Old World Swine

To Gladden The Heart of Man

Eric Scheske ends his blogging week with a drinking post of enduring significance.

The problem with what Sean Dailey calls the Lost Art of Catholic Drinking is that there hasn't been enough research on the subject. Oh, there's been a butt-load of drinking, but few really paying attention and taking notes (mental notes, I mean).

If drink is a good thing (and it is), then there must be a Right Approach to it, and if there is a Right Approach, it should be discussed and expounded upon in order to inoculate against the hundreds of Wrong Approaches.

Scheske's right about the importance of drinking music. I used to have a bad habit of trying to introduce new music to people at parties... very bad form. The music should be as transparent and broadly enjoyable as possible.

The Eighties are a favorite decade around our house, on drinking nights. Even the kids like most of the stuff from our early MTV days... until Martha and I start singing in harmony. then they tend to drift away, for some reason.

For us poor college kids, early MTV was like an instant party. Put a case of Shaefer on ice (which cost about what you would pay for a stick of gum), crack open a gallon bottle of Gallo and *poof*... les le bon temps roulez!

Then the brain trust at MTV corporate got into a bad batch of 'shrooms and decided reality television was a great idea. What the heck was wrong with a random mix of new wave, hair metal and ZZ Top? Even when it was bad, it was tolerable. Ranting about of the stupidity of the videos was part of the fun. Ah... good times, good times.

But I have strayed from my outline. The thing to remember is that there is a way to drink which is not only permissible, but a positive good. There is a way to ride the wave of inebriation, a righteous path that leads to catching the ultimate tube of happiness... man. I always called it Nursing a Buzz, but Mr. Scheske calls this the One Way Ratchet (neither of which should be confused with Nurse Ratched).

The one essential ingredient to good, solid Christian Drinking is companionship. Add music and food and no king could boast of anything better.

Pot Luck

PIPE CLUB
Pipe club meeting last night, Down at Romeo's. Great company, as usual. There is one very talented pipe carver among the regular crew... I want to get more information about him and also take photos of some of his pipes to share in a post. I met one new member and asked him how he discovered the club. He told me he found it through Old World Swine! I'm accustomed to corresponding with people around the country, even a few in other countries, but I'm always taken aback when I meet anyone locally who knows about my blog.

Michael Jackson
Two questions I am very surprised I have not heard once in all the press coverage of Michael Jackson's death: 1) Was he anorexic (which is known to cause heart problems)?  2) Will his children have their DNA tested to find out whether they are, ya know, related to him at all?

Teacher Training
I have been busy the last couple of weeks with intensive teacher training courses that are part of the Non-Traditional Licensure program in Arkansas, which has cruelly hampered my blogging efforts. The subject matter is very interesting (pedagogy, cognitive development, and all that stuff you forgot from your College Psych 101 course). The days are pretty grueling... they only feed us gruel. Really, though, your sitting on a plastic cafeteria chair around a table for 8 hours, taking notes. It makes for a long week.

AND SPEAKING OF COLLEGE
Here is Tom Lehrer singing Bright College Days.

Bright college days, O carefree days that fly,
To thee we sing with our glasses raised on high.
Let's drink a toast as each of us recalls
Ivy-covered professors in ivy-covered halls.

Turn on the spigot,
Pour the beer and swig it,
And gaudeamus igit-ur.

Here's to parties we tossed,
To the games that we lost,
We shall claim that we won them some day.

To the girls young and sweet,
To the spacious back seat
Of our roommate's beat up Chevrolet.

To the beer and benzedrine,
To the way that the dean
Tried so hard to be pals with us all.

To excuses we fibbed,
To the papers we cribbed
From the genius who lived down the hall.

To the tables down at Mory's (wherever that may be)
Let us drink a toast to all we love the best.
We will sleep through all the lectures,
And cheat on the exams,
And we'll pass, and be forgotten with the rest.

Oh, soon we'll be out amid the cold world's strife.
Soon we'll be sliding down the razor blade of life.

But as we go our sordid sep'rate ways,
We shall ne'er forget thee, thou golden college days.

Hearts full of youth,
Hearts full of truth,
Six parts gin to one part vermouth.

Domestic Partnerships

I've been wondering, lately, whether the possibility a legally recognized "domestic partnership" of some kind might not be feasible for any two people who just find that the arrangement makes practical sense.

In other words, any two people could set up housekeeping together... call them roommates. It has nothing to do with foggy notions of romantic love, or sexuality or with any emotional component at all. It has nothing to do with redefining marriage or the family, but is fair to people who want to establish legal ties for practical reasons.

Let's say for the sake of argument that it's two old guys who argue all the time. They just find forming a working partnership makes life easier. They can look out for one another. One might have a steady income, say, but be unable to keep up with household chores. The other takes care of the day to day chores, but depends on the income of the other, and maybe needs the health benefits, too.

It appears to be fair, but it may have implications for the traditional family that I'm not seeing. And, I have a feeling a lot of gay activists would reject it, even though it is what many of them have claimed to be after for so long. Redefining marriage and the family seems to be the real point with some.

Discuss.

The Stuffy and Rigid Orthodoxy of Modern Art

Paul, at The Aesthetic Eleveator, posts a link to this Roger Scruton article in City Journal , dealing with the idea of beauty in art, and ugliness as the orthodoxy of the modern academy.

Great stuff. If you have any interest in art, go read it.

Because I am lazy, I will simply reproduce here what I left in the combox at TAE;

Terrific article. This is what happens when someone more intelligent and educated writes thoughtfully on the issues I have tinkered with on my blog...

It is a meaty article, but I'll throw out two passages that stood out to me.

"This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role."

The truth is that desecration, deconstructionism and sensationalism are the orthodoxy of the Academy, now, and are every bit as entrenched, exclusive and inbred as the conventions of the 19th century academy in Europe (which had its own issues). The student is encouraged - or prodded -  by professors to attack the status quo, but it is a mythical status quo. The real status quo belongs now exclusively to the Modernist movement. If one has any *real* desire to rebel, he can do no better than to question the orthodoxy he is being fed in art school.

But the whole idea of art as rebellion misses the point."Rebellion" isn't a value. Its value depends completely on what one is in rebellion against.

Scruton also says of the experience of beauty;

"The haste and disorder of modern life, the alienating forms of modern architecture, the noise and spoliation of modern industry—these things have made the pure encounter with beauty a rarer, more fragile, and more unpredictable thing for us."

This seems beyond doubt, to me. As I've said, we hold nature at arms length in the modern world, and this has brought us a number of benefits, but it has come at a high metaphysical price.

There is no reason to just accept that it must be this way though. We need to pause and take stock of where the blind rush of industrialism has taken us, and then intentionally and systematically begin making our environment more harmonious and more seamlessly integrated with nature. It can be done, but over the last hundred years it has not been a priority. Good grief, we have the technology to accomplish it. What is wrong with us?

One final thought: desecration is an entirely negative act. It has no power except the power that comes from the thing being desecrated. You can not desecrate a pile of dog poop. I suppose you could try, but the act would carry no weight, as it would be meaningless and could offend or upset no one (that I know of).

You can, however, desecrate a cathedral, or the image of the human body, or the Cross, or the Statue of Liberty, because these things carry a great depth of meaning in themselves. It reminds me of what C.S. Lewis said about the banality of evil, that evil is by its nature only ever a parasite on the good, that it cannot even succeed in being evil in the same way that goodness succeeds in being good.

"Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness".

The spoilers, the deconstructionists, the desecrators, have no power of their own, so they have to borrow it from somewhere else.

Happy Fourth!

 

"America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed"
- G.K. Chesterton

To bolster your festive Independence Day spirit, I want to point out that an American, Joey Chestnut, now holds the world hot-dog eating record, having beaten a Japanese opponent named Kobayashi. Apparently, this is one American who doesn't believe in no-win scenarios... now, doesn't that make your heart swell with pride? Or cholesterol?

In addition, it brings a tear to the eye to note that our dear friends in North Korea are celebrating with us, today, using some very expensive fireworks of their own.

Back from Vacation

We're back and mostly recovered from our brief vacation break. The AC is working again (did I say, recently, how much I appreciate air conditioning?) and the dogs have stopped giving us hurt and confused looks... "How could you leave us for two whole days with only the neighbors looking in now and then? How-ow-ow???".

We went to Branson, Missouri. Yes, tacky and materialistic. Yes, hokey, flashy, tourist-y and shallow... but the kids love it. As is our custom, we ate our way around Silver Dollar City. Very good food for a theme park, much better than what we experienced at Disney World, but it seems to be slipping, a bit. In fact, the park seems to be slipping a bit.

SDC expanded like crazy for a couple of decades, erecting one monstrous thrill ride after another, along with an ever-expanding repertoire of diversions for the kiddos... but the economy may have hit them like it has everyone else. We noticed that a number of features were in need of cleaning and repair, and others had been stripped down to basics. It wasn't crowded, as we expected. The wait for rides was happily brief.

What attracted us, initially, to Silver Dollar City was the fact that it was small-ish, kind of homey in an unapologetically Southern way, full of huge oak trees (providing delicious shade) and exuded a warm, relaxed atmosphere very welcoming to families. The rides were always fun, but the great attraction was the whole feel of the park. In the beginning, the rides were noticeably smaller and less flashy than those in more urban areas.

And then there was the food; Huge, open-air pans of fried potatoes mixed with onions, peppers and other secret yummy stuff... ice cream with strawberries, cobblers, very respectable barbecued ribs, turkey legs, pancakes, honey roasted pecans, Kettle Corn, pork rinds fresh and still popping from the hot oil, fried sweet potatoes, cookies a foot wide, whole barbecued chickens, corn-on-the-cob...

The park, as I say, has grown a lot during the time we have been going there, and in recent years has competed more directly with destinations like Six Flags or Busch Gardens. It was more often crowded and noisy. It catered more openly to a younger crowd. Though it retained a good bit of the family-friendly, old-timey pioneer atmosphere at the center of the park, the expanded areas grew more flashy and modern.

We enjoyed our trip, though. The first day, Martha and the kids went to see the Titanic exhibit in Branson and swam in the hotel pool while I took care of some business in Little Rock. I joined them later that night. It was nice to get away together, again. I don't know how many family trips we may have left!

At any rate, glad to be back home.

A Few Days Off

Weird that we're now experiencing the reverse of the Ice Storm power outage of this past winter... it's in the nineties and our air conditioning is out. The last few nights have been spent trying to figure out the best positions in which to sleep, so that the maximum surface area of skin is exposed. Repairman is on the way, but is facing a backlog.

One benefit - it's nice having dinner on the screened porch and counting hummingbirds and fireflies. I like to use my best "southern plantation owner" voice to intone, "Dinnah on the veranda, deah?"

I did manage to expose the AC's evaporator coils, but they are cleverly designed so that no mortal will be able to clean them. They didn't appear that dirty, however, so I expect the unit is low on coolant. The fan on the outside condenser unit is also having problems. I noticed that it was getting power, but not running. I could hear the electrical relay kick on, but the fan remained motionless and would just hum. Using all my mechanical knowledge and experience with tools, I managed to get it going by poking it with a stick. I can't do that all summer, though.

It seems like a fortuitous time to take a few days off for some family R & R. We are heading out this morning and will be back Thursday.

Startling Pattern Emerges

It's like they're all just waiting for us...

I think my grandfather's death was the first that really affected me as it happened, though I understood the concept of death, having seen a lot of T.V. westerns, along with media coverage of the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination, the Munich Olympics and other deadly events.

I've seen a number of deaths, since, and taken note of many more, but the tight grouping of celebrity deaths in the last week has made me look back over my experiences of death, and I have begun to sense a pattern.

Stay with me, here. I'm no conspiracy nut, but it begins to appear that no one is safe, and that the chances of death for any one of us - by my rough figures - approaches 100%. For instance, the older I get, the more people in my general age group pop up on the news, having died in one way or another and it is most often treated as a surprise, if not a shock.

But the shock, to me, may be unjustified. I don't want to start a panic, but it looks to me like we may all be headed for the cemetery.

"Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom."
Psalm 90:12

Last week we heard first, of course, of Ed McMahon, then Farrah Fawcett, then Michael Jackson... next, Billy Mays and this morning I read that Fred Travalena and Gale Storm passed away.

I have no great observations to make, except to say that the only genuine shock for me would have been if Michael Jackson had somehow lived to a ripe old age. I did not see how he could manage much longer. Over the past few years he appeared to be a shell.

I have good memories of Fred Travalena, who often appeared on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, was all over the variety show circuit, and also starred with Rich Little, Frank Gorshin and other master impressionists on The Kopycats - a comedy show (which I never missed if I could help it) built around impressions. He was also an extremely prolific and successful voice actor.

Most people may not know anything much about Gale Storm, but my wife will remember My Little Margie (which was old already when we watched it) from our days as college students, when we could count our TV channels on one hand.

For a long time, when driving by by a cemetery, I have had the distinct and unshakable sense that those dwelling under the tombstones are watching and waiting and maybe chuckling a little... laughing at the living and their frantic and petty preoccupations. Sometimes, I can't help but laugh, too.

This idea of the connectedness of the living and the dead runs deep in the human heart, and is confirmed in the doctrine of the Communion of Saints... which is just the Church expounding on the teaching of the Lord that "He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive."  (Luke 20:38).

A Nice Bit of Belloc

Sean at The Blue Boar posts a delightfully bracing excerpt from Hilaire Belloc's The Four Men, which you really should read. In it, a wan and tepid ascetic (The Poet) is taken to task by his companions, because of his pessimistic and puritanical denial of the essential goodness of Creation.

Not that there is not room for asceticism... far from it! But the discipline of the flesh should always affirm and never deny the greatness of God's creative work in nature. All desire - properly understood - is a desire for God. The point of mastering our desires is to properly orient them to their ultimate source - the Creator God - not to deny them altogether.

As I said in Sean's combox;

Life in Christ means *real* life... with what C.S. Lewis called "some blood and sap in it". Not the negation of desire (as the Buddha proclaimed), but the fulfillment of every true and eternal desire of the human spirit.

Every false desire is simply one of these true desires twisted back on itself. The Gospel does not kill desire, but untwists our desires to make them straight and true again ("true" in this sense like a well-planed board, or the path of a well-crafted arrow), so that we may follow them to their source... the creator God, One in Three.

What I've Been Talking About

Photo: Mardetanha -  WikiMedia Commons

My problem with the Iranian situation and calls for more active involvement from the administration occupying the White House has always been a question of being almost wholly ignorant of what we are cheering for.

We all know that Ahmadinejad is a loon just a few ticks below Kim Jong Il in grandeur, we have all heard his inflamed fantasies of a final comeuppance for the Jews and their chief enabler, the Great Satan, the United States. We remember his face from the first Iranian revolution, where he was involved with the attack on the U.S. embassy, the kidnapping of American citizens and their continued imprisonment. He deserves to be deposed.

But Ahmadinejad doesn't really run the country. The country is run by the Supreme Leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and a network of clerics, mullahs and others. You may remember Khamenei's predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini. The Supreme leader controls the armed forces, has veto power over any legislation, and can even summarily dismiss the President.

The defeat of Ahmadinejad will result in almost no real change in the actual governance of Iran.

Now, let's look at the opposition leader, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, for whom we are supposed to be rooting. There is some hazy idea of the opposition in Iran being idealistic freedom fighters, longing for a more open, free society and better relations with the West. While a number of the opposition supporters may talk this way, and many may believe what they say, the actual candidate supposedly representing this new Springtime In Tehran is barely distinguishable from Ahmadinejad, in terms of his pedigree.

According to this Jeff Stein article in The American Conservative, for instance, you may be interested to learn that;

...three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
 
Mousavi, prime minister for most of the 1980s, personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, and dispatched him to Damascus as Iran's ambassador, according to former CIA and military officials.

The ambassador in turn hosted several meetings of the cell that would carry out the Beirut attacks, which were overheard by the National Security Agency.

"We had a tap on the Iranian ambassador to Syria," retired Navy Admiral James "Ace" Lyons related by telephone Monday. In 1983 Lyons was deputy chief of Naval Operations, and deeply involved in the events in Lebanon.

"The Iranian ambassador received instructions from the foreign minister to have various groups target U.S. personnel in Lebanon, but in particular to carry out a 'spectacular action' against the Marines," said Lyons.

God help the people of Iran, but I can't see how we can claim to really have a dog in this fight. The world is a complicated place, and we like to see things in simple, good against evil terms, but we ought not let that blind us to the messy realities.

Yes, protest the death and oppression and lack of freedom... but don't expect any real change in Iran as a result of our efforts, even if we "win" and Ahmadinejad is sacked. Mousavi will be happy enough to receive our help, now, but once in office he would just as likely give us a khanjar in the back, as a way of reassuring those Iranian hardliners who might have questions as to his real loyalties.