A Face in the Crowd

I see that as Ron Paul's Iowa numbers rise, the old story of his 1980s and '90s newsletters has reappeared, this time in The Weekly Standard. For those who may have forgotten, Paul had an (apparently lucrative) newsletter business during the period in question; a good deal of outrageous (racist, conspiracy-mongering, "anti-Zionist") material appeared in these newsletters. Paul claimed that this material was published without his knowledge, that he was angry when he found out about it, and that these items do not represent his views. (Even if he's telling the truth, that doesn't say much for his executive abilities.) As might be expected, the pro-Paul folks have denounced this "sad neocon hit piece," complete with lists of names (many of them Jewish) of The Weekly Standard's writers and editors and comments on their zeal to have America fight "their" (read "Israel's") wars for them.


Paul is an interesting phenomenon, an exponent of both a fundamentalist libertarianism and a paleoconservative isolationism. He has a fondness for conspiracy theories, as all too many paleoconservatives had and have. Among the latter, in the 1930s it was the conspiracy of the Jewish Bolsheviks and bankers (what are a few pretend political differences among Jews?) and their gentile tools to get the U.S. into a war in Europe, a conspiracy that reached its zenith when FDR (who these same folks alleged was a secret Jew) maneuvered the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor so that he could declare war on Germany. In the postwar period, among the heirs of the old American right, it was a strange combination of fear of both domestic Communist conspiracies and "entangling alliances" broad, often laced with  "anti-Zionism," and on the fringes, with Holocaust Revisionism (which began soon after the war).

Now, I don't know that Congressman Paul himself subscribes to the old-right position in all its details (though he seems to receive a lot of support from the followers of Willis Carto and has appeared in his publications). But Paul represents a certain mindset that is uncomfortable with the messiness of most human affairs; that sees (usually sinister) human intent in most of the bad things that happen in the world. For traditionalist Catholics, it's the Jews and the Masons; for the plebeian right, it's the "ZOG" and its racially inferior tools; for many on the left and the right, and apparently for Paul, as for his pal Alex Jones, it's the CIA and the Mossad and the Federal Reserve.

What appeals to many about Paul, I think, is what's seen as his honesty and directness. He opposes our imperial wars (how many are we fighting today?), the burgeoning domestic security apparatus, the increased regimentation of both the economy and of civil society. He may be right about one or all of these things. And even if he's wrong, you know that he's consistent, unlike the rest of the Republican field. But I think that clarity is bought at a very heavy price

It's perhaps the saddest commentary on the current state of the Republican Party that the only candidate around who seems to energize some at least of its cadres reminds one of no one so much as Charles E. Coughlin.

Eye of Newt

The other night my 10-year-old asked to use the iPod. She was having a harder time getting to sleep than usual (when it's hard enough), and music helps her to relax. But at that hour (almost 10 pm), the prospect of actually having to think while scouring the skillet was too much for me. After a few minutes of excavation, I found the little radio buried on my dresser, plugged in a pair of ear buds (or ear bud, as only one was working), and headed for the kitchen. Hockey games were on both of the local sports stations; hockey is a horrible radio sport, even worse than basketball, though I can at least work up a little interest in the Byzantine workings of the local b-ball franchises. So I pushed the button for the political talk station. At that hour, the usual parade of sneerers and shouters gives way to a host who, though his politics are not so different from the rest, is at least knowledgeable, civil, and well-spoken. And he doesn't take phone calls. I've never been able to understand the attraction of listening to the opinions of people who are no better informed than I am.

From http://www.havelshouseofhistory.com/

The first segment of the program concentrated on the Republican field in the presidential race. I was shocked—shocked, I tell you—to discover that Newt Gingrich was surging ahead of the pack. (I'd heard he was running, but I hardly thought he was a serious candidate.) Apparently Newt's giant intellect had quite blinded folks to his spotty personal record on the family values front. Now, Newt is a bright guy, no doubt, but even in his salad days as Speaker of the House there was something a little too slick about him for this writer. But I suppose that compared to Governor Romney, who has all the political charisma of his late father, Governor Romney, Newt pushes more of the correct ideological buttons and is less likely to put the public to sleep.

I hesitate to write about the rest of the field; suffice it to say that I can't see any of them standing on the Capitol steps taking the oath of office. Even those who are sensible on some issues are wacky on others. So far, I'm likely to pull the lever for none of the above. If only Homer Tomlinson were still around. Be sure to leave a comment on his wall.

Whee, Doggie!

I've gained a new appreciation for the words of the immortal Jed Clampett that head this post.

Last month we added a new resident to the six (seven in the summer) who share our two-and-a-half-bedroom apartment: a ten (now eleven)-month-old half yellow Lab–half golden retriever named Amsterdam. He's frisky, friendly, and housebroken. And so far, he's weathered the assaults of the other puppies in the house. He's an early Christmas present for child #2, who's wanted a dog for years.

Now, I'm not someone who's wanted a dog for years. I've always thought of myself as a cat person, though feline friends make my eyes itch and my sinuses throb. You know, little animals that keep pretty much to themselves, stay indoors, and catch the occasional mouse. So it's been a surprise to me that I don't just tolerate but enjoy snapping Amsterdam's leash onto his collar and heading up to the dog run to watch him cavort with his neighborhood species-mates. And it's truly a joy to have at least one member of the household who's glad to see me whenever I open the door. Whee, doggie!

The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that ’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe"

Good Stuff for Free

Last night I went to a lecture on the Apocalypse (the Revelation to John). It was part of the Theology in the City series at St.Vincent Ferrer (Lexington Avenue and 66th Street—the most beautiful church in New York), which runs through the spring on the first Monday of the month in the church hall. Details are here. Last night's topic was the temple. A very interesting study of the Jerusalem temple and its relation to our Lord. The presenter, Fr. Bruno Shah, O.P., is stimulating, enthusiastic, and edifying. If you're in New York, give it a try. I'll try to blog some more about this in the future.

The Conscience of a Post-Conservative

I came to political consciousness in 1960; undazzled by the light from Camelot, I worked in the local Republican storefront stuffing envelopes for ol' Tricky Dick. (Now there's someone who's also looking better—if only he hadn't been a criminal.) Four years later, having read The Conscience of a Conservative and now addicted to National Review, I was sitting in Madison Square Garden, a not-quite-fourteen-year-old, giving Murray Kempton dirty looks and singing, to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic,"

Comes a man from Arizona destined to be president,

And he's dedicated to the cause of better government,

Sworn to bring back law and order and restore democracy,

So all men shall be free.

Let's put Barry in the White House,

Let's put Barry in the White House,

Let's put Barry in the White House,

Let Barry carry on!

I quote from memory; even Google has no knowledge of this campaign classic.

In high school and the first couple of years of college, I was a big-government libertarian—national defense was one of the few permissible activities of the state, and I wanted a lot of it. A taste for T.S. Eliot, conversion to Christianity (at an Episcopal Church—this was thirty-one years ago) and the influence of college friends led me to traditionalism, mostly semi-serious: Booing Cromwell in the movie of the same name; waving a Union Jack at Queen Elizabeth II's bicentennial visit to New York; reading the Manifesto of Las Palmas at the annual Franco Day picnic; attending Panikhidas for the as-yet-uncanonized Russian imperial family. It was a relief to self-identify as a monarchist; it disarmed leftist acquaintances and allowed me to indulge an above-all-that cynicism about the party politics of the day. It was satisfying to talk about the necessary alliance of throne and altar, and the social reign of Christ the King. But behind the traditional gesturing was still the National Review paradigm: keep markets free and carry a big stick.

I may have kept the paradigm, but around about this time I stopped reading National Review. I couldn't work up much interest in its economic enthusiasms or its concentration on electoral politics. (For a while I switched to The New Republic, which at least had a robust and well-written book review section.) I still voted reliably Republican: Reagan, Bush I, Dole, Bush II (mea culpa). But I did so increasingly out of a sort of conditioned reflex, without enthusiasm. More and more, the level of political discussion was being set by radio call-in shows and snarky television panels. I stopped watching TV; I switched my radio listening to sports talk; I stopped reading the newspaper, except for (occasionally) the sports section. Even my online reading, when the net became the medium du jour, steered clear of news and political commentary. Party-political discourse seemed utterly predictable and hollow, devised to appeal to core constituencies obsessed with self-interest and/or single issues, consisting of vacuous slogans, trash-talking, and my-didn't-that-feel-good hyperbole flung at the opposition.

Now, I know that politics has always been a clash of interests in which nothing is too low if you can get away with it. But along with the hoopla went serious thinking and serious debate about fundamental issues. I suppose television is to blame, both for its reduction of thinking to sound bites and campaigns to horse races decided by gaffes, and for the cost of using it, which has made politics a game only the rich can play.

Well, all this is not news; everyone seems to complain about it, but like life in the Grand Hotel, nothing ever happens. But now we find ourselves in a global economic crisis, a seemingly endless series of short wars abroad, a "war" at home that has us willing to surrender more and more of our liberties for a no doubt false sense of security, and most troubling of all, an accelerating concentration of wealth in the hands of a few with a concomitant shrinking of the white-collar equivalent of the yeoman class and a loss of social solidarity. And all this is in the context of an increasingly intrusive and nanny state that seems equal parts Oprah and Nurse Ratched.

And so here we are,with a field of presidential candidates who shouldn't be running for president of the senior class and with the "most intelligent president ever," who has faded faster than the Cheshire cat (he has a charming smile, though) and seems almost completely ineffectual. And look around at the Congress. Are there any statesmen lurking there? And I'm not talking about Clay, Calhoun, and Webster; I'd settle for Bob Dole, Hubert Humphrey, and Sam Ervin.

And the "conservative movement"? What's left of that? The Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, Ayn Rand, Ron Paul, and the NRA? Frankly, these days I don't care.

Just put me down as a post-conservative. I'm not a liberal in the contemporary sense, which seems to mean a libertine socialist; while I must admit that I'm inclined to re-read a little Marx these days, I'm not moving that far to the left. Neocon? No, I've never had the hots for Woodrow Wilson. Libertarian? Whoever John Galt is, he's not me. Traditionalist? Not lately; I know something about history, and besides, I'm not that insecure. Fascism? That increasingly seems to be what we have now.

Here's my political credo in a nutshell: "O put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man, for there is no help in them."

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

Sic et Non

I'm the family dishwasher. When we were packing up my tiny studio apartment (with 6,000 books) before our wedding, DW-to-be opened my kitchen cabinets and was shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that they were filled with videos of 1930s and ’40s horror movies. The connubial division of labor was decided right there: She would cook and I would clean up.

Now, I don't have the spiritual chops to fill that dishwashing time with contemplative raids on the infinite or Zen exercises in Being Here Now. So to redeem the time, I listen to paranormal podcasts, theological disquisitions, Mormon colloquia, and lectures from iTunes U—the usual stuff—on the iPod I wrested from my oldest. Last night I was listening to a podcast on "Christ and Culture" from the folks at Reformed Forum, mostly OPC Presbyterians associated with Westminster Theological Seminary. (For the record, I am far from Reformed. Some of the favorite theological loci of Calvinists give me the willies. If this Catholic has any favorites among Protestants, it has to be the Lutherans—of which more anon. But I do like to broaden my horizons, and before I started listening to these guys a few years back, I had no notion of who Herman Bavinck, Abraham Kuyper, or Cornelius Van Til were. While I can't say they've become friends, they have taken a place on my notional reading list, though I'll probably be eighty-five, Deo volente, by the time I get around to them.)

Now the point of all this, if there is one, is that that podcast was full of dichotomies—the city of God vs the city of man, saving grace vs common grace, church vs state, divine law vs natural law—reflections, for some of the participants, of the "antithesis" between God and Satan, the elect and the damned.

Then this morning I started (again—maybe this time I'll get past Irenaeus) reading The Faith of the Early Fathers by William A. Jurgens, a three-volume catena of patristic passages. The first group of passages comes from the Didache, perhaps the earliest post–New Testament Christian writing. The first sentence of the Didache reads:

There are two ways, one of life and one of death: and great is the distance between the two ways.

Most of us, I think—and for better or worse, that includes me—are wary of such stark alternatives. Our post-Hegelian mindset inclines us to look for the synthesis that overcomes antitheses by transcending them. We search for a way to "live into the tension," to take a "broader" or "higher" view, to "nuance" the choices we're confronted with. "Black-and-white thinking" is crude or simplistic or, Times forbid, "fundamentalistic." The sic et non has given place to the coincidentia oppositorum.

So sometimes it's good to be reminded (even by Calvinists) that the search for synthesis has its limits. Because, in the words of noted theologian Bob Dylan,

You’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord,
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

Spleen—Political

I confess to not listening to the president's speech Monday night, nor to the replies from the Republican leadership. The summaries on the web were depressing enough. The two parties deserve each other, and, sadly, I'm not sure our perishing republic deserves any better.

It embarrasses me to admit I'm a Republican; it has for the last twenty years, ever since the debacle of the Clinton impeachment (no love lost for him, by the way, though he does look better and better in the wake of his successors). As for the Democrats . . .

We have spawned a political class that has little in common with us. Our elected legislators and our often unelected government minders are distinguished, not by party or principle, but by which trough they and their clienteles like to feed at. Some prefer the mash that keeps an unlikely coalition of unions, academics, and investment bankers fed; others dine with factory farmers, defense contractors, smokers of Atlas Shrugged, and talk-radio nitwits. No matter—there's always been plenty to go around, and if there isn't much today, the blue pigs and the red pigs can fight over who gets to devour the scraps.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

Okay, okay . . . I broke my promise. So sue me. No more talk: From now on, only action!

By Way of Introduction

I am a Secular Franciscan, a lay person who tries to live the Gospel according to the example of St. Francis of Assisi. (And who, in my case, does a rather poor job of it.) The name I use here is that of the Seraphic Doctor, St. Bonaventure, who, in addition to his teaching and writing, served as the Minister General of the Friars Minor and is regarded as their second founder.

Poverty, inner and outer, is the special charism of the Franciscans. Our founder is known as the Poverello, the Little Poor Man, the troubadour of his beloved Lady Poverty, his brothers are the Friars Minor, the lesser brothers. Disputes about the living out of the poverty he willed for his followers threatened for a long time to destroy the order, and finally resulted in its division.

All this is by way of background for a series of reflections prompted by the resistance to thinning out my library I've documented below. Over the course of the next week or two, in addition to the usual japery, I'm going to be exploring detachment, attachment, and the meaning of poverty in the life of a fairly self-centered, comfortably middle-class American, who, in spite of all that, calls himself a Christian.

Nailed

My dear wife took up the challenge of my May 25th post here. Since then, four bags of books have found their way to the Strand, another box has taken up residence behind the loveseat, the blockade in the bedroom has been dispersed, and a hundred and fifty CDs have found a more space-efficient home in binders. These cheering signs of progress, alas, have not quite dispersed the wifely thunderclouds: the two bedroom bookcases that are particularly neuralgic are still there, though somewhat less laden, and the other thousand or so CDs still await jewel case–free homes. (It's amazing how much those suckers weigh, even with the CDs and booklets removed).

Still, progress is progress, and given the emotional cost to yours truly, might perhaps be greeted with more enthusiasm.

Getting the Lead Out

Did I say I was going to blog more regularly? Well, this is better than once every couple of years. I'll post Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—at least. I promise.

Spring cleaning

My wife is a devotee of clean surfaces. Clutter distracts her, unsettles her, and makes her grumpy. Alas for her, she married a man who is both a pack rat and a stacker. I rarely throw anything out if I can think of the least excuse to save it, and view any available surface as a resource waiting to accommodate books, papers, and CDs.

Right now I'm in the midst of a Grand Dislocation: the spousal foot has come down, and come down hard, on all my iniquities: stacks, piles, clumps, and, of course, heaps have to go. Heart-wrenching decisions have to be made, and salty tears spot the covers of books read, reread, and unread, the accumulation of forty-five years.

Piled up (what else?) in front of the living-room wall of bookcases, they testify to spiritual pilgrimages (most of the Anglican books and some of the Orthodox books are going, while most of the Catholic books stay), jobs held (the publishing business is a bibliomaniac's paradise), enthusiasms of years gone by (the Buddhist books are almost all there), and self-imposed courses of study that never got past the intro phase (What can I say? I really did mean to learn Chinese.)

Still 0n the shelves is the evidence of lifelong obsessions: Mormonism (a particular source of uxorial unrest), esoterica Western and Eastern, Hasidism and Kabbalah. And there are still-growing collections I race against time to master, as if purgatory were a comprehensive exam: philosophy (Will I ever get through Fichte and on to Schelling and Hegel?), with the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin occupying a shelf and a half; theology, Barth and Balthasar in the lead; and biblical studies, Von Rad and Bultmann and Childs and a yard of unread commentaries; the case full of poetry. I'm fast running out of strategies to keep them hidden from wifely eyes. Double shelving? Of course. Closets? Just about full. Apartment living has its limitations.

For the unsentimental, ebooks beckon—like music, they occupy no space—but not for me; the pixel will never replace the page. The feel, the smell, the weight of a book are beyond the capacities of Kindle, iPad, or Nook. (Though if you want to give me one of those—especially the iPad—I wouldn't object.) So DW and I will continue our marriage-long struggle, the minimalist aesthetic of the Ryoanji temple versus the joyous prodigality of the Strand Bookstore. And I'm afraid I know who'll win in the end.

A Note from Underground

Well, it's been a long time—a year and a half, more or less
—since I last posted here. I won't try to tell you what's happened since then. Suffice it to say that the time has been eventful.

Now I have more time to post, more tranquility to think, and a real desire to write. The purpose remains much the same: to share what I'm reading, what's on my mind (often the same), and, I can only pray, a useful observation or two. Keep watching this space!