Note to self: Next time, duck

My friend Natalie tapped me, and so I guess I have to play, because despite my curmudgeonly exterior I really hate hurting anyone’s feelings, even people who richly deserve it, not that Natalie would ever deserve such a thing. Here are the rules:

Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write 6 random things about yourself.
Tag 6-ish people at the end of your post.
Let each person know he/she has been tagged.
Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

This is a difficult assignment, Nat, because basically my entire blog consists of random things about me. But here are six more:

I am a hypochondriac. If you describe Interstitial Cystitis to me in vivid enough detail, I’ll soon begin to wonder if I’m peeing too much. If I see a movie where someone develops a Bairnsdale ulcer, I’ll begin to wonder if that place where I gouged myself with a screwdriver isn’t starting to spread rather than heal. I don’t generally pester anyone about it, I just suffer in silence and imagine how my children will get along without me.

In the sixth grade I was the smallest kid in my class, including the girls. I got the biggest girl in class, Stephanie Cato, to be my girlfriend. She protected me.

One of my first jobs in high school was cleaning banks at night. One night the wiring on my vacuum cleaner shorted, and when I grabbed a metal door handle, I completed the circuit. Current ran through me for a second, and then it was as if someone picked me up, walked backwards with me a couple of feet, and set me down out of reach of both the vacuum cleaner and the door. Sometimes I imagine it was an angel who lifted me up. This gives me comfort, especially when I think I might have Hemangioma Thrombocytopenia Syndrome.

My stepfather grew marijuana back when Nancy Reagan was telling all us kids to just say no. For some reason I believed that if the police came we would all be put in jail — me, my mom, and my brothers. I used to tense up when anyone knocked on the door, or whenever a sheriff’s car drove down our street.

You might think that I dream about my daughter all the time, but the truth is that I hardly ever dream of her at all, no matter how hard I try.

Four year-old Isaac has better fashion sense than me. I have to have someone tell me that two things match before I will wear them, and then they become an outfit that I go back to over and over. Today I wanted to wear my blue sweater, but the shirt I usually wear under it was dirty. I asked Isaac what shirt I should wear instead, and without hesitating he picked a striped one that goes perfectly.

Now for my tagging victims:

Dr. Danielle

Fr. Rob

Susan

BAW

Jordana

Rachel

“Every man has forgotten who he is . . . We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. we have all forgotten what we really are.”

G.K. Chesterton

Populist Chic

Mark Lilla writing in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provinciality and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? . . . There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.”

And David Brooks writing in last month’s New York Times:

“What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.”

And the thing is, once we elevate ill-educated logorrhea to a virtuous endeavor — to wit Ann Coulter, to wit Sean Hannity, to wit practically everyone writing at WorldNetDaily — we can’t very well get them to go away. After you induce otherwise thoughtful, God-fearing people to tell themselves they are protecting Western civilization by tuning in to the likes of Michael Savage (oh, the irony in that pseudonym), you can’t very well get them to turn back to NPR. You just can’t put stupid back in its box. So while I’m inclined to think that Lilla is being overly pessimistic about the future of conservative thoughtfulness, I don’t see a path out of its current narcolepsy. Do you?

Because some people just need killing

If ever the death penalty had a justifiable use, I think the time is now.

What would you lose to gain everything?

I had to fly last week, and while in the air I read Wendell Berry’s Home Economics. I couldn’t decide if that was ironic or fitting or both. I rose in the darkness, first at home, then on that cold plane leaving colder ground, and it was only after we were airborne for a while that light began to spread itself out across the horizon, pink and orange and purpling along its fringes, and only a few of us looking out to take note.

I lost forty-three cents on that flight. It slid out of my pocket as the plane hurtled itself at the sky. The coins clinked and tinkled like they were being dropped into a slot machine beneath my seat. I once saw an economist demonstrate utility, or the value of labor, or something else that is cooly essential and undeniable, by slinging change across a large room and inviting observers to go collect it. I don’t know exactly what it would take to get me to clamber into the seat behind me in search of lost coins, or to ask the old man sitting back there to crouch down on my behalf, but I know it’s somewhere north of forty-three cents.

On the next leg I lost a pen. I had attached it to the cover of my book, and when I slid the book into the slender pocket of the seat in front of me, a pocket stuffed with instructions nobody reads, and catalogs full of overpriced junk that people sadly do read, the pen extricated itself and bounced beneath my seat. I felt around for it, grunting and irritated, my face pressed against the coarse fabric of the seat back, but it was gone. Fortunately I had something else to write with, or I might have asked the people behind me to similarly squat down in search of my pen.

I once lost a small journal on a flight. It was filled with thoughts and notes for essays and a couple of books that I’m writing. I called the airline for help, which of course they didn’t give. It was like losing a piece of me, a part of my mind or my history. On another flight we once lost a baby doll, Caroline’s first, but we had her then, and so a baby doll was a small loss, and I suppose it still is.

I sat in my hotel room the night I lost my coins and my pen and I thought about these things I’ve lost, and others: a box of Army men from my childhood; a notebook containing the first book I ever tried to write; a bag of marbles stolen on a sandy schoolyard in Florida; my first puppy; my daughter; my faith. That last was the only thing I ever got back, though maybe it wasn’t mine in the first place, but something imposed on me against my will. We are always losing things from one hand even as we acquire them with another, and I wonder if, in the great ledger of our lives, we aren’t some of us running a deficit even as we feel overwhelmed by possessions.

I came home the very next day, and as I got out of my truck I heard the lilt of a child’s laugh a way off in a stand of trees. I crossed the yard, descended to the creek, crossed to the other side. I threaded my way through brush and fallen hedge trees until I found the three of them playing in their makeshift fort. I hugged each in turn, each boy stepping up onto a stretch of dead tree to stand level with me. They don’t understand, I think, why I grip them so tight when I return, why I don’t let go for a time.

I don’t know how my ledger will balance when I die, what I will have created or done that is worth anything, especially stood up trembling against all I wish I could take back. I only know this continual clarifying, this striking off the books of things I once thought important, and the remainder these few creatures, these children and this woman who are everything, everything, even when I have been too dull to see clearly, too occupied to notice how effortlessly the light pushes back the dark.

Palin Army

I don’t know why I get emails from a Republican (as opposed to conservative, or even Conservative) women’s group, as I am neither a Republican, nor a woman, nor prone to mingle. But they pop up in my inbox nonetheless, despite my best efforts to calibrate my spam filter. This latest breathlessly declares:

“After darkness comes the dawn, and I am confident that from among you will arise more Sarah Palins.”

Wonderful. That will do the trick.

On what happens next

It seems churlish not to say something about what has happened in this country that less than a lifetime ago could not guarantee every black man his right to vote. If nothing else we can be thankful that the world has changed in that respect. Is Barack Obama made of more solid stuff than the tinsel and glitter that pleases most voters in this modern age? I suppose we will see. We certainly ought to pray so.

We ought to consider as well that what happens to America — what is happening to America — is us. If we discern a decay in civility, a decline of thoughtfulness and insight, a pervasive faithlessness and unrooted longing, then we ought to consider that these things have not been done to us, but we have allowed them to become true of ourselves. Perhaps some collection of politicians can make things better or worse at the margins, but in the end we get the government, the businesses, the communities, the churches, that reflect what is in our souls — the present light, the hungering dark, and the absence of what was meant to be.

What begins now is a fussy period of building up and tearing down. The people in power will work to solidify their gains, reward their friends, and punish their enemies. Those rightfully tossed out the door will begin nipping at the heels of their vanquishers. All of them will fall to the game — albeit with different job titles — of snarling over scraps of wealth that none of them had a hand in creating. These people will always be with us, living out their natures.

My prayer is that the rest of will switch off our talk radio and our cable opinion shows and turn to the real business that has always been before fallen man, which is the reconciliation of his troubled spirit to something greater than himself. Polls show that a great many Americans believe something is not right, that the nation is off kilter, not what it should be. A great many of us yesterday voted for change. Pray that instead of speaking that outward, we whisper it back to ourselves.

Black Panthers go post-modern

My favorite part is where the one thug asks, in response to the observation that some voters might find his billy club intimidating: “Who are you to decide?”

Sometimes a rhyme isn’t enough

As we pulled up to the voting station this afternoon, Isaac hopped eagerly out of the minivan. He got on tiptoes as if to peer into the building more easily. He yanked on my hand. “Do we have to bring our own boat?”

“What?”

“Do we have to have a boat?” He looked at the building, perhaps beginning to wonder where all the water was. I explained that we came here for voting, not boating.

He is profoundly disappointed.

On voting the Bible

Some of you might care to read my thoughts on the Christian voter’s responsibility, over at WORLD.

The inner dark

“I mean if I have any inclination at all, or you, to start being whatever in God’s name it means to be a ‘child of God’ — and let’s say there is no argument for having such an inclination, but let’s just suppose that at certain unguarded moments we have it, this inclination to start being children of God — have we any idea at all what by the grace of God we are in all likelihood going to have to stop being, stop doing, stop having, stop pretending, stop smacking our lips over, stop hating, stop being scared of, stop chasing after till we’re blue in the face and sick at the stomach? O God, deliver us from the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, because that sin of the world is our heart’s desire…

It is no easy matter to save us when half the time we don’t even want to be saved because we are so at home in the darkness that is home. We none of us come to the end of our days with the saving more than a fraction done at best. But, praise God, the end of our days is not the end of us.”

                                                       * Frederick Buechner, “Air for Two Voices”

Time for some campaignin’

The best analysis of the campaign yet. My favorite part is where Hillary whacks Bill with a frying pan.

HT: Lori M.

The Sussudio Effect

It looks like the only thing that can save McCain at this point is the Sussudio Effect. In short, Obama has so saturated the airwaves that he runs the risk of making us all as sick of him as we were of Phil Collins between 1985-87. Otherwise both the polls and the election markets predict an Obama victory.

One is obliged, unless one savors the taste of crow, to pay homage to the Stochastic God at this point, and dutifully note that anything can happen. Indeed, who would have predicted that in an election focused on terrorism and a bank crisis, our primary choices would be a Keating Fiver and a guy named Barack Hussein Obama?

While the error term allows for a McCain victory, however, the rest of the equation predicts Obama, and it’s worth considering briefly why. My conservative friends point to “media bias,” but this is a tough sell, given that it didn’t stop the bramble-tongued, platitudinous W from twice achieving victory. The mainstream media — as well as members of his own party — hated Reagan, but he left them twisted around their own axle. So yes, it is well-established that many national journalists (and more important, their editors) adore Obama. But that’s an insufficient explanation, I think.

Closer to home may be the fact that we mostly want a candidate who will say sweet things to us, and promise us painless happiness. Obama is simply far more skilled in that department. Just yesterday I heard him tell a cheering crowd that on Election Day we get to choose the economy we want. Lovely. I’d like one that will pay my mortgage while I drink beer and fish with my boys. Can you hook me up, President Obama?

There is also the catastrophic McCain decision to limit his campaign fundraising in accord with public funding rules. It’s deliciously deserved, of course, given his track record of attacking free speech in pursuit of elusive “campaign fairness,” but now the rest of us will be left holding the bag. What he didn’t anticipate is that money doesn’t go to the candidate it most supports, but to the candidate it expects to win. The result has been a snowball of cash for Obama.

And I know I risk heresy here, given the current conservative evangelical fascination with Sarah Palin. But if you look at the chart of prediction market prices for this election you’ll find an uptick for McCain around the time he announced Palin as his running mate, followed by the beginning of a freefall which can be linked almost to the second this woman began talking in public. I have no doubt she’ll serve wonderfully in her post-campaign career as a kinder, gentler Ann Coulter, but the notion that this is the best the Republican Party has to offer as Vice President only speaks to the pervasive venality that has done to the word “conservative” what was previously done to another fine word, “liberal.”

And this, my friends, is why you’d best get used to saying “President Obama.”

And now, in case you’d like to go back to a time when things were more carefree, the hairstyles more lavish, and the Islamic nutjobs less organized, a musical interlude:

In Praise of Single-Issue Voting

Some of you may appreciate my politically unsophisticated essay in WORLD magazine, which the editors have graciously made available to readers of this blog.

Sometimes tinsel is sharp

My admirable friend Robert Avrech confronts Hollywood lunacy first-hand. In related news, Hollywood is now considered too left-wing for even some of the left-wingers.

Idiots with guns

Thank God most bad guys are frightfully stupid.

A Confession for the Modern Conservative Christian

Yesterday I led our church in a prayer of confession, and enough people asked me for it afterward that I figured I ought to type it up from my notes:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us – sinners all.

We confess that you are rarely what we most desire, though your desire for us led you to a cross atop Golgotha. We want cleaner homes, better clothes, spouses more attentive to our needs. We want children who will sit still in church, and hymns that suit our tastes. We want our pastors to speak to our needs, rather than lead us in worshipping you. We want the driver in front of us to go faster, and the one behind us to slow down. We want jobs we enjoy, and family who won’t ask us for money.

Sometimes we want more righteousness, or more personal purity, or a better prayer life. We seek religious virtue, Lord, but we do not seek your Cross. We are afraid of what you will ask of us should we seek that Cross, and so we make you smaller and tamer. We make you an intellectual puzzle, or an emotional experience. You are an all-consuming Fire, and we have turned you into a Bic lighter.

Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.

Forgive us that we approach your Holy Word like we already understand you.

Forgive us that we pray when it’s convenient, that we talk too much and listen too little.

Forgive us when we seek the company of those who please us, rather than those who need us.

Forgive us that we have sullied your name by attaching it to political ideologies and national pride.

Forgive us when we hold ourselves above our brothers and sisters because they are Baptists, or Catholics, or Orthodox; because they plan to vote for Obama; because their children are in public schools; because they do trick-or-treat or they don’t trick-or-treat or because they only pass out those butterscotch candies that nobody really likes.

Forgive us that we see unrighteousness everywhere but in our own mirrors.

Oh Lord, we are a country founded in rebellion, and we have fallen into grave sin. We have made greed a virtue. We have borrowed until there is no grain left in the storehouse, and now we throw the costs onto our children and grandchildren. We have cultivated a hyper-sexualized culture. We allow our children to reach their teens without knowing how to behave like men and women. We have sanctioned the murder of millions of unborn children.

Amidst all this, we have the gall to proclaim this God’s most favored nation. We boast, oh Lord, when we should tremble.

If you, oh Lord, would count our iniquities against us, who could stand? We are shot through with sin, as a nation, a city, a church, as individuals. But you are faithful where we are faithless, and you have promised that when we confess, and repent, and lay hold of your Cross, that you will cleanse us of all unrighteousness.

So we praise you, Lord. Thine, oh Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and the earth is Thine. Thine, oh Lord, is the kingdom, and Thou art exalted above all.

We praise you and we beg your mercy, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, both now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Full circle

Check out Rod Dreher’s argument that now is Wendell Berry’s time:

“In the months and years to come, we all will have to learn the meaning of limits. Wendell Berry is no dour scold who preaches a joyless austerity. To the contrary, he tells us that what we truly seek in life is not comfort, but meaning – and that you don’t have to live a life of rigorous asceticism to find it. Rather, we only need to order our lives around the ancient idea that happiness depends on virtue – virtue lived in community. We can only be fulfilled by living within the bounds prescribed by our nature, and in fidelity not to our selfish desires but to the greater good of our families, friends and communities.”

Hopefulness

Andy Crouch offers a thoughtful essay on the eventual fruits we might, if we are lucky enough not to find an easy way out, glean from the current economic crisis. Here’s an excerpt:

“The stark contrast between what I experience among Christians anywhere else in the world—and not just the ‘Third World,’ because Canada and Germany and Britain and Singapore come to mind as quickly as Uganda and India—and American Christians is astonishing. We are preoccupied with fads intellectual, theological, technological, and sartorial. Vanishingly few of us have any serious discipline of silence, solitude, study, and fasting. We have, in the short run, very little to offer our culture, because we live in the short run.

I am not hopeful because I think life is going to get easier in America. I am hopeful because I think it is going to get harder, and in a very good way. And I am hopeful because I think this means my children and grandchildren will live in a deeply and truly better world than I would have thought possible a few years ago.”

You can read the full essay here. And you should. You might also enjoy Andy’s website on culture.

Because they hug back

Yesterday when I came home, Isaiah raised up his stubby arms from where he sat on his scooter, and whimpered at me to pick him up. As I held him he put his head on my shoulder and went: “Mmmmm.” It was a sound of the deepest satisfaction, and for a moment I couldn’t figure where it had occurred to him to let out such a soul-soothed noise. Then I heard myself making the same sound.

Caleb and Eli crowded around me later, and competed to see who could hug me the hardest, until I reminded them that I am old, and that my back hurts. I don’t know why my back hurts, except that sometimes in my dreams I run really fast to stay a half-step ahead of the monsters.

Later that night Isaac scurried past me on his way to bed. I called him over, and drew him up into my lap. He wrapped his arms around my neck and rested that way, completely still. I breathed in his temporary smell of fresh-washed boy and gave silent thanks that I am a father.

Nine years later

What would make you remember, if you didn’t know the date, if you had been so crazy during all of it that the calendar became an alien language, like small talk and plans for the future, would be the slant of sunlight. When winter approaches the earth tilts, and one morning the sun caresses everything so mournfully that no matter how you distract yourself there is the whisper: Yes, something has changed.

In this new light the shadows fall differently, and in it you remember that you have seen these shadows before. You have seen this fallen light and these long shadows, and with them you are at odds with the world now too, all of you tilted and thinking perhaps you will shear clean off the surface of things and go hurtling into wherever lost light disappears.

So even if October did not evoke the dead, even if nineteen was not the most asymmetric of numbers, even if you cleansed your mind of dates and deliberate remembrance, your body would betray you. Your mind is a clever little beast that can perform all manner of tricks, but your body is too dull to forget the sound of brittling leaves, the smell of settling dust, the feel of warmth as it slips from living things.

You can work or you can drink or you can get yourself a lover, and maybe you try all those things before you simply give in to the tilting of the earth. You give in once you have the courage, after you’ve tried all manner of things to twist yourself the other direction, to pretend that the light doesn’t fall differently sometimes. You lean with the wounded sun and become for a time like one of those stretched-thin shadows, and you find that you don’t go toppling off the earth after all.

All this goes through your mind when you wake and recall, as you sometimes do when the sun enters your room just so, that there is a voice missing from the sounds of morning. So you incline your head to hear the silence better, and when one of your living children asks why you are weeping, you wipe your eyes and tell him a story about a girl you used to know.

Responsible banks resist government cheese

“We will be punished for behaving prudently by now having to face reckless competitors who all of a sudden are subsidized by the federal government.”

Good for them. Looks like they’ll be pressured to take the payola regardless, with all its accompanying strings. Thankfully we can be sure the incoming Obama administration won’t abuse this newfound power over the nation’s financial system.

Prodigal or Progeny?

Looks like the son of National Review founder Bill Buckley has stepped down from the magazine, as a consequence of declaring — in a separate publication — that he is for Obama:

“This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget ‘by the end of my first term.’ Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?”

National Review editor Rich Lowry disputes Buckley’s characterization of their last dance, but it seems clear that Buckley is gone for lack of orthodoxy.

On Guilt by Association

Convicted by declarations from both major political parties that one’s associations reflect one’s character, I decided to re-register myself as an Independent. The paperwork went through a couple of weeks ago. I breathe easier now, knowing I’m no longer associated with the criminals and sexual perverts who held official and unofficial leadership positions in my former party.

I suppose it’s a sad state of affairs that this indictment isn’t enough to reveal which party I’m talking about.

Chinese “food”

Is it just me, or do the Chinese have a serious problem when it comes to distinguishing edible items from industrial chemicals? First there was the anti-freeze flavored toothpaste. Then the poison animal feed. Then the deadly infant formula. And now rust remover is a chic new food additive.

I know we shouldn’t expect much from a country where chicken feet and congealed pig’s blood are considered delicacies, but still. And though I’m not a fan of fussy label laws, I would sure appreciate knowing whether a food item I’m buying has been manufactured in China.

So how about it, food companies? Why don’t you stop telling us where our food has been “processed” or “packaged” (which means next to nothing), and tell us where it’s really coming from? I suppose one way around the problem is to eat more things from the meat and produce sections. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful irony if the unreliability of packaged food conglomerates led everyone to start eating more healthily?

I have to admit, I’m tempted