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The Great Books perspective on Harry Potter

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There’s an interesting article up on Touchstone by a chap named John Granger, the author of several books on Harry Potter who’s a graduate of the University of Chicago, analyzing Rowling’s books as “the ‘shared text’ of the twenty-first century.”  This is a more significant statement than it might seem, coming from a former student of Allan Bloom, who argued “that ‘shared books’ are the foundation of culture, politics, and individual thinking; as such, Granger is arguing—quoting Chuck Klosterman in Esquire—that

Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture.

Klosterman thinks that’s a bad thing, but Granger strongly disagrees:

Before meeting Allan Bloom and, through him, the Western canon, my friends and I were a sarcastic and self-absorbed, if good-hearted lot, nourished on stories that were only diversion and dissipation. I have to think my children are better prepared and more willing to embrace that tradition than I was because of their years of instruction at Hogwarts castle. . . .I struggle to think of any fictional work of the last two or three centuries that had the potential to shape the cultural and political agendas of its time as this one does. Dickens’s crusading social novels? Uncle Tom’s Cabin? The Jungle? Harry Potter differs from these in that the others ignited a latent Christian conscience. The Potter novels help foster one into existence. . . .From this text, we can build a conversation about virtue and vice, and about what reading does to the right-side-up soul. From it, too, we can take an invitation to go on to even better books—ones that our grandparents’ great-grandparents had in common, and others that our children may one day write. Hasten the day!

It’s an interesting argument, and I think he may be on to something.  It’s certainly worth considering seriously.

I hope there are no skeletons in the Obama closet

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because Rod Blagojevitch is going down, and he’s going down hard; and unlike Tony Rezko, who kept his mouth shut after his conviction when the government tried to roll him, I don’t think Blagojevitch has the necessary selflessness or nobility of character to take whole hit himself. Indeed, as Rosslyn Smith notes,

Blagojevich may have more reasons that the obvious reduction of sentence to offer additional political scalps for Patrick Fitzgerald’s trophy wall. Hell hath no fury like a sociopath who sees himself on the losing end of a power struggle.

If he thinks Barack Obama can be one of those scalps, I have little doubt Blagojevich will wave it in Fitzgerald’s face, for whatever he can get out of it, and just for the sheer pleasure of the thing; in fact, even if he doesn’t have anything on the president-elect, I suspect Blagojevich may try to bring him down anyway. I hope he doesn’t, but this is Illinois politics, and particularly Chicago politics . . . you just never know for sure. Let’s hope Senator Obama did indeed come through the Chicago machine clean, and that his former colleague doesn’t have anything to use against him; if not, we’re all in for a really bad time.

The road to recovery begins with unsparing self-criticism

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and J.R. Dunn of American Thinker has done a wonderful job of helping start that process for the Republican Party, stating bluntly, “The GOP Must Take Out the Trash.”  It’s an excellent piece (though I think his comments on the Democrats are overstated, that doesn’t invalidate his points about the party of elephants), and I commend it to your attention.  I particularly appreciate Dunn’s point that even for conservatives,

voting for the Democrats in 2008 was a rational act. Not a very smart act, and in the fullness of time definitely to prove a mistaken one. But rational because the alternative was to vote for the party of Ted Stevens, Larry Craig, Duke Cunningham, Mark Foley, and a gaggle of beggars drooling for earmarks and willing to throw small children onto train tracks to get them. In 2008, the party of Trash went up against the party of Change. That brand of Change is no doubt empty, specious, and dangerous, but you can’t argue with the fact that it smells better than trash.You pay a price for tolerating trash. Perhaps not an obvious one, perhaps not an immediate one, but you always pay a price. The GOP is now paying that price, after getting its wakeup call in 2006 and refusing to roll out of bed. As for current efforts at reform, everything else is on the table except this one factor, despite the easily comprehended fact that everything else will be totally irrelevant if this one factor is not dealt with. Corruption cannot be ignored. As has been demonstrated time and again this past decade, sane, moral, and intelligent voters will not settle for a party comprised of the reprobates that have populated the GOP in recent years.

And though Dunn doesn’t mention Sarah Palin, I want to note that this is one of the major reasons I support her:  taking out the trash is a major part of her political MO, and of her reason for being in politics.

Wise words on pride

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Pride is a blossom of ashes—bitter in the mouth, sharp to the nose, stinging to the eyes, and blown away on the first wind from the mountains. Plant no pride, lest you harvest shame.—Proverb of AltiplanoThis proverb (and the whole society of Altiplano) comes from Elizabeth Moon’s novel Once a Hero; Moon’s one of the better writers of military science fiction around, and this is one of her best. I note the irony of posting a proverb from a fictional society so soon after posting the title sequence for a non-existent sitcom, but for all that it was created in the service of a Secondary World (to use Tolkien’s term), it has the ring of old truth, and is well worth remembering.

Obama’s Senate seat up for auction—get your bids in now

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Even by the standards of Illinois politics, this is a big one: this morning the FBI arrested Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, on federal corruption charges. Perhaps the most staggering part of the indictment is that, as U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald put it, “Blagojevich put a ‘for sale’ sign on the naming of a United States senator.”

Blagojevich is accused of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy, including alleged attempts by the governor to try to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama in exchange for financial benefits for the governor and his wife. Blagojevich also is accused of obtaining campaign contributions in exchange for other official actions.

It’s no secret that the president-elect wants his longtime adviser Valerie Jarrett named to his Senate seat; apparently, Blagojevich was irate that his former colleague wanted him to do so without offering him anything in return, referring to President-Elect Obama in highly profane and unflattering terms. According to the story in Politico,

Federal prosecutors allege that Blagojevich explored one possible quid-pro-quo—he’d appoint a top adviser to Obama in exchange for Obama giving Blagojevich the post as as secretary of health and human services. The indictment makes clear the Obama adviser is Valerie Jarrett, now an Obama White House aide.“Unless I get something real good . . . I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying,” Blagojevich was taped saying on Nov. 3, the day before Election Day.Blagojevich, a Democrat, added that the Senate seat: “is a . . . valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing.”

None of this, as Fitzgerald was careful to point out, suggests that President-Elect Obama is in any way guilty of anything; the fact that Blagojevich was trying to wrestle some sort of benefit out of him doesn’t mean that he or any of his staff were guilty of anything, and there appears to be no reason to think they were. If anything, it appears that they responded to Blagojevich’s demand for some sort of bribe by ending the conversation. That sets them apart from some of the other people Blagojevich was considering appointing to the seat, since at least one of them offered money “up front” for the job. (Update and correction: that candidate has now been confirmed to be Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), but the only evidence so far that he or any of his associates offered Blagojevitch money is the governor’s own statements, which have not been independently corroborated.)This whole fiasco certainly sheds light on the political milieu through which Barack Obama rose to power, but the real import here has nothing to do with him, but rather with his successor: with the indictment against Blagojevich, who’s going to appoint the next junior Senator from the state of Illinois?HT: Power LineUpdate: You know things are getting bad when the lolcats are laughing at you:
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The root of disorder

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If we’re going to deal with life in any truly productive way, we need to begin by facing and accepting the reality that this world is neither what we want it to be nor what it was meant to be, and neither are our lives. It wasn’t always this way. God created the world good, in harmonious order, blessed with everything necessary for life. He made us in his image and gave us the world to manage and care for, to tend and steward for its benefit and our own; he created us for relationship with him, to know him and love him as our Creator and ultimate Father. All he asked of us in return was to accept his authority—to accept that he’s God, and we’re not.That’s why, when the enemy wanted to bring us down, he started where he did. What was the bait he used on Adam and Eve? No, contra Woody Allen, it wasn’t about sex; rather, it was about pride, and the desire to escape that authority. The serpent’s temptation was simple: “Do this and you will be like God. You won’t have to trust him to tell you what’s right and wrong—you’ll be able to decide that for yourselves.” You will be like God. Why was that the first temptation? Because the keystone of the created order was, and is, that God created everything and rules over everything, and all of his creation finds its proper place under his authority. To disobey, to reject his authority, was to break that order and plunge creation into chaos. We cannot find our way out of that chaos on our own, no matter how hard we try, because as long as we’re trying to do it on our own, we’re still contributing to the problem. The only way out is to surrender our desire for autonomy—our desire to be gods of our own lives—and let God lead us.(Excerpted, edited, from “Out of Chaos, Hope”)

God uses waiting

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Advent is a season of waiting. It’s about waiting for God’s redemption, for his promised deliverance from the power of sin and death. It’s about learning to wait faithfully and patiently, trusting God to keep his promise; it’s about preparing ourselves to celebrate Christmas by using the time leading up to that celebration to examine our hearts and discipline our impatience. Especially in our broadband microwave instant-oatmeal society, it’s about stepping back from our culture’s emphasis on fasterfasterfaster and learning to slow down, to understand that just because God doesn’t give us what we want rightnow doesn’t mean he isn’t at work; it’s about learning to understand the work he does in our lives while we wait.And it’s about learning to understand the importance of trusting God in the waiting, and for the waiting. The Exodus gives us a great example of that. You may remember the story of how Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt, and eventually rose to power as the right-hand man of the Pharaoh, the king of that nation; and how in a time of famine, Joseph’s father and brothers and their whole household came down from Israel to live in Egypt. For a long time, this worked out well, and Joseph’s family grew into a large and flourishing tribe, known as the Hebrews; but then a Pharaoh came to power who hated and feared them, and made them slaves as the first step in destroying them. They cried out to him to deliver them, and did he swoop down right away and set them free? No. People were born in slavery and died in slavery. The Pharaoh who first enslaved them died, and his heir took the throne, and their slavery continued. But in the proper time, when everything was right, God acted, and they were set free.And notice who he used: Moses. Though a Hebrew, Moses grew up in the palace as Pharaoh’s grandson; he was a golden boy. On the one hand, he could have settled in to his position as royalty, turned his back on the people from whom he came, and joined the oppressors; certainly many, many people in his position would have done so, given the chance, and many throughout history have. He didn’t do that. On the other hand, if he was going to be the one to free his people from slavery, you might have expected that he’d do that from his position of influence, as one of the heirs of the man who held the reins of power. That didn’t happen either. Instead, Moses’ life went all wrong: he let his anger get the best of him and killed an Egyptian who was beating one of his fellow Hebrews, and ended up having to flee to the desert to avoid being put to death. He had it all, he had the perfect opportunity to do whatever he wanted to do, and instead he ruined the whole thing—or so it must have seemed at the time—and left himself no choice but to run for his life. Sure, his early life had seemed promising, but he’d squandered that promise, and now he’d spent forty years out in the wilderness tending sheep. He was a nobody, a has-been, a footnote to history. He was a sermon illustration in the temples of Egypt on what happens when you lose your temper. That’s all.Except, he still had one thing: he still had faith in God, for whom he had chosen the side of his enslaved people over the side of luxury and privilege to begin with. He spent those forty years in the desert waiting, and maybe he still had ambitions or maybe he figured that he’d be a shepherd in the wilderness for the rest of his life, but he never stopped believing that God would be faithful to set his people free from their slavery in Egypt; and so when the time was right, God came to him and said, “Moses, I’ve chosen you to go tell Pharaoh to let my people go.” To be sure, Moses argued with him, but in the end, he went and told Pharaoh to let his people go; and in the end, Pharaoh didn’t really, but God delivered them anyhow, with Moses leading the way.There’s an important lesson in this, I think: when we’re waiting for God’s deliverance—from whatever we might need him to deliver us from—our waiting isn’t wasted time, and it isn’t unnecessary. It’s God preparing the ground, and preparing us—not only for our own deliverance, but to be his agent of deliverance for others as well. This is how he works, in this time between the times, when Jesus has come to begin the reign of God on earth but not returned to complete that work; he has left us in place here as his body, the body of Christ, his hands and feet through whom he works to carry on his ministry. What God is doing in us and for us isn’t just about us; as we wait for the answers to our prayers, he’s lining things up to answer them in the proper time, but he’s also preparing us to be the answer to other people’s prayers. We wait, not only for God to deliver us, but for him to work through us to deliver others; and even the waiting is part of his work.(Excerpted, edited, from “Deliverance”)

The best ’80s sitcom that never was

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Neil Gaiman recently posted the news:

Like all of you, I believed that all episodes of the mid-80s Jonathan Coulton sitcom MONKEY SHINES (in which I guest-starred as the irascible drunken writer next door) had been wiped and lost for good. A great loss to the world of entertainment, and to fans of Paul and Storm (who actually got their start on the show, and not, as most trivia articles claim, as the pair of bloodsucking dentists in that X-Files episode).People talk about Bosom Buddies, Cheers, The Golden Girls and then the ones who were there say “. . . and Monkey Shines,” and the room falls silent, pondering the magnitude of the loss.So I was amazed when I heard that the title sequence had been rediscovered.

Here’s the story from Paul and Storm:

Jonathan Coulton’s short-lived sitcom “Monkey Shines” had an extremely brief run on ABC in 1985; it was cancelled during the first commercial break of the first episode, and was ordered destroyed by then-ABC President Grant Tinker. The show slowly developed a cult following through the years, however but although numerous rumors of bootleg recordings of the show circulated, they all proved to be hoaxes or, in several cases, episodes from season 3 of “Felicity”.In early 2008, in a sub-basement of the Yale University anthropological studies department, researchers unearthed a Betacam master video recording of the pilot episode opening credits. (Unfortunately, the remainder of the episode was apparently recorded over with footage of the Yale Whiffenpoofs “1991 Holiday Jamboree Sing-a-bration”) To date, this remains the only authenticated footage from “Monkey Shines”.

Without further ado, the title sequence from the infamously obscure sitcom Monkey Shines:

For those of you wondering what’s going on here, this is the original explanation:

“Monkey Shines” is Jonathan Coulton‘s entry to the Round 1 Challenge of the song writing competition, Masters of Song Fu.The Round 1 Challenge was announced on May 20, 2008. The challenge was:

You must do a song in the style of a classic television show. Not only that, but this song is the theme for a fictional television show about yourself (or your band). By “classic television show” theme song, we mean the type of themes found in shows from the 1960’s – 1980’s (ie Gilligan’s Island, Cheers, The Fall Guy, Diff’rent Strokes, Welcome Back Kotter, Greatest American Hero, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Facts Of Life, Green Acres, Gimme A Break, The Monkees, etc.). Your theme song must include both lyrics and music. It must run no shorter than 30 seconds, and no longer than one (1) minute.

Jonathan included the pitch for his “show” in announcing the song on his blog:

I am a stuffy, middle aged bachelor with an enormous inheritance. The monkey is a charming but unpredictable rake, who is also a master thief. In the pilot episode he is arrested while trying to steal my collection of jewels. He charms the judge, who much to my dismay orders that as a condition of his probation, the monkey must become my butler. Hilarity ensues as we try to live together, each of us coming to learn and appreciate the other’s perspective on life.