Abby has this great account of the Patriot’s Day parade in Concord. I decided not to go, because I’m still congested from having bronchitis in March. (After reading Abby’s report, I wish I had gone — she spends way too much time describing horses, and almost no time at all telling us about the canon, muskets, and re-enactment of the skirmish at the Old North Bridge.)
Category Archives: Arts & culture
Mr. Crankypants stimulates the economy
Last month, Mr. Crankypants received a notice from the Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service. It began:
“We are pleased to inform you that the United States Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed into law the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which provides for economic stimulus payments to be made to over 130 million American households. Under this new law, you may be entitled to a payment of up to $600 ($1,200 if filing a joint return), plus additional amounts for each qualifying child.”
What a great idea this is! When our economic stimulus checks arrive, Congress and the President know that we will all go out and spend all that money on consumer goods, thus stimulating the economy right out of the recession into which we are currently descending. Now, probably Mr. Crankypants should spend his economic stimulus check as follows:
- $278 to pay off the doctor’s visit for bronchitis back in March. (Mr. Crankypants can only afford a crummy HMO-with-deductible these days, which means every doctor’s office results in a big bill in addition to the already insanely high monthly health insurance premiums.)
- $100 put aside as a gasoline emergency fund. (With gas prices climbing up towards $4.00 a gallon, and no end in sight, it seems like good idea to have a little reserve fund on hand in case things get really tight.)
- The remainder put into retirement savings. (What with rising food prices and rising natural gas prices over the past few months, it has been impossible to put as much money into retirement savings as usual.)
But Mr. Crankypants knows that none of these expenditures will help stimulate the economy out of the recession. Consumer goods! That’s what we’re supposed to buy! Our economy runs on consumerism! Being a true-blue patriotic American, here’s what Mr. C. will purchase to stimulate the economy:
- One month trip to California, to clear out the last of the bronchitis.
- Brand-new hybrid car that gets 50 mpg, to beat those high gas prices.
- Vacation home on Nantucket Island, to provide retirement security.
With all these great consumer purchases, Mr. C.’s economic stimulus purchases will total more than $600. Surely Congress and the President understand that they are dealing with a true patriot, and so will fund the balance of these purchases. Why, if every American spent as much money as Mr. Crankypants, the recession would be over! Hooray for Mr. Crankypants!
William Howard Taft Attack Ad
In the 1908 U.S. presidential election, William Howard Taft was attacked for his Unitarianism. He refused to respond to the attacks, and won the election. But imagine if his opponents had had TV attack ads in their arsenal….
A note about the historical facts behind this attack ad….
The [1908 presidential] campaign was notable for the vicious attacks on Taft’s Unitarianism, particularly in the Midwest. Evangelical Protestants, in a flood of letters and newspaper articles, accused him of being an infidel, a Catholic, etc. His religion was no secret. He attended All Souls Church faithfully. Roosevelt and others responded sharply to the attacks. Following his own instincts, as well as the advice of the President, Elihu Root, and other Republican leaders, he said nothing himself in response. Bryan did not attack Taft personally, but he would not criticize those who did, thereby implying that he agreed with them. (Link.)
Any resemblance between the content of this attack ad, and attacks on the religious liberal running in the 2008 U. S. presidential primaries, is entirely intentional. 1:27.
Note: Although blip.tv is now defunct, I had a copy of this video and uploaded it to Vimeo. Click on the image above to view the video.
PodCamp Boston 3 announced
PodCamp Boston 3 will take place July 19-20, 2008 at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA. From the email announcement: “PodCamp Boston 3 will be two days of great conversations, knowledge sharing, and insights into the leading edge of new media.” No lie.
You can register at www.podcampboston.org/register — I’ve already registered. I was at PodCamp Boston 2, and it was a great opportunity to extend my knowledge about new media. Hope to see some of my Boston-area readers at PodCamp this summer — do let me know if you plan to attend.
Easter egg
In anticipation of Orthodox Easter (which will be on April 27th this year), I decided to hide an Easter egg on this site. If you find it first, I will send you chocolate, enough to make it worth your while to solve this puzzle. There are at least three ways to find the Easter egg.
Rules to win chocolate: Follow the instructions that appear at the Easter egg precisely, then return here to post a comment saying you’ve found it. First comment (judged by time stamp on comment) gets chocolate. There is a possibility for a second prize winner, and there are instructions at the Easter egg for claiming second prize (also chocolate). When you comment, be sure to enter your correct email address, because that is how I will reach you to find out where to send the chocolate.
If you find the Easter egg, and you want to talk about it in the comments here, please use the ROT-13 cipher so you don’t spoil things for those who wish to find it on their own.
And yes, I know this puzzle has absolutely nothing to do with the purported purpose of this blog.
True confessions
As a child, I was not particularly nice. From about age 8 to about age 16, I thought practical jokes were funny. I was particularly evil on April Fool’s Day. My April Fool’s Day “jokes” included the following:
- On the kitchen sink, taped down the handle of the spray thingie, and aimed it so that when anyone turned on the main faucet they would get sprayed.
- At breakfast time, added blue food coloring to the milk. Just enough so that they didn’t actually notice it until they poured the milk onto their cereal, at which point they suddenly realized everything was light blue. (N.B. I have never put milk on my cereal.)
- Put light coating of Vaseline on the toilet seat of the bathroom used primarily by my older sister. Resulting slipperiness blamed on my younger sister, who was then only two years old, who was assumed to have been playing with diaper rash ointment.
My own memories of my practical jokes fail at this point, mostly because I’d just as soon forget what a jerk I was.
So now it’s true confessions time:– What April Fool’s Day jokes, of which you now repent, have you played on others?
Reading Trollope
Needing a good novel to occupy my attention, I happened across Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children. It has turned out to be a good book for me to read right now. Trollope is gentle with his characters:– he makes you see their deepest motivations; and he shows you when they lie to themselves or misjudge the people around them; but he is gentle with them, and you feel that you want to know them. In his autobiography, Trollope writes that his characters lived for him, or that he lived with them, and that he liked them. He had enough affection for them that he sometimes couldn’t kill them off even when the plot demanded it, and the same characters appear in novel after novel because (he says) he liked them that much.
I don’t read Trollope for his prose style; his prose is adequate but sometimes the seams show. Nor do I read Trollope for his plots, for his plots can be a little too creaky. But I do find myself caring for his characters. I still get upset when I think about the ending of The Small House at Allington, because I cared about the characters.
Too many novelists (especially recently) do not treat their characters well:– they treat their characters as disposable entertainment modules, or as commodities, or as inferior beings, or as superstructure upon which to hang a plot, a concept, or a philosophy. Too often this is the way the world treats real human beings:– as disposable, or as commodities, or as inferior beings, or as superstructure on which to hang political power. I suspect the real reason I wanted to read Trollope right now is because of the ongoing presidential election campaign, in which the candidates seem to treat the United States populace as mere pawns, things to be polled, bought, and moved about on a political chessboard; this political campaign is not being gentle with anyone.
Water cooler conversation
“Hey, didja see it on YouTube?”
“What?”
“That crazy preacher guy. You know, the religious leader that presidential candidate follows?”
“Oh yeah, him.”
“What a nut case. Ya know what he said? He said, ‘You impostors. Damn you! You slam the door of Heaven’s domain in people’s faces.’ [1] What’s up with a preacher saying ‘damn you’? Isn’t that swearing?”
“Huh. I didn’t know he said that.”
“Yeah, doesn’t it sound like he’s a communist or something? I saw this other video clip where he said, ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.’ [2] Hey, in my church I learned that you gotta earn your daily bread. This preacher sounds like a goddam Commie who wants to give everything away to homeless.”
“Jeez, he sounds like a radical nut.”
“You don’t know the half of it. He also said the peacemakers are children of God. [3] You know what that means — he’s one of those anti-war nuts that wants us to pull out of Iraq and leave it to the terrorists. Anyway, that’s what Brush Limburger said on his radio show.”
“Christ, that’s pretty bad.”
“Well, it gets worse. If you look at those picture of him, he looks like a hippie nut, with that long hair braided down his neck. And I’m telling you, he doesn’t look exactly white, if you know what I mean. Like maybe he’s Middle Eastern, where all these terrorists are coming from. [4]”
“Hoo, boy. You think the guy is a terrorist?”
“Hey, all I know is he doesn’t like us Americans. There was this other YouTube clip of him preaching, and he said, ‘How much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?’ [5] You can lay money on it that he wants to bring down the American government. [6]”
“Man. Thanks for telling me all this.”
“Yeah, well, I’m just trying to keep America safe. No way am I going to vote for anyone who follows a religious nut like that — I’m a good law-abiding Christian, not some kind of Commie peacenik who wants to bring down the American government.”
“They should just execute guys like that.”
Notes:
[1] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 23.23, Scholar’s Version translation.
[2] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5.4, King James Version.
[3] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5.9, from the King James Version.
[4] Scholars generally agree that Jewish men in Jesus’s time wore their hair long and braided; as for Jesus’s skin color, it could have been a light to medium brown.
[5] Words of Jesus of Nazareth, Mark 9.19, New Revised Standard Version.
[6] Not to belabor the point, but Pilate accused Jesus of being “King of the Jews,” i.e., a possible political threat to the government.
My take on Jeremiah Wright
Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired minister of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, strikes me as the best kind of prophetic preacher, someone who speaks without sugar-coating his moral and religious message for the comfort of his listeners. Jeremiah Wright now has the misfortune of being Barack Obama’s former minister, and Wright is being trashed because he preached a prophetic message, a few seconds of which have been replayed as sound bites on national media in recent days.
But preachers have to answer to religious standards, not political standards. We are not bound to preach patriotism for the United States, we are bound to preach the permanent truths that we find in our religious traditions. It may not be politically acceptable to do so, but we preachers at times may be called to point out that our country cannot legitimately take the moral high ground until we face our own moral failings with candor. And we prophetic preachers may find ourselves called to proclaim, for example, that ongoing racism demonstrates that some white Americans do not treat their neighbors as they themselves would like to be treated. No one likes to hear that they have moral failings; this is one reason why some of the things we preachers say are not appreciated.
Politicians, on the other hand, have a very different task from preachers. Politicians do not speak prophetically; they speak in order to build political consensus. As a preacher, I am not surprised when I hear Barack Obama trashing Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. Wright preaches a religious truth: Our country has done moral wrongs, and those of us who are religious persons need to engage in repentance and forgiveness for those wrongs. Obama’s political truth is different; he needs to distance himself from Wright and build a political consensus.
It should be obvious by now that I’d rather hear Jeremiah Wright preach than Barack Obama speak. As a preacher, I might want to take Obama to task for sugar-coating our country’s moral failings. But then, I guess I should accept that he’s only a politician and thus is in the business of sugar-coating moral truths (from my point of view, anyway).
One last point: I wonder why we have not heard about Hillary Clinton’s minister, and John McCain’s minister. If I had a presidential candidate in my congregation, I trust they would be embarrassed by some of the moral stands I have taken; if they weren’t embarrassed, I would take that to mean that I had been sugar-coating moral truths.