I’ve heard a lot of people complain about having Christmas decorations and Christmas music in all the stores starting the day after Thanksgiving, and I get where they’re coming from, but I don’t exactly agree; in particular, even if it is properly Advent, Christmas music at least has the potential to be far better than the normal run of store music. No, what I really object to is the kind of so-called “Christmas” music we usually get these days: to wit, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Jingle Bells,” “Jingle Bell Rock,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and this year, what might be the worst song Paul McCartney ever wrote (something called “Wonderful Christmastime”), spiced with the occasional Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby tune, in seemingly unending rotation, courtesy of various singers and bands. (The other day I heard a version of “Jingle Bell Rock” that was so awful and so over the top I broke out laughing; I think it’s the only positive experience I’ve ever had of that song, which I loathe to the very core of my being.)For crying out loud, if they’re going to play Christmas music at all, would it kill them to play music that’s actually about, you know, Christmas?
Arab leaders to Israel: “Take the shot!”
OK, now this is interesting: apparently, Israel is being encouraged to target and kill the leaders of Hamas—encouraged not by the West, but by Arab leaders. According to a report posted on Power Line,
Israel’s Maariv reports unnamed heads of Arab states that have passed diplomatic messages to Jerusalem encouraging Israel to kill Iranian funded and trained Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas’ firing of scores of rockets against Southern Israel during the current “cease fire”.What some Middle East policy analysts and diplomats in Washington may not realize with respect to increasingly optimistic Western assessments of Hamas as a diplomatic partner is that today’s news report in Israel reflects more the rule in Arab capitals than the exception. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak expressed his concern to the Arab press that “Egypt shares a border with Iran following Hamas’ May 2008 rocket assault on the Israeli city of Ashkelon with Iranian manufactured grad rockets.Earlier this month Egyptian Foreign Minister Egypt’s Ahmed Abul Gheit warned that Cairo would never accept an “Islamic emirate” in Gaza—a key stated goal of Hamas. Mohammad Abdallah Al Zulfa, member of The Saudi Shoura Council said yesterday on the Arab network’s Alhurra news program that “Iran is the big threat in today’s world, supporting all the terrorists from Hamas to Hezbollah to some other terrorists that we don’t know their names yet”. “Iran destabilized the region by supporting all the illegal activities and activists such as Hamas. . . .”
Sounds to me like the leaders of Israel’s Arab neighbors have figured out they’re next on the hit list and are hoping to use Israel as a proxy to do what they themselves dare not (because of the PR fallout, and the chance of Iranian retaliation).
Avery Cardinal Dulles, RIP
I’m not sure how I missed this, though part of it is that I had gone a week or two without checking the First Things website; his death last Friday wasn’t surprising, given that he was 90 years old and in poor health, but it’s still a loss for the church. As Joseph Bottum summarized his career,
Created cardinal for his theological work by John Paul II, Avery Dulles was one of the great figures of the twentieth century: a theologian, an intellectual, a teacher, a writer, a lecturer, and a kind and gentle man.In his long life, he wrote more than 700 articles and twenty-two books, and it is hard to imagine how anyone today can fill the roles he played in the Catholic world and American public life. As the disease that took his life progressed, his final months were a trial that took away his powers to speak, write, and move. But he seemed, in those months, to live even more serenely, more spiritually, and more beautifully. May God welcome him home.
Bottum’s obituary of Cardinal Dulles expands this, and tells in brief the story of a remarkable life. It is a strange thing that the great-grandson of one Secretary of State (John Watson Foster), great-nephew of a second (Robert Lansing), son of a third (John Foster Dulles), and nephew of a Director of Central Intelligence (Allen Dulles) should become known not as a government official but as a Catholic theologian, but such was the mystery of God. A profound thinker and a man of grace both in his theology and in his life, he, like the pope who ordained him cardinal, represented the Roman church at its very best. Requiescat in pace, Avery Robert Dulles.
Carol of the Week
This great hymn by Isaac Watts is commonly miscast as a Christmas hymn, when Watts didn’t write it for Christmas and it really has nothing particularly to do with the birth of Jesus; it’s actually a better fit for this season of Advent, since what it’s really about is the Second Coming.
Joy to the World
Joy to the world! the Lord is come;
Let earth receive her King.
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing.Joy to the world! the Savior reigns;
Let men their songs employ,
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains,
Repeat the sounding joy.No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness,
And wonders of his love.Words: Isaac Watts
Music: Lowell Mason, from a theme by George Frederick Handel
ANTIOCH, 8.6.8.6.6.6.
An ice day
It’s definitely high winter in the Midwest. The heaviest weight of this storm fell north of us, but we got a respectable amount of ice last night, though the temperature did rise above freezing and start melting some of that this afternoon; it will be interesting to see what the weekend brings. Anyway, I thought I’d post a few pictures (the rest after the break), because as destructive as they can be, ice storms are beautiful, too.
That tree isn’t having a good year; it had one of its trunks (if that’s the right word for them) break off earlier this year, and now it’s lost another one to the ice:
There’s even a little green under the ice:
For Eli
I saw this in The Classic FM Pocket Book of Music, which I ran across at Dr. Kavanaugh’s house; this is the entry on the French horn:
A member of the brass family, if this instrument was uncoiled it would not only stretch for more than three metres, it would also give you something to do on a Sunday afternoon. Best not attempted during the quiet bit in a concert, though. Great composers for the horn include Mozart and Richard Strauss.
And just to be fair, here’s what they have to say about mine own instrument, the bassoon:
The bassoon is the lowest woodwind instrument of the orchestra. It looks something like a didgeridoo wearing too much jewellery, but with an espresso frother coming out of the side. In fact, just like espresso, it too comes in single and double varieties.
Government aid: the real “trickle-down economy”
Liberals react to times of conservative ascendancy in economic policy by deriding the “trickle-down economy”; even in times such as these which are far from that, you can see this derision lurking behind liberal critiques of the Wall Street rescue package. The irony of this is that, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the modern liberal approach to helping the poor is actually its own form of trickle-down economics—the only difference is that the substrate through which the money trickles is government rather than the private sector. This might seem like a minor difference, but it really isn’t. In the private sector, the people at the bottom are in the same system as the people in the middle levels; in the government sector, they aren’t. Thus, in the private sector, as the money trickles down to the folks in the lowest-paying jobs, it helps create new higher-paying jobs, opening up opportunities for those folks to move up the ladder and make more money. In the government sector, as the money trickles down to be paid out to clients, it also helps create new government jobs—which benefits people in government, but does not create opportunities for those on the bottom (in most cases, at least).Thus the key is that “trickle-down economy” is really a misnomer as applied to the private sector, because what really matters isn’t the movement downward but the opportunities it creates for movement upward as it opens cracks in the substrate. It is, however, an accurate descriptor of the government-assistance economy—and thus it’s here that we really hit the reality that expecting money to trickle down to those in need is a highly inefficient way to distribute it. As Michael Novak writes, citing Sowell, in the latest First Things (excerpted here—it’s not even up on the site yet),
if you add up all the money that Congress has designated for the relief of the poor, the total turns out to be more than would be required simply to give every poor family some $30,000 in cash per year. Another way to look at it: Most of the American poor already have significant income, if not quite enough to lift them above the poverty level. If one calculates the gap between the financial benefits they already enjoy and the full sum that would lift them above the poverty level, it turns out to be a much smaller amount than is currently designated to be spent for their benefit. As the economist Thomas Sowell writes, to try to feed the swallows by feeding the horses is an immensely inefficient way to get help to the swallows. The middlemen in poverty programs often fare far better than the poor. Direct cash grants might be far more efficient.
I think they would, especially since (as Barack Obama has already proposed, and George McGovern before him) the disbursement could be handled through the IRS; you’d want some sort of sliding scale at the top end so as not to provide people with a powerful incentive to remain officially poor, but a grant program like this that was funded by the complete abolition of the federal welfare bureaucracy would be, I suspect, both more efficient and more effective than the programs we have now. It would also have the advantage of transparency, and thus intellectual honesty, about what the government is really doing here: namely, taking money from some people to give to others. Doing both in terms of the tax code would provide much greater clarity about how much, and to whom, and on what basis. Given these advantages, I think this would be a proposal conservatives could gladly support.
Time for damage control?
According to the Chicago Sun-Times (your source for all the sordid details about Chicago politics that the media didn’t want you to know before November 4),
President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is reportedly on 21 different taped conversations by the feds—dealing with his boss’ vacant Senate seat!
Given Emanuel’s deserved reputations for smarts and toughness, it is likely he wasn’t approached by Blago on the pay-to-play conspiracy, but the prospect of blunt talk between the congressman and the governor about many subjects and people has to be unsettling to the president-elect and his most important aide.
Unfortunately for the incoming administration, once he’s indicted, Blagojevich is entitled to copies of all those tapes as part of the government’s responsibility to disclose all the evidence against him, which means that
the prospect of slow, selective leaking of parts of the exchanges is part of the calculation about political damage now underway at the office of the president-elect. The president-elect would be best served by calling on the U.S. Attorney to release any and all tapes between any of his advisor or staff and Blagojevich and his staff. Better to get all of the shop talk, however salty, out early and completely than drip by drip over the next few months.
It will be interesting to see if Barack Obama (or Rep. Emanuel) is savvy enough to do exactly that, or if the Obama team will instead follow the example of most politicians by turtling up and hoping for the best. In most cases, that’s a disastrous strategy which only maximizes the damage; however, given that during the campaign, the media made it work for the Obama team by sweeping everything under the rug as fast as they possibly could, they may well be tempted to try it again here. In this case, given that there’s a federal investigation involved, it isn’t likely to work, but you never know.
The overwhelming coming of God
—Mark 1:1-4For God to be born as a human being was a wonderful thing for this world; it was also a deeply perilous thing for us. John the Baptizer understood this, and the writers of the Scripture understood this, even if we too often don’t. That’s why we have this curious little thing here in Mark, which I highlighted in this post: he says, “As it is written in Isaiah,” and then he doesn’t quote Isaiah, he quotes Malachi. It’s only after he’s thrown Malachi in there that he gets to Isaiah. The folks who like to look for errors and contradictions in Scripture jump all over this one, but the truth is, this is no mistake.It is, rather, the first example of a structure Mark uses in a number of places in his gospel—scholars call them “sandwiches,” in a rare example of a technical term which is actually intelligible. By way of illustration, you can find another in Mark 11, in his telling of the story of the cursing of the fig tree. Jesus curses the fig tree, it withers, and he uses that to teach the disciples a lesson. But Mark doesn’t tell that story straight through; instead, he separates it, and in between, he puts the story of the cleansing of the temple. The cursing of the fig tree “sandwiches” this story. Mark does this to give added emphasis to the cleansing of the temple, and to tell us that these two events belong together—we can’t really understand one of them without understanding the other one.It’s the same thing here. Mark says, “As it is written in Isaiah . . . the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’” But he doesn’t leave this in one piece—he separates it, and in between the two halves, he puts Malachi 3:1. It’s jarring—intentionally so, I think—as an audience expecting the great promise-proclamation of Isaiah 40 (because what else would he be quoting, given the context? They knew their Scripture) gets instead the foreboding of judgment of Malachi 3, and the message that we can’t take Isaiah’s hope without Malachi’s warning.God came to earth, and is coming again, to deliver us from the power of sin and death, and to bring an end to all oppression and injustice; but we cannot imagine ourselves to be guiltless in this respect, and so as part of this, he comes to cleanse and refine his people, washing and burning away all our impurities. Thus Malachi asks rightly, “Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?” because even for those who love and fear him, his coming will not be easy—it will be overwhelming. He will come not to affirm us as we are as wonderful people, but rather to purify us—to complete the work of smelting away all the slag and the dross in our lives. In the face of that, who can stand? None of us. Not even one. The good news is, though, we don’t have to. As the singer-songwriter Sarah Masen put it, “The fool stands only to fall, but the wise trip on grace.” All we can do is cast ourselves on the grace of God, on the price paid for us by Christ on the cross; all we can do is lay all of ourselves at his feet and let him refine us and purify us until we can bear his joy, his love, his goodness, his holiness, his peace.(Excerpted, edited, from “Who Can Stand?”)
Birds, bees, and guinea pigs
Most days, the route I take to and from the church takes me past one of our town’s pet shops; and for the last while, one side of their sign has been advertising “BABY GUINEA PIGS & STARTER KITS.” Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t a starter kit for a baby guinea pig be a mommy and daddy guinea pig?Just wondering.