Politics & Economics

The Plug

Posted on by John W Gillis / 2 Comments

obama-tahdah So, the Conniver-in-Chief speaks tonight about the environmental mayhem in the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s see…

The first thing he will say is that he is in charge and in command, yet simultaneously responsible for nothing.

Then he will blame everyone within reach: BP, George W. Bush (!), and Congress (yes, even Congress will get at least a token whipping for this – not because they bear any real responsibility, but because almost everyone hates Congress, so they’re an easy mark).

Conservative talk radio personalities may also get some blame, but I’m not going out on a limb on that one (no pun intended).

In keeping with his political strategy of dividing to conquer, The One will not only blame BP, he will demonize them. It is crucial to his strategy to make the American public hate BP enough to divert most if not all of its anger onto BP.

I don’t think I can watch…

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Ruminations

Peeking Into the Past

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Having reached the end of my second Franciscan University course a couple weeks ago following a mad rush of activity, I’ve found myself wandering a bit aimlessly, contemplating my next move. Over the weekend, I ended up rummaging through a series of old journal entries from the mid-90’s, and came across a handful of comments I’d like to save from the dustbin:

I was able to drive more sanely today. I have many such improvements in mind.
3/5/96

It’s important to make your life worth living; it’s important to live for something worth dying for.
3/5/96

A prayer life is the essential difference between living a truly human life, and living a charade.
9/2/96

The problem with me and drinking is that they’re mutually exclusive.
9/13/96

Once upon a time, I stood up firmly for my beliefs. But that was when I was a rebel: it’s easy to be staunchly egotistical.
9/22/96

I was thinking about change, about repentance, about awareness of sin, and humility. It dawned on me that repentance, or change for the better, is nothing more than being open to a movement toward truth which one already possesses – or apprehends. Repentance, which is spiritual growth, never comes about (never?) as from an outside force, but rather is nothing more than allowing oneself to be convicted of the truth one already apprehends – and which is generally apprehended apprehensively!

This movement brings one closer to the real source of truth, Christ, and consequently opens one up to yet new apprehension of truth – which yet again demands either conversion or aversion. To avert the truth is to refuse and deny repentance. Contrariwise, to confront the truth is to be constantly faced with the perceived need for conversion. Anyone with any experience in that genuine change for the good becomes, as it were, immune to that type of pride which is oblivious of humility. For the one who knows repentance, and who lives a life of spiritual growth, humility is a no-brainer. It is not so much that humility makes repentance possible, as that repentance makes the lack of humility downright impossible. Hence humility grows with repentance, not vice-versa. And spiritual growth is growth in humility.
12/2/96

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Politics & Economics

The Edge of Politics

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Richard Fernandez over at Pajamas Media posted a disturbing commentary yesterday on a couple of articles he had recently read concerning the apocalyptic economic problems facing both California and Great Britain. The root of the problem, in both cases, is easy enough to identify: the entitlement mentality that promotes the belief that something can be had for nothing (or little). The title of his article (I Want My MTV) sums the matter up neatly (money for nothing, chicks for free…).

But it’s easy to hammer on the unsustainability of free lunch programs for massive numbers of people. In the abstract, more or less everybody understands that. What’s disturbing about the viewpoint of Fernandez (and his interlocutors) is an unvarnished pessimism that politics would even be capable of tackling the problem – but they may be right:

Britain has gone into debt to buy a ball and chain. Who’s going to tell the electorate that? And how do you sell solutions to such monumental problems to an electorate accustomed to being promised ever more comfort, safety and ease? The answer: you can’t. The political system can’t meet the challenge without liquidating itself. Faced with an insoluble problem the political elite marks time by becoming obsessed with trivia. It rearranges the deck chairs on its Titanic. It whistles past its graveyard.

I keep telling myself that America has a reservoir of resiliency that will surge up to fend off the dangerous lurch to the left which the country has taken – telling myself that the overreach of the Obama regime will awaken a sleeping giant that has too quietly acquiesced to the steady leftward march of the nation over the past century, and that it will manage to do so before we plunge over the edge.

But listening to people rationalizing the government takeover of the healthcare market – whether that be various flavors of the Obamacare vision, or even the current regulatory shakedown of (non-profit!) insurers here in Massachusetts under Romneycare – it strikes me that the defense of these actions is almost invariably couched in moralistic terms that defend taking (i.e. stealing) from the “haves” for the greater good – whatever that might mean, or may actually entail in practice.

In other words, this is hardly a political problem at all, but rather a spiritual one. It is an outcropping of a spiritual poverty which displaces even basic, common-sense morality with a self-righteous moralism rooted in the will to power – and adept at laying those crafty paving stones of good intentions.

Mine is a very different rationale than Fernandez pursues, but it certainly supports his conclusion.

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Politics & Economics

The Law of Rule

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As the leftists in Washington basked in the faux glory of their successful healthcare reform con job last week, it was hard not to be struck by their lack of gravity. You would have thought they had just won an arm wrestling competition, or perhaps a neighborhood gang fight. Despite all the high-fiving, and the preposterous assertions that the vote portended the doom of the Republican Party, it is awfully hard not to see this as a hollow victory for Obama: a political manipulation of the worst kind, for all the world to see; watching him strong-arming his own party over against the evident will of the majority of the governed. What a spectacle.

Listening to the bi-linguae explanans emanating from the victorious discussants, either before or after the vote, it would be hard to judge whether the measure was an historic watershed in the progression of human culture on these shores between two seas, or a simple means of securing just liberties for the disadvantaged that was being blown all out of proportion by the wild-eyed obstructionists in the Republican caucus, and their unkempt tea-bagger enablers. But they’re racists, all, by golly. Yes, we’re all racists now…

I went out to gas up my car on Friday night, as the arms were being twisted, and the “reconciliation” option was still on the table, and I subjected myself to government funded radio on the way – even though it was obvious by then that the fix was in. I heard Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift discussing reconciliation, saying that even though critics claimed it was politically devious and maybe even unconstitutional, it was actually a common device used by both parties to pass laws, and could even be considered “almost routine.” I nearly drove off the road, my head was spinning so violently. This gaggle of savants went on to talk about how reports out of Washington were accusing TEA Party protesters of yelling things at black congressmen, which surely demonstrated the elements of racism to be found in opposition to President Obama’s social agenda.

One of the few sane voices I heard on the left last week came from, of all places, the Washington Post, in an opinion column by Ruth Marcus in which she suggests that a little humility might be in order, given that nobody actually has any idea what just got passed, or what it will actually mean for the future of the country. “Gee, I hope this works” is how she characterizes her hangover perspective. My biggest beef all along with this boondoggle is that it was never thought through. Marcus seems to grasp that, now that the horse is out of the barn.

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Ruminations

EPT (Eastern Pretend Time)

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So begins what is perhaps the toughest week of the year for me. The annual screwing up of the clocks began yesterday, and if history is any teacher, it will take me a week or so to regain my equilibrium. Until then, I pay the price.Rebecca, wide awake And I’m not the only one: my early-bird daughter Rebecca did not get out of bed until 9:00 (pretend time) this morning, having become obviously discombobulated over the weekend (and not being able to get to sleep until after 10:00 PM last night). In either a stroke of good luck or of insightful planning, her school had no session today, in order to hold a staff development day, so she was able to sleep in.

There has always been something inherently absurd in this collective pretending that it is a different time than it actually is, but the practice took on Markeyesque inanity a few years ago, when pretend time was extended in duration in the U.S. – not long, I might add, after parts of the rest of the world adopted the original form of the silliness. The cost in IT conformance of this clever boondoggle was ridiculous – and many systems still don’t work right for a few weeks. But now the beginning of this formerly springtime ritual has been pushed back into the last couple weeks of winter – and hence into Lent.

I guess it was four years ago when I decided to make a Lenten commitment to attending Mass daily. My parish was offering an early-morning Mass at 6:30 AM for the season during the work week, and it seemed like a good discipline. I was completely exhausted by the end of Lent, but I soon missed daily Mass so much that I figured out a more sustainable means of participating regularly, and have gratefully done so ever since. But I’d also volunteered to read one morning each week during that 2006 Lenten season, and now I continue to be asked each year to read, though I otherwise rarely attend the early Mass now. I’m reading on Thursdays this year. So when Thursday morning comes around this week, at 6:30 Pretend Time (5:30 AM, in reality), I will ascend the two short steps toward the altar, and approach the ambo to proclaim the Word… if I can see straight. I’ll need toothpicks to keep my eyelids open on my homeward commute, twelve hours or so later.

I can understand why lots of people like to get up earlier in the summertime to get their work done early, so they can relax in the late daylight. But why do we need to collectively agree to pretend it’s actually later than it really is when we do so? And why do we need the government essentially forcing it on us – especially in the winter (as if it really matters what time of year it is when the government decides that it’s not what time of day it is).

I understand that any attempt to fit time into a taxonomy is an exercise in practicality that necessarily involves some level of hubris, but the traditional division of the day – even including the timezone concept – reflects a pragmatism of cooperation, a kind of common framework or language that allows people to understand each other. Daylight Saving Time, by contrast, reflects not a pragmatism of cooperation, but a manipulative capitalization on the dependence such cooperation has created across society. It’s an abuse of the taxonomy of time. I really think people can work out their own schedules – whether individually or in groups – without Congress declaring that Noontime will henceforth and until further notice occur at precisely one hour past Noon. That’s not “enlightened”, that’s Orwellian.

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Ruminations

Tempus Fugit

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MaybeToday.org turned two years old last Monday (March 1st). I spent the evening out with my wife, celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary. Having been married on Feb 29th, we usually get our choice of dates on which to celebrate the remembrance, although we don’t often wait until the 1st. We had a nice dinner at Restaurant 45 in Medway, and as is customary on the occasion, it served as a quiet opportunity for recollection, reflection on the past, and for taking stock of how things are going.

On the drive home up Rt. 16, while passing a road in Holliston I used to travel daily commuting from our apartment in Milford to General Chemical in Framingham, it struck me how life experiences very often seem to possess an import amplified in proportion to how early in life they occur.

In other words, it seemed like that left onto Brook Street, which picks up Western Ave through Sherborn and into the southeastern outskirts of Framingham, was a gateway to a road so many times traveled that I should be able to find my tire marks worn into the pavement – like an old friend with whom I share so many stories. I felt a nostalgic tug to travel it once again. Likewise, the whole experience of working at General Chemical looms large in the scope of my composite memory of the path my life has taken to the present. But I worked there for only about three years, back in my early twenties. In contrast, I’ve sat a year longer than that in my current office, which is merely the most recent of five offices I’ve occupied in my current building, which is the fourth building I’ve worked out of for my present employer (in some permutation or another) over the past fourteen years. Yet, in terms of being a perceived life episode, I’d have a hard time not seeing the earlier experience as more life-defining.

The high school experience is another glaring example of what I’m referring to. The four years I spent in high school can almost be viewed as four distinct episodes in my life, each writing a major chapter of my life’s journey (or development, if you prefer), in numerous ways. Even the summers back then seem like they were so much longer, so much more decisive. I hesitate to say that time just doesn’t seem as interesting anymore – Lord knows I’d be somewhere between bored stiff and embarrassed to death if I had to relive a day of the inanity that was my adolescent life – but it might have something to do with the relative lack of crises in my life these days. The occasional heart attack notwithstanding, I lead a pretty crisis-free existence these days, and perhaps that equanimity just lends itself to a general dialing-down of the memory-experience meter. Perhaps our memory is a drama that, lacking dramatics, tends toward quietude and stillness.

Or maybe I’m just stumbling upon another angle to the age-old truism that life seems to accelerate as we age. But I’ve never heard of anyone trying to recapture their forties or fifties, no matter how old they get. One needn’t look far to find people aching to recover their lost adolescence, though. I don’t believe youth offers the vitality we tend to ascribe to it – at least not beyond the physical robustness that aging breaks down. In the life of the mind – in the living-ness of life, in our relationships, our imagining and thinking, and our willing, both loving and sinning – youthfulness is such a crude exactor of purpose, crying out for perfection to wisdom and prudence. And yet, time flies…

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Signs of the Times

The Great Entitlement Society Blows a Gasket or Two

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It seems that The Great Entitlement Society has hit another bump in the road to paradise lately. Seeing California in the throes of economic meltdown has been one thing, but watching the Greeks taking to the streets to clash with police in frustration over government austerity measures that threaten the leisurely lifestyle of public sector “workers” who collect 14 monthly paydays per year until retiring at age 57 is breathtaking. Where do these clowns think the money to bankroll them is going to come from, and how is it that they are entitled to it? Well, as it happens, they think they have some entitlement to fleece the Germans, and are even willing to invoke WWII to justify what I guess is some craven attempt at reciprocal or retributive criminality. No small part of this, of course, is played by the reality that the Greeks, like so many other moderns, have contracepted and aborted their way into demographic irrelevance.

Apparently not to be outdone, however, are public education beneficiaries in the U.S. who targeted Thursday as a national day of protest over the diminishing availability of funds to underwrite or subsidize their learning experiences. It’s a little hard for me to get my head around their thinking. The economy is tanking, so tax receipts are diminishing at all levels of government as less money changes hands in the private sector, so there is less money in the public coffers to pay for services and entitlements, so they think they should protest that the world is treating them unfairly?

I don’t know why they don’t just offer to pay more out of their own pockets: that would not only ameliorate the unconscionable crisis of their lacking expected perks, but would prove a glorious example to the rest of us of how enterprising Americans have always accomplished their goals. “Put the $ where our minds are” one of these signs reads… to which I can only reply: What money? Whose money? Your money? My money? More proof, as if any needed, that we have raised a society of people who think public goods come from a big wet-nurse in the sky, called “they.”

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Religion & Society

Archbishop Chaput Fingers JFK

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Related to the juxtaposed references to articles on civic and religious engagement in Monday’s post, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput delivered an address at Houston Baptist University on Monday entitled The Vocation of Christians in American Public Life, which is particularly interesting for the way he takes John F. Kennedy to task for his famous speech in Houston 50 years ago, in which Kennedy tried to reassure his audience of Protestant ministers that his Catholicism would not play a meaningful role in his public performance of duty, should he be elected President of the United States. Archbishop Chaput lays at Kennedy’s feet much of the facile double-mindedness that has since become so culpably endemic in the lives of too many Catholic public figures. Furthermore, he ties it to a general disintegration of of intellectual, moral, and spiritual vitality within the Catholic Church in America:

Too many Catholics confuse their personal opinions with a real Christian conscience. Too many live their faith as if it were a private idiosyncrasy – the kind that they’ll never allow to become a public nuisance. And too many just don’t really believe.

It’s a pretty sober reflection.

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Signs of the Times

Where Is This Heading?

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

I came across a couple of interesting studies today – whether there is any kind of correlation, I’ll let the reader decide.

In a poll done by the Knights of Columbus, the religious attitudes of the so-called Millennial generation are compared to the older surviving generations, breaking out the Catholics among the generations as well. This is a bit of a fluffy presentation – looking more like a PowerPoint deck than a real study – but the results are intriguing, in a morose way. I must say that I question some of the analysis, as presented on the KoC site, since they seem to be able to take as “good news” that 66% of Millennial Catholics consider abortion morally wrong (and an even smaller number considering euthanasia morally wrong). I can’t help focusing on the 1 in 3 who don’t find abortion morally wrong – that’s like Holocaust survivors thinking the Final Solution must not have been all that bad!

The second one, the American Civic Literacy 2010 Report, from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, explores the relationship between civic knowledge and college education, and reports some disturbing, if unsurprising, results concerning the state of civic knowledge in the country. [Note: The actual civic literacy test being reported on is available for taking on-line at the site linked – please go see how easy this was.]

Why am I not encouraged by any of this?

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