Verucasaltism

I just gave him a big shoutout and, yes, I'm usually completely down with Charlie Pierce. But I think he's missed his target here when he says that George Effing Will is trying to equate climate-change-denialism with "science".

He puts up this Will quote from his WaPo column and no, I'm not going to link to the insufferable sonofabitch but Pierce does if you want to read his condescending little screed. In it Will says of the current Roman Catholic pontiff:

"He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation's premises."

and what Pierce picks from this chunky nougat of fuck is that Will is claiming that pretending that human beings are not substantially changing our planet's environment is "scientific" and "rational" and that to suggest that they are, or might at least be doing enough to support some serious investment in changing that, is to be against "modernity, rationality...and science".

But I think that Will's point is really worse than that. It's in his conclusion that this concern for things like planetary temperature is an attempt to destroy "...the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources." and that "...celebrat(ing the) nation's premises." involves subordinating everything else to "people and their desires."

Now this isn't an elusive or subtle idea. In its simplest form it's just what Veruca Salt wanted from Willy Wonka: everything, the whole world, and right fucking now. It's greed, raw, naked greed. It's selfishness on a Randian scale, the "desire" is simply that everyone and everything else owes me what I want and more and right this very second. Call it the "rollin' coal" theory of social responsibility. Or call it what it really is; the morals of a four-year-old...or Veruca fricking Salt.

And I agree that a hell of a lot of human history has been about people trying to get everything yesterday. But should that really be "our nation's premise"? Should we really be all about trying to be bigger, fatter, richer, stronger, happier than everything and anything regardless of the cost? Is that a "precious resource" or more likely to be a "problem"?

George Effing Will in his capacity as the nation's Republican Intellectual wants to tell you we should be, and it is.

Bullshit.

He's a Bad Egg, and so is his argument. Hell, so is any argument that is nothing but fucking Verucasaltism in a goddamn prom dress.

Meddlesome priests.

I was reading Pierce today on the latest revelation in the ongoing saga that is the Roman Catholic Man-Boy Love Association and had a brief vision of the sainted Thomas a' Becket.

Because like that irritatingly martyred man the Church cannot seem to see the beam in it's eye for the mote in other people's. Worried about its ability to speak commandingly on what it considers sins it overlooks the inevitable predation of the strong on the weak that will occur when you give the strong the sanction of holy authority and fail to place limits on their acts.

It's not an "if".

It's a when.

For the simple reason is that most men are not saints. And even most saints are not "saints" but, rather, men like Thomas Becket who prize their own authority, their own power and the power and privilege of their organization above the welfare of others.

The good people among them will, at least, do no harm - although, like Becket, may well do harm to others or to the commons in their zeal to do what they see as good to what they see as "theirs".

But the bad people among them will be monsters.

And the worst part about a religion is that it settles an armor of God (or gods) on the monsters, so that their monstrosity is concealed or, worse, is exalted into heroism. Thus can an Arnauld Amalric say “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" (Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His) deeming himself a pious man doing the good work his Lord has commended him to.

This is not a failing of the Catholic Church. It is not a failing of religion in general. It is a human failing.

But...it is a failing of religion - and the Catholic Church in this case - to fail to recognize that humans will use the tenets of their church to excuse, or hide, or enable their own failings if they are not strictly overseen. The power of holiness, the assumed mantle of godliness, will give those among them without scruple a weapon of terrible strength.

So the first duty of any cleric, from the humblest acolyte to the mightiest heirophant, must be to remain unsleepingly vigilant to the danger of that weapon. To be merciless in uncovering the abuse of trust and faith. To be self-sacrificing in publicly punishing the guilty and redeeming the victims. To place the faithful above the object of their faith.

But as any of the faithful would tell you; the path of duty is narrow and steep; the path of conformity, sloth, and luxurious power that leads to Hell broad, easy, and gentle.

So the fact that the fathers of the modern Church are no different in their loyalty to their own than Becket was nine centuries ago should come as no surprise to any of us.

Radio Check

Sorry so slow around here. I had just about enough time to post a Facebook update that reads: "Get up. Work. Go home. Cook. Eat. Read. Snuggle. Sleep. Repeat."
And, yeah, that's pretty much been it around here for the past week or so.



However, my reference for the Rhineland crisis is finally in, so I'm slowly beginning to pull that post together. And I WILL make some time for blogging later this week. Although I almost hate to do it; I've been wading through the news from both Salem and D.C. and the Force of the Stupid is so strong it's almost visible.

And the problem, regardless of what the problem seems to be, always seems to lead back to the same well; the return of the open sort of oligarchy that served us so well in 1892.



Whether you look at foreign war or domestic politics, the default setting in my country seems to be "what's good for the wealthy is good for the nation." I cannot imagine who the hell thinks that is a good idea or why, but on almost every subject from who gets taxed and how much to how we pay for our medicine to whether or not we can or will regulate who gets to shoot whom with what to what we should be doing in the less-paved portions of the world the "solutions" that my governments seem to arrive at always seem to result in providing (or intend to provide) more wealth for the wealthy, more power for the powerful, and more comfort for the comfortable.



I've talked over and over (and over and over...) about why I believe this is so and why I believe that is unlikely to change and why I don't believe that this is a good idea for most of us, but the setting does not appear to be changing or, frankly, to be changable given our social and political condition.


And that just depresses the shit out of me.

Sorry.

Anyway, we have an Argentine as the Supreme Pontiff. How fucking cool is that? Yeah, I agree; not very. But hopefully the old Argie can at least try and get his guys to keep it in their pants around those adorably perky little choirboys...



Hang in there; back soon with bloggy goodness.

Ancient of Days

Just a couple of brief notes today.

Am I the only one who finds it utterly cool that we just lived through something that has only happened four times in recorded history (that we're sure of, anyway) and only once before in the past 600 years?

I should add, however, that the sede vacante left by the latest incumbent is a siege made perilous by the still-unresolved problem of clerical misbehavior.

As one who flirted with Catholicism in my adulthood as much as I appreciated the pageant-history and magical traditions when it came to the sticking point I couldn't stomach the authoritarianism. It seemed to me then and still does that if a faith or a religion (and I do not consider the two the same or often even very similar) is to do more human good than harm it must allow for its adherents the freedom of their own morals. Especially Christianity, which is probably the most difficult and complex religion to practice.

Pace the other great faiths but in their essence they seem to me fairly coherent for the believers. Islam and Judaism are fierce, totemic tribal faiths based on loyalty to a patriarch-deity partial to His partisans and implacable to outsiders. Buddhism is as much a tradition and a philosophy as faith and one based firmly on a peaceful, meditative tradition and renunciatory philosophy. Hinduism...well, I haven't figured out quite what the hell Hinduism is.

It doesn't seem terribly complex to me to be Shinto, Jain, Animist, Sikh, or Zoroastrian.

But Christianity? Christianity is fucking impossible.

You have to reconcile the tribal-God of the Old Testament with the Father-God of the New and try and figure out how to live by the strictures of a Savior who only demands six impossible things of you before breakfast. No wonder many people of faith, and almost all the major Christian religions, have either abandoned, or never even attempted, to live as Jesus commanded. Because, as a better writer than I put it:

"No, you just don't understand. Let's all put our brunch plans on hold, because if you really heard what I said, you'd be absolutely terrified. You'd want to run or give up your faith, or kill me right now, because what I said was impossible. What I said is absolutely going to break you. If you're lucky."

And you all probably know how I feel about what happened when Jesus met Rome. The result wasn't just rendering unto Caesar that which was Caesar's. It was becoming Caesar.

IMO the clerical child-and-pretty-much-anything-else-moving-with-a-hole-in-it-abuse-scandal isn't about who put whose totem pole in whose donut hole.

It's about the fact that when confronted with the most clear-cut choice between humility and contrition, and power, the Holy See chose power.

The reigns of the last two Popes have, at bottom, been about buttressing the power of the Church rather than its humanity. Regardless of how you feel about the Levitican rules, you'd have to agree that if you choose in favor of an ancient text over kindness toward living humans you aren't exactly choosing in favor of the things your Savior talked up like brotherhood, compassion and love. That tends to work better for things like dietary rules about shellfish or owls than deciding who should or can love whom and what should place a man or woman outside the bounds of your God's care.

It seems rather dreary that an institution like the Papacy - which, whatever you feel about it, carries such a glittering and complex tradition of scholars, schemers, poets, madmen, villains, and saints - has been filled in my late lifetime by little men who seem to be obsessed with rules, authority, and chastening any trace of individual conscience in both laity and the lower clergy rather than trying to expand the horizons of the faith and the love their founder preached.

Their legacy is a curia crammed to bursting with other pettifoggingly narrow and stern little men who would rather wag their fingers at a couple of homosexuals embracing than leap with the joy of the Good News and give all their riches to the poor. And from this precious lot the Church will be blessed with its next pontiff.

Ma nisrat lech bamoch!? as Jesus himself might have said.

Speaking of old things, this early Kodacolor/Kodachrome test film is kind of fascinating:

The fascinating thing is not so much the film itself, which shows that the Kodacolor process still had a long way to go in 1922, but the motions of the actresses in the film.

As the Slate website says: "Their open expressions of feeling and the particular way they move their hands and tilt their heads...are so unfamiliar now, they seem like a foreign language." It's that, combined with the peculiar intimacy granted by the color film.

Black and white film emphasizes difference. The images look removed t us, unlike anything we're used to seeing either in film or our lives. The monochromatic pictures increase the distance between us and the people we're seeing on film.

But the women (and the child) in this little film look very familiar, less the Twenties fashions. Especially the last subject, the blonde woman in the shiny robe that smoulders and pouts, not all that much different than some 2013 starlet vamping for the camera.

And I mention as an aside that we tend to forget that the Twenties and early Thirties were, in fact, a very "modern" period in films. A lot of pre-Code films of the time have an almost 21st Century license around sex and sexuality; so it's no surprise that a screen test actress might throw in something spicy for the boys in the editing room.

Except that...go back and watch her. The actress' face and her body just...well, they just don't look and move like a modern woman.

You've seen modern screen actresses smoulder and they don't smoulder like that.

I think we often don't realize how we are shaped by our arts as we shape them. The gestures and expressions in the 1922 film are the exaggerated ones of the old melodrama and Victorian stage by way of the silent film era, where the actors had to "talk" using stylized movement and larger-than-normal facial gestures.

To us in 2013, raised on the naturalistic style we see around us, and on television and film they appear ritualistic and bizarre.

So I thought that this little clip at once brings to young life people who must be dead or very, very old while at the same time emphasizes how far removed from them and their time we have grown.

Surely, while "everything old is new again", many things are irrevocably changed into the weird and marvelous with the long passing of the days.