“Long before the storm, New Orleans was by almost any metric the worst city in the United States – the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy, the most corrupt and brutal cops. Yet a poll conducted a few weeks before the storm found that more New Orleanians – regardless of age, race, or wealth – were ‘extremely satisfied’ with their lives than residents of any other American city.” – Dan Baum, from Nine Lives, Death and Life in New Orleans.
New Orleans in a nutshell.
06-Mar-09Taking on “Award-winning Architecture.”
02-Mar-09A friend of mine came up with the term “award-winning architecture” to describe the worst, most intellectual bits of modernism that blight our national landscape. He called them that because you can be certain that the worse they are, the more honored they had been by an intellectual elite completely out of touch with humanity (how we need more Dostoevskies, smart humanists to chastize the excesses of the money-slave intellectuals). On my trip down through the South I found plenty of these spaces now going to rot, malls that have been shuttered and will clearly never reopen.
Take a listen to James Howard Kunstler dissecting this phenomenon. Is he wrong at all? The whole lecture is worth listening to (about 20 min.), as it is, among other things, very funny. And at the end of it, you’ll have a sense of what you can do about it (like participate, yourself, in the vitality of places like New Orleans worth living in).
Small government is big business.
02-Mar-09“One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat [the Democrats] is with better policy ideas,” – Rush Limbaugh
“Small government” is just a business slogan at this point. It should be given a trademark symbol like “Nodoby Beats the Wiz (TM)” to remind people that it’s just a slogan, with no content whatsoever. It’s an ad pitch for the entertainment industry known as talk radio. And that’s all talk radio is, another entertainment industry. Rush has a lot in common with “those Hollywood types” after all.
But there are lines, and you cross them at your peril. I remember getting angry in the 1990s when I heard the CEO of Ford say that he considered his line of work to be “the entertainment industry,” explaining why Ford’s main focus was car “features” rather than building good, cheap combustion engines that moved people from place to place safely and efficiently. “This guy’s an idiot,” I thought. “Someone’s going to let him have the entertainment industry and they’re going to take the automobile industry for themselves.”
I’ve taken my time writing in response to Tuesday evening’s political events – the speeches of Obama and Jindal – but the ground has not shifted in the intervening days. The best vocalized reaction from a pundit, I have found, comes from David Brooks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoKd9irM9dM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2ztrF253DE
Obama’s speech was muscular and serious, a ripening of all the maturity he showed as a candidate. And it was all the more impressive beside the pygmy performance of Jindal. Jindal’s condescension to his audience left me with the distinct impression that he has no brain – which I hear is not true, but he will now have to convince me otherwise. He certainly seemed to be without “guts,” i.e. a reservoir of real human experience with which to govern. Perhaps this failure will be good for him in this regard.
The Republican “answer” of “fiscal discipline and less government” is incoherent at best and more likely a flat out piece of lying doublethink. The reason it is incoherent is that the primary task most Republicans see for America in this generation is victory in the “war on terror” – a task which is presumably only suitable for government to undertake. This has been the cause of the huge increases in federal spending. You can’t have an empire without a large federal budget.
But the incoherence of the modern Republicans goes down deeper and deeper the more you plunge in. You cannot support both small government and big business. The reason why small government is good is because power corrupts – man is weak, greedy, and imperious – not trustworthy, in short – and so power is better off distributed. But the same philosophy argues against the concentration of power in big business as well. What is more, a small, powerless government cannot ride the horse of big, powerful business. The horse will purchase the rider, in that instance. Have we not seen that?
City of David.
02-Mar-09As I write this, it’s the last hour of March First, Saint David’s Day. The feast is named after a Welsh man, but the feast was appropriated by Saint David’s School (where I taught in years past) as the feast of King David. The Western Church typically does not call Old Testament figures “saints” nor celebrate them in the calendar, a most unfortunate omission, but Saint David’s School is a curious exception, being named after the man who ordered the death of Uriah.
On Wednesday, reading the text of the Miserere (a psalm of David) in mass, I was overwhelmed by his resemblance to New Orleans. Murderer and adulterer, but also God’s king and anointed; the slayer of Goliath and also the master of the lyre; the man who danced like a fool in front of the Ark and wept like a child at the death of his treacherous son Absalom. And the only full man in all of the Bible.
Dan Baum (another New Yorker in love with this city) said:
It’s different out here [outside of New Orleans]. We’re richer out here. We have more stuff, and we drive newer cars. It sounds corny, but life means something in New Orleans. Day-to-day living in New Orleans matters in a way it doesn’t out here, and you pay a price for that. It’s scary and stressful to live in New Orleans, but I don’t have to tell you that.
As with any life lived close to the mystery, and away from the rules.
Science and Religion.
27-Feb-09A very fine piece discriminating between the two: levelheaded and all true. The best written work I’ve seen from the sage Michael Holleran.
If by whiskey…
26-Feb-09Students of rhetoric should take a look at the 710 News’ post on the rhetorical technique of taking a term and defining it in two ways, one way being desirable and the other not. Does this have a name? Did the ancients do it? If it is modern, surely someone has explored modern rhetoric the way the ancients did their own, no? Where do we find that information?
http://710news.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/george-washington-plunkitt-and-the-if-by-whiskey-fallacy/
“If by wine you mean the water of life, the sweet breath of the vine, the blood of Christ, the sap of the hills, the consolatrix of Omar Khayyam, and the water of Hafiz, then I am all for it; but if by wine you mean the punch of the devil, the debauchee of the young, the ruination of the drunkard, the wrecker of homes, the affliction of the lonely, the disease of the priest, then I oppose it.”
Mardi Gras Overall.
26-Feb-09As a general rule, I found the Mardi Gras events to be a continual crescendo of size and diminuendo of intensity. “Extension is the complement of soul,” I believe is the relevant apothegm (if you keep on saying it to yourself enough over a period of years you will feel how much truth is in those six words). Krewe du Vieux was all Carnival soul, with its Priapic floats, wit, trangression, and fantastic music (the music never got better, and the small-street setting never was excelled). My second favorite night was Thursday night (Muses, Krewe D’Etat, Chaos), then almost in descending order: Friday, Saturday, Monday, Sunday, Tuesday. The parades waxed exoteric. But the social iron of the city did get hot and did flow a bit, and I met huge numbers of people during the last four days.
Next time, I would see more of Rex, and try to get some of the ritual that closes off Carnival. Fat Tuesday itself lacked concluding and pointed ritual. And what I would do myself is get every dainty dish I love most, pizza and cherries and pineapples and insalata caprese and the like, and have a great dinner and eat them all. For in the end, it is the “boeuf gras,” the fatted calf, which is slaughtered to close Carnival, and you want that kind of death and closure to start the next period of your life.
The whole experience does have spiritual value – Mass on Wednesday was one of the most moving Church experiences I’ve ever had. I found myself weeping at the gift of life again and again. But admittedly, that’s not just because of Carnival.
Mardi Gras Out of Context – 3.
26-Feb-09In the French Quarter, I saw a man standing at an intersection with a sign saying, GOD IS NOT FAIR. A man came up to him and asked him if he was with the Jesus people a few steps from him. And I thought to myself, “That is a great theological question. That is precisely the thing I want to know.”
He replied that he was not. But he could have been, and his sign might still have been the same.
A Hindu story I have received: a man asked his guru how many reincarnations it would take to reach enlightenment. The guru replied, “For those who love God, seven. But for those who hate God, only three.”
And a Christian saying: “In the first half of your life you fight the Devil. In the second half of your life, you fight God.” Is this not the story of Jacob, he who has wrestled with God?
Some sense on marriage.
04-Mar-09I’ve finally seen some internet writing on gay marriage that makes sense – a reader writing in to Andrew Sullivan, who makes a nice, tempered, intelligent reply. The problem with the gay marriage campaign has been that marriage is not a right, but, as the above reader describes it, “a social institution.” It is a socially approved form of relationship. Society has the right to confer or deny that approval. I believe that it is absolutely imperative for society to assert its power here. Gay marriage is (to me) not a threat to marriage in the least. But a court-established “right to marriage” is a huge threat, because the cultural shape of the institution will not stand against a “right” to marry, especially when marriage can also be interpreted as a crucial part of the free exercise of religion. Very fragile cultural growths such as the equality of women are built on institutions like monogamous marriage. The institution will grow and change over time – naturally and organically – but for a tiny minority to tamper with it invites problems. Sullivan deals with this perfectly – this, he says, is the reason why broad-based social change in attitudes is better than judicial fiat.