women make up less than 20 per cent of the 577 members of the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament?
Good points, ladies. But the truth that human dignity is not defined by decrees of the state does not mean it is defined by the customs of any particular group, either. For all that some women embrace it willingly, there is something very undignified about hiding the face. The dignity of a woman is the dignity of a person, and the face veil suggests, quite simply, that the wearer is not a person — for her husband and children, maybe, but not for you and me.
This is a sad state of affairs but not one that governments can solve with bans. If anything, these will provoke resentment among Muslims at large and rebellion among the young (watch for more veils appearing, not less). As Muslim leaders themselves say, the answer lies with the education and empowerment of Muslim women.
What would help a lot is a decision by European women to dress and conduct themselves in a style consistent with feminine dignity. Half-bared bosoms and burqa rage are definitely not the way to persuade our Muslim sisters to give up the veil.
Despite all our surface feminism, we really don’t treat women with dignity.
(But do we treat men with dignity, either?)
From today’s Writer’s Almanac:
It was on this day in 1536 that Anne Boleyn was beheaded for the charge of adultery, only a few years after she had inspired King Henry VIII to create an entirely new church just so that he could marry her.
When she met Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn was an 18-year-old girl who had plenty of admirers. She was beautiful, but she was also smart. She could debate theology and discuss literature.
Henry wanted Anne as a mistress, but she was an extremely ambitious young woman. And so she told the king that she couldn’t give herself to him unless they were married. He was genuinely smitten with this young woman, and he was also desperate for a male heir. So he decided to break with his wife of more than 20 years, and asked the pope for an annulment of his first marriage. The Pope refused, for both political and religious reasons. Henry had spent his life as a devout Catholic, and took very seriously his role as a defender of the faith. But when the Pope stood in the way of his love, Henry declared himself the head of the new Church of England, and granted himself an annulment in his own matrimonial suit.
Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn in 1533. It was only the second time in English history that a king had married for love, and it was possibly the only time in history that a new church has been founded just to facilitate a marriage. And yet, that marriage didn’t last long. He didn’t like that their first child was a girl. The one thing that might have saved Anne would have been a male child. Historians think she may have had several miscarriages or stillborn children, and it is certain that she miscarried in 1536, a stillborn male four months into her pregnancy. A few months later, she was arrested on charges of adultery and was set to be executed. Most historians believe the charges were false.
After her death, portraits of her were destroyed, along with her books and correspondence, and poems and songs she wrote. Her rivals spread rumors and made up stories about her, to defame her reputation in the history books, claiming that she’d been ugly and deformed, with a sixth finger on one hand and a huge hump on her neck. But despite all that, her daughter Elizabeth, the daughter who had so disappointed Henry VIII, grew up to become one of the most influential queens in history.
The ECUSA, part of the “entirely new church” Henry VIII created “just so that he could marry her,” still isn’t letting anything stand in the way of sexual desire.
I’m starting to think that ‘Tea Partier” has become a largely brain-dead epithet for mainstream media, much as “fundamentalist” has long been.
Jim DeMint is “The hero of the tea partiers” and believes that “the market is freedom incarnate; an institution of superhuman goodness.”
Rand Paul’s primary win is a “Tea Party Victory,” but he conspicuously believes in austerity and peace – a very Front Porch Republic kind of guy. I read that about him and felt very friendly, though I have no association with the Tea Party (beyond being fed up with both major parties, as they are rumored to be as well).
I have no idea what the Tea Party is supposed to stand for and how one can reliably be indicted for being a Tea Party kinda guy.
Writer’s Almanac
Had permission to reprint
I don’t have. So here.
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 ownYes, 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 ownMoney, 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 ownMama 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.
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.
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 