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Eating Crow

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Eat That Crow Now! It’ll Only Smell Worse Later.

Eat That Crow Now! It’ll Only Smell and Taste Worse Later.

The New Yorker does it again in this hilarious cartoon by Peter de Séve in the November 26, 2012 issue.

Instead, what does the GOP do? They discount the results of the November 6 election and pretend they won it in a landslide. They not only lost it, but they are just-this-close to losing their reason for existence altogether.

The Tea Partiers will die off (remember they don’t like ObamaCare); the Libertarians will never amount to anything but a small, noisy minority; and the remaining wing nuts will gravitate elsewhere when the circus train rides out of town.

 

Throw the Guilty Parties Off the Fiscal Cliff

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Make the Guilty Parties Pay For It!

Make the Guilty Parties Pay For It!

Metaphors are dangerous things. During this month we have enough to worry about with the supposed end of the world on Friday, December 21, according to somebody’s misinterpretation of the Mayan calendar. And we also have the so-called “Fiscal Cliff,” a series of Draconian cuts that automatically go into action if Congress does not act by the New Year.

Now getting Congress to act quickly—even if there is widespread agreement that failing to act would have dire consequences —is well-nigh impossible. So naturally, I have a modest proposal.

Since approximately half the members of Congress are millionaires, the obvious solution is to make them pay for the mess out of their own funds. Those Senators and Representatives who are unwilling to pony up and make good should be deprived of their civil rights and sold into slavery. Perhaps they could raise a crop of sugar cane in Guantánamo or be sent to political re-education camps in some Blue State that would be willing to take on such a liability.

I think we have been mollycoddling Conservatives for far too long. They are making everything worse for the majority of us and should be made to pay. They could talk secession all they want, but I think that, for these Traitors (and I truly believe they are such), they should be given the “Man Without a Country” treatment.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Edward Everett Hale’s 1863 short story, it tells of a man who repudiated the United States and was sentenced to be passed from ship to ship, never landing on American (or any foreign) territory as long as he lived. Also, he was deprived of access to news about his country. You can read the story at Gutenberg.Com by clicking here.

Sunday Movie Interlude

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Ben Affleck, Star and Director of ARGO

It’s so rare for me now to see a film that is currently playing—and by the look of it, it’s nearing the end of its run—that I thought I would write about it. What makes it doubly rare is that both Martine and I liked the film.

When I asked her as we walked out of the theater whether she liked the film, Martine answered that she thought it was all made up. Then she mentioned she knew one of the six people who worked at the embassy who escaped imprisonment by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guard because her real name was used in the film: It was Cora Lijek, one of Martine’s algebra classmates from her high-school days in West Long Branch, New Jersey.

When we got home from the theater, we looked up the story of the Teheran embassy hostage crisis: Sure enough, Martine saw that the story of the six who hid out at the Canadian ambassador’s residence really happened. You can see for yourself by clicking on Wikipedia. The article there actually names names and gives details of which embassy employees were captured, which released early by the Ayatollah, and which escaped by hiding out as guests of the Canadian government.

As for the film itself, it was strictly an edge-of-the-seat tale, with a liberal admixture of humor, especially in the scenes with John Goodman and Alan Arkin as filmmakers. Ben Affleck plays the role of Tony Mendez, a CIA specialist in getting people across borders. He concocts a seemingly far-fetched idea of pretending to be a Canadian film crew filming a sci-fi fantasy epic in Iran and providing the six escapees with fake Canadian passports and new identities as members of the film crew scouting out locations for the upcoming production of a film to be called Argo.

The actual film called Argo is definitely worth seeing. If Affleck has any more films like this in his plans, he may well become one of our more interesting directors, of which there are so few in Hollywood.

 

The Endless Attributes of the BVM

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The Immaculate Conception of the BVM

The Immaculate Conception of the BVM

Today is the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Along with the Assumption of Mary, it is one of the more recently created holy days of obligation thanks to the inflammability of the Pope, itself a relatively recent attribute..

As one who has been through the Catholic school system (grades 2-12), I have been exposed to the rapidly expanding role of the Mother of God in Catholicism. There is a word for this: Mariolatry (Mary + Idolatry). It didn’t help that the priests who taught me at Chanel High School in Bedford, Ohio, belonged to a religious order called the Society of Mary. Just to make things more confusing, there were two Societies of Mary (both denoted with an S.M. after the priest’s name), the Marianists and the Marists. Our order were the Marists.

In addition to all the attributes of Mary, and the special devotions to her held by the Legion of Mary, to which I did not belong, there were a whole host of saints. Our school was named after St. Peter Chanel, a French Marist missionary who was martyred for his faith in Polynesia (on the island of Futuna) and eaten by cannibals—the only saint known to have suffered such a fate.

New saints are being created all the time. Just this year, Benedict XVI elevated Kateri Tekakwitha, an Indian maiden, to sainthood. Here she is:

St. Kateri Tekakwitha

St. Kateri Tekakwitha

Just so she doesn’t feel jealous, some new attributes for the Blessed Virgin Mary are even now being dreamed up by the Sacred Consistory of Adventitious Marian Attributes (SCOAMA) in the Vatican, including the ability to solve Rubik’s Cube puzzles in less than two minutes, miraculously finding parking places directly in front of whatever her destination may be, and being able to keep her girlish figure for over two millennia.

That reminds me of my friend Alain Silver, who was once offered a relic in Europe, nothing other than a piece of wood from the Blessed Virgin’s boat. Now I do not recall any tales from the Bible about Mary’s boating proclivities, but it could be true! 

Catholicism sometimes seems as cluttered as the Hindu or Graeco-Roman Pantheon, but I do not object to it. There are many aspects of Catholicism about which I feel nostalgic, though the statutory rape of altar boys and attempts to dictate what is and what is not sinful regarding human sexuality are not among them. But when I get troubled and confused, I simply return to my special devotion to the Sacred Multiplicity of the BVM.

The Brazilians Love Me

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Brazilian Samba from Rio

Brazilian Samba from Rio, Of Course!

To be more precise, Lista de Email loves me. I get at least one comment a day from them, from a sports website in Portuguese at http://www.boliche.com.br. They always have something nice to say, though it is so nonspecific that I could be talking in my web postings about roasting nude Brazilian women on a spit and they would be making the same vaguely encouraging comments.

If the intent was to get people to visit their website, well, you can click on the link above and make them happy. In the meantime, I will continue to erase all their comments from my website lest I appear to be a bookie from Sao Paulo. I don’t think I am, but maybe I’m wrong.

In the meantime, the Lista de Email siege continues unabated. I’m preparing the boiling oil, and, if they really rub me the wrong way, it will be time to fetchez la vache.

 

“You Are Here to Risk Your Heart”

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.—Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP

Bucket List

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The Inca Ruins at Machu Picchi

The Inca Ruins at Machu Picchu

Every once in a while, I take stock of places I would like to visit, despite the fact that the amount of time I have remaining looks ever more finite. What is particularly difficult for me is that Martine is afraid of going to most of the places on my bucket list, whether for reasons of health (mosquitoes, altitude sickness) or because of socio/political prejudices (Russia, Turkey).

In random order, here are ten places I would give my eye teeth to visit:

  1. The Inca ruins at Machu Picchu in Peru, plus several of the archeological sites near Cuzco.
  2. The Trans-Siberian Railroad from Moscow (if I had the time and money, from London) to Vladivostok.
  3. Visiting Greek ruins in Turkey, Italy, and—oh, yes—Greece.
  4. Pompeii and Herculaneum, for a look at an ancient world buried by a volcanic eruption.
  5. When I went in 2001, I didn’t get a chance to see enough of Iceland, so I want more. And maybe I can add Greenland and the Faeroe Islands as well.
  6. The Shetlands and Outer Hebrides of Scotland.
  7. Argentina’s Iguazu Falls.
  8. A cruise on the Danube to see the lands of my forefathers.
  9. Mauritius and Réunion in the Indian Ocean because, well, I had to pick at least one tropical location.
  10. Chilean Patagonia, because Martine and I traveled through the Argentinean portions and loved them.

That’s a fairly long list, and I wonder how much of it I can get to. The biggest limiting factor, of course, is money. The type of travel I like is not cheap, even though I eschew luxury accommodations and five-star meals.

 

 

The Hamfisted Military of America

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Infantry in Viet Nam

Infantry in Viet Nam

The United States has probably the most powerful military in the world—provided, of course, that it is used to fight the battles of the Second World War over again. You know what I mean: Those large set-piece battles with penetrations, encirclements, flanking maneuvers, the whole West Point 101 ball of wax.

Too bad that the wars we have gotten entangled in since the Second World War do not play to our strengths. One doesn’t need a college degree in military science to appreciate the following factors:

  1. Whereas the people of the United States know nothing about foreign languages and cultures, all cultures know a great deal more about us than we know about them.
  2. Because our news media blares all around the world, guerrilla fighters know when the American people are tired of a war and want to end it.
  3. If the “bad guys” a.k.a. “freedom fighters” want to win, they just have to blow up one or two Americans to smithereens every day or so. Just so long as every news cycle has some bad news in it.
  4. The nationals who have allied themselves with the American forces are highly suspect as to their allegiance. The ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam), for instance, acted as intelligence for the North Vietnamese. (Guess why so many incidents of “terror” in Afghanistan are committed by fighters wearing the uniforms of Karzai’s army and police.)
  5. Before long, the American forces will be confined to “Green Zones” or “strategic hamlets” or other fortified places where they could be picked off at will—usually just one or two at a time.

The thought keeps hitting me between the eyes: If we’re so stupid about it all and keep making the same mistakes over and over again, why do we even bother? What do we accomplish?

Unregenerate

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Speaker of the House Boehner

Speaker of the House Boehner

Excuse me, but didn’t the Republicans just lose a major election because they were as out of touch with their people as Louis XVI, the Tsar Nicholas II, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak ever were? Doesn’t that imply a period of self-examination, of wondering what they could have done wrong?

But no! The Republican house leadership is pretending they won the election. Speaker of the House John Boehner is pretending that Americans want billionaires and millionaires to pay less taxes because—by golly, by gosh!—most Americans want to be millionaires and billionaires. And where should the money come from that fuels the government? Just take it away from the poor and the Middle Class! Oh, you know, those 47-percenters who are such a drag on the rest of us.

I would urge President Obama to take Boehner out to the woodshed and liberally apply a two-by-four to his orange face. Nothing else seems to be getting through to him.

Look, if the Republican Party has a massive suicidal urge, that’s all fine and good. But don’t let them be like those inarticulate bastards who take an arsenal to their workplace and blow everyone in sight away before pointing a gun to their own empty heads. I think it’s time for an intervention.

Not Learned in School

Classroom

Classroom

I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.—Neil Gaiman, The Sandman