Artists like cats?

 "Artists, like cats, communicate abstractly, at a remove. This is why artists hate to be asked what their work means. Even if what they make is a picture of a landscape, or a race riot, it's not 'about' only those things. It's about much more -- including itself, its materials and how they were used, and how the artist sees the world."

"As for art itself, that's much more like a dog: never quite behaving, making a mess, costing a lot, always making you get supplies, but paying you back in wonder and delight."

-- Jerry Saltz, in his book "How to Be An Artist"

Shot and chaser (culture wars)

Note the delta on the Rotten Tomatoes move review aggregator site between audience scores for the movie "Nefarious" and professional critics' reaction to it.

Then ponder this essay by John Daniel Davidson for The Federalist.

Davidson's point (not coincidentally hinted at by the wildly different reaction to "Nefarious" from average moviegoers and film critics) is this: "When one side stakes its claim to political power on offering abortion up until birth and transgender operations for 8-year-olds, and holds out these policies as proof of its moral authority, we're way past arguing over how to get the economy back on track." Moreover, "Tucker Carlson hit on this at the end of his big speech at Heritage recently. He compared the values of the political left to the values of the Aztecs, who sacrificed children to their bloodthirsty gods -- and he wasn't wrong." 

Several commentators have since said that Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch fired Tucker Carlson over that speech, because Murdoch has peculiar notions of what "extremist" thinking is. Tucker probably saw that coming, joking even at the time that prayer is always a good strategy when you're engaged in spiritual warfare, even if the guy recommending that is -- like Carlson himself -- a mild-mannered Episcopalian.

Remembering Gerard Vanderleun

Gerard Vanderleun was a blogger whom I never met, but admired in spite of the sketchy job he'd once had editing Penthouse magazine. He left us on January 27 of this year (2023), at age 77 after a short illness. 

Gerard had a sharp mind and a generous spirit. His influential blog lives on for awhile, thanks to the good graces of his companion Jean Kaufman, who herself runs a fine blog under the nom-de-plume The New Neo.

In some ways, Gerard Vanderleun was the blogging's answer to singer/songwriter John Prine, who has also gone recently to his reward. 

"Judas: A Saint for Our Seasons" is re-posted here as a tribute to Mr. Vanderleun. I first read this essay when Gerard published it on April 18, 2014, but it may have been a re-posting of his own work from 2006 even then. Whether this essay appeared once or several times, it was originally on his own blog, American Digest. 

Like almost everything else Gerard wrote, this searing meditation on cultural failure and its implications still holds up well. 

All of the following words are his, re-presented here because they deserve to be remembered.

Judas: A Saint for Our Seasons

If we betray the people who love us, what's to stop us from betraying the country that makes us possible?

Did you ever break a promise?
Did you ever break a vow?
Have you traded love for money,
And are you happy now?

Did you kiss him in the garden
And then abandon him to fate?
Is your final sin forgiven,
Or is it far too late?

WHEN IT COMES TO DISCOVERING new ways to cheapen the human soul, the "professional intellectuals" of our society have cornered the market. So it was in 2006 when, timed carefully to cash in on the Easter holiday, the "serious" editors of National Geographic chose to release their gleanings from a sheaf of rags and call them "The Gospel of Judas."

Having risen through the echo chamber of "higher" education and survived the ruthless but quiet vetting process of their "profession," these editors knew full well that what they were putting out into the world was not a "gospel." They also knew that calling it a "gospel" would ensure greater attention and greater sales. Beyond that, the editors, secular cultists all, also got a quiet little tingle by having, in their minds, "stuck it" to the Christian church once again. As usual, such secularists love to stick it to Christianity. Addicts of auto-erotic spiritual asphyxiation, their onanistic pleasure in these deeds is only enhanced if they can be performed during the most holy days of the Christian calendar. Only then can maximum profit and pleasure be assured.

This dark thrill of denigration has the immediate benefit of pleasingly confirming them in their own Church of Zero, and the secondary benefit of being much, much safer than, say, sticking it to Islam, a faith that enforces its demands for respect with bombs and beheadings, and whose central message to all cowards is "Don't mess with Muhammad." The sad fact of our modern era is that if you denigrate Islam, you often have to bag up body parts and hose down the sidewalk, but when you denigrate Christianity the most you need to clean up after yourself is a warm washcloth.

Your gedankenexperiment for today is to ask yourself, regardless of your religious beliefs, if the editors of National Geographic, being given an ancient manuscript that "proved" the Koran was nothing more than the blatherings of some ergot-besotted Bedouin who had munched one too many hallucinogenic plants while hanging out in a cave near Mecca, would have published the same "proof" as loudly and as broadly? Would they have done so, or would they have issued a Press Release citing concerns for the "provenance" of the manuscript and their employees' safety? Regardless of your religious beliefs, you know the shameful answer.

But beyond these considerations, the publication of the "Gospel" of Judas has another, deeper and more lasting benefit to our neophytes of nihilism. It puts one of the final elements of their anti-morality play at center stage. It seeks to sanctify treason.

It was never a question of "if," but only a question of "when" our contemporary society would discover an avatar who would make treason acceptable. It only codifies the realities of their secular belief system. Treason against others or one's country has long been as common as adultery in this country. Like adultery the rate of treason is on the rise because, like adultery and similar forms of personal betrayal, it no longer has any consequences at all.

It is true that the federal crime of treason is not easily established and is rarely if ever charged. But the formal crime of treason is not what I am discussing here. Rather the more common, garden variety of treason as understood by plain people -- the rabid and unremitting hatred, expressed in word or deed, of the country that gives you the freedom express your hatred. It is the treason of the ingrate, the soul-dead, the politically perverted, and the bitter; it is, as Roger Kimball at The New Criterion discusses, the treason of intellectuals and "the undoing of thought."

It's a fact of our self-centered contemporary existence that betrayal has become one of the common forces that shape our lives. For when our own desires ride us like a drunken demon lodged on our shoulders, betrayal is the first order of the day when others seek to thwart our desires, or even when others become a mere inconvenience to our wants and whims.

We've long permitted greater and greater levels of betrayal in our society. We've codified them as law, policy and custom as far as the wishes of the individual are concerned. It is no longer sophisticated or fashionable to speak of selfishness as betrayal. That word is so harsh when, after all, we are only speaking of "differing needs," aren't we. When the betrayal of others is glossed over with phrases such as "I needed to be me," or "I needed my space," or "I needed more money," or "We were just on different paths," then the elevation of this disease of the soul from the betrayal of another into the larger realm of treason against all is only a question of degree.

The problem is that shame, a vestigial thing in many shrunken souls, persists, and shame must be driven out of the soul if the secular is to thrive. Both betrayal and treason are still weighted down by a lingering sense of shame within at the same time they are made safe from the onus of blame without. Both are permitted by our cults of personal freedom and "sensible" selfishness, but both are formed of dark matter and not easily expunged from one's soul no matter how reduced it may have become.

There was, perhaps, only one moment in history when humans "knew not what they did." In all other times we know, at the deepest level, exactly what we do when we betray another, or others, or ourselves, or our country. We know it clearly and so we bury the ugly deed deeply. Still it persists, remains and rots in the tomb of our souls. A wiser culture called this "sin" and sought to have it confessed and forgiven as meaningless in the shadow of the greatest sacrifice. Our therapeutic culture calls it "guilt" and seeks to palliate and expunge it so that we may live a guilt-free life regardless of our acts. More and more of us live in the latter culture and seek a life forever free from sin, from guilt, from the consequences of our betrayals. And yet this final freedom eludes us.

What is needed, in this secular age of self-intoxication, is a Saint who will remit our sins of betrayal; who will by his very existence sanctify treason. And who better fits this role than the man who betrayed the greatest love for the smallest change, Judas?

The worshipers of the Church of the Self need Judas today more than they need Christ, and they need Christ more than they can know. They need Him so much that they are compelled to reject Him utterly lest their shabby Church be seen as it is, a hovel made of mud and wattle, of empty objects, shabby dreams and promises broken. A statue of Judas would blend right into the niche above their television; a household god whose only requirement is an offering of silver, from time to time, or a shopping spree at the mall to secure his love and blessing; our "Saint Judas of Perpetual Extortion."

Betrayal is a common catechism in the Church of the Self. Hymns to Me are the hosannas it hurls at an empty heaven. The politics of such a church require as First Things a rejection of all things not of, by, and for the self. A religion or a country of the people, by the people, and for the people is high on the list of things to be abhorred since it requires an allegiance that is other than to the self. The Church of the Self effectively mandates treason, and we see it now manifested daily in the bright robes of "unstiffled dissent" which shroud an increasingly vicious anti-Americanism that has its roots, not in reasoned criticism, but in unreasoned hate. We hear the hate but what we have not been allowed to see is the treason behind it.

That is now "changed, changed utterly."

Now our traitors to God and Country have found a sheaf of rags that "prove" that the greatest treason was really "all good;" that Judas was really the greatest friend Jesus ever had and was, with a kiss, doing him the greatest favor ever done.

Treason, done with the kiss of "my personal freedom," proves that you do not really hate your country, you love it. You are, in the final analysis, your country's best friend. In these "new" old tales about Jesus we read that Judas betrayed the Son of God because Jesus told him to do it. Really? Or did his betrayal come, not from any request that may or may not have been made, but from humanity's persistent lust to sin freely and without even the thin penalty of remorse? Was this final treason done because this sin had been secretly blessed by God, or for the sheer dark thrill of asserting the self at the expense of life in the light?

"I betrayed my friend, because he gave me the freedom to do so. Feel my love for him."

"I betrayed my country because it gave me the freedom to do so. Feel my love for it."

Black is white. Hate is Love. Slavery is Freedom. Treason is Loyalty. That last phrase fits right in to the secular catechism, doesn't it? All it needs to become holy writ is an avatar, a solid historical personage with the power to turn darkness into light, lies into truth, and betrayal into something that was, in the final analysis, "all good."

Saint Judas, step right up to the Gates, ring that bell, and don your halo -- you the man.

A personal almanac for 2022

Lots of publications put end-of-year lists together, but I'm particularly fond of this effort from The Federalist, and don't disagree with staff selections there. Even before finding that particular compendium of "winners and losers," I thought it might be fun to cobble a personal summary into being, so here's my almanac for the Year of Our Lord 2022:

Best surprise:

Finding a Great Pyrenees dog that was being fostered under the auspices of a rescue organization after my sweetie had done a lot of research into the breed. Pearl makes a wonderful companion and a top-notch guard dog. Not for nothing are Pyrenees known for their soulful eyes.

Favorite new movie:

Top Gun: Maverick -- and seeing the film with my Uncle Jim was a bonus. I like this one even better than the original Top Gun movie.

Gone too soon:

Gian Carlo Zollo was a proud Italian prayer buddy and an inspiration who shuffled off this mortal coil at age 70 on 19 October 2022, after having beaten cancer earlier in the year. Pneumonia took him down, although some of us think that with better care it might not have. Carlo was an absolute rock for his family, and those friends he treated like family. We hope he's gone to help "prep the place upstairs for us," as mutual friend Jeff once put it.

Most excellent road trip:

It was heartwarming to be able to attend my sister's wedding in Phoenix AZ on 04 February. Eve and Frank had quite the celebration. Mom danced, and Dad was there in spirit. I got to meet some of Eve's friends, several of whom she's known all her adult life. 

Cheers to these older movies:

I'd forgotten how good Hear My Song (1991) and Secondhand Lions (2003) are. Genuine storytelling seems now to be a lost art. I also enjoyed War for the Planet of the Apes (2017).

Novel that made the strongest impression on me:

American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins must be reckoned a contemporary classic. It wasn't published this year, but it's on this list because I read it this year.

Most fun to read this year:

My Enemy, My Ally (Star Trek: Rihannsu #1), by Diane Duane. Everything you liked about the original TV series helps make this book a blast to read.

The American Dream onscreen:

If you had to pick three movies from the same year in an effort to understand this country, then 2022 was a good year. Watching Father Stu, Elvis, and Devotion would give anybody a better-than-average introduction to the important aspects of American culture.

I'm not crying; you're crying:

(The best evidence I can vouch for of culture in or near Raleigh, if friends from the Northeast or Western U.S. coasts still think all of the American south is backward):

• The Theatre Raleigh production of City of Angels this past summer
• Bittersweet -- the "chic spot for coffee drinks, desserts, and specialty cocktails" on E. Martin Street.

Ben Franklin spins in his grave:

The American sage known for saying that he and the other founding fathers had bequeathed to their fellow citizens "a republic, if you can keep it" would have been appalled at the FBI's August 7 raid on former president Donald J. Trump's Palm Beach FL home. I'm all for law and order (thanks, Dad!) and I think Trump is an egomaniac, but that was an instance of political thuggery that pharmaceutical companies and other groups with effective lobbyists have learned to count on. 

Hoping to do this again:

Favorite string band The Steel Wheels hosts an annual Red Wing Roots Music Festival near Mount Solon, Virginia. Heavy thunderstorms soaked festival-goers this past June, but the festival was still a good time, and its top-notch live music makes a repeat visit sound worthwhile.

Quotes of the year:

1. "Solar and wind can never be anything more than boutique forms of incremental electricity production, and they will never, ever, be able to keep this country warm on cold winter nights."
   -- Buck Throckmorton at the Ace of Spades blog, December 30.
2. "Angels don't bluff. That's why I never play poker with 'em." 
   -- Carlo Zollo, who said that when he was still with us and may now be doing that very thing.
3. "The key ingredient of groupthink has always been the fear of social isolation, which leads us to be swept up by propaganda. It’s a fear so pervasive that—like fish in water—we are rarely aware of the effect it has on us." 
   -- Stella Morabito, paraphrasing her fascinating new book on "the weaponization of loneliness."
4. "Look who's running our Defense Department -- Obama lackeys put there to degrade our combat readiness and morale, while defining the two greatest threats to American national security as 'climate change' and Republican voters."
   -- J.J. Sefton in a sarcastic but on-point screed for the Ace of Spades blog from 19 May 2022.
5. "The profound crisis that the Church is experiencing in the world and especially in the West is the fruit of the forgetting of God. If our first concern is not God, then everything else collapses. At the root of all crises, anthropological, political, social, cultural, geopolitical, there is the forgetting of the primacy of God."
   -- Cardinal Robert Sarah in an interview about his new book, The Day is Now Far Spent.

Presumptive Italian PM quotes Chesterton

This passage from G.K. Chesterton of England has currency again, thanks to Giorgia Meloni of Italy:

"Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. 

We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. 

We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."

Class warfare in the multiplex

My sweetheart and I both enjoyed Where the Crawdads Sing, and in that we were not alone, despite the movie's very mixed reception among professional film critics (see samples below).

These critics can't be trusted. As the snippets illustrating this post show, neither Clarisse Loughrey nor Peter Bradshaw was paying enough attention to the film they were supposed to review. 

Loughrey, for example, missed several onscreen cues to the effect that "Crawdads" takes place in North Carolina. 

One might excuse a British reviewer for not knowing what North Carolina's state flag looks like (it's in courtroom scenes), but the movie also announced its location in dialog more than once. 

Bradshaw's complaint is even dumber. Two Black actors play pivotal roles in the story, so to call the movie an "all-white reboot" of anything else is ridiculous. In the current social climate, it's also irresponsible.  

And it's hard to say anything about Gary Kramer except that his visceral dislike for Where the Crawdads Sing sure makes him seem an unhappy soul.

Sadly, the dichotomy between critical (33% approval) and popular (96% approval) reception for Where the Crawdads Sing isn't a one-off. 

You can see the same dynamic at play in the "Rotten Tomatoes" reaction to the last year's hero-worshipping documentary about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the camera-loving face of federal response to COVID-19 who hasn't seen actual patients since he completed his residency decades ago:

More recently, scoring on Rotten Tomatoes also shows a gulf between what audiences (95% approval) and critics (39% approval) think of The Terminal List. 

That eight-episode exposition of a U.S. Navy SEAL's revenge is many things, not least a commentary on the value of informed consent. I thought season one very much worth watching, with fine performances throughout, and unusual fidelity to the novel on which it is based. 

Actors Chris Pratt, Taylor Kitsch, Constance Wu, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Tyner Rushing all turned in yeoman work for season one of that series. Even so, professional critics were more likely to sneer at the effort. One can't help but wonder if their beef with The Terminal List was mostly ideological. They probaly don't understand the appeal of such allegedly polarizing real-life figures as Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, either.

Plans A through F

Michael Anton's astute political analysis is always worth reading. This time he writes about why "They Can't Let Him Back In."  And you know very well who he is.

Anton writes:

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.

To the point that Anton makes about what might be called a country club war on Trump's base -- and Neo's related thoughts about the January 6 subcommittee's quixotic quest for something to charge Trump with legally -- think of Rodney Dangerfield's character in Caddyshack: Like Donald Trump, Dangerfield's character ("Al Czervik") has money enough for membership at the Bushwood Country Club, but other golfers consider him uncouth. Attitude-wise, Czervik, like Trump, has more in common with Bill Murray's gopher-hunting groundskeepr than with the other people in his social class.

I'm tickled by that fact that Anton uses a nautical analogy near the end of his essay. I had a similar thought (seawater on the brain?) for this recent piece published by The Locke Institute's Carolina Journal, except that I was looking at progressive reaction to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, rather than political machinery prepping for the 2024 presidential election.

Bookmarking some good stuff

Mothers' Day on the American civic calendar coincides with Good Shephered Sunday on the American Catholic calendar this spring, and Maureen Mullarkey has thought a lot about the consecration of Russia that was performed earlier this year by Pope Francis. She's cynical but brings receipts, as they say:

Part One: (a snippet): "However grievous Putin’s sins, his regard for the Orthodoxy into which he was secretly baptized in infancy appears more convincing—to those who chance to look—than Joe Biden’s rosary rattling. Does this excuse Putin’s tactics in Ukraine? No, not at all. But it ought not be lost on us that the tactics we now condemn—aerial bombardment of civilian centers; no distinction between combatants and noncombatants—are the very ones used by the Allies in World War II."

Part Two: (a snippet): "Nations exist to protect their own interests. The moral quality of those interests, and the means to advance them, is hard to determine in a world anxious to scuttle Judeo-Christian reasoning. Instead we suffer the presumptions of unaccountable bureaucrats. A self-selected power network, they position themselves outside the constitutional constraints of the existing world order. Pope Francis embraces their enthusiasms. Our Lady of the Great Reset, ora pro nobis."

Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson confines his gaze to domestic goings-on, but he has no patience for unaccountable bureaucrats, either:

"...what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending opinions, or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices, or ending the Senate filibuster, or adding two more states to the 60-year-old, 50-state union, or curtailing states’ rights to set their own balloting procedures, or trashing the Constitution’s Electoral College?

The hard Left has detoured from the mainstream of American voters onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51 percent public approval for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives. Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of governance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both." 

If you think that Hanson's worry about what he calls a "radical trajectory" is misplaced, then you haven't wrapped your head around such Orwellian developments as the new Disinformation Governance Board, the federal penchant for retaliating against disfavored groups, or the complicit silence from the Biden administration about protests at the homes of U.S. Supreme Court justices and the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion that triggered those protests. 

Misguided reaction to that leak forced prudent Catholic parishes to pay special attention to security this past weekend, not because the legal reasoning in Justice Samuel Alito's draft is unsound, but because -- as John C. Wright and others (like Bookworm!) have noted -- it makes sense enough to strike idealogues as threatening. There's a good summary of the draft at Bookworm's blog. 

Not be be combative, but anyone woke enough to cheer for the Next Big Thing has been miseducated or manipulated. In a few cases, they're manipulators themselves. Journalism and politics attract more than their share of such people -- they're activists under color of authority. But we now know, thanks to the COVID pandemic, that public health has big problems, too.

Fortunately, hope springs eternal, as singer/songwriter Mark Humphreys also reminded us years ago:

Gimlet eye on WRAL

It's another spring weeknight in the Carolinas. I haven't yet mastered a "shut down" routine as recommended in Cal Newport's Deep Work, and raiding the freezer at this hour for a Drumstick ice cream seems irresponsible. Beyond that, going back to the novel I'm currently reading means keeping its characters sorted in my head, and I don't have the mental energy for that at the moment, so TV wins. 

I decided to have fun with story treatment in today's 7:00 pm news on WRAL, the local broadcast affiliate for both Fox and NBC, which in my head is best known for throwing talent and money at its "severe weather center" and "storm team."

• In the first news block, there's a story about 70 municpal employees suing the city of Raleigh over its vaccination and COVID policies, including a monthly surcharge that Raleigh will soon be levying against medical insurance for the unvaccinated.
  
  Many of those suing the city are first responders, the reporter notes, without providing any other context for the suit, such as how the city settled on its $50 per month figure for the surcharge. Neither reporter nor anchor mentions that even vaccinated people can still get COVID. I'd also like to know a bit about the history of suits like this -- have municipal employees in North Carolina filed class action suits against their employers before? Alas, WRAL won't answer questions like mine.
  
  
• The lawsuit story is followed by a story describing an FDA meeting about "the need for a fourth [COVID] booster shot." After the in-studio introduction, both news anchors toss to a field reporter who quotes a local doctor touting boosters ("If you've only had three shots...I am a little concerned.").
  
  The story includes a plug for a local pharmacy. Juxtaposing its fear-mongering against the suit by people who "chose not to be vaccinated" (emphasis from the WRAL anchor, because it's their fault) makes the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Raleigh sound unreasonable. Was that the intent?
  
  
• The one bright spot in the broacast turns out to be a hit from a Duke University School of Public Policy professor about events in Ukraine. It's very clear that the intentional targeting of civilians is a war crime, he says, while describing the "repetitive fire patterns" used by Russian artillery to shell an area, pause, and then resume fire so that first responders in that area are targeted, too. That's a detail I haven't heard elsewhere.
  
  The professor also points out the Vladimir Putin is, among other things, a "serial bigamist." Unlike most of the people who provide sound bites for this broadcast, Professor Simon Miles contributes several nuggets of new information. Full marks to WRAL producers for his segment, which unfortunately seems to be the only one of its kind.
  
  
• Following the Ukraine story and a blurb about the shooting of two people in Fayetteville (with no names released by the police and no suspects found yet), WRAL teases a story about how supply chain woes might be good for business. Say what?
  
  It turns out that two local pundits think the pandemic represents a "significant opportunity" for companies to be proactive rather than reactive about their sourcing. That's a solid point, but it doesn't mean that supply chain disruptions are good, as WRAL claimed while trying to gild the decomposing lily. 

Local news producers have never called me for advice, but then they tend not to use inset maps when talking about wildfires or shootings in other states, either. How hard would that be? Are Carolinians supposed to recognize the names of little towns in California's Napa Valley, for example? 

I give this newscast a C+, which it gets only because the Duke University professor added unusual detail about the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Update (18 April): In a story on evening newscasts about mask mandates being lifted at RDU Airport in the wake of today's ruling by a federal judge who struck down the nationwide travel mask mandate that the CDC had imposed for more than two years, the WRAL reporter is wearing a mask. I hope that was a personal choice rather than a diktat from her producers, because the optics involved are decidedly ironic.

Of note in a new year

Gerard Vanderleun's old poem for his then 16-year-old daughter Justine on her birthday is a thing of beauty.

If you don't read any of the investigative books now about about the mendacious Dr. Anthony Fauci, all you really need to know is that his signature moves are talking out of both sides of his mouth and moving the goalposts.

It's good to see Maureen Mullarkey wondering what hiding our faces says (or might say) about the condition of our souls.

Also, J.P. Sears is a funny guy.

As 2021 slinks away

Among many other things, I'm thankful for the preset buttons on my car radio. I actually heard all of the following songs today:

• I Can See Clearly Now (Johnny Nash)
  
• Sister Golden Hair (America)
• With or Without You (U2)
• Day After Day (Badfinger)
• Walk Like a Man (Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons)
• Slip Sliding Away (Paul Simon)
• These Dreams (Heart)
• Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
• I Heard it Through the Grapevine (Marvin Gaye)

In other entertainment news, "American Underdog" is a movie worth seeing.

The Klavan Catechism

From the 2016 memoir The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, by Andrew Klavan:

The fact was, as a story -- even leaving out the supernatural, especially leaving out the supernatural, taking it all as metaphor, I mean -- the Bible made perfect sense to me from the very beginning.

I saw a God whose nature was creative love. He made man in his own image for the purpose of forming new and free relationships with him. But in his freedom, man turned away from that relationship to consult his own wisdom and desires. The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalog of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve's mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it's what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that. The original sin poisoned all history. History's murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are not the inescapable plot of the story we're in.

The Old Testament traces one complete cycle of that history; one people's rise and fall. This particular people is unique only in that they're the ones who begin to remember what man was made for. Moses' revelation at the burning bush is as profound as any religious scene in literature. There, he sees that the eternal creation and destruction of nature is not a mere process but the mask of a personal spirit, I AM THAT I AM. The centuries that follow that revelation are a spiraling semicircle of sin and shame and redemption, of freedom recovered and then surrendered in return for imperial greatness, of a striving for righteousness through law that reveals only the impossibility of righteousness, of power and pride and fall. It's every people's history, in other words, but seen anew in the light of the fire of I AM.

It made sense to me too -- natural sense, not supernatural -- that after that history was complete, a man might be born who could comprehend it wholly and re-create within himself the relationship at its source. His mind would contain both man and God. It made sense that the creatures of sin and history -- not the Jews alone but all of us -- would conspire in such a man's judicial murder. Jesus had to die because we had to kill him. It was either that or see ourselves by his light, as the broken things we truly are. It's only from God's point of view that this is a redeeming sacrifice. By living on earth in Jesus, by entering history, by experiencing death, by passing through that moment of absolute blackness when God is forsaken by God, God reunites himself with his fallen creation and reopens the path to the relationship lost in Eden. Jesus' resurrection is the final proof that no matter how often we kill the truth of who we're meant to be, it never dies.

[That summary right there is worth the price of the book, I think]. 

But there's more:

For years, maybe most of my life, I had languished in that typical young intellectual's delusion that gloom and despair are the romantic lot of the brilliant and the wise. But now I saw: it wasn't so. Why should it be? What sort of wisdom has no joy in it? What good is wisdom without joy? By joy I don't mean ceaseless happiness, of course. I don't mean willed stupidity for the sake of a cheap smile. The world is sad and it is suffering. A tragic sense is essential to both realism and compassion. By joy I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness. Why not? The hungry can't eat your tears. The poor can't spend them. They're no comfort to the afflicted and they don't bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.

Klavan's insight summoned a song for me. 

The  "Nazareth" that Robbie Robertson of  The Band was writing about pulling into "half past dead" was Nazareth, Pennsylvania, home of the Martin Guitar company. But we all know which Nazarene put the original town in Judea on the proverbial map. And I don't think it coincidental that the refrain of  "The Weight" is deliberately redemptive: "Take a load off, Annie" [or Fannie, if you sing it that way]. Take a load for free!

If you take a load off, what are you supposed to do with it? Jesus is the man who stepped up to say "You put the load right on me!"  Moreover, he volunteered for that.

The best kind of Christian music is stealthy Christian music. Ol' Luke ain't the only one "waitin' on Judgement Day." [Remember the stream of pilgrims going "down to the river to pray" in O Brother Where Art Thou, or Jake and Elwood Blues putting the band back together because they were "on a mission from God"? Remember the question about "Will the Circle be Unbroken" by and by, or Rick Beato pointing out that U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" has gospel music phrasing in it?].

It's not too much of a hop from "The Weight" to C.S. Lewis and what he wrote about "The Weight of Glory." Think of the same theme in two different keys. But as the Klavan excerpt (and the harmony between Levon Helm and Mavis Staples in their live recording) makes clear, the Chronicles of Narnia author wasn't the only one "surprised by joy." 

While I'm on a roll, let me drag J.R.R. Tolkien up to the bar so he can help me make the argument from Middle Earth that Frodo and Sam and the other hobbits were invited into the Fellowship of the Ring not merely for their humility, but also because the most obvious characteristic of hobbitry (hobbitdom?) is joy (in contrast to the fragile valor of the humans, the cultivated detachment of the elves, the pugnaciousness of the dwarves, and the wisdom of wizards). 

The Fellowship needed joy, which I think is why Tolkien inserted two "spare" hobbits into it for a total of four, and no more than two representatives of any other free race among the nine heroes. As Saint Paul had before them, Tolkien and Lewis saw joy as a hallmark of the Christian life. 

It's inspiring to see a contemporary thriller writer like Andrew Klavan wrestle his way into the same insight, and then surrender to it.

My Thanksgiving cooking playlist

My sweetheart spent last night making a pumpkin pie while listening to Christmas music. Contrarian that I sometimes am, I still insist that Christmas music before Thanksgiving is premature, That said, her example inspired. 

We were doing meal prep in two different states, so I kept track of what was playing while I made deviled eggs from a proven recipe in The Deplorable Gourmet.

Directions in that crowd-sourced cookbook are, for the most part, spot on, but there's no way that prep time for deviled eggs is only 30 minutes -- at least not for me! My tripling the recipe didn't shorten prep time, but that's alright. Thanksgiving, y'all.

The playlist is eclectic because Dad had an influential hand in forming my musical ears. I miss him.

Pro tip: Slice the eggs on the longitude, not on the latitude. And I think they peel a little easier if you go pole to pole, north to south, after denting the egg to give your thumb some purchase.

Music to peel hard-boiled eggs

• Honky Tonk Woman -- Rolling Stones
• End of the World Again -- The Steel Wheels
• Good Hearted Man -- Fats Domino
• Call Me -- Blondie

Egg slicing

• Something so Feminine About a Mandolin -- Jimmy Buffet
• Mirabeau Bridge -- James Keelaghan

Scooping and grating

• You Ain't Going Nowhere -- Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
• When Silence Was Golden -- David Schnaufer
• Brighter Than the Sun -- Colbie Caillet
• The New Jerusalem -- Dan Wheetman

Mix and measure

• When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings -- Willie Watson and Tim Blake Nelson
• Worried About You -- Rolling Stones
• Fat-Bottomed Girls -- Queen

Using the "Poor Man's Pastry Bag"

• Some Nights -- Fun.
• Si Lo Hice y Que -- Carin Leon
• Into the Mystic -- Van Morrison
• Be Thou My Vision -- Martha Bassett
• More Than a Feeling -- Boston
• How Great Thou Art -- Home Free

Decorating with Paprika

• Find a New Home -- Will Banister
• Yellow Ledbetter -- Pearl Jam
• The Load-Out -- Jackson Browne

The recipe doesn't include a dash of Frank's Red Hot, but my deviled eggs do. That's how I roll.

More of the underrated

These actors and actresses have more range than many people seem to give them credit for having:

• Kathryn Erbe
• Katheryn Winnick
• Jack Black
• Ana de la Reguera
• Mary McDonnell
  (Truth to tell, however, when you successfully play characters in both Dances With Wolves and Battlestar Galactica, people know you've got game)

Among poets, on the evidence of When Earth's Last Picture is Painted, I think Rudyard Kipling is underrated.

Among brewers, don't sleep on the Benedictine monks of Birra Nursia.

Underrated musicians (lauded but not as well-known as they should be, given their talent):

• David Mason, the trumpeter on the Beatles' song, "Penny Lane"
• Laith Al-Saadi, dark horse Voice contestant and Michigan music legend
• Evelyn Glennie, deaf but extremely accomplished percussionist

An almanac page

 Looking back at this summer....

Most entertaining event on TV
The "Field of Dreams" baseball game played August 12 in Dyersville, Iowa between the Chicago White Sox and the New York Yankees.

First day I saw fireflies out locally
June 4.

Biggest summer expenditure 
New HVAC system was installed June 15, and totally worth it.

Biggest blessing of the summer
Lisa is officially free from cancer!

The closest thing to a vacation we could manage this season
A road trip to Seaford, Delaware to drop in on family briefly.

Most "North Carolina" thing we did
Visiting the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park and Museum in Wilson, NC.

Best live music of the season
(Only live music of the season)
Harry Connick, Jr. and his band at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary NC on August 24.

Most entertaining summer movie
It's a tie between "The Death of Stalin" (2017) and "John Wick" (2014).

Most autumnal summer movie
I was impressed by "Last Flag Flying" (2017)

Famous missing persons
R.I.P. to singer/songwriter Nanci Griffith, and Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts.

Best books I read this summer
It's a tie between two very different memoirs that both happen to be immigrant stories:

• MIG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lieutenant Belenko, by John Daniel Barron
  (copyright 1983)
• Call Me American: A Memoir, by Abdi Nor Iftin
  (copyright 2018)

Olympic stories I liked

If you knew nothing else about what a topsy-turvy couple of years the Wuhan Coronavirus and official response to it bequeathed to the world, you might guess that something big and destabilizing had happened just by watching "Tokyo 2020" signage on TV in the summer of 2021.

An Olympics without spectators seems wrong. I don't envy the people in charge of programming the choices they've had to make, either. But in spite of those constraints, a few athletes and athletic stories nevertheless inspire:

• Filipino weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz impressed me with her improvised water-jugs-on-a-yoke training tools.
• American Lee Kiefer -- gold medal in fencing while going to medical school? Whoa!
• American swimmer Lydia Jacoby has the best cheering section I've seen. And she plays bluegrass bass in whatever spare time she can find.
• It was fun to see Poland win the inaugural 4x400m mixed relay.
• Ya gotta love a diver who qualifies for the Olympic final at age 41, as Japan's Ken Terauchi did.
• Wrestling gold medalist Tamyra Mensah-Stock made news for enthusing about how much she loves representing America. I like that. She's great. But if she had a chat with NBC commentator Mike Tirico, I missed it.

The people writing human interest stories about American athletes haven't dug as deep as they might have had to in the good old days when Sports Illustrated was running stories by the likes of Frank Deford, but the one-two finish by Katie Ledecky and Erica Sullivan in the 1,500 meters also moved me. Ledecky has charisma, a metric mile is a really long swim, and anyone who medals in that event is amazing. 

Ditto the one-two finish for the US in the women's 400-meter hurdles by Sydney McLaughlin and Dalilah Muhammed. Both women enthusiastically endorsed their "iron sharpens iron" rivalry, and both seem appropriately regal on the track.

Sophistry of the highest order

I graduated from a nominally Jesuit-run university and was glad for having had the chance to go to college at that school. Even so, there are multiple reasons why "Jesuitical" as an adjective has a perjorative connotation, and  -- sadly -- what Pope Francis just did won't help restore luster to that word. 

Basically, Francis today approved the publication of an official "moto proprio" that pours rainwater all over one of his immediate predecessor's more popular initiatives. 

It's now clear that Pope Benedict XVI was wrong to resign in 2013 -- unless perhaps his resignation was part of a divine plan to chastise the Church for awhile, which it might well have been, based on lots of what we've seen since then.

Ironically for someone in his position, Pope Francis is no fan of the most venerable form of the Mass we have. Even more ironically, his order today shackles the celebration of the Mass in Latin by using a document form with a Latin title which means "On his own impulse."

Sheesh. This Catholic wishes that Pope Francis had more impulse control.

Here -- in part -- is why the new edict stinks (You can be gentle and call it "ill-conceived," if you like). Fr. Dwight Longenecker's pitch for "subversive obedience" got my attention, also, as did Father John Zuhlsdorf's hot take. 

Those two priests argue more persuasively (to my ears, at least) than the biretta-fearing columnist for National Catholic Reporter who says this change was forced on Pope Francis by bad behavior from people like the aforementioned Father Z.

While crossing Raleigh boundaries

Fall remains my favorite season of the year, but there's nothing quite as endearing around North Carolina as twilight in early summer. Cares seem to leach from the world for about half an hour, when the setting sun tinges the air a shade of lavender that slides almost imperceptibly into periwinkle blue. 

Skinny rabbits graze on suburban lawns, ignoring the blinking yellow-green lanterns of the fireflies that almost float by, buoyed by an alchemy of small wings and southern humidity. 

Twilight is the only time of day when, while commuting west to east, my thoughts segue from, for example, the Tuckman model of group development over to the bemused realization that "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" are actually songs about the same thing. 

Christian radio on the east side of the 40/440 split (where the same FM band flips from WSMW's "We Play Everything" format over to "HIS Radio" and its "Positive, Encouraging" tagline) runs seasonal promotions this time of year. My current favorite touts a pilgrimage to Israel with the slogan, "You haven't lived until you've toured the Holy Land with about 30 Tennessee rednecks."

Personally, I'd rather hear Gov't Mule sing "Soulshine" than listen to Tauren Wells croon his way through "Known," but that's a generational and probably also geographical thing. 

(Existential sidebar: Am I too quick to dismiss honest sentiment as cloying, or does anyone who grew up watching Marlin Perkins narrate Jim Fowler's close encounters with dangerous animals on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom between 1970 and 1983 really appreciate 'Contemporary Christian Music' as a radio format?)

It's in early summer, on this particular weekend, that one of my parish priests can preach insightfully about the "Markan sandwich" of  Jesus coming to the aid of Jairus, the synagogue official, despite being interrupted by a faithful woman with a history of hemorrhages (a story within a story =  a"sandwich," according to people who know). 

Fr. Ramirez de Paz pointed out that Jesus does not regard the woman who is healed by touching his cloak as an interruption. She is a child of God. Moreover, the wise young priest wryly observed, "To Jesus, death is not an emergency. To us, it is." 

And I did not know until it was mentioned in this sermon that the raising of Jairus's 12-year-old daughter from the dead is one of only three times in the New Testament when the original Greek text also includes the words of Jesus in Aramaic (in this case, it''s Jesus' tender invitation, "Talitha koum").

Both stories in that Markan sandwich have special resonance now that my sweetheart is blessedly and and cerfiably free from breast cancer, according to the oncologist whom she'd been treated by for more than a year.

Friend Chris, a dab hand at borrowing from the Church Fathers, observes after the fact that it's no coincidence that the woman in the story featured in the Catholic liturgy this week had suffered from hemorrages for 12 years, or that the girl whom Jesus brought back to life was 12 years old, "given that there are 12 tribes of Israel."

Learning about Motte and Bailey

 Today I learned about the Motte and Bailey fallacy. Interesting stuff -- and all too common, it seems.

The reference that first piqued my interest was at Instapundit, where Glenn Reynolds got it from the Facebook page maintained by Mr. Phil Magness. 

So then I went to Wikipedia, which admittedly can be sketchy, but the entry for Motte and Bailey there was helpful.

And yes, this illustration makes sense:

I feel edumacated! And Bookform the Essayist has a long-form but fascinating explanation about why this matters, as does science fiction author John C. Wright, who comes at critical race theory from a decidedly different angle.

If Blue Bloods characters talked masking

Blue Bloods has been a mainstay of network TV for more than a decade. While Tom Selleck gets top billing for playing NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan because even his mustache enjoys gravitas, the commissioner's unflappable competence makes him a “Mary Sue'' compared to other members of the cast. That’s why supporting characters in the series fit into mashups that Frank doesn’t. 

Think instead of Bridget Moynahan and Steve Schirripa, who play Frank's daughter, Assistant District Attorney Erin Reagan, and her chief investigator, Anthony Abetemarco. What might those two say to each other if they were arguing about, for example, mask mandates in church?

Both Anthony and Erin are at least nominally Catholic. Irish and Italian backgrounds give them common cultural and religious references. When they volley back and forth, it's not always a foregone conclusion as to whose thinking will impress enough to become an anecdote at the Reagan family dinner table next Sunday night.

The following conversation hasn't actually happened. But with a respectful nod to the Blue Bloods script writers, it probably should:

Anthony broaches the subject of mask compliance while on his way out of Erin’s office after a long day. He pauses with his hand on the knob of her frosted glass door to look back over his shoulder and sound her out. The pose is familiar to both of them:

“This mask thing in church is getting to me, Erin.”

She looks up without saying anything. She'll wait. She’s the counter-puncher.

“I mean, I get it,” Anthony adds, stepping tentatively toward her desk. “Nobody wants the covid. But when somebody says that vaccination doesn’t keep me from catching the virus and spreading it, then I gotta wonder what the shot is for, you know?”

“I can’t see fighting your parish priest on that one,” she replies. Thanks in part to her job within the criminal justice system, Erin has always been quicker to bend the knee to authority than Anthony ever will be. “The diocese doesn’t want legal trouble, and the churchgoing crowd skews older. When the governor’s trying to keep everybody safe, the archbishop can’t afford to look callous.”

Anthony looks disappointed with that answer. He knows when his boss tries to skate past a point by being glib.

“It’s not the governor’s job to keep everybody safe,” he says. “That’s what people like you and me do. That’s what your brothers do. And most of the seniors who want the vaccine already have it. Even when the teachers’ unions were calling their members 'front-line,' seniors had first crack at vaccination.”

“But masks help slow the spread of the virus,” Erin suggests.

“Do they?” Anthony pushes back. “The doctor who talks most about masks is making bank, but even Congress can’t get a straight answer from the guy. Let's face it: Tony Fauci hasn’t had a bedside manner since before Giuliani was mayor.”

“The mask thing is about following the science, Anthony. You know that.”

“Maybe it was once. It’s not now. I trust the CDC about as much as I trust the FBI. Even little kids still have to mask up. Little kids! And what do we hear from public health officials? ‘If it saves just one life.’ Or baseball analogies. Like nobody outside insurance understands risk assessment anymore.” 

“You don’t like masking? Nobody does.”

“I’m not anti-mask. I’m `pro face’. Especially in church. To be honest, I’m more of a Christmas and Easter guy than a regular churchgoer, but the idea of people being made in the image and likeness of God ought to give pastors pause, don’t you think? All I hear is fear. You'd think going maskless for an hour on Sundays was like playing with rabid dogs.” 

“Can you blame shepherds for not wanting to lose any sheep?”

“How much caution is too much? You see bodies being stacked like cordwood in Florida and Texas and Mississippi? I don’t. Last I checked, science was science even in places like Georgia. I guess the archbishop watches TV news. With those guys, it’s all case count and who needs a ‘vaccine passport.’ They wouldn’t know context if it bit them in the ass! They don't say jack about unintended consequences, either. I need to share my medical history to get on a plane or go to a show? I guess HIPAA doesn’t exist anymore. And the people pushing vaccination louder than anyone else just give you a deer-in-the-headlights look if you ask why we should all be guinea pigs, which is what we are if the nurse with the syringe in his hand has to tell you that you're getting a dose under an emergency use authorization.”

“I understand your cynicism, Anthony. You sound like Danny trying to sell me on a prosecution despite problems with chain of custody in the evidence room. But if you have this conversation with your pastor and he says, ‘I still think protecting you from me is my duty,’ then what?” 

“Like my pastor's gonna listen to an old detective when there's epidemiologists who can't get a word in edgewise? But maybe I start talking to Saint Jude again.”

“The patron of lost causes?”

“Bet you didn’t know he was a paisan.”

“Good night, Anthony.” 

“Good night, Erin.”