Original Face

Equal time

    I have been asked to give equal time to the no-happy father's day sentiment out in the blogosphere.  Given that our Democrat controlled Congress is soon to mandate equal time (how that squares with freedom of speech and the press I have never understood), I figured, well, why not.  So here it is.
    I have posted a poem of Philip Larkin's previously.  He is a very complex and interesting figure in modern British poetry.  An atheist with a sense of the divine, he has the knack of penetrating below the surface of things and showing the inner aspects of life.  He also can be richly ironic and pungent.  Here is a poem that knocks parents, parenting and parenthood.

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don't have any kids yourself.

You are heroes. Now get out...

    Mom, apple pie, the flag and the Boy Scouts.  For decades there were few things more emblematic of America and American life than that.  They were, all four, icons that provided touchstones for the national sense of self.
    That all ended when the left wing establishment began attacking a number of American institutions, most particularly, the Boy Scouts.  The Scouts' requirement to have a belief system not only alienated them from the establishment's good graces but caused the Scouts to be driven out of schools, libraries and other public buildings.  Their reputation was vilified as they did not adhere to the post-modernist ironic critique of American society that is the Baby Boomers' own emblematic conceit.
    Then yesterday happened.  A tornado touches down, scores of injured men, women and children laying wounded in debris covered territory that made professional rescue equipment for all intents and purposes useless.  But, there was a squad of senior level Scouts camping nearby.  Without regard for their own safety, the boys used the first aid skills which they had been taught in the Scouts to treat the victims, keeping them stable until the rescuers could make it to the scene.
    They are heroes.  Selfless boys who, when called upon, came through for their fellow Americans in need.  Of course, they still will not be allowed to meet in the local school, library or town hall. 

Welcome to the middle class

    Yesterday's ruling in California which struck down that state's ban on gay marriages is a watershed moment in American cultural and social history.  Although Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court came to the same conclusion several years ago, the size and clout of California makes gay marriage a reality throughout the United States.  The decision's opinion cites California constitutional rights, over which the State's supreme court is the final authority, thus making further appeals though the federal judicial system impossible.  It is a fact and everyone will have to get used to it.
    Most of all, the gay community.  Since Stonewall, and privately before that landmark event, the gay community has seen itself in large measure outside of the cultural norms of American society.  Without the ability to create legal covenants, the idea of permanency in relationships was considered by almost all Queer theorists to be a heteronormative construct.  Although, not as much a part of the lesbian ethos, a sense of casual-ness about relationships, especially sexual relationships, was a significant part of gay cultural self-identification.  To be sure not all gay commentators were happy with this state of affairs.  The former editor of The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan, has long written about the need for the gay community to embrace standard American lifestyles and values.
    Sullivan has written eloquently about the need for gay marriage as the necessary step for the creation of a stable gay middle class.  Domesticity that comes from making vowed commitments changes the perspective of not only the couple involved but the surrounding society.  Now that gay marriage is a possibility, the question faced by gays is: Why are you not looking for a life partner?  Gays who continue the present lifestyle no longer have the psychic and social protection that such a relationship is a legal impossibility.
    The transformation of gay culture in the next generation will be fascinating to watch.  If I were in the Republican Party's leadership, I would be welcoming this decision with champagne corks flying.  There will be millions of new married couples and, as the pollsters have told us for decades, the real gap between Republicans and Democrats is the gap between married and single adults.

Callous

    Next Sunday is the annual Walk for Hunger.  My parish is, as usual, having a group participate and this week's bulletin announces that all those who are walking for hunger should meet at 7.30 in the parish hall for breakfast before setting out.  Huh?  Breakfast?  Walk for Hunger?
    But it all, in a bizarre way, makes sense.  What are "Walks for" hunger or breast cancer, or AIDS, or diarrhea research?  Do they do any good? Do they make sense?
     Proponents say that they raise money, but donors would donate regardless of anyone treading the streets, wouldn't they?  They involve enormous organizational and logistic costs, they tie up traffic (with all of those autos burning $3.70/gallon gasoline and releasing carbon monoxides into the air waiting for the mass of walkers to cross the streets) and involve the diversion of police and other essential services.  All of these things make them among the most colossal wastes of money one could imagine.
    At the end of the walk what does society get out of it?  Much less money for the poor. 
    So why does it go on?  Because it is the quintessence of liberalism.  It makes the do-er "feel good" regardless of whether it actually helps or hurts.  Walkers can feel wonderfully self-righteous about their sore feet and sunburned arms and heads.  They can see it as their Bhutan march for the underclass.  Who really cares about results when one can feel good about one's self, after all.
    Stop it.  Stop it now.  Do something productive instead.  Clean up parks, scrub graffiti, feed the homeless, help the infirm cross the streets.  Anything that in the end of the day contributes to the commonweal.  Donors would almost certainly be more generous, the overhead would be less and the self righteous crowing would be due to doing something perhaps unpleasant but worthwhile.
    Oh, one more thing.  Skip the breakfast.  Use that money instead to feed the real hungry. 

Rose is a rose

    The hollers in West Virginia are up in arms because the new owners of a psychiatric hospital constructed, like most public mental health in patient facilities, in the early 1900s, are going back to calling it by its original name the "Lunatic Asylum."  Now aside from the fact that I can't see how this will be good for business, it seems to me that this is much ado about very little.  Yet, the political correctness police are everywhere, demanding that we alter our speech in order to protect feelings.
    The Massachusetts Board of Education has been spending its meeting time debating the changing of the names for schools that are not up to standard from under performing to, get this, "Commonwealth Priority Schools" and those schools that are really, really bad news, well they would become "Priority One Schools."
    Of course, the Board could have taken its time and effort and applied them to making these schools better, but that wouldn't stop people's feelings from being hurt.  Isn't that special.

RIP, Mr. Buckley

    WFB died today.  If you don't know who WFB was, then you have not been part of the conservative intellectual movement.  In fact, you probably have not been attentive to the debates on politics and political theory over the past half century.  William F. Buckley, Jr. was the pater familias of modern American conservatism.  As a young man, immediately out of college he became an infant terrible with God and Man at Yale, in which he indicted his university for, what several decades later would be known as, political correctness.  With his rapier wit and a vocabulary as vast as the Oxford English Dictionary, Buckley singlehandedly demolished the left wing conceit that all conservatives were intellectual cretins.
    Without Buckley there would have been no Reagan.  The Cold War would have not have ended the way it did.  Simply put, without Buckley the America we know would not be.  He demonstrated the power of ideas in the world of action.
    He also taught how to conduct one's self while engaged in the public arena.  He did it with good cheer, wide eyed cherubic grins as well as the respect of his colleagues on both sides of the political divide.  When you were with him, he gave you his full attention, regardless if you were merely an undergraduate news reporter or the President.  He was the sine qua none Yale Man.
    Rest well, Mr. Buckley...and, thank you.

   

Please don't step on my blu-ray disc

    Toshiba has all but hoisted the white flag.  The long battle between HD-DVD and blu-ray as the dominant format for high definition DVDs is just about over.  The deciding factor was the decision of the company for which Hillary Clinton was a director, Wal-Mart.  This week the giant box retailer decided that it will only sell blu-ray machines and discs from now on.  The company has such power in the marketplace that Toshiba, which had been fighting Sony's technology, has come to realize that there is little point in continuing the war.
    I don't have a dog in this fight.  Unlike the VHS vs. Beta-max contretemps in the 1970s, there is no one clearly better technology.  Both blu-ray and HD-DVD are equal in that regard.  But, one had to fall.  Retailers were getting tired of having to carry both brands and consumers were staying away until a winner was chosen. 
    Now if they could get on with the satellite radio merger.

Like a scene from "Bananas"

I don't know if you remember the old Woody Allen movie (What is it about Allen?  Two columns in a row???) "Bananas" where the Latin American dictator tortures a prisoner by making him listen to endless Neil Diamond recordings (Gotta be something in the Geneva Conventions about that...).  Well, the Boston oldies station (103.3 FM-  WODS) has today gone to holiday music wall to wall until Christmas!

No, please, Mommy, make them stop!!!

Steinberg's view of the world played out

In the famous cover of The New Yorker, a native Manhattanite gives his view of the world which ends at the edge of the Hudson River.  Other than LA, San Francisco and Tokyo the rest of the world to the west is an undifferentiated blob of land with the occasional blowing tumbleweed.  In the late lamented television series The West Wing, the token Republican staffer Ainsley Hayes (played by the amazing Emily Proctor) tells Sam Seaborne, one of the most insufferable of the presidential aides, that he isn't so much against guns as he is against those who like to use guns--the folks who live in the "red states" or Steinberg's tan blob.

These thoughts from popular culture crossed my mind when I read that the Democratic staff director of a US House of Representatives committee strongly advised a series of inoculations such as would be prudent if traveling in the third world for committee members attending a NASCAR race this past weekend. (Ostensibly the travel was business related.)

Understandably the good folks at the speedway and the surrounding North Carolina counties took exception to these instructions.  The committee's Republican staff and members were flabbergasted but they also knew a political gift when they saw one.  The bloggers (like me) caught wind of it and a full political imbroglio has been taking place in NASCAR land. 

While such a story is, in reality, much ado about little, it bespeaks the attitude that could be fatal to the modern Democratic party.  Unless it suppresses its sense of superiority and disdain for most of the nation (the so-called "fly over territory"), its message will be ignored outside of urban areas.  It will be reduced to a political party of the coasts and a few other urban centers.

By the way, in the end no one was vaccinated . No one got ill, either.

A tad overweight but with violet eyes to die for...

That is how Gary Trudeau, the writer of "Doonesbury," characterized Elizabeth Taylor some time ago.  Well, she is a bit more overweight and at 75 uses a wheelchair to get around but there are those eyes...

At least that must be the feeling of Jason Winters who, if the papers are to be believed, is on the runway to become husband number nine.  Taylor will have been married ten times, but two of them were to Richard Burton. 

I think that this laps both of the Gabor sisters combined.  Way to go, Lizzie.