First Things and Battlestar Galactica

At the risk of veering off into the fever swamps of sci-fi fandom, I’d like to make a plug for Battlestar Galactica. As nearly as I can tell, and against all reason, this show is probably the most serious offering on television for exploring the boundaries and relationship between faith and public life.

Really, you say, how interesting. Tell me more.

Well, if you insist.

For those unacquainted with the background of the show, the Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi channel, is a grimy, minimalist update of the velveeta-drenched 1970s, post-Star Wars television program starring Loren Green and a host of eminently forgettable actors. It appears to have been filmed mostly in British Columbia which probably accounts for the fact that the entire cast looks grungy even when in dress military uniforms. About the only thing the new series has in common with the old is its basic premise: 12 colonies of human beings numbering in the billions of people are effectively wiped out by humanoid machines called Cylons armed with nuclear weapons. The remnant survivors form up around the last surviving military ship, the Galactica, and begin their trek to…somewhere. Here’s where the religion angle comes in.

It is pretty clear that before the Cylons begin nuking the humans, the colonists were fat, complacent, and drained of spiritual energy. The gods (names identical to the gods of ancient Greece) are worshipped in a pro forma manner, treated as a kind of corporate mythology to prop up the state and unify the civilization. The gods themselves are without value because in the minds of most they don’t exist. Among the technocrats of the 12 colonies, religion is boob-bait for bubbas. (Speaking of that, the most religious colony is Gemenon which appears to have been inhabited entirely by black Baptists. Wade Henderson, call the Racial Stereotypes Division.)

Here the show’s writers take note of the atheists-in-foxhole conundrum. With colonial civilization in ruins and Cylons dropping out of hyperspace every 33 minutes to finish off what’s left of the human race, the hard-pressed colonists are facing a crisis of hope. Through despair, religion makes a come-back. The colonial scriptures tell the story of a 13th colony called Earth. Galactica’s commander, Adama (first man, get it?), declares that he knows the location of Earth which has been a closely guarded government secret. He will lead the people to salvation. In fact, Adama has lied, playing the old double game of using religion to rally the people while believing not a word he says about the existence of Earth.

Adama’s civilian counterpart, President Roslyn, under a death sentence from cancer, finds true faith. She believes in Earth’s existence, that the scriptures are authentic and the information they contain essential to human survival. Her religious vision animates her constitutional role as leader and protector of the people. As she agitates for finding the way to find Earth, Adama leads a coup against her government. Undeterred, Roslyn peels off a third of the civilian fleet to search for Kobol, the ancient home planet of human civilization. On Kobol, she finds what she’s looking for, a kind of planetarium that shows the general direction of the Earth. For the first time since the attack there is hope and direction for the survivors. Even Adama is converted to her viewpoint. Technology has failed, military strength has been found wanting. The myth, it turns out, is both true and full of hope.

The human struggle to balance and integrate religion and public life is juxtaposed against the single-minded religious fervency of the Cylons themselves. In the old series, the Cylons were pure machine. In the new show, they appear identical to humans – only sexier. Unlike the lukewarm polytheistic colonists, however, the Cylons are zealous monotheists serving the One True God. They evangelize the top human scientist and tell him to repent of his sins. The head Cylon, the eye-popping Number 6, says repeatedly that God has a destiny for each person. She also makes it clear that you don’t want to be a sinner in the hands of angry Cylon. Here is the worst of religion as we know it: belief at the point of a sword, an inquisition, holy coercion, a jihad. In their single-minded war against the humans, they resemble nothing so much as al-Qaeda out to impose a universal caliphate.

It is hard to watch these murderous Cylons without feeling a twinge of sympathy. Their war appears to be a nuclear powered adolescent rebellion on steroids. These are the children of men returned with a vengeance. The implication is that these beings are made not begotten, filled with gifts but devoid of love. One of the sub-themes of the show is the Cylon effort to duplicate human reproductive processes. I doubt we will find this to be a simple issue of the relative efficiencies of cell division versus manufacturing. The Cylons want to be fully human, and, perhaps, to supplant the colonists as the sole heirs of divine love. In their desperate effort to replicate every detail of human life they are pathetic and menacing at the same time.

There is much to be examined in this series, and it is interesting the producers devoted so much of the first and second seasons to the complexities of religion in a democratic society and to driving home the point that for faith to be real it has to be freely chosen as well. It is ironic that in a time when the role of religious faith in public life has taken center stage both at home and abroad, it has fallen to a science fiction program to ask questions unfit for prime time. For the sake of economics, Hollywood might want to rethink that. It turns out sleek special effects and ersatz high-technology are unnecessary when a program inhabits a rich moral universe.

Be sure to check out the latest profile of White House speechwriter-cum-senior-advisor, Mike Gerson. As I keep telling every committed Christian I know, the next President is going to be a huge disappointment -- even if he or she is a Republican. Bush not only shares the values of evangelicals, he expresses those values in a language that appeals to the God-minded. That is largely the work of Mr. Gerson who has truly set a new standard for presidential speechwriting.

My favorite dead-wrong but funny quiz answer of the day:

Fill in the Blank: With the Currency Act of 1900, the Republican Party put America's currency firmly on the __________________.

I've had two students answer "map."

With all this posting, I feel I should say something...

Silence is golden?

No? Then you’ve have to settle for a legal tale.

One of the Style Editor’s comrades of yore is now an assistant DA, protecting the fair and fortunate citizens of her area with her razzle–dazzle legal skills and not inconsiderable common sense. Occasionally, as a sort of public service and exubernatcelebration of th efact that she is no longer in private practice, she shares the occasional tale, such as the following:

The Beauty of Having Nothing Left

This is another one of my "why I love my job" moments. I had a pro se motion hearing yesterday with a guy named Louis. Louis was representing himself because he was dissatisfied with the mediocre representation he had been receiving these past five years. While I still don't have a clue as to what specifically Louis was asking the Court to do for him, like most prisoners I deal with, at the end of the day he was generally just hoping that we were going to change our mind about things and send him home.

About 15 minutes into the hearing (and about an hour after I first started trying to figure out what it was he wanted and 30 minutes after I first realized he was perhaps the dumbest man I have ever met), Louis finally began to realize that we weren't changing our minds and that he was in fact going to have to finish serving the balance of his prison term. It was at that moment that he realized that, since he was already maxing out, he had nothing left to lose. He looked up at the Judge and with a great deal of sincerity and passion stated, "I would like the record to reflect that the Commonwealth can KISS MY ASS."

I must admit it was a beautiful moment. I am also pleased to report that Louis still has approximately 12 months left to relive that glory out at the local pen.

Let me take a moment to do Bunnie Diehl's work for her. (Thank me, Bunnie.)

So here is Christianity Today on the National Prayer Breakfast. Key 'graph:

The prayer breakfast, begun during the Eisenhower administration, historically draws 3,600 attendees from 155 nations, including heads of state. A low-profile group commonly known as Fellowship Foundation sponsors the annual event. The group's well-connected members around the world work behind the scenes to provide members of Congress and foreign dignitaries with spiritual encouragement and fellowship. Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minnesota, who co-chaired the breakfast with Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Arkansas, is the event's first Jewish chair.

Then CT goes and kind of confuses the matter. They write that King Abdullah of Jordan, according to his advisor Joseph Lumbard, "wants to engage in a deeper dialogue with Catholics and members of other Christian traditions."

"We all have an interest in a secure and just peace in the Holy Land," Lumbard said. He added that the king has also been trying to "help evangelicals come to a more thorough understanding of the traditional teachings of Islam" and address misunderstandings resulting from the claims of extremists. Following the luncheon he met with a select group of evangelical leaders.

Color me crazy, but doesn't that kind of retroactively go and make the whole Prayer Breakfast kind of, you know, Evangelical and Protestant? When, at long last, this year any pretense to being a Christian gathering was finally dropped and it is finally and matter-of-factly a gathering of Interfaith American Civil Religion? When even "the Fellowship" has for years resisted being called Christian? (Remember, it's "Jesus plus Nothing"?)

Just asking.

[Ed.–BTW, what do you think of the Jeff Sharlet piece on Sam Brownback in Rolling Stone? Well, not that much. It's cringe-inducing, sure, because it involves Sam Brownback; but my respect for Sharlet continues to wane. He used to be God-haunted, but he now seems to find it much easier to be a sort of Side Show Barker of Freaks, Geeks and Deaks of American Religious Life for an eye-rolling Upper East Side audience. This is not a hard job.]

In RE The Danes

Fascinating thing to see the Danes struggle with the problem of their own determined pluralism. It turns out that not everyone is as committed to the principle of live-and-let-live as some of our European allies thought they would be. A substantial segment of the Muslim community seems completely unreconciled to notions like a free press, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, etc. At the same time, they seem to have fully internalized the rights-demanding victim culture, which is handy if you are trying to generate a smoke-screen to cover tyrannical impulses.

It is time for Europe to wake up and, to paraphrase Justice Robert Jackson, acknowledge that tolerance and pluralism cannot become suicide notes. Pluralism and tolerance have to be defended -- even to the extent of tapping phones and engaging in the occasional pre-emptive strike -- if these ideas are not going to be used as a hammer to destroy the societies that generate them. Keeping a republic, or even a constitutional monarchy, puts demands on all of us. Even the Danes.

Darn decent article by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe, "We are all Danes now." Alternately stunning and pleasing to see the Continentals of Old Europe finally showing some backbone, is it not?

Count me as thinking this is fascinating -- Mussolini's last surviving child has died, his son Romano at age 79. He was an accomplished jazz pianist who played with all the greats of the 50s and 60s (talk about anti-fascist) AND was married to Sophia Loren's sister. Whoah!

Having some chicken wings for your Super Bowl party? How about this guy? He won a wing eating contest in Philly...173 chicken wings...

Thoughts on Boehner

Dr. Potomac has had only very limited exposure to now-Majority Leader John Boehner but he thinks that exposure is instructive nonetheless. A number of years ago, Dr. Potomac attended a political fundraising event where Boehner was present. There he was slouched in a comfortable chair, cigarette in one hand and a darkish whiskey in the other regailing what Dr. Potomac assumes was a lobbyist with what he further assumes was a joke Boehner wouldn't want attributed to him in print. Boehner was all deep-set eyes, darkly tanned skin and cynicism. This is the man to whom the House Republicans have entrusted their future. Because cynical men have their place when narrow majorities are at stake, Dr. Potomac withholds judgment as to whether Boehner as leader is a good or bad idea.

Oh, and one other thing. A close professional associate of Dr. Potomac who is frequently called on for advice relating to personnel has a rather iron-clad rule: never hire a Boehner staffer. Something to ponder, isn't it?

Oh I don't know about that. I think the test is HIGHLY accurate.

I'm a Mercedes SLK!

You appreciate the finer things in life. You have a split personality - wild or conservative, depending on your mood. Wherever you go, you like to travel first class. Luxury, style, and fun - who could ask for more?

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

OK, much to his surprise the computer indicates, somewhat tentatively, that Dr. Potomac is a sporty Honda S200. Since anyone who has made Dr. Potomac's acquaintance would probably be quite surprised to see him behind the wheel of such a vehicle, it makes him wonder whether this test isn't somewhat less accurate than one of those personality tests they give at church retreats and government employee training conferences.

I thought I would come out an Edsel or Ford Falcon, but turns out I am a practical Mazda Rx-3.

As per my curmudgeonly reputation, I move to eliminate the State of the Union Address and return to the "Annual Address to Congress," which was used from Jefferson to Wilson. The only thing missing Tuesday was Joan Rivers standing on the red carpet critiquing congressional dress -- one network actually asked its analysts, "President Bush is wearing a blue tie. What do you think is the significance of this?" How did he dress? How was his "delivery?" Who gives a flying fish? Just write up a message, send it to Congress, and have the clerks read it. If it was good enough for Franklin Pierce, it's good enough for George Bush (they are distant relatives, you know).

Drunk riding is legal in South Dakota. Giddyup!

Good point over at the "other" curmudgeon site, Joys of Curmudgeonry. "If the cartoon-caricatures of the prophet Muhammad were meant to propagate a dim view of the character of Islam, they do not do so as nearly as well as do the reactions to them in the Muslim world."

I'm a Dodge Viper!

You're all about raw power. You're tough, you're loud, and you don't take crap from anyone. Leave finesse to the other cars, the ones eating your dust.

Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.

Here that, Doc? Back off. I don't take nothing from nobody, understand? Yeah.

Now I will go move my Neon before it gets a ticket...

Certain technological improvements in Dr. Potomac's home now make it possible to watch television and surf the web at the same time. Difficult to say whether this will be thought of as progress for civilization as a whole.

Good grief! Liveblogging the State of the Union! Dr. Potomac appears to have turned into an insatiable blogger. (With plenty of inside jokes, too; most people in the United States are happily ignorant of just who Rosa de Lauro is.)

Another Warning Shot in Virginia

Democrats captured another Assembly seat in a special election yesterday. This time the victory came in Loudon County, one of the high-growth ex-urbs of a type that fueled President Bush's victory in 2004. Admittedly, not all ex-urbs are equal. Loudon's close proximity to DC makes it a haven for current and former bureaucrats and those who make their living off the federal contracting teat. Leesburg, the county seat, is trending artsy these days, a kind of St. Michael's, Maryland without the water. During a recent visit to Leesburg, Dr. Potomac passed a late-night palm-reading/blue-grass music joint right in the middle of town. He thinks this an ill omen in terms of Loudon's cultural and political future.

The scale of Democrat Mark Herring's victory is impressive as he garnered almost 70 percent of the vote over Mick Staton, a Republican county supervisor. The main issues in the race were the pace of development and traffic congestion -- not too suprising given the growing pains of the outer suburbs. The underlying problem for the Republican was undoubtedly that virtually no one was paying attention to a Statehouse by-election at the end of January. That's all well and good, but why not? Dr. Potomac thinks something deeper is at work here. After two very intense, "national security" elections and the grinding war in Iraq, he fears the base may be in a state of semi-exhaustion. And, while he appreciates Karl Rove's recent framing of the 2006 mid-term elections in national security terms, he wonders how much juice is actually in that issue right now. The trends don't look good this morning.

SOTU V

Sabotage! Just lost 20 minutes of brilliant commentary. Dr. Potomac was momentarily distracted by Rosa De Lauro's scarf. She appears to have been kicked out of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft.

Alito gets a standing O welcoming him to the Supreme Court. Very nice. Salt in the wounds, one would think. Buh-bye, Sandra Day. The doors to the chamber are heavy -- don't let one hit you on the way out.

The Levin brothers are sitting together, one from the House and the other from the Senate. They appear to be Disney escapees from the set of Snow White. Grumpy and Dopy or perhaps Grumpy and Sneezy. Hard to tell them apart.

Can someone tell me why Lloyd Ogylvie, former chaplain of the Senate, is in attendance this evening?

SOTU IV

We appear to be edging into the domestic security portion of the speech now. He asks for reauthorization of the Patriot Act. Silent Dems, minority Dems. W claims constitutional authoritiy on wiretaps. "If there are people on our country talking to Al Qaeda we want to know about it because we won't sit back and wait to be hit again." It is an unanswerable argument. Prepare for dithering in the Democratic response.
(By the way, how galling it must be for the likes of Maria Cantwell to stand and applaud a person and policies for which she has no sympathy. Dr. Potomac wonders whether they all go get drunk after its over.)

SOTU III

Wow. W takes on radical Islam as the primary threat to freedom of the world. "We love our freedom, and will fight to keep it." Most of the Democrats refuse to join in the applause on the main "victory in Iraq" points. Shameful. There it is: the Democratic party's real problem. A significant portion of it has no will to defend the country's core principles and values. What is the sound of one Lieberman clapping?

The President looks grim. "We must stand behind our military in this vital mission". Finally the Ds clap ("it isn't the troops we oppose; just the policies that put them there." Do they honestly believe the public is going to make such a distinction or vote for people who do?)

Prolonged applause for "no nukes for Iran." Some one should move a resolution giving our president the authority he needs to prevent that. How about you, Senator Schumer?

SOTU II

A nice grace note: the tribute to Coretta Scott King to kick off the address.

Looks as though the female Senators and Representatives have cleaned out Washington department stores of their red gowns.

I see in the balcony Dr. Gary Slutkin of Ceasefire Chicago. This is a very interesting violence reduction program that takes a public health/epidemeological approach to gang activity. A favorite of the First Lady.

The State of the Union I

What a pleasure. There he is, Samuel Alito, newly minted Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Quite a victory to deliver the President just before addressing the nation. Could there be just a little more life in this presidency (and in the Republican majority in Congress) than the media would have us believe?

Fun with BHL

The gentlemen at Powerline are greatly exercised about M. Bertrand Henri Levy. Yikes, they're cross.

Not me! I have been reading his reviews and, as FDR was wont to say, "what a gas"! [Ed-You mean M. Levy? Him, too!] Laughter is the best medicine when the diagnosis is "French Intellectual".

Let us first lovingly and admiringly consider M. Alex Beam (sorry, it's contagious) of the Boston Globe. He begins by explaining just who the hell M. Levy is:

Sophisticated people everywhere -- Tina Brown! Adam Gopnik! -- are taking French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy's new book, ''American Vertigo," very, very seriously. BHL, as he is known chez lui, figuratively retraced the 1831 American journey of his countryman Alexis de Tocqueville, spinning out his impressions first in a series of Atlantic magazine articles and now in a book.

Color me skeptical. I can't take Levy seriously at all. I stuck with his first Atlantic article until I tripped across the phrase ''Detroit, sublime Detroit." I burst out laughing.

Me too! I think I might have held on until M. Levy sought to understand the Native American question by talking to Russell Means, or someone. Then I moved on to see who Benjamin Schwartz was snarling at this month.

Beam does say that BHL gives a celebrity appearance worth the price of admission:

I heard Levy talk last spring at the New York Public Library, and it was magnifique. Catch him if you can. Levy's English is quite good, but even he couldn't decipher a meandering inquiry from his acolyte, loony-left actor Richard Dreyfuss, who seemed to want to talk about the First Amendment. ''What did he say? What did he say?" Levy kept asking his handlers, but alas no English-to-English translator was present.

So that's where Richard Dreyfuss has been since What About Bob? I was wondering...

But for a real, hit'em in the groin, savage takedown, you have to look for a Midwesterner; say, a Professional Midwesterner, like...Garrison Keilor! Who do the Liberal Fogey had it in him?

It's a review so good that I just want to paste the whole thing. Here are some highlights:

It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize...

He likes Savannah and gets delirious about Seattle, especially the Space Needle, which represents for him "everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel." O.K., fine. The Eiffel Tower is quite the deal, too...

Bombast comes naturally to him...

As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions...

And finally...

America is changing, he concludes, but America will endure. "I still don't think there's reason to despair of this country. No matter how many derangements, dysfunctions, driftings there may be . . . no matter how fragmented the political and social space may be; despite this nihilist hypertrophy of petty antiquarian memory; despite this hyperobesity - increasingly less metaphorical - of the great social bodies that form the invisible edifice of the country; despite the utter misery of the ghettos . . . I can't manage to convince myself of the collapse, heralded in Europe, of the American model."

Thanks, pal. I don't imagine France collapsing anytime soon either. Thanks for coming. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. For your next book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people involved?

My lesson is: despite everything that divides me and Garrison, we are united when some French Egoist writes a book.

Let's Play, "Who Wrote This?" !!!

The continual mistake of the Bush administration is to think, based on not much thinking to begin with, that people are people -- pretty much the same the world over. This is why the president extols democracy. (Lenin, more of a cynic, purportedly observed: ``Democracy counts heads without regard to what's in them.'') It must be what everyone wants because it is what everyone here wants. To denigrate this kind of talk suggests racism -- You mean we are not all the same? -- or a musty neocolonialism. But the hard truth is that culture and religion matter, and we should not expect moderation (as we did garlands and ecstatic maidens when U.S. troops entered Baghdad) just because that's how we would react. Toto knows the truth. The Middle East is not Kansas.

Who do you think? George Will? Nope. Brent Scowcroft? Nope. Pat Buchanan? Uh-uh.

The correct answer is: Richard Cohen!

Dr. Potomac long ago observed to me that he had stopped reading Richard Cohen because he was tired of reading whatever had popped into Richard Cohen's head before deadline. Case in point. It doesn't even fit into the opera omnia of Professor Richard Cohen. Skepticism of democracy? A belief that some cultures are better than others? Wuh! Huh! Do I have to even bother to look at old columns to see that this has nothing whatsoever to do with any of his political though in general?

Didn't think so.

A Shake-Up in The Arab Dream House

Unlike some in the commentariat, Dr. Potomac is not seriously disturbed by the fact that the radical Hamas faction has captured control of the Palestinian Authority. On university campuses across America, this is what would be called a "teachable moment."

The dominant feature of Arab politics is that it is buried in so many layers of lies and self-deception that it is paralyzed. The typical Arab government is a strong-man atop a restive populace who plays a double game of eliciting aid from the West while keeping its domestic population satisfied anti-Israeli (and anti-Semetic) rhetoric. (As the late Herman Talmadge said of politics, it is an art of taking votes from the poor and money from the rich while promising to protect them from one another. The Arab strongman simply plays this game at a higher and more dangerous level.)

In this sense, the Hamas victory is clarifying because it begins to wash away layers of political illusion. Namely, it has had the effect of installing a leadership that at least reflects the attitudes and misconceptions of the population it governs. To the extent that its rhetoric is anti-Israeli, it will have the virtue of being sincerly so and can therefore be dealt with in a serious fashion. No more will we have to degrade ourselves or the Palestinians by pretending that we believed their leadership while that leadership pretended to make peace with Israel. If the Hamas government continues in its aggressive ways, we pull the aid plug and no one (possibly not even the French) will say we have gone too far. The collapse of what remains of the economy in the West Bank and Gaza strip will teach its own lessons about elected extremism.

The second layer of this cleansing is merely potential. Elections change things, including the party that wins. In the post-election "man on the street" interviews one heard rather little concerning the destruction of Israel as the top priority of the average voter. One did hear a great deal about corruption, lack of basic services and problems with the local economy. Assuming Hamas must face a second clean election (a dicey assumption, Dr. Potomac admits) there will have to be a rather dramatic overhaul of the Hamas platform if the group intends to maintain its majority. One reason that democratic states don't start wars is that their politicians are too busy attending to the concerns of voters. War is bad for political business and is therefore avoided unless absolutely necessary.

This is all speculative, of course, and a whole variety of nightmare scenarios remain all too plausible. On the other hand, the world had just spent forty years on a road to nowhere with Arafat and Company. The Hamas victory at least gives us the chance to begin a frank and open conversation with a part of the world that has for too long been a deception, wrapped in a lie, inside a falsehood. It seems rather hopeful compared to diplomatic nonsense that preceded it.

Reflections on the Beaver State

This week's court ruling on the Oregon assisted suicide legislation provides so many opportunities for comment it is difficult to know where to start. The collapse of medical ehtics and/or Western civilization? The painful irony that is Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, and Ruth Ginsburg upholding the sacred principles of federalism? The laugh-out-loud dissent in which Antonin Scalia points out that Congress probably did not envision suicide as a legtimate form of "health care" when it passed statutes governing the prescription of powerful sedatives? A target rich environment, to be sure.

It would be petty to dwell on these ironies. Too easy, sitting Ducks, as it were. Dr. Potomac would rather take his (and your) precious time fully illuminating how the Oregon law that overturns several thousand years of human wisdom concerning the practice of medicine fits with the avalanche of illogic, denial and wishful thinking that from time to time seizes the state. Follow the story -- if you dare.

Chapter 1: The Tri-Met Honor System

In the mid-1980s, the denizens of the local bus system decreed an end to fare collections. In a fit of civic-minded lunacy, Tri-Met, which served hundreds of thousands of riders across the Portland-metro area, decided that the costs associated with collecting fares exceeded the revenue they generated. How this calculation was achieved Dr. Potomac cannot recall but he thinks the math would have been suspect even to the lower third of his high school algebra class. At any rate, it was decided that fares would now be collected on a sort of a don't-ask-don't-tell policy for public transportation. Riders who didn't drop their coins in the farebox were "assumed" to have purchased a pass elsewhere but didn't have to present one. Local and national news outlets hailed the program as the "next step" in mass transit, one that focused completely on the benefits of public transportation without sullying the concept with profit and loss statements.

Painful, isn't it? Even you, dear reader, can imagine the outcome of the scheme. Ridership skyrocketed, revenues plunged and red-ink, in an already heavily subsidized system, poured out of the Tri-Met offices into the streets. Fares had effectively been repealed but human nature -- you know, that part you heard about in your intro Econ courses called "the free-rider" phenomenon -- remained fully operational. Tri-Met was sinking fast.

Normal human beings would have bowed to defeat and reinstated the fares. But Oregonians are not normal, they are liberals. When confronted with indisputable evidence that the world is not as they wish it to be their response is completely predictable: double the bet. Also like liberals, they fell back on the coercive power of the state to attain their goal of a remade human nature. In this case, the Tri-Met board hired cops -- you know, public employees complete with generous salaries, benefits, and pensions? -- who had the sole purpose of staging raids on buses to catch fare-cheats. Dr. Potomac personally witnessed such a "bus-bust" complete with youths trying to scramble out of the bus windows to avoid capture. After a few months of the Tri-Met police state, a proof-of-fare policy was quitely reinstated.

Chapter 2: Free Bikes

Having learned nothing from the Tri-Met experience, in the early 1990s the City of Portland and a non-profit organization joined hands in a project that combined moral up-lift of the poor and the religious cult of environmentalism. In an effort to reduce traffic in the downtown core, the city and its non-profit partner decided to make bicycles available free of charge, and without locks, in special bike racks across. The bikes would be maintained by troubled youths from poor areas who, it was said, would learn a trade in bicycle repair. (You might well ask: how many bicylce repair-persons did the people of Portland need? Was the local community college undersubscribed in its bicycle repair classes? Were the pleasant folk of Portlandia being left with slipped chains and flat tires on the major thorough fares?) Users, it was thought, would return the bike to any one of the conveniently placed racks so that other car-averse Portlanders could have a turn.

Uh-huh. Well, it didn't turn out that way, of course. The bikes, hundreds of them, had a strange way of disappearing. It seems that the cash value of the bikes was somewhat greater than the non-cash benefits derived by riders or the youth who were building skills. Strike two for Oregon.

Chapter 3: Don't Kill Yourself -- Unless You're Really Sure

Twice now, by referenda, the People's Republic of Oregon has passed its physician assisted suicide legislation. Bad idea, of course, one Dr. Potomac thoroughly disapproves of, top of the slipperiest slope imaginable. What's really interesting, however, is the way Oregonians are responding to their own law.

One evening last fall as Dr. Potomac was driving home from a hard day SERVING THE PEOPLE, he chanced upon an NPR story concerning a curious (to them) phenomenon: a dramatic spike in suicides among elderly Oregonians. Turns out the old and sick were quite sensitive to the signal the public gave them in approving physician assisted suicide. The elderly, few of them terminally ill, were offing themselves in substantial numbers and without the aid of a doctor. The conventional means (carbon dioxide, gunshot and hanging) were quite adequate to the purpose and since the state had sanctioned it, why not?

True to form, Oregonians were agast. A sad, traumatic thing it is when one's mother or father or grandparent decides to shuffle off the mortal coil ahead of schedule. Something must be done, they cried, and so something was. (Can you guess? Wait for it.) Yes, the solution to the problem of elder suicide is a state-financed program...to prevent suicide among the elderly. "But, but," you might sputter, "it's unreasonable, illogical, comi-tragic." Yes, it's Oregon.

To My Faithful Readers -- Both of You

Dr. Potomac is shocked to have found his post concerning Intelligent Design both read, commented on and linked to. In appreciation to the two individuals who took the time to respond to my thoughts, Dr. Potomac answers back.

First, in response to TLKS2MYHRT, Dr. Potomac did not mean to leave the impression that ID and the debate over human origin is somehow unimportant. On the contrary, he believes both subjects to be well worth deep reflection and inquiry. His own ability to argue for the created nature of humanity has been immeasurably strengthened by studying the work of Philip Johnson, Nancy Pearcy and others. This is, quite simply, the most important foundational question any of us can address. Getting these issues wrong has been the source of incalculable harm, and getting them right is essential to a right relationship with God, ourselves and each other. To all those working in the field of ID, Dr. Potomac says, in the words of Winston Churchill, "KBO -- Keep Buggering On!"

To Eric Phillips, Dr. Potomac can't agree that ID is science because it doesn't seek to measure anything nor is it testable or verifiable through observation -- yet. Rather, ID is, at its best, a philosophical and logical objection to Darwinism and a very good one at that. Taking the world as a whole, it asks the question: Is it really possible that the complex beings (human and non-human) are simply the product of chance and time? If one finds a watch on the beach, is it possible that it assembled itself out the raw materials at hand? (Frankly, anyone who believes that will believe anything. According to a chemical engineer I know who has made something of a study of this, the math -- the number of mutations necessary to move from single-cell organisms to homo sapien -- just doesn't work in the available time-frame. Math, he tells me, is where Darwinism really falls apart.)

The other contribution ID makes is to point out the gaps in the Darwinist argument, marshaling the facts that are available to say, "Wait a minute. You have no evidence to support your assertion." Forcing science to clean up its act and behave like a good citizen is all well and good. The problem here is that science is pretty persistent about filling in its gaps, and if we base our case for creation solely on the gaps in the Darwinist system, little by little those gaps will be filled in with a mechanistic explanation. Once the gaps are explained away...what, exactly, will be left?

Dr. Potomac believes that one of the worst aspects of the way that we are engaging in this argument lies in strengthening the notion that the scientific method is the only way by which we can know things. This, he believes, is a betrayal of our full humanity. God created us with more than one faculty for perceiving and understanding the truth we find around us. Let's open as many new fronts in this fight as we can, including a robust engagement of the humanities that speak to the mind and soul.

A Random Walk with Dr. Potomac

Yes, it has been too long. Too bad. Dr. Potomac has something to say today.

He is much vexed by the Intelligent Design controversy. As a Christian committed to the truth of the biblical narrative, he believes in a human anthropology rooted in the uncaused cause of God's creative action. As a political professional he has deep misgivings about the way the ID debate is playing out. Unless there's a quick change in tactics that incorporates both science and the humanities, all may well be lost for another century.

Forget about Richard Dawkins. The real problem for the ID movement is that the conservative intelligentsia is out in force against ID. George Will, Charles Krauthammer and, most recently, James Q. Wilson, have all published briefs, and fairly compelling ones at that, against ID in the biology classroom. Unless ID advocates have decided to "go it alone" against the universities, the New York Times and their own friends in media, something has to change.

Now, Dr. Potomac freely acknowledges that many of our conservative intellectuals have gaps in their reasoning concerning ID. Wilson's piece, for instance, argues that the "blind spot" embedded in the human eye is evidence against a creator -- for what all knowing God, he says, would permit such a deficiency? Dr. Potomac responds with, "Why stop there? What about cancer, hurricanes and earthquakes?" Wilson's statment seems to be not much more than a redraft of, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

Which brings Dr. Potomac to his point. Our ID folks are earnest but weak and are locked in a cage-match with Science, by far the strongest force in Western thought. In such a fight, they will eventually be carried from the arena unconscious. To mix metaphors, in the science courtroom all the evidence is on their side, they have hand-picked the jury and the judge dines daily with prosecutor and the foreman. The process is rigged. It is a fight worth having -- if for no other purpose than to drive the Darwinist priesthood into frenzy -- but no one should be under the illusion that it can be won.

Creationists (and what a fine bit of work has been done to render that word an unspeakable embarassment!) are strongest (or at least should be)in the humanities. Despite a couple centuries of assault, denigration and obituary notices, God is, as always, cheerfully persistent about His own existance. The human heart remains tuned to eternity, and ultimate questions continue to wake us in the middle of dark nights. The moral imagination is alive and well; indeed it is both immeasurable and unquenchable. When one reads the work of Darwinists as they grapple with the uncomfortable questions of existance that arise from the imagination (the "God gene", altruism as a genetically selected behavior, ethics in general) they sound rather out of their depth, in the same way that ID advocates sound in a biology classroom. There's a weakness there, a blind-spot, as it were, in evolutionary biology. We ought to be making the most of it.

Dr. Potomac read the other day that a Kansas University professor, who regards himself as a scourge of the ID movement, proposed making a science class on ID part of the university's offerings on mythology. This gesture of contempt ought to be considered an invitation and opportunity to rethink the strategy.

O Emmanuel

O Emmanuel,
Rex et legifer noster,
expectatio gentium,
et Salvator earum:
veni ad salvandum nos,
Domine, Deus noster.


O Emmanuel,
the one awaited by the gentiles,
and their Savior:
come to save us,
Lord our God.


And with that last O Antiphon the Style Edotor departs for vacation. A blessed, joyous Christmas to all and a Happy 2006!

I have returned. In reality, I never really went away, but I've been very busy and lurking on the site, hip-hip-hooraying every time the Style Editor and O-man contribute.

Speaking of meat-pies, I love them. It has become a family joke in some ways. I mean, what's better than meat covered in buttery pastry? Maybe meat stuffed with meat (like roast turkey with a pork stuffing?), but pies will do just fine. Yesterday, as a matter of fact, I went to my favorite neighborhood market in Methuen, Mass. to pick up some gorton (Quebecois spiced meat spread, a poor man's pate), two small steak and kidney pies, and a tourtiere pie. I'm feeling my Quebec roots. no? The smell when you open the market door knocks you over. Lovely. I miss it living so far away in Indiana. [Sigh] Pastie pies are lovely too, but I find them heavier in the belly than the French pork pies. Once upon a time, the O-man insisted that pies were New England culinary culture par excellence, and I poo-pooed the idea. Now I am reconsidering...

Since I haven't blogged in such a long time, I'm tagging myself. "Tag, I'm it!"

1. I met both Dan and Marilyn Quayle. I actually met Veep Quayle at Burlington (VT) International Airport as part of the "welcoming committee" that was ushered planeside. This was back in 1991-1992.
2. People have said, at various times (and obviously under the influence of something rather potent), that I look like Bucky Showalter, Audie Murphy, and/or Nathaniel Hawthorne. Get your glasses cleaned, please.
3. I like very cold beverages. Ice cold. No warmish British beer for me.
4. The last cd I bought was Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin.
5. I have never been west of the Mississippi River.

I have returned. In reality, I never really went away, but I've been very busy and lurking on the site, hip-hip-hooraying every time the Style Editor and O-man contribute.

Speaking of meat-pies, I love them. It has become a family joke in some ways. I mean, what's better than meat covered in buttery pastry? Maybe meat stuffed with meat (like roast turkey with a pork stuffing?), but pies will do just fine. Yesterday, as a matter of fact, I went to my favorite neighborhood market in Methuen, Mass. to pick up some gorton (Quebecois spiced meat spread, a poor man's pate), two small steak and kidney pies, and a tourtiere pie. I'm feeling my Quebec roots. no? The smell when you open the market door knocks you over. Lovely. I miss it living so far away in Indiana. [Sigh] Pastie pies are lovely too, but I find them heavier in the belly than the French pork pies. Once upon a time, the O-man insisted that pies were New England culinary culture par excellence, and I poo-pooed the idea. Now I am reconsidering...

Since I haven't blogged in such a long time, I'm tagging myself. "Tag, I'm it!"

1. I met both Dan and Marilyn Quayle. I actually met Veep Quayle at Burlington (VT) International Airport as part of the "welcoming committee" that was ushered planeside. This was back in 1991-1992.
2. People have said, at various times (and obviously under the influence of something rather potent), that I look like Bucky Showalter, Audie Murphy, and/or Nathaniel Hawthorne. Get your glasses cleaned, please.
3. I like very cold beverages. Ice cold. No warmish British beer for me.
4. The last cd I bought was Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin.
5. I have never been west of the Mississippi River.

O Rex Gentium

O Rex Gentium,
et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis,
qui facis utraque unum:
veni, et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.

O King of the Nations,
and the one they desired,
keystone,
who makes both peoples one,
come and save mankind,
whom you shaped from the mud.

Doubting Thomas

Even doubting Thomas gets his day, and it's today, December 21st.

Today's Collect:
Everliving God, who strengthened your apostle Thomas with firm and certain faith in your Son's resurrection: Grant us so perfectly and without doubt to believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God, that our faith may never be found wanting in your sight; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Don't forget to bake your meat pies!

O Oriens

O Oriens,
splendor lucis aeternae,
et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina
sedentes in tenebris,
et umbra mortis.

O Dawn,
splendor of eternal light,
and sun of justice,
come, and shine on those,
seated in darkness,
and in the shadow of death.

Bunnie Diehl has tagged me to list give random facts about myself. This is a poor choice on her part, because there is no more boring subject to give 5 random facts about oneself than I, and yet nonetheless here I am giving in to vanity for the sake of all two of our readers:

1.) My favorite Christmas video (and second favorite Christmas story) is A Child's Christmas in Wales.
2.) When in high school, I passed off my freshman English teacher as 33rd in line to the throne of England. I must confess it caused a sensation, but I was dealing with honor students there. Bright people, but not very smart.
3.) While young, I scored very high on the geek meter by writing a longish story around the Battle of Brunanburh. It was awful. (The story that is. I suppose the battle was awful too, but as it didn't exist then, the English language was not slaughtered in the battle. It certainly was in the story.)
4.) I never had my teenage rebellion. I think I'm saving it for my 40's.
5.) I can milk a cow.

As for tagging other people, I'm always the person who breaks the chain mail chain, so perhaps I 'll do it here as well, although if Singin' in DC wants to oblige, I'm sure we will all be entertained.

O Clavis David

O Clavis David,
et sceptrum domus Israël,
qui aperis, et nemo claudit,
claudis, et nemo aperuit:
veni, et educ vinctum
de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris,
et umbra mortis.

O Key of David,
and scepter of the house of Israel,
you open, and no one shuts,
you shut, and no one opens:
come, and lead the prisoner
from jail.
seated in darkness
and in the shadow of death.

O Radix Jesse

O Radix Jesse,
qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos,
jam noli tardare

O Root of Jesse,
who stand as a sign for the people,
kings stand silent in your presence,
whom the nations will worship:
come to set us free,
put it off no longer.

O Adonai

O Adonai,
et dux domus Israël,
qui Moyse in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.


O Mighty Lord,
and leader of the house of Israël,
who appeared to Moses in the burning bush,
and on Sinai gave him the law,
come to redeem us with outstretched arm.

O Sapientia

O Sapientia,
quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter,
suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom,
who proceeds from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching out mightily from end to end,
and sweetly arranging all things:
come to teach us the way of prudence.

O my! O Antiphons!

December 17th is the traditional start date for the Great O Antiphons of Advent. What are the Great O Antiphons? Good question!

Let's start with what an antiphon is. An antiphon is "a refrain-like verse from Scripture that begins and concludes a psalm or canticle. Sometimes it is also interspersed within a psalm. " Or so claims the LCMS Liturgical Dictionary. The church music kids writing on Wikipedia give a more comprehensive definition, and point out that antiphon is essentially "a response, usually sung in Gregorian chant, to a psalm or some other part of a religious service, such as at Vespers or at a Mass."

The Great O Antiphons are the seven antiphons recited or chanted before and after—although such are standards these days that often they're chanted only before—the singing of the Magnificat during Vespers (Evening Service). If you want to be extra solemn about it, you can chant the antiphons 3 times, "once before the canticle and before and after the Gloria Patri." The Great O Antiphons are sung on the days leading up to Christmas, starting on the 17th of Dec and ending on the 23rd. (The liturgically inclined Roman Catholics know this as "the Octave before Christmas.") The Anglicans got it in their heads at some point to start O Antiphoning on the 16th of December, but I really can't be responsible for what the Anglicans do, can I?

No one knows how old the O Antiphons are. Apparently Boethius (c. 480-524), when he wasn't consoling himself with philosophy, mentioned them. Others say by the 8th or 9th century they were being used in worship in Rome. Still others give props to Gregory the Great. But no matter really, what is clear is that the Great O Antiphons have been part of the liturgical celebration of Advent since the early church.

There are actually divers O Antiphons, but "by the end of the Middle Ages their number had been almost universally fixed at seven, the key words of which, when reversed in order, form an acrostic that beautifully fits the Advent season: "Ero cras"-"I shall be tomorrow."" Except in England, which as an island didn't get the message from Continent in time, so they went with eight antiphons and the acrostic "vero cras", which shows you that either they weren't so hot with the Latin or with the acrostics. (This is why the Anglicans start the O Antiphons on the 16th, so they can fit their last one, "O Virgo Virginum" in on the 23rd. (I'm still not responsible for what the Anglicans do.))

And now let me quote some more from someone who sounds like he knows what he's talking about:

"The importance of “O Antiphons” is twofold: Each one highlights a title for the Messiah: O Sapientia (O Wisdom), O Adonai (O Lord), O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse), O Clavis David (O Key of David), O Oriens (O Rising Sun), O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations), and O Emmanuel. Also, each one refers to the prophecy of Isaiah of the coming of the Messiah."

You think you don't know the O? Actually, you probably do. That clever clogs, John Mason Neale, popped them all into a hymn known as "O come, O come, Emmanuel." If you've ever sung that, you've sung the O Antiphons.

So there you have it: the dealio with the O. I shall post one each day, but I promise I shan't add anything beyond the scripture references. You don't need me to give thoughts on the texts O Antiphons. You do some thinking for yourself.

And so, as the monks used to say to each other: "Keep the O!" (No really they did. I'm not making that up.)



The interesting and literate bits of the above come from "The Great O Antiphons of Advent" by Carl Schalk and "What Are the ’O Antiphons’?" by Fr. William Saunders. The annoying bits are solely mine.

Clearly I'm Not Getting Through...

Last Sunday, one of my Sunday School students asked, "Do you celebrate Hanukkah or Christmas?"

The Second Vermont Republic

...which seems to be pretty much the same assortment of nuts the first one was.

If this article from the Buchanite/Libertarian/Green/Wacko part of the political spectrum doesn't bring the Doc out of his early winter hibernation, what the hell will?

Dawkins Craftier Then Dennett

So Richard Dawkins, Oxford Village Atheist, got interviewed by Beliefnet. (Heh. How he must have cringed and curled his lip at their name.) The result is all pretty much standard Dawkins' stuff: since I am a scientist, I have the priestly authority to say that you are an idiot for being religious, blah, blah. Also much use of the argumentum ad Herculeum, ie., "I'm tougher and stronger than you, wimp, because I can deal with the universe as it is." Standard stuff.

But I thought this was rather clever of the old rogue:

Is atheism the logical extension of believing in evolution?

They clearly can’t be irrevocably linked because a very large number of theologians believe in evolution. In fact, any respectable theologian of the Catholic or Anglican or any other sensible church believes in evolution. Similarly, a very large number of evolutionary scientists are also religious. My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

Why is this clever? Because of this chortle-inducing episode recounted on the excellent First Things blog by Stephen Barr, professor of physics at the University of Delaware.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett visited us at the University of Delaware a few weeks ago and gave a public lecture entitled “Darwin, Meaning, Truth, and Morality"... Dennett claimed that Darwin had shredded the credibility of religion and was, indeed, the very “destroyer” of God. In the question session, philosophy professor Jeff Jordan made the following observation to Dennett, “If Darwinism is inherently atheistic, as you say, then obviously it can’t be taught in public schools.” “And why is that?” inquired Dennett, incredulous. “Because,” said Jordan, “the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution guarantees government neutrality between religion and irreligion.” Dennett, looking as if he’d been sucker-punched, leaned back against the wall, and said, after a few moments of silence, “clever.” After another silence, he came up with a reply: He had not meant to say that evolution logically entails atheism, merely that it undercuts religion.

Jeff Jordan’s question underlines how the self-appointed defenders of the scientific method are trying to have it both ways. Don’t allow religious philosophy to intrude into biology classrooms and texts, they say, for that is to soil the sacred precincts of science, which must be reserved for hypotheses that can be rigorously tested and confronted with data. The next minute they are going around claiming that anti-religious philosophy is part and parcel of the scientific viewpoint.

You see? Dawkins' doesn't let himself fall into the trap that Dennett does; but, as Barr points out, both Dawkins and Dennett want to have it both ways. Dawkins is just cleverer about it.

Barr also makes the very useful comment about the real world of academia, rather than the caricature that Dawkins and Dennett and bad journalism have created:

One of the glories of science is that people come together to do it who have all sorts of religious beliefs, philosophical views, cultural backgrounds, and political opinions. But as scientists they speak the same language. It is a wonderful fellowship. I have written research papers with colleagues (and friends) who are fierce atheists and think my Catholic beliefs are for the birds, and they know that I think their atheism is for the birds. Yet we respect each other as scientists. People like Dennett who wish to equate science with their own philosophical views (presumably out of vanity) risk doing immeasurable harm both to science itself and to its prestige. He is entitled to his philosophical opinions, but he is not entitled to claim them as the utterances of Science.

Goodness Gracious!

...as the Secretary of Defense would say, doubtless while mentally subsituting some Navy oaths he learned back when he was flying off a carrier.

The Ombudsman had literally no idea he would stir up a hornet's nest when he made some mild comments re Christmas and Megachurches. I mean, the Ombudsman is a weak violet who flinches from the brisk give-and-take over at Bunnie Diehl's. He does not have well-developed canines; he does not believe that truth is necessarily on his side because it is his side; only once in while does the Ombudsman have a right to his opinions. [Ed.-Then why the hell are you blogging? Good question! Note that I haven't been doing it much!]

So I am surprised, and I guess it is because people can't parse distinctions. Me, I am willing to blame it on email and blogging...somehow they are mediums that encourage inattention. Let me therefore say it plainly. Megachurch members are not evil...megachurch pastors are not evil. They are, even, Christian brothers and sisters of mine. That does not mean they can't do silly things, and do them for all the wrong reasons.

Look, it goes beyond the whole Christ-mas argument. (You made your point, Bunnie. Now move on, or find another argumentum ad somethingorother.) It is profoundly a question of Christian discipleship. I note that a favorite culture-war gambit this season are protests against saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Christmas"; or protests at Target because they do not allow Salvation Army bell-ringers on their property. These protests are attempts to, I believe, make it clear that the commercial extravaganza that now begins just after Halloween is really, truly, Christian...kind of.

Well, if the best we can do for the Faith is grab hold of those enormous inflatable plastic lawn ornament snowglobes with the happy snowman inside, or the "Grinch" Holiday Special, and shout "This is about Jesus!", then count me out. I'm not interested. Wal-Mart can own that holiday season, if that's the case.

It seems to me that the best thing to do to reclaim Christmas as Christmas is to worship...

Holiday Shopping Tips!

When in doubt, there's always Che-Mart! That's where Che Guevara, "world's greatest T-shirt salesman", has many designs to suit your whim and fancy.

My favorite, I think, is "My parents paid for college tuition and all I got was this Che Guevara t-shirt".

No Church on Christmas

The wonderful Bunnie Diehl and her readers have gone off on a tear, viz., "...Megachurch People are Evil", blah, blah, blah. The Very Cheerful "Singin' in DC" at Songs for Frogshas registered what she refers to as "Liturgical Rant #1" in outrage at Megachurches. "The thing about Christmas," she cybersnarls between clenched electronic teeth, "is that it is about *Christ* and *mass*, gathering together to celebrate the birth of the infant Jesus in Bethlehem." [And, goodness, maybe "Singin'" should not only come up with a new handle (I mean to say, really) but start a Liturgical blog with Bunnie and the Style Editor...it would be like the Three Liturgical Horsewomen of the Apocalypse.]

What is the reason for this outrage? Some Megachurches, you see, are cancelling Christmas. That is, they are not having service on Sunday, December 25th, because it's...Christmas. It takes a lot of people to put on a Megachurch Extravaganza, you see. Hundreds. And on a holiday, shouldn't they be allowed to be home with their families?

Lee over at Verbum Ipsum wonders, if they aren't having services because the unchurched won't show up for Christmas, well, "'reach[ing] the unchurched' is presumably not an end in itself is it? I mean, once you've got them what do you do with them? The whole point can't be to reach the unchurched "seeker"; you have to be reaching them for something."

Well, not to be blase and cynical about it all, but colour the Ombudsman unsurprised, kids. I mean, let me flick off some dust from my impeccable Mechlin lace and 'splain things. No, "reaching the unchurched" is the telos of the Megachurch. Indeed, Megachurches are not really churches so much as they are businesses designed for the purposes of evangelism. Note comments by Willow Creek that "church leaders decided that organizing services on a Christmas Sunday would not be the most effective use of staff and volunteer resources". Effective use of staf and volunteer resources...man, if that ain't B-School Talk, what is?

My only problem with this argument is that all the other Big Box Stores will be open for business on Christmas Day! Of course they will, we have to be able to make a return! So when are the Holy Big Boxes going to realize that viability and maintainence of their Brand requires them to utilize resources for Customer Interaction on December 25th? Couldn't they at least have some people to pray with people who stop by and want their money back?

The Comedy of Life

So you're a professor at UC Berkeley. You are walking into your office. And there are a couple of students involved in the Act of Eros; they are in flagrante delicto, as those of us with a smattering of the classics would say; they are caught in the carnal clench, tupping away like sheep in the spring, as Brigadier Sir Harry Flashman, VC might put.

I mean, I wish I can make this stuff up, but I'm not clever enough. Hey, and those of us who put Doctor Curmudgeon & Co. on their Lutheran blog roll? Just hope you have a good Lutheran earthy sense of humor, OK? You, too, mother.

Also I note with chortles of pleasure and guffaws of glee a real-life "Dead Parrot Sketch", via the misfortune and frustration of Verity at Albion's Seedlings. Verity, you see, wants to move to India; and apparently they don't allow any foreigners to own land there. And they can't really believe that anyone would want to be an Indian citizen.

So that results in problems for Verity and comedy for us, don't you see?

[Ed.: What do you think of these Anglosphere chaps, anyhow? Ombud: [shiftily] Well, er, nice folk, um...[inspired] why don't you ask the Doc? They like Albion's Seed, you know. Ed.: [with a frown] Isn't that the book you have agreed not to discuss lest your friendship be ended? Ombud.: That's the one! Though, mind, he has almost convinced me of his point. That, and reading primary sources.]

Hmmm, What is This Place?

Yes, I seem to remember it...furniture very dusty. Bourbon bottles where I left them. Dishes still in the sink...Style Editor must have rushed out the door, I presume.

OK, it's good to be back.

Guinea Wop Representation Up!

The President has nominated Judge Samuel Alito of the 3rd Circuit to the Supreme Court. As conservative guinea wops from New Jersey ourselves, The Ombusdsman and I think this is an excellent choice, especially with Justice Scalia looking like he's due for a heart attack anyday (The Ombudsman suggests that perhaps on the next duck hunt, Justice Scalia asks Dick Cheney about a good cardiologist.)True, this move may drop the conservative guinea wop population of New Jersey by 33% and the Lutheran quota has been lost to the Papes (and on Reformation Day too), but we must take the the roughs with the smoothes. Overall, this is wonderful news.

The ruse of "small ball"

All through the baseball playoffs I kept hearing that the White Sox were devotees of "small ball" or "smart ball," in other words they succeeded by using bunts, sacrifices, and stolen bases. They did the little things to win, rather than swing for the fences a la Earl Weaver. And they were roundly applauded on tv and radio alike for this philosophy of play; many hoped it would harken a new era of the game, a back to the future movement opposed to the unpopular (with some) ideas of "money ball."

Seems all that was a bit overdone. According to this study, for all the talk of Chisox speed, it really didn't make that much difference. Their stolen bases added 3 runs to the total number of runs they scored all year (about 1/4 of a win) and, on top of that, they scored almost 1/2 of their runs by way of the homerun (second in all of baseball behind the Twins in that category). Which means the Chicago White Sox scored more runs and were more dependent on the homer than either the Yankees or Red Sox. So much for small ball.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Witness this writer in the Toronto Star who is dead wrong on so many levels. The stolen base canard aside, he suggests that money ball philosophy is only about OBP and not about pitching, which seems conveniently to forget that one whole chapter of the book "Money Ball" was about an undervalued pitcher named Chad Bradford that Billy Beane managed to pry away from Kenny Williams of (you guessed it) the White Sox. This writer clearly did not read the book. Where does it say that pitching is not important? Horse manure. Look for high OBP guys who walk a ton, don't strike out, and take a lot of pitches; find pitchers who don't walk a lot of guys, throw strikes, and keep the ball in the park. How radical is that?

He notes the importance of Scott Podsednik to the Chisox this year, and how the team traded away a power hitter to get the speedy leadoff man. True enough, but Podsednik was central to the White Sox because of his, ahem, OBP which if memory serves was north of .400. He helped them because of was the quintessential table setter, not because he stole bases. By the way, the White Sox led baseball in caught stealing -- think of how many extra outs they ran into because of their silly small ball tactics, taking the bat out of the hands of power hitters behind them. Why such bitterness against "Money Ball" anyway?

On a lighter baseball note, a funny little mock article about how Leo Strauss impacted the Pale Hose championship this year can be found here.

Listen Very Carefully I Will Say This Only Once

People don't like your opinion. No really it's true. There are scads of people, hordes even, who dislike your opinions. Some may even find ways of voicing displeasure with your opinions, thereby expressing their own opinions. I would hope they follow the general rules of civility when doing so, although from what I've seen of the blog world this is not always the case, but people are free to express their disapproval of your opinions. And now for the really earth shattering news: advertisers are people too. If you are a blogger blessed with advertisers, and an advertiser doesn't like what you say, that advertiser has a perfect right to withdraw advertising from your site.
This public service announcement is prompted by a a story out of Maryland. To sum it up a blogger put up what many considered an offensive reference to the Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, a senatorial candiadte for the Sarbanes seat. An advertiser on the site, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine, was one of the people who found it offensive, so offensive that he withdrew his ad and thus his financial support from the site. The article in the Washington Post covers the incident and then sussed out this fascinating take on this action from other bloggers:

Other liberal bloggers defended Gilliard and took after Kaine for pulling his ad. Markos Moulitsas, editor of the blog Daily Kos, said that advertisers should expect edgy content and that Kaine's actions could threaten their editorial independence.

"I don't want bloggers to be afraid to say things because they don't want to offend an advertisers," Moulitsas said.

Oh puh-lese. No one is obligated to support you. If you modify your opinion so an advertiser stays, this is not the fault of the advertiser, but of your money loving heart. You can cook with gas, but if your advertisers can't stand the heat, they have the right to get the hell out of the kitchen. The decision to stick with gas or switch to electric is entirely up to you, however, and trying to place the responsibility for this decision on others sounds more like petulant whining than a bold declaration of intellectual freedom.

She Knows the Croaking Chorus

A big cordial blogger hello (HELLO!) to the new blog Songs for Frogs and its uberposter "Singin' in DC". The official tag reads: "A Capitol Hill reporter shares the amusing anecdotes that can't make it into news stories ... and thoughts on life, love, faith and running shoes." But those of us fortunate enough to know the zany, talented and downright HI-larious Singin' know that this is but an understatement of the matter. As the posts already up reveal, the entertainment value is high. Where else will you find comments about Senators and their hand grenades?

The Obesity "Epidemic"

We Americans are not only growing but are actually BREEDING obese pumpkins ! When will the epidemic end? And how can the Brits hope to compete against the hefty Yankees?

You know, I have never been to an opera either, not because of anti-elitism (hell, I'd go in spite just for that reason), but because the opportunity and time have not emerged. Then again, I've not been to many concerts or performances at all. I saw Chorus Line on Broadway in the late 80's (fell asleep in the warm theater), caught Phish (guy played a vacuum cleaner during a song, and virtually all the fans looked like Jesus) and Great Big Sea (in DC about 7 years ago, not bad) while in college (ungrad and grad), and, um, that's about it. A few plays here and there. Quite disgraceful, no?

Perhaps Bunnie should not read this lovely bit by Theodore Dalrymple over at the Social Affairs Unit. Baroque is superior to Rock! Imagine!

Speaking of disgraceful, there were plans to auction off the jawbone of an unknown Civil War soldier in New Hampshire, until it was pulled under public pressure. Everything has a price apparently.

A lovely commentary here by Roger Sandall. Just a taste for you,

But I don’t care if the Maya civilization did collapse. I don’t think we should shed a single retrospective tear. It might be interesting to know how or why it fell—whether from war or drought or disease or soil exhaustion—but I don’t much care about that either. Because quite frankly, as civilizations go, the Mayan civilization in Mexico didn’t amount to much.

Now I know this is a shocking thing to say. Gallery owners in New York and elsewhere will cry out indignantly about the glories of Maya art. They will show you terra cotta figurines and fine reliefs and paintings and tell splendid tales of “kings” and “nobles” and such. In deference to this view we shall gladly concede that Maya art is not uninteresting. But it is sheer romantic fantasy to mourn the passing, around 900 AD, of an aristocracy of hypersensitive native aesthetes—though anthropologists and art critics have written reams of such stuff.

Glamorous talk of “kings” and “lords” and “nobles” always sounds better than a realistic description of murderous and predatory chieftains with little but power, conquest, self-glorification, enslavement, and killing and torture on their minds. Yes: they wore spectacular feather head-dresses. Yes: they built sky-high piles of masonry. But their hands dripped blood—incessantly.

Yet another disgrace: the Beatles have been voted an icon of the 20th century over Louis Armstrong. This is right up there with those who have been memorializing that Baby Boomer bard John Lennon, whose "gifts" I simply do not understand or appreciate ... or see evidence of. I just don't get it.

Nice commentary on John Buchan right here, the greatest of the espionage writers.

Only Gassy Old Windbags Need Apply

The Nobel Prize for Literature has finally been announced, a week after the originally scheduled time, and it has gone to Harold Pinter of the UK.

I have no opinion on the Pinter. I've not read him. I know his political views, which are a dime a dozen in the literary world, but I don't know his actual work, so it may be he well deserves it. He may be the best pick ever for all I know.

But what is far more interesting than the Pinter is the possibility as reported for the past week is that the Nobel committee hesitated because it was split on giving the Prize to the Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk. Why? Because Pamuk has publically come out against genocide, stating that the Turkish government was responsible for genocide against the Armenians and the Kurds, a statement for which he will soon be tried.

So now with the announcement of Pinter, we see the Academy has shown it's usual courage, the courage it so boldly displayed during the Rushdie affair. The much mentioned possibility that Pamuk was too young for the award is completely specious. Much tosh is talked about how the Nobel is an award for "lifetime achievement" and at 54 Pamuk doesn't have a large enough canon (Only 7 novels. Shocking!) to justify the award. Nonsense. If you look at the history of the Nobel, it has been given many times to authors in their 50's or even YOUNGER. Gracious this author didn't publish her most impressive work until 15 years AFTER her Nobel.) But then people used to think that quality trumped quantity. Now apparently the Nobel Committee thinks that if you want to be considered, you have to be a gassy old windbag. If I were Mr. Pinter I wouldn't be very flattered.


I don't know whether Mr. Pamuk is Nobel worthy. I've never read him, and it's not my call anyway. (If it were, here would be the 2005 winner for Literature.) The point is the Committee thought Pamuk Nobel worthy but then backed away because it values politics over literature. The last courageous choice the Nobel committee made of literature over politics was in 1970. Judging from this year's actions, the committee will never be as courageous again. The only good thing about this decision for me is that it has inspired to me not only to read Pamuk, which I've never done, but to buy his books as well. I may well hate his writing, but I say the courageous should at least get some royalties.

What Bunnie hasn't told you

I offered to PAY for her opera experience and still she turned up her twitchy nose and muttered rich atavistic libertarian oaths against the elite under her carrot laced breath.

He's Irish, not stupid

The Corner at National Review is touting the bizarre rumor that U2 is holding a benefit concert for Sen. Rick Santorum's re-election campaign this Sunday in Philadelphia. I know that speed is thought essential in the hurly burly blog world, but could we pause for thought occasionally? How likely is it that Bono, who has been very careful to not align himself too closely with any political side, would commit not just himself, but his BAND for a political fundraiser for the re-election campaign of a Senator with whom he some things, but not everything in common? Next to impossible. Has The Edge no edge? Does he just knuckle his brow to the commands of Bono if Bono had in fact so commanded? I think not.

I am the rasaest of tabulas when it comes to rock music. I am not just a void of knowledge on the topic; I am a black hole. But like everyone else in DC, I have been an interested observer of Bono going through his political paces, and while I do not agree with many of his positions, what is clear is that he's a canny man. He's been careful to appeal to both sides, and while he thinks well of Santorum's former Chief of Staff, I doubt he would go out on such a political limb as to volunteer his BAND for a fundraiser. He does not strike me as a man who would throw over his mates for the sake of a tenuous political tie. ( I assume the members of the band are his mates but perhaps those with knowledge of the rock world will tell me everyone in the band hates Bono's guts, and he theirs, and it's all about him in his mind.) Bono doesn't need Santorum for his political ends--Casey would probably be just as sympathetic to his desires--but he does need his band.

As for the rumor, consider the source . Or rather don't. I know many in the conservative movement love this source, because it feeds them the kool-aid 24-7 through a 14 gauge IV, but I have found it to be notoriously unreliable. I wouldn't trust a story from it unless I established three independent confirmatory sources for the story, and there are none for this one. What is clear from the Internet is that U2 is playing that evening in Philly at part of their tour. (Get your tickets here!) I'll bet Santorum's re-election campaign has bought seats at that concert, and the reporter zonked on the heavy kool-aid spun it. Now if this is obvious to me, why can't the bright lights at National Review figure this out?

(To be fair in the 30 minutes it took me to spew this piece, The Corner did figure it out and put up the correction, but my original point stands. They should have known this story was ridiculous on its face and should also know better than to trust NewsMax. Clue in Conservative Kids!)

Scooter Support

Now that the White Soxs have swept the Red Soxs, the Pink Soxs, a new breed of hairless Corgis has been created. Before he starts building this breed, I encourage Dr. C to go see Wallace and Gromit, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. For one thing it will cheer him up. For another, it 's a valuable lesson about mucking about with nature. I'm sure Scooter would agree.

Nobelly Done

The Style Editor interrupts her extended hiatus to congratulate the winners of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, J. Robin Warren and Barry J. Marshall. Drs. Warren and Marshall received this well deserved honor for their discovery that ulcers are caused not by stress and diet but by a bacterium, Heliobacter pylori. The Style Editor remembers vividly the controversy that surrounded their discovery and the lengths to which Dr. Marshall went to prove the connection in the face of established thought and the contempt of his "peers." Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health, is spot on the money in saying: "I think this is a perfect example of how excellent science triumphed over conventional dogma. The prize affirms that we must keep true to our scientific principles of exploration, and continually question our assumptions." The academy, or established thought, can be a huge threat to actual science, and I am pleased that in honoring these two scientists the Nobel committee seems, at least for a moment, to recognize that.

Congratulations to two Aussie scientists who got the vibe of science. (It's the inflammation; it's Heliobacter pylori; it's the vibe.) I hope they're stoked.

Pope Benedict XVI opened his first bishop's synod today, with a full plate of issues to mull over. "A tolerance which allows God as a private opinion but which excludes Him from public life... is not tolerance but hypocrisy," the Pope said in the homily. "When man makes himself the only master of the world and master of himself, justice cannot exist." Delicious!

As usual, it is difficult to tell the difference between a Boston Globe article and one of their editorials. The two tend to blend together. Read this article on priests in the Boston Archdiocese and decide for yourself. Ugh.

I thought this was quite interesting: researchers claimed to have found the home of Homer's Odysseus. Robert Bittlestone - backed by two experts - claims the rocky island depicted in The Odyssey is part of Greek tourist destination Cephalonia. He used satellite imagery to match the area's landscape with descriptions in the poem about the return of the man behind the wooden horse of Troy.

Too bad most of the "hurricanes are examples of global warming" crowd haven't read this rather interesting article in Reason. Too much to expect, I guess. Anyhow, it dismisses the notion that big storms have anything to do with g.w. or G.W.

And this article was fascinating: British teachers using an online site have reached the conclusion that children's names are a fairly accurate indication of what kind of student they will be. You can bet the parents were outraged at this. The good names (studious and polite) are: Kate, Gregory, Sean, Charlotte, Jamie, Daniel, Lucy, Isobel, Ben, Sam, Harpreet, Imran, Asam, Alice and Joseph. The bad names (rude and disorderly) are: Bobbi-Jo, Kloe, K'tee, Kristopher, Jayne, Wayne, Charlie, Liam, Ryan.

Now, when asked to think up a list of the most violent countries in the developed world, few people come up with Scotland. But, according to the UN (admittedly a pretty bad source for anything), the Scots are commiting violent crimes at a high rate. By the way, England and Wales are #2.

The study, by the UN’s crime research institute, found that 3 per cent of Scots had been victims of assault compared with 1.2 per cent in America and just 0.1 per cent in Japan, 0.2 per cent in Italy and 0.8 per cent in Austria. In England and Wales the figure was 2.8 per cent.

And I thought gun control would solve all their problems...but apparently, in Scotland at least, there is a knife control problem. Maybe we should have registration and a waiting period on knives too.

A good looking blog, The Joy of Curmudgeonry, is on the scene. T'will be linked soon.

President James A. Garfield died on this date in 1881, the victim of assassination, leaving the White House for the inestimable Vermonter Chester Alan Arthur (right there behind Pierce, Buchanan, Fillmore, and, of course, Warren G. Harding in the heart of the Doc). Raise a glass to Garfield tonight.

And perhaps the proprietor of Zambone.com will explain to us all why he likes cows so much.

Interesting note here in the BBC, that KGB agents infiltrated the highest levels of the Indian Government in the 1970s -- "We had scores of sources throughout the Indian government," the book quotes former KGB general Oleg Kalugin as saying. "It seemed like the entire country was for sale."

Did everyone see this so-called debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway on C-Span the other night? Entertaining, but, as the WSJ makes clear, was more a red meat festival for the New York leftie crowd (or perhaps I should say soy burger festival) than an actual forum. Still, Hitch held his own admirably.

Apparently there is a move afoot to change the Red Cross emblem to something "less religious." One proposal is to change the cross to a red crystal.

Who the hell is Harold Evans over at the BBC? He claims (sounding a tad like Don Quixote, methinks) that Katrina will finally wipe the last vestiges of Social Darwinism from American shores. Read, for instance:

America has long been entranced by stories of fortunes made by hard work and perseverance without help from government. More tellingly many of them come true, truer in America than anywhere else. It is just that they are not the whole story. When people fail it leaves, exposed as a raw nerve, the question of moral duty in a civilized society.

So Social Darwinism has remained in the American psyche, sometimes submerged in the current, sometimes coming to the surface like a log in a fast-flowing river. [President Grover]Cleveland's sentiments might have popped up any time in the 1980s on Ronald Reagan's teleprompter. His remark that "government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem" was an echo of Cleveland and many presidencies thereafter.

The log came clearly into view again when turbulence in the wake of 9/11 led to the re-election of George W Bush. His instinct for low taxes and small government has been neatly encapsulated by the evangelical tax cutter Grover Norquist: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

My judgment is that the log of Social Darwinism will disappear again under the toxic flood waters of New Orleans. The corpses floating face down in the muddy overflow from broken Mississippi levees are too shocking a sight for Americans of all classes and parties. They are too kindly a people. They will look once again for vigour and compassion in government, even at the price of higher taxes.

Apart from my amazement of his using Grover Cleveland, this is fighting paper tigers. As he readily admits, Americans are a most charitable and kindly people, itself deflating the central factor of Social Darwinism that people ought to be allowed to fail and fail hard, without much compassion and concern from the rest of us. We have the lovely mixture, which works well in a federal system, of distrust of centralized government (which has zero to do with compassion, by the way -- few things are more cold than a national bureaucracy filing paperwork and filling patronage) and individual and neighborhood acts of compassion.

We fear national incompetence -- well-established here and elsewhere over these many, many years of New Deals and Great Societies -- and embrace private initiative and the acts of those governments closest to us. When they fail, then and only then are the feds invited and welcome. Mr. Evans seeks to upend this, and make the feds welcome first on the basis of a vague, curious, and frightening "compassion in government." Governments can love us too much, and when they do they take more than give, talk more than listen, and grow at the expense of individuals and competing institutions. And soon that love is smothering, unwanted, and inescapable. This has absolutely nothing to do with Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and the host of Social Darwinists. It has everything to do with history and the track record of governments.

Yes, Bunnie, we are a bunch of derelicts, aren't we? August was vacation, but we should be back on the job now.

So.

I just love how the media is all over the President and the feds about the lateness of the hurricane response. It was late, but last I checked the first respondents in any natural disaster, and the first planners of evacuation routes, are the local and city governments, backed up by their state. 25% of New Orleans is below the poverty level, thousands do not have the automobiles to leave, and depend on local public transportation for evacuation. And yet still, Mayor Nagin screams and yells on the radio (but was quick to get some good photo ops with the President yesterday too) about late federal response. Hey, Mr. Mayor. Why are all these buses just sitting here in a flooded parking lot? Whose plans were foul? Who was unprepared?

And then they begin attacking the President about not fully funding levee reinforcement, ignoring former ACE Director Mike Parker (brilliant on CNN last night, I thought) who calmly explained that levee funding has been negligent since the LBJ Administration. And even if Bush had funded the levee reinforcements way back in 2001-2002, the current ACE Director even said it wouldn't have made much difference, and that the repairs wouldn't have been completed by now anyway.

I see that a consortium of nations is releasing 60 million barrels of oil to help the US fuel crunch, and that is admirable. I think it is also good economic policy. If gas prices remain at an average of over $3 for the rest of the year, consumers will cut back radically on spending (can you imagine what Christmas at the malls will be like? Would you like to own retail stocks right now?), and the economy will flatline. And when the US economy flatlines, it takes others around the world with it. Keeping US gas prices low is good global economics.

Here's a laugher: first the media and many pols says FEMA's late response is due in part to bureaucratic snafus, paperwork, red tape, and poor coordination. Fine, I don't disagree a bit. Then Mary Landrieu turns around and suggests creating a Cabinet-level position to coordinate disaster relief. Then another talking head on CNN yesterday said because unemployment in the Gulf States would be such a problem, perhaps we need to create a National Recovery Administration, a la the New Deal. Wait, I thought bureaucracy was the problem...

Another good one: Katrina's devastation was due to global warming. Excuse me, when hurricanes were devastating the Gulf Coast around the same time that St. Thomas Aquinas was writing the Summa, was that due to global warming too? Even the Weather Channel this week discounted the role of global warming in this disaster, and they are hardly a branch of the Republican National Committee.

David Frum has some particularly good links on the politics of Katrina over at NRO.

That should cover me for a day. O-man? Style Editor? Doc Potomac?