Si, es verdad

Cassandra has the numbers.

I chose the heading for this post because I can speak "Mexican," too. It's an "in on the joke" kind of thing -- as one southern writer whose name I forget said recently, it's like like shouting "Free Bird!" at a "Celtic Women" concert.

And this is bad how?

A couple of "progressive" writers conned the New York Times into giving them op-ed space, it seems, and they used it to wish that gender feminists of their own ilk had someone like Sarah Palin to admire.

The key sentence in their argument is pure comedy gold:

"Democrats have done nothing to stop an anti-choice, pro-abstinence, socialist-bashing Tea Party enthusiast from becoming the 21st century symbol of women in politics."

Don Surber decided to shoot a few fish in that barrel. As DavidL pointed out on Surber's blog,
"Holmes and Traister fret that Mrs. Palin will steal [gender] feminism. Can’t be done; Gender feminism is dead."

The denizens of "Free Republic" also had some fun with the column. Best reactions there:

"It took two women to write an op-ed about one woman" and "In a nutshell, it all boils down to abortion for these leftist hacks. I bet dollars to doughnuts if Palin was pro-abortion, none of the crap that she endured for 2 years would have happened."

I think the point about gender feminism being dead (Ace says drab and unimaginative) has merit, and it's not unrelated to legacy media attempts to keep race-based politicking on life-support (as coverage of the "Restore Honor" rally in Washington, D.C. over the weekend demonstrated again, with columnists like Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post claiming "authenticity" in their umbrage because they don't understand people like Alveda King.)

If I may generalize shamelessly, the progressive world view suffers from cognitive dissonance because it speaks often of "equality" but requires winners and losers to provide evidence for its claim that any society short of its own utopian vision must be a zero-sum game for the people in it.

Booklet Review: Be an Amazing Catechist

In most Catholic parishes, volunteer catechists are the unsung heroes who strive to pass "the faith once delivered to the saints" on to future generations. I was a catechist for two years in a huge parish whose Director of Religious Education does a yeoman job of supplying volunteers with resource books, and Lisa Mladinich's Be An Amazing Catechist would have been a worthy addition to that pile, second only to the New Catholic Answer Bible in its usefulness.

What Mladinich has written is, in essence, a 30-page pep talk. But Our Sunday Visitor's Publishing Division picked it up because editors there recognized the same thing I saw in my review copy, to wit, Be An Amazing Catechist is a spiritually-grounded booklet packed with what Mladinich rightly calls "valuable tools for making your apostolate in catechesis more vibrant, more exciting, and more effective."

In my own brief career as a once and future catechist, my biggest challenge was a class of fifth-graders who had a mixture of auditory and kinesthetic learning styles (yes, Mladinich covers that, too). The girls were sweet and eager to please, but the boys' favorite activity was a weekly game of "stump the teacher," and they never asked easy questions like "What is the Trinity?" or "How come Catholic bible translations have more books in the Old Testament than Protestant bible translations do?"

The question they delighted in tying me in knots with was "Where did God come from?"

I always answered "God didn't come from anywhere, because He made everywhere," but then they'd say "But you said Jesus is God, and He's Mary's son, right?" So we'd have a conversation about the difference between God the Father and God the Son, but whenever I thought I was making progress, the Primary Questioner would say "That doesn't make any sense, Mr. O'Hannigan."

Had Mladinich's book and its 15 practical tips been in my catechism kit back then, I might have fared better than I did while losing that argument with a gleeful 10-year-old and his admiring sidekicks. Some of her suggestions seem blindingly obvious, but the cumulative effect of combining "no-brainers" like "Use the Bible" and "Don't give up on slack-jawed teeenagers" with more innovative stuff like "Try puppets" and "Don't neglect your own sacramental life" is a step-by-step program for doing a better, more joyful job as a catechist. If you're trying to spread the faith, or you're intimidated by the thought of trying to spread the faith, this booklet (only $2.95 for one copy or $17.95 for ten) can help.

P.S. There's more book talk over at Julie's place.

Waterlogged

Cordoba House supporters meet the Pirates of the Caribbean, over at American Spectator Online.

That one was especially fun to write.

Judge got it right this time

Gabriel Malor provides context, but (as he also says) the opinion issued yesterday by District Court Judge Royce Lamberth that grants a preliminary injunction against the president's attempt to spend tax dollars on embryonic stem cell research makes a compelling read.

What's immediately apparent is that Judge Lamberth's "findings of fact" are more factual than Judge Vaughn Walker's.

Summer Almanac 2010

Favorite movie:
The Karate Kid (2010)

Runner-up: What About Bob? (1991)

Favorite book:

The Loser Letters, by Mary Eberstadt

Runner-up: Dog On It, by Spencer Quinn

Most unexpected development:

Neighborhood swim team has an undefeated season (5-0)

Passages:

Our black cat of 10+ years, Pikabu, now hunts in the Elysian Fields. Four weeks after her passing, we bumped the family pet count back up to 3 by adopting a shelter kitten whom we named "Guido."

Illogic in judicial robes

Matthew J. Franck looks back at Perry v. Schwarzenegger:

"Judge Walker seems to have committed the fallacy of composition—taking something true of a part and concluding that it is also true of the whole of which it is a part. If it is true that “gender” no longer matters as it once did in the relation of husband and wife, he reasons, therefore it no longer matters whether the relation is one of husband and wife; it may as well be a relation of husband and husband or of wife and wife, since we now know that marriage is not, at its “core,” a “gendered institution.” But restated in this way, it is quite plain that the judge’s conclusion doesn’t follow from his premises. To say that the status of men and women in marriage is one of equal partners is not to say that men and women are the same, such that it does not matter what sex their partners are. The equalization of status is not the obliteration of difference, as much as Judge Walker would like to pretend it is."

And butterflies are freeee

(Photo courtesy of my neighbor Kelly)

Bookmarking

Serious:

• Elizabeth Scalia on The Ground Zero of Our Madness.
• Christopher Johnson on why it's stupid to blame people for not knowing what the president believes (see also Spengler, who agrees with Johnson).
• Andrew McCarthy exposes "the tolerant pose"; Frank Gaffney bats cleanup.

Interesting:

• Steve Skojec visits Mission San Xavier del Bac (white dove of the desert) near Tuscon, AZ.
• Jennifer Fulwiler has snapshots of Mount Angel Abbey (St. Benedict, OR)
• Lefty Christian organization Sojourners is funded by George Soros.
• Mark Humphreys writes an appreciation of Christopher Hitchens.

Entertaining:

• John Nolte applauds Sylvester Stallone's latest movie project (which has apparently blown Julia Roberts off the marquee -- and that's a fine thing to do, these days).
• Why Elizabeth Esther hated "Twilight" and you should, too.
• John C. Wright offers the "5 Definitive Criteria by Which Science Fiction Cinema is to be Judged."

(James Taranto is better at making lists like this one, but he has people who help compile his list items)

Ending Operation Iraqi Freedom

In case you missed Cassandra's post yesterday, it's worth reading. This is just part of it:

"This is a day I never thought would come. And yet I hoped for it every day, especially when it seemed that the sun would never come out again. I'd like to write something beautiful, something to stir the soul. Something to mark out this day - to etch it in my memory forever. But I can't find the necessary distance. What I will do is something I have asked you all to do so many times over the past 7 years. Please take a moment tonight after you get home from work, perhaps in that quiet moment just before you drop off to sleep, and say a silent prayer for all those who made this day possible.

Their faces have passed in silent review before me all day long: the ones who lifted me up with their courage, who put grief and fear and weariness aside and did what needed to be done. Those who never made it home. And those who came home forever changed; some for the worse, some for the better. Most probably somewhere in the middle. And all those who still keep watch on distant shores."

Caroline Glick has a more dispassionate but equally sobering look at this milestone.

He woke up on the wrong side of the floor, perhaps

But he sure writes entertainingly on those days.

Horeshoes and hand grenades

Kathleen Parker has a muddled column up at the Washington Post arguing that the Cordoba House complex should get built precisely because many people don't want it built. She's a prizewinning columnist and a sometime teacher of writing, which is why I found the following juxtaposition in her essay so startling:

"The idea that one should never have one's feelings hurt -- and the violent means to which some will resort in the protection of their own self-regard -- has done harm rivaling evil. It isn't a stretch to say that the greatest threat to free speech is, in fact, "sensitivity."

This is why plans for the mosque near Ground Zero should be allowed to proceed, if that's what these Muslims want. We teach tolerance by being tolerant."

The first quoted paragraph makes sense, although I wonder why Parker hedged her bets with a nod to "harm rivaling evil." (She's not the kind of pedant likely to sniff about how people can be evil but ideas do not have the necessary will, so one is left to ask why she couldn't just have called the violence to which she was alluding plain old "evil." Was it not evil enough?)

Immediately following the caution about giving too much weight to sensitivity, her thesis "this is why..." paragraph tripped alarms in my head. Plans for a new mosque not merely near Ground Zero but in a building rendered unusable by parts of a crashing jetliner should proceed because Muslims have hair-trigger tempers? Surely Parker could not have meant something so stupid.

Having said, in effect, that there is no right to sashay through life unruffled by what other people do (long live free expression!), Parker treats that axiom as motivation enough for Manhattanites to be magnanimous about the new mosque and community center complex. It might be, if you can overlook the extortion implied in her cagey reference to "harm rivaling evil" from people who'd rather demand respect than earn it. But there is no hint from Parker that -- thanks to the indelible events of 11 September 2001 -- magnanimity would run more properly the other way, from Muslims offended by the alleged overreaction of mosque critics to the non-Muslims with whom Cordoba House backers keep saying they want to "dialog" or build bridges.

Parker ends her essay with a beautifully-executed somersault on the moral high ground: "When sensitivity becomes a cudgel against lawful expressions of speech or religious belief -- or disbelief -- we all lose," she writes.

Boy howdy! If there's a better way to cap a column written more in sorrow than in anger, I haven't seen it. But as the late Tim Russert used to say, let's go to the tape: Who in our day is most likely to use sensitivity as a cudgel against lawful freedoms? Whose ideology teaches that the world is divided into the "House of Submission" and the "House of War"? And what peace-loving imam goes out of his way to court controversy?

One problem with Parker's argument, in other words, is that it depends on faulty audience analysis. "We teach tolerance by being tolerant," she says, but she says it to the people who already have a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and a lively appreciation for the separation of powers, not to mention things like NASCAR and "national cupcake day."

Parker's subtext seems to be that the better angels of our nature are always the ones willing to take it on the chin. This actually plays to jihadist advantage in her teaching metaphor, because there are lots of Muslims who look at American decadence with disdain and say "Who are you to teach us tolerance? We don't need no education!"

Another problem with Parker's analysis is that, ironically, it makes too much of sensitivity. Law is not at issue because all involved concede that Cordoba House developers are within their legal rights to build a mosque in the 9/11 debris field, but it's not necessarily "sensitivity" that compels Good Samaritans to come to aid of people being mugged, for example: it's a sense of duty founded on respect for personhood, which itself is part of the cultural patrimony we all received from Jewish and Christian forebears.

Perhaps the dead who inadvertently consecrated even an old Burlington Coat Factory far above our poor power to add or detract deserve such respect as we can still pay by standing up to the people who enabled their religiously-motivated killers -- and yes, although it is careless to generalize, even some "moderate" Muslims did that enabling, not least by trashing American-style pluralism or couching objections to terrorism in careful language that spoke of its "complexity" and made exceptions for members of the Militant-of-the-Month club (Tim McVeigh? Terrorist! Hamas? Not so much-- they've paid their dues, you see).

Memo to Kathleen Parker: Nowhere is it written that "Wilsonian Democrats" are inherently better than "Jacksonian Democrats." Or, to make the same point in more familiar terms, Charlie Brown never stopped trusting Lucy to hold the football for him, but that glutton-for-punishment approach to kickoffs didn't make him better than the philosophical Linus or the acerbic Schroeder. If we're going to face potential Islamists like Peanuts characters, we'd best emulate Snoopy-- that beagle of the boxing glove on the nose, the World War One pilot's wardrobe, the tennis grimace, the early vulture fantasy, the outfielder speed, and the gumption enough to go tearing around with Linus's security blanket whenever its owner got complacent.

UPDATE: See also this from Tom Maguire.

Making satire work

From an old review of William Goldman's The Princess Bride by Orrin Judd:

"Goldman isn't so much trying to alert the reader (viewer) that the story is fiction, instead he's trying to convince us that it's real, or at least that there is an S. Morgenstern and an original version. He wants us to appreciate, even to love, Morgenstern and his Princess Bride in the same way that he did as a boy, at least fictionally or at least books like this one that the real William Goldman recalls from his real childhood. And this is the little-understood secret to any effective parody/satire/what-have-you: before the irreverence begins, you have to approach the source material with reverence. It's just not very funny to make fun of something that no one takes seriously in the first place (which perhaps explains why comedy is so completely the province of conservatism and why liberals have no sense of humor--taking everything seriously but reverencing nothing, they find no amusement in irreverence). Princess Bride is so funny precisely because Goldman has been so careful to follow the conventions of the fairy tale and because he's obviously thought them through so thoroughly. Thus, for all the fun he has at the expense of the genre, in the end the good guys win, the bad guys are dead or vanquished, true love has been vindicated, and we all fondly recall having our father or grandfather read to us."

Nicolas Poussin paints The Assumption

(Poussin lived between 1594 and 1665, and if you're so inclined, you can safely take this painting as evidence of what John Henry Newman would later call "the development of doctrine," especially if you remember that the Assumption was not formally defined as a matter of faith until 1950. Catholic Answers has more about the doctrine of the Assumption, both in an online tract and in the testimony of one T.L. Frazier).

Here's part of Frazier's essay:

"To be assumed into heaven is to enter heaven both body and soul, meaning complete personhood and not the soul alone, by a direct act of God. Thus "Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, for God took him away" (Gen. 5:24; cf. Heb. 11:5). Elijah was assumed into heaven, though in a more grandiose style (2 Kings 2:11). Catholics believe that Mary entered heaven in this same manner, though they generally believe that she died before being assumed. Mary is seen not as a petty goddess, but as a redeemed Christian granted a special privilege through the love of Christ.

On the other hand, to ascend into heaven is to enter heaven by one's own power, and "no one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven--the Son of Man" (John 3:13). Only Jesus, being God, could ever ascend into heaven. Once I understood this distinction, I came a long way toward understanding the Catholic belief in the Assumption.

I began to see it was very similar to the Evangelical doctrine of the rapture where, at the end of time, Christ snatches living Christians off the face of the Earth, glorifies them, and transports them both body and soul into heaven. The same idea of being physically snatched away into heaven before the general resurrection lies behind both the Assumption and the rapture. There seemed little reason to say that the rapture was scripturally feasible while maintaining the Assumption wasn't."

(The painting reproduced here came from Olga's Gallery)

Love to hear that robin going tweet, tweet, tweet

Sarah Palin:

Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where radical Islamists killed 3000 people?

Please tell us your position.

We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they? And, no, this is not above your pay grade.

If those who wish to build this Ground Zero mosque are sincerely interested in encouraging positive "cross-cultural engagement" and dialogue to show a moderate and tolerant face of Islam, then why haven't they recognized that the decision to build a mosque at this particular location is doing just the opposite?

Over in the chorus, Bill Kristol looks at the language that President Obama used before backpedaling unsuccessfully (if this were just a local controversy --!!-- in the Big Apple, it would have been eaiser to vote "present").

Kristol is often wrong, but when he says that we as Americans aren't "traumatized," I think he's making a small but important point. John Hinderaker would probably agree; he's already looked at the mind behind the White House "Iftar dinner" speech and found it shallow.

What makes the president's fawning attempt to laud Islam for its alleged contributions to the American founding so laughable is, among other things, the dominant strain in Muslim theology, which -- in marked contrast to the Christian thinking with which the Founding Fathers were familiar-- ignores secondary causality and distrusts reason. I'd like to see Josh Barro address those points, but as the reader comments on his heartfelt defense of the proposed mosque point out, he dodges the big questions.

Meanwhile, while Ross Douthat of the New York Times is late to the debate, his thoughts are interesting.

Refresher course on church history

The painting at left is "Peter Preaching with Mark," by Fra Angelico, which I found at Olga's Gallery after following a tip from Julie at Happy Catholic.

The reprint (repost?) of an old article by George Sim Johnston made me think of it.

Answering friends who assert against all evidence that the primitive Christian church was not Roman Catholic, Johnston points to the historical record:

"In 95 A.D., a three-man embassy with a letter from the fourth bishop of Rome arrived at Corinth, where there were dissensions in the local church. In that letter, Pope St. Clement speaks with authority, giving instructions with a tone of voice that expects to be obeyed. The interesting point is that the apostle John was still living in Ephesus, which is closer than Rome to Corinth. But it was the bishop of Rome (at the time, a smaller diocese) who dealt with the problem.

Then there are the seven letters of St. Ignatius, who was martyred in Rome in 106. Ignatius was the third bishop of Antioch (Peter had been the first) and a disciple of the apostle John. Because these letters, written en route to Rome, are so Catholic, their authenticity was long contested by Protestant scholars, but now they are almost universally accepted as genuine.

Ignatius was the first to call the Church "Catholic." He writes to the Ephesians that "the bishops who have been appointed throughout the world are the will of Jesus Christ…. Let us be careful, then, if we would be submissive to God, not to oppose the bishop." And his letter to the church at Smyrna attacks those who deny the Real Presence: "They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of Our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins…."

It is noteworthy that in addressing the Church at Rome -- a less ancient see than Antioch -- Ignatius's tone changes entirely. He is deferential, praiseful: "You have envied no one; but others you have taught."

The obvious (or so it seems to me) question for any church that claims to be Christian -- especially the original Christian church -- is "what have you taught?" (or, from another perspective, Whom?). When Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians, he famously summarized the message as "Christ and Him crucified."

Elizabeth Scalia implies something very similar in her recent suggestion that the core of the gospel is that in Jesus, God gives us strength to "walk through fire instead of around it."

That's something I want to remember more often myself.

No dog in this fight

But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology makes a lot more sense than the Cambridge City Council person who wants to deny economic reality. Lisa Fabrizio has related thoughts.

Book Review: Frames

Frames by Loren D. Estleman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Loren Estleman is that rare novelist who is worth reading in as many different genres as he chooses to write (at least three by my count), and this breezy little novel about where modern Hollywood meets its own past was a fun read-- think screwball comedy for the digital age.

I especially appreciate that so many of the characters in the book are drawn sympathetically. "Fanta" and "Kyle" and "Harriet" and "Sergeant Clifford" and "Kalishnikov" and Valentino himself are people whom I'd actually like if they were real. Even "Anklemire," the former Marketing Weasel now slumming in UCLA's Information Services department, brims with sleazy good humor.

So why three stars rather than four or five? In two words, "shop talk." What got to me after awhile was Estleman's near-manic insistence on packing the story with film trivia. I get that the lead character and his friendly supervisor are both film geeks, but I also get the impression that Estleman was trying too hard.

This is nominally a murder mystery, but you can't read three consecutive paragraphs in the book without encountering a cinematic reference of some kind. Sometimes the allusions are unobtrusive, but more often than not, they read like what you'd get if everybody in a room were trying to outsmart each other. These characters have a patter. If I may traffic in movie references for the sake of a point myself, "Frames" is like a mashup between "The Pink Panther" and "The Philadelphia Story" -- each a good film in its own right, but bound to lead to confuzzlement when combined, which is why I "refudiate" Estleman's intent while admiring his craftsmanship.

Although Valentino has title billing, the characters that kept me reading were the beautiful law student with the preposterous name ("Fanta") and the emerald-eyed LAPD sergeant whose best scene is an interrogation. Without those two women, the story would drop from "likable" to merely okay. Still, you could do worse in picking a summer read.

Impertinent questions

I ask a few "impolite" questions while writing today about "the mosque, the masks, and the mayor."

Current events, craven politicians, and song lyrics! Sometimes I just can't help myself.

UPDATE: This from Wafa Sultan is related, as is this news of a Muslim rival to Greenwich Mean Time. Also, and not surprisingly, Nice Deb is on the case, and in for the long haul.

Just to put the cherry on the sundae, Douglas Murray has the quote of the week:

"The U.S. authorities are making the same mistakes, and in exactly the same order, as those that the British government has made. Violent Islam is the problem and therefore some other form of yet to be decided upon peaceful Islam is the solution. Either way, win for Islam. Whatever the question, the answer is “Islam.”

In my experience this is a terrible mistake. The answer to violent Islam is not Islam. And contra every liberal pundit practicing their religion of peace and acceptance speech, building a mosque by ground zero is not a counter-argument to violent Islam. It is an apology, and an offering, to it."

Two sides of the coin

There is media used poorly (anybody paying for lies about Sarah Palin, this means you), and there is media used well, as it is in this Jeep commercial:

Designated hitter

Ann Coulter explains Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence as only she can.

She says Hitchens can write

But I think the Anchoress writes as well or better, at least in this instance.

Hitchens' evocative, unsentimental treatment of the difference between the "land of the sick" and the "land of the well" certainly makes a compelling read.

His command of metaphor remains deft and his choice of adversaries remains daft (Henry Kissinger might be a suitable sparring partner, but Joseph Ratzinger? Please. Is that the kind of hubris that one has to forgive in a guy who picked a fight with Mother Teresa? I'm with Mary Eberstadt in proclaiming that the little lady in the blue-and-white sari won that match handily).

Nevertheless, cheers to Hitchens for noticing that an "astonishing" number of people are praying for him.

One symptom of a bigger problem

Mark Harris writing in Entertainment Weekly last May about why "American Idol" is "off its game" now:

"The real problem with Idol's class of '10 is that they have absolutely nothing to say. And I don't mean when they talk. I mean when they sing."

[...]

"I don't really blame the contestants. Most 16- to 24-year-olds think everything is about them...But when did it become a gospel truth that the highest value of art is as a form of self-expression? Maybe the fault lies with a hundred thousand middle school teachers who, with the best intentions, try every day to make writing or painting or singing or acting or dancing less intimidating by telling kids that it's all about letting whatever's inside you come out to play. And that can be great advice, but when you find yourself under a spotlight as glaring as American Idol, the line between self-expression and self-absorption is very thin, and the road to pathological narcissism isn't long and winding but perilously short."

This rant about Inception from movie critic James Bowman covers related ground.

Because "dog" spelled backwards...

Five favorite devotions? I wish I had five favorite devotions. I'd be a better person.

I'm more likely to do these than others, though:

• Pray the rosary
• Read from the "pocket psalter" in occasional observance of the Liturgy of the Hours
• Ask my guardian angel for help with lector assignments
• Do "Lectio Divina"
• Make the sign of the cross (Although I have been too furtive about that in communal settings where Baptist and Presbyterian friends open meetings with a prayer simply by bowing their heads)

Joseph Susanka has more.