What is it with the pope, anyway?

Our week-long look at the disastrous papacy of Francis continues with this piece that asks a simple question: does he aim to lead the Church, or destroy it? For that matter, does he really know what the Church teaches?

The Pope is in town, in case you haven't heard. Not in Dallas, where I am, but out father East.  There will be a fair amount of fuss being made, much of it over how Good Pope Francis is ushering in the new progressive nirvana, and probably even more about how the evil conservative Catholics, not to mention the evil Republicans, are busy slamming him.

Of course, that's the typical MSM slant.  It is true that many Republicans disagree with the Pope on matters environmental and economic, and it's also true that a lot of conservative - more likely traditionalist - Catholics have been having kittens over his papacy.  If you're a regular reader, you know I haven't been too happy about this papacy either, having gone so far as to suggest that if I were considering converting today (instead of twenty years ago when I did convert) I probably wouldn't do it because I would be looking at a Church that might have truth on its side, but didn't appear to stand for anything.

Now, it's very easy to find political commentary picking a bone with the Pope.  For instance, George Will had this to say:

Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony. With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary. They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak — if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.

Meanwhile, at the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last asks if we should see the Pope as "Menace or Farce" (h/t Fr. Z)

For instance, the Holy Father seems to have a habit of appearing to endorse all sorts of left-wing political causes. There was the time he posed with environmental activists holding an anti-fracking T-shirt. And the time he posed for pictures holding a crucifix made from a hammer and a sickle. And the time he held up a poster calling for the British to hand the Falkland Islands back to Argentina. In each instance, the official Vatican response has been to suggest that Francis didn’t mean to endorse anything because he’ll pretty much smile and pick up anything you hand him, like some sort of consecrated Ron Burgundy.

Now, it is true that there's a ideological dimension to this; there's no question that the Pope is interjecting himself into a political discussion, not merely pointing out the existence of a problem, but offering explicitly political solutions, rather than charging the various legislatures with finding a solution.

There is, however, a spiritual aspect to this as well, and one can make a compelling case that in this religious, as opposed to political, dimension, the Pope continues to fall short.  The website The Federalist had a very good piece on this Monday, with Joy Pullmann writing, among other things, this:

I’m not sure who Pope Francis’s religious advisors are, but it seems they’ve forgotten the Gospel isn’t directly aimed at helping the poor or averting supposed environmental disasters. The Gospel is centrally about saving our eternal souls, about addressing spiritual—not material—poverty. Yes, the material world is broken because of sin, and it will be restored after the Last Day, but that’s an effect, and not the focus of scripture. What’s primary is our souls, not our pocketbooks.

She goes on to write:

In the course of loving our neighbors, as the Bible commands, of course we should seek to meet their physical needs, both through and beyond seeking to meet their spiritual needs. Acknowledging the truth that the world will always contain hungry people is not an excuse for not feeding the people in your life whom you have a duty to feed.

Maybe Pope Francis should welcome the environmental apocalypse he thinks is coming.
But the human condition of sin has ensured that everyone cannot be rich, healthy, and a lover of God. It’s sad, but true. We will never achieve utopia in this world. That’s kind of the central story arc of the Bible: How humans screwed themselves and the whole world up, and how Jesus has and will ultimately put things to right. Getting all the way to a perfect eternity, however, requires first an apocalypse.

So maybe Pope Francis should welcome the environmental apocalypse he thinks is coming. That’s partly a joke and partly serious, because every time I see another Planned Parenthood butchering video I am ready for Jesus to take me and my kiddos right up to Paradise and end this sick, mad world. But at the very least, Francis could do a better job communicating what my Catholic friends keep insisting to me he really does mean.

I get weary reading all this; it grieves me to see the Church that means so much to me disintegrating like this.  I'll say it again: Pope Francis could not be doing a better job driving the Church apart if he'd been sent by the Soviet Union (or Satan, take your pick) to ruin everything accomplished by the last two popes.  And I get just as weary being reminded by henny-penny hand-wringers that you're not allowed to criticize the Pope.  As a matter of fact, that really ticks me off.

Look; one should always be careful talking about the Pope.  The papacy is a divinely-ordained institution, and that's all there is to it.  Not only do I accept that, I wholeheartedly embraced it at the time of my conversion.  I believe it today.  But it also has to be said that the College of Cardinals don't always choose the right man for the office; anyone who thinks that the Holy Spirit divinely chooses the pope not only denies the existence of man's free will, he overlooks such occupants of Peter's Chair as the Borgia Popes.  In other words, one must respect the office, but there is no reason not to look at the specific occupant with a cocked eye.

Let's take this a step further, though.  Not only the papacy, but the basic clerical structure of the Church - bishops, priests and deacons - exists in the Bible.  What goes for the pope goes for them as well; respect the office, if not the occupant.

However, when it gets to the Curia, the governing organization of the Church - well, that's a man-made institution.  No only is there nothing divine about it, even the popes themselves have had to keep a very close eye on it from time to time for their own benefit, not to mention well-being.  The Curia, and the upcoming Synod of Bishops, is fair game as far as I'm concerned - again, as long as you remain somewhat respectful in your words.  Just as I get turned off by old ladies taking me to task for criticizing the pope, I also get torqued by people who behave like rabid Pavlovian dogs whenever Francis' name is mentioned.

Therefore: I have great concerns that Pope Francis is doing dramatic damage to the Church.  He disrespects those who have fought long and hard to defend tradition; his recent decision on annulments is nothing short of indefensible; his off-the-cuff statements are tiring at best and alarming at worst.  We like to talk about the "brand" today, and Francis has weakened the Catholic "brand" to an almost crippling degree.  Those who are the most impressed are those least likely to come back to the Church, or to defend the Church's traditional teachings.  Those most disregarded, most dismissed by him, are the ones who have fought the hardest and believe most fervently in Christ's teachings.  I don't know about you, but buddying up to your enemies and dissing your friends is not my idea of a successful business plan.

Francis' papacy has been a disaster, and if the upcoming Synod weakens the family further, as many expect it to, going back on two millennia of Church teaching (as well as Christ's words), then we see a real possibility of schism, and if that happens then we're really going to have some questions to ask.  All we know is that at the Last Judgment, we'll all be called to account for my actions.  I will not fare well when that happens, but at least I'd like to think I've tried to defend the Church, in my words if not always my actions.  However, the man who calls himself a "loyal son of the Chuirch" will have to do the same, and all in all I think I'd rather be in my shoes than his.

There's bound to be more to come on this, both from the Pope's trip and from me.

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Do you wish someone would tell it like it really is? Why not read The Collaborator, the suspenseful "theater of the mind" involving a showdown between two powerful men, each of whom has a vision of what the Church is and what it believes in.  The Collaborator "helped me understand Pope Francis better," according to one critic - find out why this story is more important than ever.

Read more about The Collaborator, including reviews and an interview with me, at my author website. The book is also available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online sellers. 

The pope's poverty of thought

Today, as we continue our week-long look at the papacy of Pope Francis, it's the pope's continuing preoccupation with poverty as a synonym for sanctity. Is Francis a Catholic or a Marxist?

A while back, returning from his papal trip to Mexico, Pope Francis took the opportunity to revisit his vision of the Church as a “Church of the poor.” Among other things, he declared that “poverty is the great teaching” of Jesus, and finished by saying, “How I wish that Christians could kneel in veneration when a poor person enters the church.” Setting aside for a moment the fact that Christians venerate no man save God, the pontiff’s words seem to me, for all the world, like a return to the quaint romantic notion of the “noble savage,” the primitive who achieves a kind of sanctity by virtue of his lack of contact with the outside world.

And if that is what he actually believes, then I think we have a problem.

I'm bothered by this automatic linking of poverty and piety. For all the injunctions which Christ made about taking care of the poor, he never promised that poverty alone would see someone into heaven. Likewise, does the pontiff really mean to suggest that any opportunity to improve oneself, to emerge from poverty and possibly become successful in business (thereby affording the opportunity to help others out of poverty) should be eschewed in favor of remaining poor? As Steve Moore, wrote in Forbes last year: “What is the theological case for telling those in the poorest villages of the planet where people still live at subsistence levels, that they have a moral obligation to save the planet by staying poor and using less fossil fuels, less energy and electricity?" Like Moore, I fail to see the connection.

When he used such glowing terms to speak of the poor, Francis said nothing new. One can go back centuries to the times of Peter Martyr, who wrote of those noble savages that “They seem to live in that golden world of which old writers speak so much, wherein men lived simply and innocently, without enforcement of laws, without quarreling, judges, or libels, content only to satisfy nature.” Montaigne, fueling the fires of such romantic rhetoric, proclaimed more than a half century later that “In my opinion, what we actually see in these nations not only surpasses all the pictures which the poets have drawn of the Golden Age, and all their inventions representing the then happy state of mankind, but also the conception and desire of philosophy itself.”

And yet we know that is wasn’t case, in Martyr’s time any more than it is our own, that the poor were living saints simply because of their poverty. The very Spanish who ran across the New World, upon discovering cannibals in the Caribbean, came to view these “noble savages” as “devils in the form of men” and, shocked, found it necessary to forcibly convert them. While there may be a certain spiritual strength to living without, particularly when doing so by choice rather than circumstance*, the vast majority of poor people see poverty as a burden to overcome, a state in life above which one should rise.

*It’s true, however, that “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” When poverty finds you, rather than the other way around, it can and does serve to focus the mind, often to great holy effect.

By elevating poverty to a kind of religious vocation, the pope threatens to deny the existence of Original Sin – in other words, he creates out of poverty a second Garden of Eden, linking not just prosperity but financial security itself with a type of corruption of the human soul. Keep in mind, however, that if evil arose out of the Garden of Eden, good likewise emerged, as Milton notes in the Areopagitica, saying “It was out of the rind of one apple tasted that good and evil leapt forth into the world, like two twins cleaving together.” Keep in mind, as one linguist pointed out, that Milton was fond of puns and wordplay, and that the word taste itself is a reference to the Latin word “Sapere,” which means both “to taste” and “to know.” Are we, therefore, to posit from this that the two words, taste and know, are fatefully intertwined, that the knowledge brought forth from the forbidden apple consisted of both good and evil?

Of course we know that Latin is not the pope’s strong suit; nevertheless to carry out this analogy to its logical conclusion – though I stress that this is merely one logical conclusion, not a definitive one – we have to view the poor, the residents of this second Garden, not as good untainted by evil, but as ciphers, neither good nor evil but blank canvases upon which both will be imprinted, as soon as knowledge of the world is experienced. Is this really the analogy which the pope wishes to create?

Perhaps it is. In lionizing the poor, the pope takes his cue from Rafael Tello, a fellow Argentine, one of the founders of “a theology of the people,” who in looking at their lives wrote of their culture as one which “is celebrated as a popular form of permanent resistance against the oppressive forces of modern development.”  When the pope declares that “poverty is the great teaching” of Jesus, he of necessity places them back in the Garden; as Catholic writer Maureen Mullarkey writes, “In this euphoric apparition, the pueblo—the indigenous poor—are a primal entity. Poverty retains a hint of Eden, and the poor are themselves agents of redemption for the developed world.”

The implications of this are manifest. Writes Mullarkey,

Bergoglio has internalized Tello’s ecstatic vision of the poor as the collective completion of the Passion of Christ. They are co-operators of salvation (Albado: “cooperadores de la salvación”) and, hence, a gift from God. Christianity provides a scaffold for sacralizing a mestizo variant of the Marxist proletariat. Theology of the people blends class struggle and mysticism in the time-honored language of gospel concern for the poor.

Mullarkey shrewdly sees problems with this. “What is new in this mystique of the pueblo is its other-worldly intoxication with poverty, as if material deprivation conferred holiness.” [Emphasis mine] Not only are the poor burdened with having to redeem the fallen world, “[they] are revered insofar as they play the role of the People, actors in a paternalistic drama directed by marxisant superiors inclined to interpret affluence as a signal of moral defect.”

I like the phrase that she uses, the idea that “material deprivation conferred holiness.” No, it does not. Faith and the acting out of faith through living a spiritual life, performing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, as well as willingly uniting one’s life and suffering to that of Christ, confers holiness. To equate holiness with poverty, especially when that poverty is something into which they’re borne, gives them a status based on something over which they have no control. You might even think of it as some kind of “unearned privilege” since they did nothing to achieve it, other than continue to remain poor. Kind of ironic, isn’t it?

I mentioned earlier this tricky bit about venerating people. This idea of playing favorites, as it were, is not just distasteful, it really runs contrary to God’s own character. The Old Testament provides an abundance of evidence to the contrary, particularly when it concerns the poor. Leviticus 19:15 teaches, “Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.” Exodus 23:3 likewise commands, “Do not show favoritism to a poor man in his lawsuit.” In other words, justice should be blind, and both rich and poor should be treated equally before the law.

James says in 2:4 warns, “Aren’t you discriminating against people and using a corrupt standard to make judgments?” While his warning applies specifically to favoring the rich over the poor (and is often stressed by today’s socially relevant Church), the opposite must be true as well, for Paul tells the Romans in 2:11 that “God does not show favoritism,” and again in Ephesians 6:9 says that “There is no favoritism with him.” Finally, Colossians 3:25 teaches God’s fairness in judgment: “Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there is no favoritism.”

What are we to take from all this? While James in 2:5 continues, “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” this is, as one commentary points out, “likely an allusion to Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount or Plain (Matt. 5:3; Luke 6:20). The poor are not inheriting the kingdom because they are better people than the rich, but because they put their trust in God. [Emphasis mine] Lacking the means to depend on themselves, or to curry favor with the rich, they have learned to depend on God.” And that’s it in a nutshell: what makes the poor the favored of God is not their poverty in and of itself, but their subsequent choice to put their trust not in the material goods of the world, but in God.

While the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, containing both good and evil, stained man irrevocably, but God did not fail to provide a solace. It is in the province of man, through free will, to use that knowledge, ill-gotten though it may have been, for the greater glory of God, by cooperation with Him in His grand design. From this divine partnership (if one can call it that) many great things have emerged. Someone, I don’t remember who, wrote once that we do not help the poor out of our own volition, but because Christ commands us to do it. James, in particular, demonstrates that good works are made possible by faith in Christ. It was part of His mission; therefore, it is part of ours as well. And it is that, as imitators of Christ – not by the mere fact of being born into the indigenous poor – which leads us to holiness and salvation.

Whittaker Chambers points out in his devastating review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that “if Man’s heroism (some will prefer to say: human dignity) no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche’s anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity.” If capitalism lacks a moral foundation, it becomes just another –ism. And so it is with the poor as well. True poverty does not qualify one as a saint, although it may well make one a saint. Likewise, true wealth cannot be measured with the Sign of the Dollar, but the Sign of the Cross.

Is it too much to draw from all this that wealth and poverty are themselves merely measuring devices of the world, and that the total draining of self to God – in other words, the self-induced poverty of everything save God – is what leads to salvation? If so, then Pope Francis ought perhaps to examine his thoughts more carefully. Remember, God judges all equally – does that not extend to the thoughts of popes as well?

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Want to know more about the crisis in the Catholic Church? Why not read The Collaborator, the suspenseful "theater of the mind" involving a showdown between two powerful men, each of whom has a vision of what the Church is and what it believes in.  The Collaborator "helped me understand Pope Francis better," according to one critic - find out why this story is more important than ever.

Read more about The Collaborator, including reviews and an interview with me, at my author website. The book is also available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online sellers. 

The Glorious Fourth

What is the pope trying to do?

Today we continue a special week-long look at Pope Francis and the Catholic Church. Is Francis a visionary needed for a new world, or a reckless ideologue trying to dismantle the teaching of Christ's own Church? In this piece, we look at the pope's words regarding Islamic terrorism.

From Rod Dreher. Read the whole thing, but the money quote asks the essential question:

What is Francis doing? Is this just the usual progressive Catholic see-no-evil dingbattery, or is there something else happening here? Again, how very odd for a world religious leader to deny the power of religion to mold the minds of men and to motivate their behavior. You would expect a vulgar Marxist to say all things are motivated by class and economic struggle and nothing but, but you wouldn’t expect a Roman pontiff to take that ridiculous and easily disproven line.

At a time when the world needs strong, realistic religious leadership to deal with the realities of Islamic terrorism (realities, I should say, that include the fact that most Muslims are not terrorists), Francis is offering jelly-brained liberal nonsense.

The picture above features a statue not only executing a facepalm, but beating the breast at the same time. I find this quite appropriate; as I've written before, I can't help but think of this pope as the pope of our chastisement - our "reward" for our lack of faith in action. Therefore, while we hide our eyes in horror at the latest pronouncement from the Vatican, we remember also to ask for forgiveness - because surely we must atone for our own role in the present state of the Church.

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Has this piece gotten your attention? Why not read The Collaborator, the suspenseful "theater of the mind" involving a showdown between two powerful men, each of whom has a vision of what the Church is and what it believes in.  The Collaborator "helped me understand Pope Francis better," according to one critic - find out why this story is more important than ever.

Read more about The Collaborator, including reviews and an interview with me, at my author website. The book is also available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online sellers.  

The Red Pope

Pope Pius XI famously said of socialism that it "is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist.”

My novel The Collaborator features a pope who looks to shake up the Catholic Church by casting off tradition and encouraging the reinterpretation of doctrine. As it turns out, he also happens to have been a collaborator with a totalitarian regime back in his home country, indirectly responsible for the deaths of numerous people through the information he passes along to the authorities. Although it wasn't explicitly stated in the book, the regime in question was certainly one of those from the left - socialist, fascist, Marxist, or even - dare one say it? - Peronist. There were, I wrote, a number of reasons why the future pope had become a collaborator, but although he may have been a sympathizer, it never occurred to me to suggest that he was an outright Communist.

Is Pope Francis a Communist, or at least a socialist? If so, it would seem to be a direct contradiction of his predecessor Pius' statement. Of course, if there's one thing we know for sure about Francis, it's that he doesn't put a lot of stock in statements from previous popes.

What he does seem to put a great deal of stock in, however, is the political theory that has developed in Latin America over the past century or so - particularly what the author Tracey Rowland, in her book Catholic Theology, refers to as "People's Theology," which dates back to the nineteenth-century Argentinian dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas and are said to heavily influence the pope's own thinking and appear in several of his public writings. Those four principles are:

1. Time is greater than space.
2. Unity prevails over conflict.
3. Reality is more important than ideas.
4. The whole is greater than the parts.

This kind of Hegelian "cultural-historical" philosophy is a distinct break with Christian anthropology in that it fails to recognize that ideas shape reality, rather than the other way around. It also seems more than a little compatible with Marx's theory of "historic materialism," in which society is seen as "fundamentally determined at any given time by the material conditions—in other words, the relationships which people have with each other in order to fulfill basic needs such as feeding, clothing, and housing themselves and their families." No wonder the pope seems to favor the idea of tossing over traditional Catholic doctrine on things such as communion for the divorced and remarried, people living together without marriage, and other things that might simply be "too hard" for people to follow. There is no such thing as "truth," one could conclude from this - everything depends on time and circumstances. It's all relative, and if that idea sounds familiar, you might be thinking of the "Dictatorship of Relativism" that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger warned against on the eve of his election as Pope.

We recall other statements from this pope: in talking about economic inequality, he said that “if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians;” when taken to task by some American commentators for his criticisms of capitalism, he replied that "I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended;” that as a young man he “read books of the Communist Party that my boss in the laboratory gave me.” George Neumayr, author of The Political Pope, quotes the pope as writing that "Inequality is the root of all evil,” and goes on to add,

One can imagine Karl Marx blurting that out, but none of Francis’s predecessors would have made such an outrageous claim. According to traditional Catholic theology, the root of all evil came not from inequality but from Satan’s refusal to accept inequality. Out of envy of God’s superiority, Satan rebelled. He could not bear his lesser status.

Rowland notes that the pope "believes that poverty bestows upon people a moral superiority, and accordingly, that for Pope Francis, the ‘deposit of the faith’ is to be found preserved among the poor living in ‘inner city neighbourhoods,' [sic]" and concludes that "Such a reading situates Pope Francis squarely in the territory of Scannone’s ‘People’s Theology'."

And then there's the pope's apparent willingness to compromise with Communist China regarding government approval of potential bishops, in which the pope “would commit to recognize as bishops only those clerics who first win from the Patriotic Association’s bishops conference.” In case you're not up on your world history, that's the kind of authority that Henry VIII sought, which led to the martyrdom of Thomas More and John Fisher, and eventually the Protestant Reformation. It's sad to think that tens of thousands of Catholics shed their blood to preserve the kind of independence that the pope now seems willing to fritter away. No wonder some Chinese Catholics fear betrayal by this pope.

I don't pretend that The Collaborator represents any form of prophetic warning, although the can be no doubt that the Church has embarked on a downward trend ever since his election*, one that has rapidly escalated in the two years since I wrote the book. I do say, however, with no false modesty, that reading The Collaborator can add to an understanding of the conflict within the Church, and the role which a pope can play in such a conflict.

*Even as he remains immensely popular with those outside the Church and those on the left wing of the Church, each of which maintains an ingrained hostility to Catholic teaching.

Last week the Catholic Church celebrated the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul; the latter the great evangelist to the Gentiles, the former the man upon whom Christ Himself founded His Church. These two walk hand-in-hand: the faith does no good if, as Christ reminded us, the light is hidden under a bushel, while it does no good to share the faith if there is no truth, no substance, to it. For that reason we'll be devoting the rest of this week to looking back at some of our previous pieces on Pope Francis, the man who, for better or worse, sits at the center of the storm surrounding the Church.

The head of the Jesuits, the religious order to which the pope belongs, is often referred to as "The Black Pope" as contrasted to the white cassock worn by the pope. In Pope Francis, we now have the first Jesuit Pope; the question remains - do we truly have a Black Pope, or a Red one?

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Want to know more about the crisis in the Catholic Church? Why not read The Collaborator, the suspenseful "theater of the mind" involving a showdown between two powerful men, each of whom has a vision of what the Church is and what it believes in.  The Collaborator "helped me understand Pope Francis better," according to one critic - find out why this story is more important than ever.

Read more about The Collaborator, including reviews and an interview with me, at my author website. The book is also available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online sellers. 

Flashback Friday: America the damned?

My own opinion is that things are slightly better now in the United States than they were a couple of years ago, when I originally wrote this piece. There's no hiding the bad, to be sure (as I wrote yesterday), and the culture is, if anything, increasingly decadent, but it could be worse - Donald Trump is no savior, but he's a hope, and at least he's not Hilary Clinton. And maybe, just maybe, this country's descent into Hell might be slowed down just long enough for a miracle. Who knows - we might even watch 1776 this year.

The Fourth of July used to be a special day for me. For a couple of years, I was the chair of the 4th of July parade in Richfield, Minnesota, and in the years before and after that it was always a treat to go to a parade.  We lived for the fireworks show at night; in addition to the shows on the Fourth, Bloomington had a show on the evening of the 3rd; if the weather was nice we drove to the top level of a nearby parking ramp, where we'd listen to the radio and eat popcorn while waiting for it to get dark enough for the show to begin.  The Fourth itself meant movies, almost in the same way that Christmas does - The Music Man, with Robert Preston, and my favorite musical of all time, 1776.  Yes, those were good times.

It's been a few years now since I've paid the Fourth any attention at all, and this year will be no exception.  I can't celebrate it anymore, because in my opinion there's nothing to celebrate. Over the course of these last years, we've seen America go straight to Hell, and last week's obscene Supreme Court decision just emphasizes the fact.  It's not only the decision itself, disordered as it is; it's this whole idea that the American Experiment has finally come to an end.  States' rights are going, if not gone; a relentless political correctness, from which dissent is not tolerated, governs our public discourse, as companies and special interest groups increasingly punish people simply for expressing their own thoughts; religious freedoms are not only done away with but scoffed at; police forces are increasingly militarized; in the name of national security, the Federal government becomes more and more intrusive in our lives; our very history is either forgotten or airbrushed.  Increasingly the world revolves around international financiers, investors more concerned with the bottom line than the High Altar.  To them it is money that makes the world go around, not the laws of gravity.  They've succeeded in reducing man to a statistic in a budget, a mere number that represents not a human soul but a profit/loss statement.  To them things such as gay rights are ideas to be pandered to; they see them not as troubled individuals but consumers with money to spend, and that's the only kind of morality that matters to them.  The poet Allen Ginsburg, in his epic Howl, called it Moloch, as is so evocatively illustrated here:


And who is there to turn to?  Not the humans running the Church; as rights are stripped away and depravities are legalized, we get lectures on climate change. Not political parties: the leftist Democrats, held captive by fanatical extremists, are the driving force behind many of these changes, while the timid Republicans, more interested in retaining power than doing anything with it, stand idly by.  Besides, the parties are just flip sides of the same coin anyway; they both want our money, the only difference being what they plan to do with it.

Man, that is depressing, isn't it?

We're all to blame for it, in a way, thanks to Original Sin.  We've allowed marriage to be corrupted through our own actions, just as we've played our own roles elsewhere.  There's more to it than that, of course; the Devil is alive and well in this world, in these United States, and he's finding many a willing disciple.  This doesn't mean we're helpless, though.  The pessimistic (but realistic) Rod Dreher has advocated what he calls the "Benedict Option," which involves groups of orthodox believers gathering into what might be called community support groups, where they exist to strengthen each other's faith, families and future.  It's not a retreat from the world, as some would have it, but a circling of the wagons.  And it's necessary because, as Dreher puts it, things are not going to get better.  Others advocate a more activist approach, attaching the issue head-on and refusing to be pushed around.  Still others think things can be turned around by electing the right individuals, that America at its heart is still a conservative nation.  The number who believe in that last category grows smaller and smaller, and if you're inclined to believe it I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to discuss with you.

In short, America seems to have devolved into a Godless, licentious nation, consumed with hedonism, basing everything on feelings rather than any kind of logical thought.  Not the sex you want to be?  Easy - just change.  Feel like marrying two or three other people?  Well, why not?  Think killer whales are human?  They probably are.  If you even bother to believe in God, you can create Him in whatever Image you want, knowing that He just wants you to be "happy," whatever that means nowadays.  What's frightening is not the question of where it all ends; it's that, deep in our hearts, we already know what the answer is.  It's not just America, of course, but the whole world.  The whole world isn't celebrating July 4th, however, and I'm not sure how we can, either.

In this atmosphere, watching a movie such as 1776 where we witness the birth of the republic, seeing what all these men were willing to risk their lives for, and then to look at what that cause has become, is beyond depressing.  To see an immoral lifestyle legalized (in the process overturning state laws passed by citizens) by a group of nine unelected officials, the same group (if not the same individuals) responsible for legalizing the murder of unborn human beings, all based on supposed rights that can't be found in the Constitution - well, if I was one who cried, I'd have shed more than one tear over these last few years.

I mentioned above that what's really scary about this is that in our hearts we know where it all leads.  A priest, talking about the various natural disasters that have befallen California recently, remarked that "When you keep giving God the finger, pretty soon he's going to grant your wish and leave you alone."  It's tempting on the one hand to look at anything bad that happens and see in it the finger of God, just as it's tempting to look at those same events and decry the idea that God would punish people indiscriminately, the innocent as well as the guilty.  But as we're reminded in Matthew 5:45, it rains on the just and the unjust.  The fact that there may have been innocent people living in Sodom and Gomorrah did not save the cities from being destroyed.  In fact, the Bible is replete with natural disasters as a sign of God's displeasure.

Speaking of which, it's worth noting that while some conservatives today suggest God is withdrawing His protection of America as a once-special country, there are others who would point out that America was founded on dubious propositions in the first place.  Such are the probing questions asked in Christopher Ferrara's provocative book Liberty, the God That Failed, which suggests that from the very beginning, liberty was a chimera, "the false god of a new political order."  Much the same message can be found in Hans-Herman Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed,  So perhaps we've been thumbing our noses at God this whole time, and that the Hell we're going through was predestined to happen at some time or another; it's just our lot that it's happening in our lifetimes.


And yet - it's all been part of God's plan that we are alive here, now.  There's obviously something we're meant to do, some role we're intended to play.  It's not likely we'll be able to determine that on our own, which means we have to keep our eyes and ears open and our prayers constant.  We must live lives that are good and pious, to the best of our abilities.  We must try as best we can to influence those close to us: friends, family, neighbors, workmates.

Most of all, I think, we must realize that we cannot be both Christians and Americans.  We can no longer live this hybrid, hyphenated life.  We give unto Caesar what is Caesar's, following the words and examples of Jesus, but we can no longer excuse what America does simply because it is America.  We pray for our country because patriotism is, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, a virtue, but we cannot go down with the ship - instead, we must head for the lifeboat created by Our Savior for our protection.

So in this weekend of rote patriotism, when for some of us there seems nothing left worth celebrating, try to remember that the things we truly celebrate are those things that are scorned by the rest of the world.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ reminded us thusly: "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

That reward is greater than any nation, any flag, any political or judicial victory.  It is the hope which we carry to ward off despair, the true joy that protects the soul from depression, the light that shines in the darkness.  If indeed America is beyond salvation, then damned she will be; our victory will be greater than that.

Originally published July 3, 2015

Step one in getting rid of the racial divide: get rid of race

Those Ancestry.com commercials you see on TV all the time are a scam, according to the wicked satirist Joe Bob Briggs, because - and here is the scam part of it - race doesn't exist.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe for a second that these tests mean anything. If you believe that DNA patterns are so historically accurate that you can discriminate between, say, Ukrainian origins and Tatar origins—it depends on which Mongol horde in which century pillaged which village, right?—then you must also believe that the guys examining your cheek saliva in Twin Falls, Idaho, have an encyclopedic knowledge of human migration patterns that are still considered mysterious by experts at the British Museum.

But what I do believe is that something did occur several millennia ago, 59 miles southwest of Baghdad, at Babel, site of the most ostentatious tower in the world before it was surpassed by Trump Tower. Whatever happened at Babel may not be exactly what the Jewish scribes describe in Genesis 11, but some series of cataclysms caused the one race to disperse into many races, or at least appear to be many races.

But even if you do not believe this—even if you believe, like John C. Calhoun and David Duke and Louis Farrakhan and Baruch Goldstein, in the purity of certain races—aren’t we finding out that Americans are so genetically messed up that everybody is multiracial?

We’re mongrels and we know it.

It's that business about America being a melting pot - remember that from your grade school history books? Probably not; I doubt they teach anything that politically incorrect anymore. But it does seem as if so much of what we face in this country today is based on fault lines created over the centuries by what have now become artificial distinctions. What's the answer? Here, the satirist Briggs becomes provocative - and also, I think, serious:

So here’s an idea. What if we declared, by law, that all Americans are the same race? We’ll call the race “American.” It’s a nationality, it’s an ethnic group, and it’s a race.

As part of this law, we would make it illegal to subclassify or hyphenate anyone. Therefore, no more Asian-Americans, no more African-Americans, not even any Native Americans, because that word would become redundant.

Wouldn’t this be the most egalitarian thing we’ve done since 1787?

Provocative indeed. Briggs goes on to savage the ways in which current (and future) census policies not just recognize, but exacerbate, these divides, which is like prodding the lion behind bars. And what happens when it turns out the lock on the door comes free?

Read the whole thing. As is the case with the best satirists, Briggs makes some very serious points, not only about the hypocrisy of the whole thing, but about the elegy we might just as well offer, as we head for the Independence Day weekend, for the quaint notion of an American nation and an American culture, populated not by hyphens, but by - Americans.

Opera Wednesday

This week we have the lovely and famous Intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni's one-act opera Cavalleria rusticana, which takes place on Easter. As the Intermezzo plays, we see the empty village square on Easter morning, just before the villagers come out of church.

It's interesting that this orchestral piece - no vocal, just instrumental - from an opera that, because of its length, is virtually never performed without a companion piece (most often with Leoncavallo's similarly short Pagliacci, which has its own famous aria, "Vesti la giubba") has gone on to become one of the most famous pieces in all of opera.  After you listen, you'll understand why.

This 2009 production was conducted by Georges Prêtre with the Orchestre National de France.

Dress code redux and copyrights

A few years ago, I remember my experience at a friend's church in singing a one-off with their choir, as our church's choir has degraded its quality with weekly karaoke performances of Top 40 hits that has grown worse, forcing me to ask why they think such hits have more virtue than sacred choral songs such as Te Deum variants from Haydn and Elder (of which our leader in Summer Chorus debuted in Carnegie Hall), and the Son of God Mass that the Summer Chorus sang this past weekend.  Choir is not for singing top 40 hits with a karaoke machine, folks.  Have the entertainment giants become such powerful groups where they want to control churches with their hits, and dumb leaders down by not letting them see over 500 years of church music from masters such as Bach?

The entertainment giants' material plays on KLVR Radio, but, it's not suitable for church.  One easy rehearsal, they boast, of the karaoke choir.  I did not join the choir to sing in a karaoke bar each week.  The choir is not backup singers for a pop soloist, as some books are pushing.  Instead of each section being its own and working with each other, the modern pop choirs have become soloists first, and teamwork of the choir is last  But sometimes, could it be the advancement of KLVR, the "modern worship" movement of Saddleback, Willow Creek, Newspring, and others, be for the detriment for those who studied choral singing?

Speaking of the Summer Chorus, the dress code issue I noticed years ago with the one-off is no better in the summer.  We saw everything from a blazer and leggings, to blouses and slacks, to the Little Black Dress, and various sleeveless looks without any consistency.  And even the men were now going over the edge, as one singer wore track pants and white sneakers when the rule was black slacks and black dress shoes.  There is no standard choral dress for summer it seems, and churches have decided the standard choral dress gives way to anything.   What has happened?  It's just as bad as the degrading of rules where golf in practice rounds the dress code no longer applies for PGA of America sanctioned events (not the USGA or PGA TOUR).  Can you imagine Phil Mickelson dressing in the same way was the women of this week's KPMG Women's PGA Championship when he does the Skills Competition as three stars of women's golf compete in a KPMG-sponsored skills challenge against a male golfer three years and change away from the Champions Tour?

As for copyrights, two of the tree pieces we sang in choir are protected by copyright, as one was written in 2001, and the other 2013;  the latter's "World Without End" was debuted by our leader's college choir a few years ago in Carnegie Hall.  As we finished our first practice, I had to warn a few attendees that cell phones (and video cameras, except for the conducting candidate's evaluation) were prohibited because they could be used to record the concert in violation of the organiser's agreement that it not be recorded without express written consent of the publisher.  These people who record the copyrighted "Son of God Mass" and "World Without End" face legal issues, and it was decided to warn them of the phone prohibition and the copyright warnings.  Most people would never record copyrighted material, but in today's relativistic world, we sadly have to warn people of such.

I don't think "pride" means what you think it means

You've probably heard it said before that "pride goeth before a fall." Pride is a tricky thing; it's one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and yet one hears and uses it constantly. We're proud of our children, our nation, our accomplishments. Most of all, we're proud of ourselves.

There's a pride festival going on this weekend in the city in which I live, and quite frankly, I'm not really sure what there is to be proud about. We all know what it is that one is supposed to be "proud" about, so I'm sure I don't need to provide any further explanation there. There are many things about it that puzzle me, though. For example, if it is true that homosexuality is genetic, as many seem to believe, then what is there to be "proud" about? It's not as if you've done anything yourself; you might as well hold a festival to celebrate your pride in being tall, or having five fingers, or being born with blond hair. You can't do anything about being tall - it's all in the genes - and unless you're willing to do some messy work with a table saw, you're stuck with five fingers as well. And while it's true that you can change the color of your hair, you can't change what its natural color is.

Ah, there's a point. If you can change your hair color, then it doesn't matter that you were born with blond hair; it all becomes a matter of personal choice. You can choose to identify as a redhead or brunette, to use the vernacular of the day. You can be whatever you want to be - it's a simple case of free choice. But if that's the situation, then it goes without saying that you can also be taught not to make that choice, and once you go down that road you're sure to get caught up in more ideological brawling, as is the case in California. And if homosexuality is something that is freely decided, then it opens one up to the unwelcome possibility of having to suffer the moral consequences for one's actions. I suppose you can have it both ways - that does seem to tie in to our desire to have freedom without having to pay the piper.

At any rate, pride. C.S. Lewis called pride "the anti-God," Jonathan Edwards linked pride to the Fall in the Garden of Eden. The ancient Greeks called it "hubris," and rated it as one of, if not the greatest, crimes. Alexander Pope once wrote that "What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools." As you might have gathered from the syllogism above, this whole "pride' thing seems to me to rest on emotions rather than logic, which is what makes it so hard to discuss, let alone debate. Dante saw pride as "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor," which certainly seems to describe the reaction that these proud citizens have to anyone who disagrees with them, so maybe the phrase fits after all.

Regardless of how one feels about the subject, it seems to me as if pride is entirely the wrong attitude to have. If pride is as bad as the philosophers and the theologians say, then we ought to avoid it at all costs. Pride invariably leads to boasting, and this continued hammering away about being proud of the homosexual lifestyle; an old Jewish proverb says that "pride is the mask of one's own faults." After all, nothing undercuts a proud crusade more quickly than self-doubt. (Although self-doubt can lead to self-reflection, which can turn you toward the truth - and if that isn't the direction you want to go in, you're sure not going to engage in that.) It's all easier said than done; Benjamin Franklin wrote that "even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome [pride], I should probably be proud of my humility."*

*Humility being one of the Seven Virtues, along with Chastity.

Even if one agreed with the aims of the pride movement, the use of the word "pride" (which has now been corrupted in the same sense as the word "gay") would seem to be the wrong way of going about it, and I've gotten sick to death of seeing it spring up around the city over the last couple of weeks. One can say that in truth there is nothing in which one should take pride, for fear that such pride will wind up reflecting back on you (directly or indirectly) rather than the focus of your attention. The Book of Sirach speaks of honor rather than pride, and contemplates who is worthy of honor, so that would seem a more appropriate feeling than pride. (Of course, in this case, is the homosexual lifestyle really honorable?) The author of Sirach goes on to say that "The beginning of pride is sin. Whoever perseveres in sinning opens the floodgates to everything that is evil." One might note, in this case, that the end result of pride is also sin.

Lust is another of the Seven Deadly Sins, and this would seem to go rather well with the type of pride we're talking about at the moment. Again, just a personal observation, but it's bad enough to be mixed up with one Deadly Sin; to be involved with two seems to be a bit too much tempting fate. After all, things are bad enough as is; do we really need to compound it by celebrating one sin with another?

Throwback Thursday: The death of opera

THE ENGLISH NATIONAL OPERA'S PRODUCTION OF THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER, 2012

We have discussed here the Adams opera The Death of Klinghoffer, built around the 1985 seajacking of the Achille Lauro that lead to the death of 69-year old Leon Klinghoffer by Arafat-aligned Palestine Liberation Front terrorists. Paul Greenberg has made serious comments about the pro-terrorist angle of the opera.

It would be right in line with our morally neutral era, with its aversion to the judgmental, its fear of taking a stand between right and wrong, good and evil.

(T)hose of us who are disgusted by its taste in this instance, and its willingness to lend itself to the most dehumanizing propaganda, have a right to speak up, too. As crowds of New Yorkers have done outside the Met. We have more than a right to speak up when evil is cosmeticized, even romanticized. We have a duty.

Mr. Greenberg's column also compared the opera to the works of pro-Fuehrer filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, and had serious words at the end that had me thinking seriously about our nation's future.

Those of us disgusted by this libretto can only echo the accusation that the opera's Marilyn Klinghoffer hurls at the captain of the Achille Lauro, who's been respectfully and even sympathetically negotiating with the murderers aboard his ship. When the ever-neutral captain must tell her that that her husband has been murdered, and his wheelchair-bound body thrown into the sea, she shrieks at him: "You embraced them!" Which is what the Metropolitan Opera now has done, too.

Art seemingly has become a propaganda piece to advance certain causes embraced by a tiny minority that few support, but they are using their platform of the stage to advance the propaganda.  It is working well in various leftist issues, whether it is cannabinoids or criminalising Christianity, or other social causes.  The Bohemians are sadly in control.  That is the a thought considering what the creator of three popular ABC dramas that air on Thursday night is promoting.  It's everywhere on HBO, Showtime, and Netflix.  They need the propaganda to advance what most oppose.

Originally published November 11, 2014

Opera Wednesday

Sorry for the more-or-less consistent absence from the blog lately; it's a case of not having enough time, what with It's About TV! and the parallel work I'm doing on a TV book. I feel as if I've been behind for so long, I'm just starting to catch up. I hope you'll see me back here more often, but if you go to It's About TV!, you'll see me all the time!

At any rate, I was inspired to look at today's choice because it was on the Met Opera channel on Sirius. It's Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, which at the Met was presented as part of a Stravinsky triple-bill, the other two pieces being the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (better known as "The Rite of Spring"), and the short opera, Le Rossignol (The Nightingale).

Oedipus Rex, based on the familiar Greek tragedy, is unusual in that it is sung in Latin, and has a non-singing narrator, who presents commentary in the vernacular of the audience. I admit to being a big admirer of Stravinsky's work, and Oedipus Rex is no exception - it's modern, but with a classical touch (or classical with a modern touch, if you prefer). Here is the entire performance, running a little under an hour, with tenor Philip Langridge, soprano Jessye Norman, and baritone Bryn Terfel. The conductor is Seiji Ozawa. There are no subtitles, but if you're at all familiar with the legend, I don't think you'll need them.

The next one in isn’t always the best call

A recent discussion locally about the resignation of a baseball coach who happened to succeed directly a legend reminded me this was a problem in college basketball numerous times with successors to Dean Smith, John Thompson, John Wooden, and other notable leaders.

Television has had that issue directly also, most notably, with the recent announcement that Sony and Turner Broadcasting are planning to do a revival of a 1972-75 (network) and 1977-86 (syndicated) game show (with another variant slightly different in 1990-91). Calvin Broadus will host what they say will be a reimagined show, but will turn away from what the Barry Family (which did the 1990 "definitions" format that later adopted parts of the classic format) had done in all three versions. However, it was the 1977-86 version where this problem that is prominent with coaches took flight.

As The Joker's Wild was continuing its successful run as a Barry-Enright Production, Jack Barry had turned 63 in an era when 65 was a retirement age. In preparation for that, he groomed Wisconsin's Jim Peck for the future transition with an occasional week of hosting during the next three seasons, with the plan being Barry would host one more full season after turning 65. That ensuing season, which he intended to be his final, would include a plan that many stations in the syndication world would see that Barry would start the episode by formally turning over the show to Peck in September 1984. Unfortunately, Barry, who was 66, died in May 1984, after his last show was taped and preparing for his formal departure on the next taping, with the successor he and his producer, Ron Greenberg, had planned to take over. Dan Enright, in one of the worst moves in television, decided to deviate away from Barry's plan and hire Bill Cullen to host what would be the final two seasons, effectively spelling the end of Barry-Enright.

Wink Martindale, who was the other host in the syndication double of Joker's Wild and Tic-Tac-Dough, remembered Barry a few years ago. Ironically, he left Tic-Tac-Dough after Enright's actions, where the show lasted just one season with Jim Caldwell.

Jim Peck later returned to Milwaukee in public affairs, and recently retired from radio. For the sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address, he recorded this piece as part of its observance.

Does terrorism have to be the “New Normal”?

Editor's Note: Today, for the first time in a long time, I have the chance to introduce to you a new member of the “In Other Words” family! If you read It’s About TV, you’ll recognize David Hofstede as the author of the Comfort TV blog one of the best classic TV sites around. As you will discover, however, David has insights and opinions that run far beyond the world of TV, and he will make for a valuable addition to the team. It’s my pleasure to welcome him to the site, and to present him to you for your consideration.

Over the past few years there have been several prominent news stories about police officers shooting African-American citizens – many of whom were unarmed at the time.

Varied opinions have emerged as a response: some see this as an epidemic of irresponsible authority, and a reminder of the racism they see inherent in our culture. Others find an attempt to conflate isolated incidents into a national trend, and point to federal and state crime statistics that suggest no such pattern exists.

But here’s one reaction you won’t hear from either camp: “This is just something to which we all have to adjust. This is the price we must pay for having a police force.”

Can you imagine the outraged response if some sheriff or politician advanced that outlook? Unacceptable, their communities would say. This cannot stand. We have to do something, so these horrific acts don’t keep happening.

Okay. So why don’t we have the same attitude about Islamic terrorism?

Why have the deaths of a dozen or two African-Americans galvanized public demonstrations and the formation of an advocacy group purportedly designed to remind people that black lives matter, while the deaths of tens of thousands of people since 9/11 evoke only sadness, followed by a resigned shrug over how the world has changed?

Of course, efforts to curb terrorism are ongoing. Plots have been stopped. Precautions have been taken. But when the next Manchester or London Bridge happens, it will produce more heartbreak than anger, and more calls for calm than decisive action.

As David French opined in the National Review, we have become comfortable with terrorism, and those of us that are not are being told by our leaders that we should.

This is the “new normal,” we are told. But it doesn’t have to be.

We monitor terrorist cells and recruitment networks when we could be dissembling them. We put known meeting places under surveillance instead of under a wrecking ball. We “contain” (to use the previous president’s word) the threat of ISIS when we could be destroying the caliphate once and for all. We make relativistic arguments (hey, some Presbyterians are bad apples too!) to avoid being labeled a bigot, instead of clearly identifying the one and only specific credo that perpetuates and inspires mass carnage.

Yes, we now have a president who has clearly identified the threat, sometimes inelegantly to be sure. But even if he expressed himself with the eloquence of Daniel Webster on this topic, the response would likely be just as hostile.

Why is that? I don’t think it’s just anti-Trump sentiment, because for all of the tough talk Republicans muster in election years, the reluctance to mount a more aggressive response is largely bi-partisan: No boots on the ground in the Middle East. No travel restrictions from countries where extremism flourishes. No profiling.

If we do these things – if we even think about them, we are told, the terrorists win. They have won because we have compromised something in ourselves that makes us “better” than they are. But what is this aspiration that is so important it is worth preserving in the face of such barbarism? At some point, it must be weighed against the ever-increasing scores of innocent people around the world whose lives are violently ended by terrorism. Is there a number beyond the thousands already lost when, once reached, that scale no longer balances?

The alternative is to accept the world as it is now, with this prevailing threat that could strike anywhere at any time. Acceptance acknowledges that there will be more attacks. More airports and concert halls and parade routes turned into crime scenes. More dead children.

Don’t the terrorists win then too? If they win either way, what is the rationale against more definitive action?

Yes, there will be consequences. Some will be unexpected and some will be ugly. But it’s long past time we started asking whether those consequences are worse than 8 year-old girls dying at an Ariana Grande concert.

The irony of CNN firing Kathy Griffin

The inappropriate picture of actress Kathy Griffin holding the headed of a "beheaded" caricature of President Trump bloodied led to CNN, a division of Time Warner (NYSE : TWX), which could be acquired by American Telephone and Telegraph (NYSE : T), removing her from New Year's Eve programming. Now that was the correct behaviour since it was inappropriate. But what people forget is this very same Time Warner, through its NetherRealm Studios, is responsible for producing Mortal Kombat, a 25-year old video game franchise where one of the glorified moves is the character "Sub-Zero" pulling the head and spine off losers in the game's signature "fatality" move. Further games in the franchise include beheading (Kitana's fan), cannibalism (Mileena's eat and spit the bones, Liu Kang's dragon), and other copious amounts of violence that led to video game ratings that has furthered the advancement of even more violent video games for "adults only" ratings.

Has anyone noted how TWX will fire Kathy Griffin for doing to Donald Trump what Sub-Zero does to losers in their own video game?

Opera Wednesday

I haven't been here for awhile, so I'm filling in for Drew this week with this clip from the bittersweet conclusion to Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier. My two favorite Strauss operas are the dark sinister pieces - Salome and Elektra, and his Four Last Songs - but even in his lighter moments, such as the comedy Rosenkavalier, there's always something a little unsettling in the music, something that touches you in just that way. And music ought to be like that.

This vintage clip is from the 1960 movie, with Sena Jurinac, Anneliese Rothernberger, and the magnificent Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Herbert von Karajan conducts the Vienna Philharmonic.

CrossFit Hero WOD's: tribute to the fallen heroes

While preparing for the week's CrossFit workout at the box (as they are called), we were informed of participation in Monday's special Memorial Day class that is designated as a "Hero" workout that honour those soldiers and public safety officers who died in the line of duty.  Their names pay homage to the bravest of the brave who have sacrificed their lives in battle.  Yet that intensity will make you think less of yourself and more of those whose names are attached to them.  While we shall not mention the workouts (that is not the reason for this post), what we shall do is remember these people who are memorialised by their names as workouts.
Murph.  Memorial Day is CrossFit's annual workout named for Lt. Michael P. Murphy, a Navy SEAL who was part of SEAL Team 10 in Operation Red Wings in June 2005, an attack best known from the book and movie Lone Survivor by Marcus Luttrell, the only member of the team that survived the attack on Team 10 by terrorists.

The Seven.  In Afghanistan, seven CIA officers killed in a December 2009 attack by a man who claimed to be an informant reporting on Al Qaeda.  When he said the magic words, we learned he was a homicide bomber, killing seven CIA officers and a Jordanian working with the seven CIA officials.

Luce.  Captain Ronald G. Luce of the U.S. Army, died during an August 2009 attack when an IED struck his vehicle in Afghanistan.

JT.  A well-seen photo of Petty Officer Jon Tomlinson, a Navy SEAL, who was one of 30 who died in 2011 after a rocket-propelled grenade struck a helicopter, features his dog by the side of his casket during the funeral.  But Tomlinson's nickname is immortalised shortly afterwards when CrossFit named a "Hero" workout in his memory.

We remember our heroes on Memorial Day.  CrossFit's names of Hero Workouts pay homage to those who have fallen for our freedom.

Musings in May

Poitical Panderings.  If it was not clear that Big Entertainment is aligned with the far left, Disney's repeated excuses in canning Tim Allen's Last Man Standing over his conservative character being the lead dog over liberals while protecting The View is a perfect example.  Most viewers do not remember ABC News developed The View in 1996 as a way to take advantage of the 1990's television realignment, and to this day, the show's strongest viewership is in Atlanta, Detroit, and Milwaukee, three markets that ABC took advantage of in that CBS's perennial winner The Price Is Right was not available in parts of those markets (and more) due to weak affiliates.  In a post-Citizens United era, the Left has decided all opposition speech must be shot down in any way, whether it is by court mandates or by control of the media.  Welcome to 1984, everyone.

The Crew Chief.  Fox News is on a decline since the scandals that took down its core: first Roger Ailes and later Bill Shine, then Bill O'Reilly.  Much of the attacks have come from leftist activists such as Mr. Brock, Mr. Soros, and other such leaders who have pushed their way through.  The ratings among the 25-54 crowd, including the Millennials that have tilted solid left from teachings, is proving that point now when a pair of sexual deviants are first (CNN) and second (MSNBC), while nuclear family men at Fox are now in trouble.  Does it say much about the entertainment mentality working to take down Fox?  Have the Murdoch Boys decided they want to remake the channel away from what made it an ace?  Note how many channels remade for management have become disasters. The list includes Spike (was associated with Tennessee), Freeform (was associated with Mr. Robertson), Esquire (was a techie channel), FXX (was a football channel), and others.

So many deaths of men that mattered.

Roger Ailes.  Roger Ailes, 77, whose work in redeeming Richard Nixon later gave way to helping conservative political causes, then pushing Rush Limbaugh to a 1990's late-night television gig before he started Fox News. The fact the Murdoch Boys want to demolish what Mr. Ailes built is sadly allowing us to see how intelligent Mr. Ailes was in the television medium. Despite the controversy over what he knew would work in a visual medium, if it was not for Mr. Ailes, an entire challenger to the one-sided media would never have happened. As the history books noted about the Clinton Administration, the media created "crises" to put their man in power, and Mr. Ailes challenged them.

Nicky Hayden.  Nicholas Patrick Hayden, 35, was the last American to win an international motorcycle racing championship (MotoGP in 2006). His Southeastern humility was shown and ability to win at the highest levels put him on a level of few others during the era where dirt-track sliding techniques mattered more than electronics (traction control included) that has given us the modern Spanish resurgence now that motorcycle road racing now airs exclusively in the United States on Al Jazeera (please see "A Kick in the Ball" from It's About TV! for an explanation). A pity that riding his bicycle during a training run that passed through the Misano World Circuit Marco Simoncelli vicinity, and a motorist was not aware, led to his death.  Share the road, folks!

Sir Roger Moore.  Roger George Moore, 89, was a television and film star on both sides of the Atlantic (Maverick, The Last Time I Saw Paris, Ivanhoe, The Saint, and of course, from 1973 until 1985, the EON James Bond franchise).  After George Lazenby made a mistake (the Australian admits it) to not renewing his Bond gig after On Her Majesty's Secret Service (and letting Sean Connery return for one more film), Moore took the Bond character to a semi-comedic at times Bond for the 1970's into the 1980's.  The era of Bond in the 1970's was a different era than that of the original 1960's, and he has been regarded as one of the better Bonds of the five.

All three of those men will be missed.