The League of Bearded Catholics

Is Jon Stewart Reading Chesterton?

If not... is he ready to?

Here he is talking about Glenn Beck (from a recent NPR interview);

The beautiful thing about what he does is, it's very difficult to argue with his facts. It's the conclusions [that are problematic]. ... It's that slippery slope. ... So what you do is, you just grab together facts and put them together and then do a grab bag of conclusions. Everything is discovered as evidence of secret plots, of secret things that could be occurring.

This reminds me of a classic passage from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy;

Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable;

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

Disclaimer; I am not saying Glenn Beck is a lunatic. However, he does have what seem to be some pretty looney ideas, which a disturbing number of people seem to accept as real explanations of the world and the state of our Republic at present. Why is it that, far from tempering the excesses of the other,  the Right and Left so often end up mirroring one another's most ghastly mental traits?

Oh, wait. C.S Lewis nailed that one;

Opposite evils, so far from balancing, aggravate each other.

Or, as he noted regarding his semi-biographical allegory The Pilgrim's Regress;

The attack on the soul from north and south represent, in Lewis's words, "equal and opposite evils, each continually strengthened and made plausible by its critique of the other."

So... evil is a two party system, where we are allowed the tormentor of our choice. And that passes for freedom.

Incidentally, The Pilgrim's Regress was my first exposure ever to C.S. Lewis and the first chapter had me howling with laughter, in recognition of my own confused religious upbringing. Not that this was anyone's fault, but so much of my boyhood grasp of the Gospel boiled down to this (from the aforementioned chapter 1);

...it all ended with pointing out that the Landlord was quite extraordinarily kind and good to his tenants, and would certainly torture most of them to death the moment he had the slightest pretext.

If You Liked Her Diaper Commercial...

 
... you'll love her Maxim cover. Check the newsstands sometime in, oh, twenty years, or so.

Another reason I am watching less and less television; the entertainment industry eats little girls and spits them out as skanky media hoes, and I just can't stand to watch the process.

Miley Cyrus, f'rinstance, has recently taken the daring, original and creative step of making a trashy music video with a lot of bumpy-grindy and not a lot of clothing. Wowzers! Who could have seen that coming from a Disney child star?

Danica McKellar, who some of you may remember as the achingly pretty and unfailingly sweet Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years, just finished being photographed in her underwear for Maxim magazine... to show that "math is sexy".

Former cutie-pie turned toplessTV vampire Anna Paquin - after a period of deep personal reflection with her publicist - decided that her career would benefit if she was bisexual for a while.

Meanwhile, I'm certain that someone, somewhere, is making book on the exact date of the ritual public de-flowering of this girl, and this one.

Raquel Welch has a message for them, and she knows what she's talking about.

We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he "wants a woman". Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).  - C.S. Lewis - The Four Loves

Life Is Too Short For Margarine

Homemade Butter...

One of the advantages of living in a settled and civilized society is that people have time to attend to things not strictly essential to life and survival. This is, unfortunately, also one of its main faults. We have time for non-essentials, and trivialities, and even nonsense. Some invest great amounts of time and expense in trivialities and nonsense, but those who invest the most almost certainly work for the government and are investing your money and mine.

This embarrassment of riches in terms of time also gives more of us the chance to worry and fret over any number of small things. We have become a nation of hand-wringers, ever watchful against germs, or the evils of high-fructose corn syrup, or the volume of methane emmitted by cows.

As Chesterton put it in his essay, The Dregs of Puritanism (where he examines the phenomenon of a local parson who is all wound into a fret over the fact that soldiers at the front are being sent cigarettes from home);

...there is the lack of imaginative proportion, which rises into a sort of towering blasphemy. An enormous number of live young men are being hurt by shells, hurt by bullets, hurt by fever and hunger and horror of hope deferred; hurt by lance blades and sword blades and bayonet blades breaking into the bloody house of life. But Mr. Price (I think that's his name) is still anxious that they should not be hurt by cigarettes. That is the sort of maniacal isolation that can be found in the deserts of Bromley. That cigarettes are bad for the health is a very tenable opinion to which the minister is quite entitled. If he happens to think that the youth of Bromley smoke too many cigarettes, and that he has any influence in urging on them the unhealthiness of the habit, I should not blame him if he gave sermons or lectures about it (with magic-lantern slides), so long as it was in Bromley and about Bromley. Cigarettes may be bad for the health: bombs and bayonets and even barbed wire are not good for the health. I never met a doctor who recommended any of them...

Our modern culture has been steeped in this disproportionate nervousness about small things, and it can surface in some entertaining ways. A day or two ago I was watching a few minutes of a show on cable TV (I'm sorry, I don't remember the name of the show, or the host, and am just lazy enough not to care to look it up) wherein the host makes himself into Robinson Crusoe on a weekly basis, dropping into the Himalayas, or the Amazon jungle, or other such scary places, with only a pocketknife or something, and demonstrates for the audience how to survive in the open, alone and unaided (except for one's camera crew).

Honestly, if I watched more TV, this would be the kind of show I would probably enjoy. I have always loved the outdoors, loved hiking and camping, and prefer to pack light and take only the essentials. Survival in the outdoors is an interesting subject, and is one of the reasons I was a Boy Scout leader for several years.

Anyway, in this particular episode, the man had apparently been left in a swamp, and was kindly showing the viewers how to get along in that sort of environment. Evening was coming on, and the intrepid host had successfully kindled a fire, and while drying his socks beside it (dry socks being Very Important) he began to demonstrate where to find the best and most plentiful meat on any alligator that one might recently have killed. He had bagged one earlier, and began carving into it with a knife, taking a quivering filet from the base of the tail. As he hastily arranged this meat on the end of a sharp stick to roast over his campfire, he thought it important enough to mention that alligator meat (in case anyone had concerns) was, in fact, very low in cholesterol.

I roared. I think it was one of the funniest things he could have said, a little like pointing out that fighting off a grizzly is really very good aerobic exercise, or that if you are stranded in the Tetons in the dead of winter, and you find it impossible to get a fire going, you can at least take comfort that you are not contributing to Global Warming (indeed, you might strike a blow for the environment through Bodily Cooling - allowing yourself to come slowly to ambient air temperature - and leave off processing carbon altogether).

I can understand if you have cholesterol numbers that challenge the laws of New Math, and your doctor has warned that your next french fry might push you right into the crematorium, that you might want to be aware of things like fat and salt and such... but we have reached the point where instead of scaring our children with stories of Trolls or Giants, we frighten them over and over with horrific tales of the dangers of hot dogs and soda pop.

I have my own reasons for my low opinion of hot dogs and soda pop (mostly that they are made by the millions, by machines, somewhere far away, using who-knows-what materials and methods), but their relative place in a healthy diet is kind of low on the list of concerns. If ever I get to keep my own chickens and pigs (I wish I'd thought of that twenty years ago), I don't expect that my morning bacon and eggs will be a great deal better for me than the stuff I now buy at the grocery store. What will do me some real good is that old, dusty spiritual discipline of Moderation and a brisk walk, not Butter Substitutes or Soy Patties (items also made in factories by mysterious mechanical and chemical processes).

But I see it's time for lunch. Homemade turkey soup and my daughter's Beer Bread. It's bread made with beer. That's such a wondrous idea, I think I'll cry. We give Thee thanks, O God...