Now don’t frown. You know you’re panting to read it. :) :) 
The former Republican vice-presidential candidate has signed a deal to write her third book. After a memoir and a collection of speeches and writing about America, A Happy Holiday is a Merry Christmas will see Palin turn her attention to the over-commercialisation of Christmas.
It will, according to Palin, be “a fun, festive, thought-provoking book, which will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defence of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas”.
PS Sorry for the lack of proper headline. I have a box which says New Media Manager which is sitting right across where the headline goes…I thought I’d managed to squeeze the title in, but it’s having none of it..
I keep buying these War on Christmas books in the vain hope that they’ll tell me where to enlist. Maybe this time…
Headline looks fine to me, Di.
I took a look and played with the link, just for grins, but didn’t find a problem with the header. Did something change at your end?
It didn’t look right. Smaller than it used to be? Not so bold? Probably me
I do have the New Media Manager box fairly and squarely across where the title is typed in and it’s blocking the preview function…I can’t find how to get rid of it.
I’m glad you’re all right…Are you busy? We missed you.
It all looks fine now. It didn’t when I first did it. I edited, reposted and it still didn’t look right.
Oh well. Funny farm here I come.
I take it it will actually be written by the Ghost of Christmas Past?
As long as the haters don’t touch Good Friday, I’m okay with it all.
Squirrel,
WordPress won’t allow me to recommend that comment, as Somebody on the same LAN appears to have already done so. But I’m positively green envy*.
* Or should that nowadays be literally green?
Bim,
–Eliot, “East Coker”
If it would guarantee a few lines like that, you could nail me up.
Gunny,
Re: the new “Quotes of Note.” I’m prepared to cut Bergoglio about a centimeter of slack for his anti-gay quotes. Consider this one, on gay adaption: “At stake are the lives of many children who will be discriminated against in advance, and deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God.” He knows who will do the discriminating better than anyone, but that’s not my reason. I wonder if, having seen what he must have seen from his perch as a Cardinal, he’s not thinking of what happens now and then when you turn children over to priests, and this is the irreducible minimum of oblique remonstrance. Of course, that would require a pig-ignorant conflation of gay with pedophile, but what would be strange about that?
Then you’re more magnanimous than I, that’s for sure. Not sure I’d go even for a millimeter.
For my money, any ascendancy to Bergoglio’s position in the Vatican hierarchy is prima facie evidence of scumbaggery, and I speak as someone whose life’s trajectory has been profoundly changed, for the better, by the influence of various oddball Catholic monks over the years. There’s a Discalced Carmelite who ran a retreat out here in Colorado for many years, for example, whom I’ll unhesitatingly nominate as the sanest human being I’ve ever met.
Not that I’m a Christian or anything out in the ridiculous sectarian weeds like that, but it must be admitted that when they drop all the dogma and evangelical bullshit, which nobody at Bergoglio’s altitude (or any routine parish priest, for that matter) can possibly do, they can be pretty damn wonderful.
Nat,
Your (very faint to be sure) defense of New Pope is worthy of the most Jesuitical of Jesuits! If paedo priests are supposed to hear a warning to mend their ways in a declaration that same sex marriage is a Satanic plot … the Church might as well cut to the chase and go back to straight out augury. Another Satanic pursuit, but, you know, fight fire with fire.
Gunny, I never heard of Discalced Carmelites before. Googled them and found out there is a colony of them ensconced less than a mile from my house. I’ve walked by their front door several times a week for years. Pretty damned wonderfully discreet, at least.
Natasha,
Yes, a few such lines make it all worthwhile.
Gunny and Natasha,
Agree with both of your remarks on Bergoglio. But it’s really just chastening the choir…admonitions for absolutists (who like being that way).
Bluth,
It never occurred to me that “paedo priests are supposed to hear a warning.” The most faux-empathy I can summon is to imagine him thinking, “Harrumph! After the mess those queers have got us into, now they want to get married and adopt kids? If that don’t take the empanada!”
But thanks for “Jesuitical.” One does aspire, and one sometimes feels one has hit one’s mark, but confirmation is still ever so gratifying.
I thought I’d bring myself up to date with all the happenings on a slow news day – but only got as far as this headline:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/16/pope-francis-church-poverty
Sorry. Not for me.
Or should I have said…Sorry – not in my name? Whatever, it’s a load of bullshit.
Discalced Carmelite sounds like some sort of fancy furrin dessert, to me.
Madame,
Indeed. All too often the Carmelite topping is burnt or, worse, undercooked to the point that it’s little more than a runny, sweetish syrup. Still, it is not true that the real Discalced Carmelite is found nowhere in the US outside of New York, no matter how fashionable that particular (though telling) snobism has become. I myself have encountered something quite similar to the real thing in a humble tacqueria in Texas, where it was presented as a simple, modest Franela Francés.
“A poor church” . . .I was a bit taken aback. Right! Flog the cathedrals, melt down the thuribles (or whatever), sell off all those pieces of the true cross for firewood. . .sell the incense to the parfumiers; cut the Cardinals’ wages (and tax their second bedrooms?). . .
(Can’t think why, this reminds me of something?)
I think, in previous centuries, they poisoned Popes with those sorts of notions, didn’t they? Much more of this, and there’ll be two retired popes hiding out in Castel Gondolfo. . .
Must say I’ve been a little puzzled by this; I thought the idea was that it was the Holy Spirit that descended on the cardinals and got them to pick the right one. So was Benedict a mistake on the part of the Holy Ghost, or were the cardinals lying? Or has one (or both) got it wrong this time?
He’s probably thinking in terms of cutting funds to missionaries and the like…
It’s what those that are sitting on a load of wealth do when they get a guilty conscience, isn’t it.
You guys forget the power of Papal Infallibility® (since 1861). All New Pope need do to ‘create’ a poor church is declare that the church is poor, and then order all the top skirts to take cut back on finery in public, take the bus, fly coach.
Back in the day Catholics used to get bread AND wine at mass. Not just the priest, but the entire congregation. Then a clever conclave of wine-drinking cardinals worked out that if the bread was the flesh of Christ, well, flesh always has some blood left over in it, so there was no reason for them to be spending hard-impressed cash on wine for the great unwashed. It was already there! In the bread! That freed up a lot of funds for silk underwear and featherbeds, no doubt about it.
In all the recorded history of the church, it is quite possible that St. Francis, after whom New Pope named himself, is the only person ever to actually, and literally, and consistently live according to the true precepts of Jesus. The single example. Which is either proof that Jesus was using hyperbole to make a point, or else that his point was simply- too uncomfortable and difficult and, well, inhuman.
Has New Pope lived his life so far really and truly according to Jesus’s precepts? Not by a very long shot. Will he force the Church to divest itself of ALL property now he has the whip hand? As Red points out: Polonium would sooner fly.
Bluth/Squirrel.
How could Francis’s new-found infallibility not have wrought a change or two in the poor man’s head? Can you imagine what that would be like? It must be as if… as if one has spent seventy years in front of the tube, subsisting on Cheetos and watching one horrible commercial after another — then, all of a blow (as the French say), the McDonald’s ad stops in mid-Ronald and, there, on the suddenly blessed screen, Sandy Koufax is pitching to Willie Mays… Something like that.
But, surely, poor is just shorthand for poor in spirit? (c.f. Matthew 5:3) And poor in spirit just means “spiritually hungry” after all. And how could the newborn Francis ever have been in a more spiritually famished place than he suddenly finds himself living in now?
“For you have the poor always with you…”
The important thing to realize is that nobody – and I mean nobody – actually believes any of this metaphysical stuff. So “poor” no longer refers to the hungry, halt and halfwitted, but to a universal condition, a kind of Henri Nouwen “brokenness” that afflicts big and small, fat and thin, clean and smelly.
Once you realize most people will say anything – Pope Francis, Richard Dawkins, Barack Obama, Andrew Sullivan, Poppy Harlow – if it makes them feel a tad better about themselves and the world (but primarily themselves), it’s all good. Then you can get back to being annoyed as hell because somebody rear-ended you in Hollywood and now you have to deal with people (claims adjusters, body shop repair people, rental car clerks) who DO have a little insight into how the world works.
But…
“Dear Teacher, whom we call bim_ballace, this is a difficult saying. Are you not simply redefining the terms – “belief” say – and thereby reducing important matters to unassailable, true-by-definition nonsense?”
“Ah, my gentle child, it would seem so, wouldn’t it? But no, of course not! That’s not what I do! A difficult saying, yes, but let those who have noses smell!”
Bim,
Yes, walking that narrow path between solipsism and tautology isn’t easy. And if nobody believes in the “stuff” of metaphysics anymore, it isn’t only because metaphysics excludes stuffness by definition. It also isn’t just because logical positivism rudely dismantled the underpinnings of all known systems of metaphysics about a hundred years ago, and nobody’s managed to replace them yet (though Lord knows they’ve tried). And it’s not even because science itself has come to occupy so much of the territory formerly reserved for metaphysics that it’s awfully hard for most people to care about what’s left. (And, speaking of which, what has brother Dawkins done to you, besides making biology more accessible and interesting than it’s ever been before?)
No, it’s because very, very few people have ever really cared at all for what metaphysics has had to say, but almost everybody believes in the bare (but comforting) notion of the metaphysical itself – we always have, and still do today. In some people, it’s the sense that I know there’s a non-factitious world beyond your carefully contrived numbers, and this knowledge of mine is, itself, proof of its existence. In the rest of us, it’s the conviction that I don’t care what you tell me or what you think you know, you can’t be that smart and there just has to be more to it. And that space is theology’s last remaining happy hunting ground, and adherence to religion is, for those who adhere to it, the still-unfailing “I refute it thus!” to the notion that if life is a problem, it’s one we won’t, ourselves, live to see solved.
Natasha,
Thank you. Where to begin? Unfortunately, there’s a bunch of crap going on at work. Perhaps I’ll take it one piece at a time…the easy part first…
Dawkins is fine, I’m sure, but he annoys me. It’s a British thing, I imagine. (Present company excluded.) There’s just something I’ve noticed over the years, whether we’re talking about Ayer or Keynes or any number of others.* I’m inclined to see it all as rather complicated, but there’s something indisputable going on, and whatever it is, it’s found almost exclusively in one imperial school. (I know, I know: more visceral, wise-blood nonsense. But that’s what happens when you’re disinclined to believe much of anything: it’s all a little acknowledgment – or collection of little acknowledgments – that existence really does precede essence (problems of language notwithstanding).) Hume, of course, suffered from no such affliction.
(By the way, if you’re in LA over the next couple of weeks, look me up through Gunny. We can cruise around Hollywood in the gleaming white Chevy Impala I got from Hertz yesterday. What a piece of shit, though it does have SiriusXM.)
* In fairness, Dawkins (and Ayer) would seem to be less odious than Keynes.
All life has only one problem, which is to successfully reproduce itself (keeping alive long enough to do it, and well enough to see offspring grow up are just subsidary to that same problem, and anything else we might do is, well, as much as we might enjoy it, simply superflous) but for life to be a problem, that would require some -thing- outside of or beyond life which, though not alive itself which could nonetheless perceive life as a problem. Which circles right back to metaphysics, doesn’t it?
To truly escape the metaphysical one must, I think, suppose that life cannot be a problem at all, and thus cannot be susceptible to, nor even sensibly ask for, any kind of solution. Which would, I think, be Dawkins position, if I understand Dawkins. Life simply is and that’s the end of it.
What Bim finds odious about Keynes is another matter altogether. Bim, what in particular do you find so odious about Keynes? What’s not to like about a man who understands about public debt that we owe it to ourselves?
Bim,
I, also, have a problem with your problem*. I’ll leave the defense of Keynes to Bluth, but I have to say he wrote some awfully good stuff between 1917 (“I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal”) and his last words in 1946: “I should have drunk more champagne.”
Ayer is about as clear and unaffected as philosophy ever gets:
But at least he has difficult passages**. Dawkins is something else. I’ve been reading science-in-English my entire life and I’ve never seen anyone do it better – not Sagan, not Asimov, not Barrow. The Ancestor’s Tale is the best introduction to evolution for the lay person that I’ve ever read, but even when he is introducing novelties of his own (e.g., The Extending Phenotype) he is never even momentarily unclear. The only attitude I can find underlying his writings is a fanatical commitment to orderly lucidity. (Of course, his later anti-thumper-counter-science rants are something else – but they weren’t aimed at me and, since I can’t pretend to read them is if they were, I have no idea how they might come off to his intended audience.)
* The exquisitely awful protagonist of Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote perpetrated an undescribed but doubtlessly precious monograph called Les Problemes d’un Probleme.
** In compensation for which he told a lot of very dry and very funny jokes. The young Natasha got to sit in the back of the lecture hall and listen to them. It is entirely possible that I will be back in LA shortly and if I am, you can hear one of them. If you don’t think it’s funny you can kick me out of the Impala at Hamburger Hamlet; I imagine you can get away before they have it towed.
Bluth,
Well, our life is a problem for anyone who thinks it matters how we live it. And since a lot of people believe there are right ways to do that and since everyone knows there are wrong ways…
I’ve never known a dog or a cat well who didn’t eventually make her views on the solution to the problem of life abundantly clear, at least to those with ears to hear or flesh to be pierced. But, at least, if they ascended to metaphysics, they kept it to themselves.
Bluth (and also Natasha),
I was referring to the tendency, on the part of Keynes, to pronounce on a range of subjects – eugenics, Jews, to name two – as if he possessed some special metaphysical insight. Like so many others, he seemed enamored of metaphysics when he felt a deep revulsion at what he perceived to be the ugliness of some life. Beauty too can inspire these extramundane musings, I suppose.
Metaphysician, heal thyself! (That’s what I always say.)
Natasha,
You’re probably right about Ayer. I just blame him for his lesser progeny. Dawkins…nothing too particular beyond what I see as his tendency to thrash that dead horse, metaphysically speaking, and not give language its due. (Not that I do…)
Okay, rushed here. But on to more important things: I’d love to hear one of those jokes, and not only will I not abandon you at Hamburger Hamlet if it’s not funny, I’ll upgrade your order to a double patty and garlic fries and let you eat it all in the Impala as we cruise Westwood and Beverly Hills!
Natasha,
I have been returning in my mind (whatever the hell that is, though presumably it exists, almost like a dog or a cat exists) to your 3:35 over the past couple of days. That is the problem, the conundrum, in a nutshell.
I am turning away from the political, at least for now, which is a good thing. My angry screed about Obama and Jamie Dimon remains unpublished, kind of like the DSM IX.
Bim,
For my money no one has ever really addressed the problem that Nat describes at 3:55 better, or with greater humanity, than Montaigne.
Bluth,
If he didn’t, I’d like to know who did. By the way — his most memorable Tweet? The one that always leaps to my mind first (and which had to mortally offend half the 16th century’s pop culture and 9/10th of its pop religion) was, “I don’t want my death to say anything my life has not already said.” From this distance, I doubt that we can begin to count the balloons he popped with that one little pin.
Bluth,
I need to read Montaigne. Perhaps there’s a good Constance Garnett translation…
Natasha,
I don’t want my life to saying anything that death has not already said.
Dogs and cats engaging in the Ascent of Mount Metaphysics? No less than the rest of us, if the rumors are true…
Yes, I really do need to read Montaigne, one of the many gaps in my education. But your very own 9000′ Miniver Cheevy is busy with such nonsense these days…brooding about Celan and Heidegger, looking for an adequate replacement for the software (and himself?) he and another developer wrote a number of years ago, jogging and doing pushups to mitigate the ravages of time, avoiding further entanglements with loathsome insurance companies while wending through LA traffic in the snowy white Impala…
Other handy Montainge tweets:
and
Bluth,
Oh yeah? “The confounding of the order and measure of sins is dangerous: murderers, traitors, and tyrants get too much by it, and it is not reasonable they should flatter their consciences, because another man is idle, lascivious, or not assiduous at his devotion.”
Bim,
Oh, but there is — at least, if we admit one or another of the more rarefied senses of “good” — and I’m surprised you don’t already own it,
M de M: “L’homme est bien insensé. Il ne saurait forger un ciron, et forge des Dieux à douzaines!”
CG: “Humanity will burn a lot of incense. We don’t know how to forget the Diet of Worms, and yet we counterfeit gods while dozing!”
Okay that one gets an in-person, fully typed out, not green at all recommandation.
In fact it deserves one of these.
Found it, buried beneath a pile of Burberry sweaters I haven’t had occasion to wear since moving to LA!
M: Je veux qu’on me voit en ma façon simple, naturelle, et ordinaire, sans étude et artifice; car c’est moi que je peins…Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre.
C: I’m gonna pop some tags, only got $20 in my pocket…