All hail the Night Train team

(photo from CNNSI web site)

I know nothing about bobsledding. But this is a good story.

A hip check for the NHL

Apart from having a soft spot for the San Diego Gulls because my brother-in-law and I had a great time at one of their games a few years ago, I'm not much of a hockey fan. I remember the 1980 Miracle on Ice and loved the movie based on that epic win, but can't talk intelligently about the sport because I like the game but do not seek it out.

That said, I think Johnette Howard is right to blast the National Hockey League commissioner for having second thoughts about cooperating with the International Olympic Committee. Here's part of the setup for her argument:

The Winter Olympics have been rightly called the best hockey tournament in the world since NHL players began participating in 1998. Thuggery isn’t tolerated, which only helps highlight the thrilling skating and speed, stunning playmaking and breathless end-to-end rushes. And all of it plays out only every four years against a backdrop of nationalistic fervor, with players who are NHL teammates going at each other like blood rivals on Olympic ice.

In other words, you can’t beat it.

Yet Bettman arrived at the Vancouver Winter Olympics last week saying the NHL hadn’t quite decided whether to continue participating in the Games when they move to Sochi, Russia in 2014.

Nor did Bettman change his position after one of his sport’s most thrilling days of competition in years — Sunday’s terrific Olympic showdowns between natural rivals Russia and the Czech Republic, Sweden and its neighbor Finland, and Team USA in its 5-3 upset of gold-medal hopeful Canada — were still making headlines around the world.

Now I want to read Rodney Stark

Stark has another book out, and this one defends the Crusades.

Thomas F. Madden has also written well on that subject.

The rescue dogs of the Winter Olympics

Border collies trained to find people buried by avalanches or other snowy calamities.

Bon mots and build-a-bear liturgies

The incomparable John Zmirak wrote recently about ongoing conflict between Latin Mass aficionados ("Trads") and their trendier Catholic brethren ("Non-Trads").

Here's the windup in his masterful explanation of the conflict:

"Of course, there's something to be said for a liturgy whose very nature resists and defeats abuses. The Ordinary Form can be extraordinarily reverent when said by a holy priest. I've been to such liturgies hundreds of times, and I'm grateful for every one. On the other hand, the new liturgy, with all its Build-a-Bear options, is terribly easy to abuse. The old Mass reminds me of what they used to say about the Catholic Church and the U.S. Navy: "It's a machine built by geniuses so it can be operated safely by idiots." The old liturgy was crafted by saints, and can be said by schlubs without risk of sacrilege. The new rite was patched together by bureaucrats, and should only be safely celebrated by the saintly."

With that in mind, here's the pitch:

"Here's what we Trads have realized, that the merely orthodox haven’t: Inessential things have power, which is why we bother with them in the first place. In every revolution, the first thing you change is the flag."

The whole essay is worth a read. Zmirak goes deeper than applying Marshall McLuhan's axiom about how the medium is the message to liturgical practice, and his witty romp through recent Catholic history may even be fascinating to non-Catholic Christians now sorting through the detritus of "seeker-friendly" services or trying to hold fast to something like the Westminster Confession while their neighbors read Joel Osteen and feel their way sideways in parts of the so-called "emergent church" movement.

In short, Zmirak is always entertaining. The man has a few peers who typically write on more secular subjects., not least P.J. O'Rourke, but P.J. has mellowed with age and is not as prolific or acerbic as he used to be in the go-go days of the Reagan administration.

Molly Ivins? Meh. I hope she rests in peace, but as a columnist she was (and still is) overrated by the "truth to power" crowd.

On the other team (mine), Ann Coulter is a streaky shooter, as likely to foul out of a game as to hit a three-pointer from the top of the key.

Tom Maguire, on the other hand, remains too little known. My hat's off to his mocking appropriation of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to describe House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on the eve of President Obama's kabuki theater of a "health summit" -- "he has sounded forth the trumpet that will ever blow retreat." James Taranto has more on that subject.

When you major in life and minor in skiing

(photo from the CNNSI web site)

Andrew Cline on what we can learn from the resurgence of alpine king Bode Miller.

Related, in a way: See Neo-neocon for thoughtful comments on ice dancing. Radio host KC O'Dea was calling it "ice prancing," and sometimes it is that, but his dismissive tone couldn't come within a country mile of the gold and silver medalists last night.

A fitting metaphor I had not heard

Mark Shea, from another in his series of essays on Mary, the mother of God (I'm guessing each essay is adapted from his books on the same subject):

In short, just as we would surely honor not just a fallen soldier but his grieving parents at the soldier's funeral, so the Catholic Church has always very sensibly paid honor to the Mother of our Captain, who died in combat with the forces of Hell and threw Himself on the grenade of sin, hell, and death to save His troops. Not to do so would be miserly and churlish.

That's why the real question is not, "Don't Catholics honor Mary too much?" but rather, "Where do Evangelicalism or fundamentalism honor her 'just enough'?"

More good stuff from the same essay:

Mary is, in the end, called "blessed" not merely because of her suffering, nor merely because she did this or said that. Indeed, Scripture does not contain an Acts of Mary because it is precisely her part in the economy of salvation not so much to do as to be. Her characteristic posture is contemplative: She "kept all these things in her heart" (Lk 2:51). Her characteristic gesture is to refer us to her Son: "Do whatever he tells you" (Jn 2:5). Her sole literary legacy is a hymn of praise that magnifies God, not herself.

That does not make her a wallflower or a cipher. It makes her the most fully saved human being who ever lived -- saved completely from sin not by the desperate rescue from the pit that the rest of us have experienced, but by being kept from the pit in the first place by the grace of her Son. This, in turn, makes her the freest creature God ever made, not an automata. For "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Cor 3:17), and Mary's blessedness consists precisely of the fact that she is named Kecharitomene, full of the grace and power of the Holy Spirit (Lk 1:28).

This curiously quiet and hidden place in the Kingdom of God, so far from the very public and dramatic trials and tribulations of the apostles with their Indiana Jones adventures and globe-trotting ways, is why Mary's enormous powers -- what Pope John Paul II calls "other and great powers" than those of the apostles -- [are] often overlooked. Her power in the life of the Church is like air pressure or sunlight or gravity: You don't think about it. It's always there, in the background, the power of the entire prayer life of the Church, quietly interceding for the noisier and more visible members, calm and relentless as a river, seemingly weak, but able in the long run to grind the Himalayas down to dust.

Advantage Lysacek

Why silver medalist Yevgeny Plushenko is wrong to fetishize progress by sneering at any men's figure skating championship won without a quadruple jump:

"If it was a jumping competition, they'd give you 10 seconds to go do your best jump. But it's about 4 minutes and 40 seconds of skating and performing from start to finish," Lysacek said.

I've enjoyed televised parts of various Winter Olympics events over the last few days and have newfound respect for all skiers after falling a bunch of times on the slopes at Wintergreen Resort, VA, yesterday (son Thomas, on the other hand, quickly became a competent snowboarder).

My favorite Olympic moment so far seems to have drawn little comment elsewhere: I thought it was heartwarming when alpine skier Julia Mancuso donned a tiara after her downhill run.

Different strokes for different folks

The American Left is great at finding hypocrisy, but only if it's on the American Right. Perhaps this means the Left is disproportionately peopled by "hedgehogs" rather than "foxes"?

At any rate, Cassandra will not let Lefties enjoy their illusions unchallenged, and some of us are grateful for her keen eye and her stiletto heels.

The anecdote about Obama's billable hours as a lawyer seems especially telling.

A domain called GreenMyChurch? Really?

I'm with Nice Deb on this one; we Catholics ought not be taking policy tips at any level from people who set their sights so low, with such conspicuous disregard for real science.

Walter Russell Mead has a related essay.

Ash Wednesday

Elllliiiot!

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will...

and then there's this:

...public declaration of our own sinfulness -- and with it, our implicit promise to fast and repent -- may seem contrary to Jesus' own warning, read as the Gospel on Ash Wednesday, to conceal our fasting, prayer, and almsgiving to all but our heavenly Father who is hidden. The Lord here is counseling us to avoid pride, the beguiling enemy of fasting and penance, not to avoid our fellow Christians, whose help we need all the more in the Lenten work of interior purification. For this reason, the Church's penitential practices have always been public affairs.

And this, from remarks that the pope made to seminarians in Rome recently:

"Even in theology, including Catholic theology, this idea is currently being spread: that God is not omnipotent. This is an attempt to find a justification for God, who in this way would not be responsible for the evil that we find so widely throughout the world. But what a poor justification! A God who is not omnipotent! Evil does not lie in his hands! And how could we trust ourselves to this God? How could we be sure of his love if this love ends where the power of evil begins?"

"Schooled by an octogenarian from Bavaria"

Funny stuff on this Mardi Gras from a "re-purposed" German movie clip that went viral awhile ago:

Remembering George Washington

The editorial board of the New Hampshire Union Leader offers a sketch of the great man on his 278th birthday.

Orange blossom special

My friend and fellow education watchdog Ann pens a thoughtful obituary to one of her childhood friends while musing about memory. It's a beautiful read.

Thinking publicly about free will

In one corner, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California).

In the other corner, Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco (Pelosi's home diocese).

Advantage goes to the archbishop.

Here's his haymaker:

It is entirely incompatible with Catholic teaching to conclude that our freedom of will justifies choices that are radically contrary to the Gospel—racism, infidelity, abortion, theft. Freedom of will is the capacity to act with moral responsibility; it is not the ability to determine arbitrarily what constitutes moral right.

(Hat tip goes to the gracious Kathleen McKinley, who also found good stuff about Sarah Palin)

In the soup

David Warren:

"But wherever we look, let us bid a braying adieu to the Primordial Soup. It was the last thin gruel supporting Darwinist atheism, and we don't have to drink it any more."

Bonus: Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt wrote about the demise of the "Primordial Soup" theory in their book A Meaningful World, which also gave the "typing monkeys" theory a heave-ho. And this traditional perspective helps.

Walking small

Sheriff Joe "Waldo" Biden has tried to be a team player but does not seem to be in President Obama's inner circle. Back when Biden was just a nominee for Vice President, he said of Mr. Obama, "every major decision he'll be making, I'll be sitting in the room to give my best advice."

That wasn't necessarily reassuring even then. But now the Financial Times (London) has an essay out about the inner circle, and -- though David Brooks says otherwise -- Biden seems conspicuously absent from it:

Edward Luce paints a picture of an administration run almost entirely from within the president's political machine — with campaign-managers-turned-advisers David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Robert Gibbs, along with Chicagoan legislative tactician Rahm Emanuel, in the room for every major decision.

Related: Nice Deb highlights a story on why decision-by-committee doesn't work so well. Sister Toldjah co-opts a song title to hilarious effect. And Neo-Neocon has a few cogent thoughts on the subject.

What's Hebrew for "lightweight"?

I didn't know the Hebrew word for "lightweight" either, until I read Jay D. Homnick's entertaining and all-too-true evisceration of the "health care summit" meeting to which the president has (briefly and belatedly) invited a few Republican critics.

Let's not forget that we're talking about structural reform that affects more than one-sixth of the American economy, here. The president says he's open to "good ideas," but that fabled openness looks more like a head fake to me. Think of the posters from the mythical "Complaint Department" that invite people to write their complaints in check boxes that are too small to write in.

A three-hour meeting with political opposition is little more than window-dressing. The Gilligan's Island cast spent more time than that on the S.S. Minnow.

Postgame

My favorite stories:

1. Peter King explains the onside kick by the New Orleans Saints (and here's a full game recap).
2. LifeSite news has a transcript of the heartwarming commercial featuring Tim Tebow and his mom (I'm with the HotAir people in wondering why it was controversial -- Bookworm has more).
3. Nothing to do with the game, but too good to pass up.

The pun of the week

Mark Steyn (emphasis mine):

"V. K. Raina, of the Geological Survey of India, produced a special report demonstrating that the run-for-your-life-the-glaciers-are-melting IPCC scenario was utterly false. For his pains, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the self-aggrandizing old bruiser and former railroad engineer who serves as head honcho of the IPCC jet set, dismissed Mr. Raina’s research as “voodoo science.” He’s now been obliged to admit the voodoo was all on his side. But don’t worry. By 2008, Syed Hasnain’s decade-old casual chit-chat over the phone to a London journalist had become “settled science,” so Dr. Pachauri’s company TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) approached the Carnegie Corporation for a grant to research “challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalayan glaciers,” and was rewarded with half a million bucks. Which they promptly used to hire Syed Hasnain. In other words, professor Hasnain has landed a cushy gig researching solutions to an entirely non-existent global crisis he accidentally invented over a 15-minute phone call 10 years earlier. As they say in the glacier business, ice work if you can get it."

Maybe humor is the flip side of condescension?

Patriotism or nihilistic malice

The problem with false modesty, according to Charles Krauthammer, with additional perspective from Harvard's Harvey Mansfield ("Those who want to put an issue like health care 'beyond politics' simply want an imposed political solution to their liking") and Reason magazine economist-in-residence Veronique de Rugy.

To one of Krauthammer's anecdotes: why does New York Times columnist Charles Blow think anyone needs to tap President Obama on the ankle? (as opposed, perhaps, to 'upside the head'?) That image alone says volumes about Blow.

Related: This from The Economist

When Don McLean rebuked John Lennon

Speculating about what motivates musicians can be less productive than writing ad copy for matchbook covers, but it’s high time somebody thanked Don McLean for making “American Pie” a veiled rebuttal to John Lennon’s "Imagine," whether he meant it that way or not.

Both songs were released in October of 1971, but “American Pie” looks backward to sift through the wreckage of change, and “Imagine” looks forward to appeal to people for whom change has not come fast enough.

Don McLean has been famously coy about any hidden meaning in the lyrics for “American Pie.” The canonical interpretation of his signature song bets on a theme of lost innocence viewed through the prism of the plane crash that killed first-generation rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper fifty-one years ago today.

After harking back to his youth as a paperboy and describing February 3, 1959 in terms of “bad news on the doorstep,” McLean introduces one of the great sing-along choruses of all time, plays with the chronology of several events, and spends five verses leading listeners on a tour of pop culture capped by a vision of Satan -- maybe Mick Jagger -- “laughing with delight” while “flames climbed high into the night.”

Who headlines a concert when the opening act is Satan? McLean assigns that thankless task to Janis Joplin by giving her a cameo (“I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news”) in the next verse.

With Bobby McGee gone and a trio of rock icons cut down in the prime of their respective careers, Joplin has reason to be feeling just as faded as her jeans. Bereft of happy news, she just smiles and turns away. Meanwhile, "In the streets, the children screamed, the lovers cried, and the poets dreamed. But not a word was spoken; the church bells all were broken. And the three men I admire most -- the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost -- they caught the last train for the coast / the day the music died."

It’s a picture-perfect description of the kind of environment where Special Forces operators, emergency medical technicians, and Christian missionaries often do their best work.

Disaster relief is in order. This forlorn tableau needs shovels, not sonnets. But note what McLean says the poets are doing: They're dreaming. It’s not a helpful response to crisis. And (work with me here) John Lennon was the guy best known for dreaming at the time “American Pie” was written.

That brings us to “Imagine.” There is no record of Lennon suffering from the rockin’ pneumonia or the boogie-woogie flu, so only ignorance accounts for lyrics like "Imagine there's no heaven / It's easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us, only sky."

Fresh off its play date with the Junior Skeptic kit from Atheists ‘R’ Us, “Imagine” sleepwalks from condescension ("Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can") to self-justification: "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

He’s not the only dreamer? As a defense of the perspective that “Imagine” is pushing, that’s no match for the scorn that almost everything in the song deserves. Judy Collins was a fair hand at dreaming, too (see, for example, “Both Sides Now”), but at least she dreamed about human relationships rather than a reformation of the natural order.

So let’s take a sad song and make it better.

We don’t even have to bring Don McLean back to the microphone yet. We can start with the ode to early stage repentance written and performed by Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley. Remember the catchy confessional part of the pot-smoking chorus in their hit song (“One toke over the line, sweet Jesus, one toke over the line”)? The line is irreverent, but if you compare it to the atheism in “Imagine,” you’ll find that John Lennon makes Brewer and Shipley sound like Saint Augustine of Hippo.

Part of the problem is that the Beatles had broken up by the time “Imagine” came out. Without band mates like Paul McCartney around to smarten him up, Lennon was left to his own devices. Pithy couplets like “Well if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow” were out of vogue. It didn’t take long for the serenity of “Let it Be” to yield to the undulating sophistry of “Imagine,” as Lennon’s solo output made other songwriters sound more profound than they actually were.

What Lennon did not understand is that when you take God out of the picture, the “sheep without a shepherd” problem rears its woolly head, and everything human gets attenuated. You end up losing all your highs and lows, as the Eagles would later say.

The vision in “Imagine” of “Nothing to kill or die for” is an applause line as empty as “answering history’s call,” not least because its converse this side of heaven is that there is nothing to live for, either. Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, almighty God!

Don McLean figured that out, which is why the redneck eschatology in “American Pie” has more to recommend it than John Lennon’s version of utopia.

There are no “sacred stores” or countries in the Lennon song. On the other hand,“American Pie” acknowledges both of those things, and goes a step further.

Consider the line “While Lennon read a book on Marx / the quartet practiced in the park,” which can be understood as one songwriter chiding the other (McLean to Lennon: Why don’t you put down Das Kapital and go do something useful? Say, aren’t those your band mates? Shouldn’t you be singing with them?)

Afterward, the questions in “American Pie” get explicit: Did you write the book of love? And do you have faith in God above if the Bible tells you so? (No? Then let’s get down to brass tacks --Do you believe in rock and roll?)

I think the rock and roll, Bible, and God questions are aimed directly at Lennon’s assertion that we should “Imagine there’s no countries” and “no religion, too.” For openers, atheism makes Satan laugh. On the musical side of things, it would be hard for Lennon to say that he does not believe in the genre to which he was then bending his own talents. And let’s not forget that rock is not a byproduct of some imaginary future where tribal allegiance is gone and all the people of the world live as one. Rock grew out of the musical traditions of particular countries. If that argument seems farfetched, consider this one: Without the United States of America on a world map, “Miss American Pie” as a beauty pageant title is meaningless, and that will not do.

There are people who insist on thinking of themselves as “citizens of the planet,” and people whose failings inspire their friends to write rock classics like “Hey Jude.” Sometimes they’re one and the same.

But as “American Pie” reminds us, there are also lovers and children and Chevy manufacturing plants, not to mention kings and queens and jesters and whiskey-drinking good ole’ boys.

And a poet not named Lennon or McLean was right to say that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

So if the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost actually do or did catch the last train for the coast, then anyone left behind is in a world of hurt. That’s what Don McLean wants us to remember, and John Lennon wants us to forget. They can’t both be right.

Now you know whose side I’m on, and – not coincidentally – why the Youngbloods’ cover of the song “Get Together” is a much better expression of hope in music than “Imagine” will ever be.

Meanwhile, there are broken church bells to fix, more than a few of them right here in America, and the good ole boys passing around Maker’s Mark don’t need to be told to imagine anything, any more than they need to be told to follow their hearts. What they need is to make better use of their talents.

Science versus ideology

Paul Chesser has commentary on that cage match. He gets a little help from Barbra Streisand.

Monster calls?

Elizabeth Scalia's essay on Lady Gaga makes for interesting reading, even for someone like me, whose total exposure to Lady Gaga involves perhaps a dozen hearings of the song "Paparazzi" because it's popular with my children and their friends.

No justice in this department

Ace on a tear, writing about the Christmas Eve bomber:

"Fuzzy thinking. They refuse to admit a bright-line distinction, a bright-line demarcation, between the Panty Bomber and all of you, so the line between how the government treats both of you becomes quite fuzzy itself. They'll treat Mad Maxipad somewhat like a normal citizen suspect... and that means they've created the precedent to treat normal citizen suspects somewhat like a terrorist.

[...]

Bush, the supposed idiot, established a bright-line distinction between citizen suspects and illegal combatants. Bush, the fascist cretin who couldn't pronounce "nuclear," set up an analytical structure wherein it was clear that citizen suspects were owed the full panoply of constitutional protections, and only terrorist illegal combatants were to be treated with lesser protections.

But Obama the Genius With the Nicely Creased Trousers has created a system wherein Mad Maxipad is sorta like me, as far as the law goes, and I, unfortunately, am sorta like him."

Grace notes

Jennifer Fulwiler: Maybe it was the music. And I love Pope Benedict's comments on the memory of a Leonard Bernstein concert (conducting choral music by J.S. Bach), which Jennifer includes in her thoughtful post.

On another musical front, one of the Powerline guys had good things to say about Simon & Garfunkel a few years back, and that duo's debt to the Everly Brothers got a nice mention, also.

Six more weeks?

The weather forecast for mid-week in central North Carolina actually looks pretty good, so Punxsutawney Phil might be wrong to predict six more weeks of winter on this Groundhog Day.

Meanwhile, Sophia the Cavalier Spaniel still romps in the snow.

Understanding Mary

Mark Shea on why the Angel Gabriel greets Mary with a salutation reserved for royalty.

A snippet:

Gabriel, for his part, does not greet her with the standard issue, "Fear not!" (a reasonable call, since she is not afraid of him). Instead, he says, "Hail!" Like "amen," "hail" is a distinctly premodern word. We use it as a joke when we pantomime our kowtows to politicians we find ridiculous and puffed up or when we cheer exaggeratedly for a sports star. We would regard somebody who used it in ordinary conversation as we would somebody who said "thou" or wore Shakespearean garb. That's because we live in a ruthlessly egalitarian age which has abandoned the snobbery and overt class consciousness of antiquity at the cost of its courtesy and courtliness.

Heaven preserves the courtesy without the snobbery. And so the angel Gabriel, a creature vastly superior to humans in the natural order, bows to a young peasant Jewish girl and speaks with the utmost reverence and courtesy in language reserved for greeting a monarch or Emperor. Normally, you said (if you were a Roman) "Hail, Caesar!" But Gabriel bows himself before a teenager in patched clothes from some ditchwater town in a forgotten backwater of Caesar's great empire and addresses her as royalty.