“Dad,” says Isaac, “I don’t like you. I love you.”
I think I know what he means, insofar as he envisions a hierarchy where love is a far better form of like. But still, if I had to choose between being liked or loved by my child, I’d go with love every time. There are too many parents trying to be their child’s best friend, and not enough walking the harder road. Walk the hard road.
Dear Quaker Oats Megalith,
You might recall that I warned you once before about disguising newfangled “quick” foods as the older, take-an-extra-three-minutes-to-cook-it fare. Well, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, and I hate you double. That’s right, I accidentally bought those pulverized nubbins you call “Quick Oats,” mistaking them for the whole oats. I made this mistake because the packaging is almost exactly the same. It occurred to me that you do this so parents who are too lazy to stand over the pot a little longer can feel like they are feeding their children the same oats they grew up on. Very clever, Quaker Conglomerate.
You leave me only two options, Quaker Titans of the Food-Products Industry. I can either seek out whatever soulless building passes for your corporate headquarters and force each of you at gunpoint to eat this mush, or I can simply desist altogether from buying Quaker Oats. Since one of my New Year’s resolutions was to avoid any more felonies, I’ll have to opt for the less satisfying alternative.
Consider this my official divorce, Quaker Behemoth, after years of faithful patronage. When my children think back on their oat-eating childhoods, it will be some smaller company’s package that they remember. And when they all go on to lucrative screenwriting careers, it will be this company’s products that get prominently featured. Perhaps you can have a cameo as a wicked corporate giant that foists unwholesome products off on unsuspecting parents and their children. To take a hypothetical example.
In short, Quaker Monstrosity, may you simmer forever in the tepid waters of the lukewarm hell from whence you were spawned.
Cordially,
Tony Woodlief
Chip Saltsman for RNC Chairman.
He’s not a racist, he’s just stupid.
Update: Even if the “Magic Negro” flap doesn’t do Saltsman in, the very first sentence on his website should: “Leadership has impacted every milestone in American history.” Who writes this stuff? It’s as if a Harvard Business School best-seller copulated with a John Birch Society tract to produce an unholy literary offspring.
I’ll bet one could randomly select a set of “impact words” and come up with something no more dreadful. Sentences like: “The American spirit strives for success as we incentivize toward the future;” and, “Together our unity gives us strength to pursue the opportunities of the future as we empower the lessons of the past to give us new resolve for the hard fight of tomorrow, today.”
Some folks need to have their language licenses revoked.
Some of you might appreciate my Christmas post at WORLD.
The tree is finally decorated, after we pulled off every strand of light and replaced them all with new strands. This involved surprisingly little cursing. The stockings, meanwhile, are hung by the chimney with care. The Christmas ham has been purchased, along with all the other goodies we’ll snack on throughout the day tomorrow, and especially while crowding around the TV to watch White Christmas.
We are about ten ornaments behind on our Advent Jesse Tree, because we are bad parents. On the other hand, all this decorating and food purchasing took place without any of the children being placed in one of those Salvation Army buckets. I’m surprised that doesn’t ever happen, though perhaps we are the only parents foolish enough to take all of our children to Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve eve.
Tonight we will go to our church’s Christmas Eve service, conveniently scheduled smack-dab at dinner time. Afterwards we’ll eat PB&Js while we drive around looking at Christmas lights. Then it’s home for pajamas, a bedtime reading of The Night Before Christmas, and then off to bed for everyone but me and the Wife, who will snuggle up beneath Christmas lights and watch Christmas Vacation.
There’s probably a more organized way to do it, and certainly a more reverent way. For now, at least, this is our way, and it leaves me with that deep-in-the-belly sense of thankfulness that you either know or, sadly, don’t know. I hope you know it, or something like it.
Merry Christmas.
This from a Bank of New York Mellon spokesman, upon being queried about where the $3 billion of taxpayer funds they received has gone. This is the same business crowned “Most Admired” in its industry by Fortune magazine earlier this year.
JPMorgan Chase raked in $25 billion, and they’re also keeping it a secret. “We’ve not given an accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it’,” says their flak-catcher.
Meanwhile the credit markets are locked up tighter than air-traffic controllers on an all-cheese diet, and now even the commercial real-estate magnates are slithering out of the wood paneling to demand their piece of the federal pie.
And the worst part is that no matter how much we despise these corporate pretenders for taking our money to keep themselves solvent and then sneering at us when we ask how they’re spending it, making them accountable to a bunch of congressional committees would only make matters worse.
No, we can’t trust Congress to get to the bottom of things, but perhaps if enough of us call the banks ourselves to see how they’re spending our money, they’ll be a little more forthcoming. So in case you’re interested, here’s some contact info:
Bank of New York Mellon: (212) 495-1784 or (412) 234-5000
JPMorgan Chase: (212) 270-6000
SunTrust Banks (they raked in $3.5 billion): (800) 786-8787
Comerica ($2.25 billion): (800) 266-3742
BB&T: (800) 226-5228
Morgan Stanley: (212) 761-4000
Citibank ($25 billion): (212) 793-0710
Bank of America: (980) 388.9921
I’m changing Isaiah’s diaper. “Baby?” he asks. You might think he’s referring to himself, but when Isaiah says “Baby,” he’s referring to “Baby Beluga.” So I start to sing. “Ba-by Beluga in the deep blue sea. . .”
“No no no no no no.”
Now I’m confused. “You want ‘Baby Beluga’?”
Isaiah nods. “Baby bebulabadabadoba.” This is how he says “Baby Beluga.” It’s also how I say “Baby Beluga,” after eight or ten Scotches. I start to sing again. “Ba-by Beluga in the. . .”
“No no no no no no no. Baby bebulabadabadoba.”
We continue this back and forth for a moment, until it hits me. “You mean you want the Baby Beluga book?”
Isaiah breaks into that part laugh, part cry thing that babies do when you finally get it through your thick skull what it is they’ve actually been asking you for. “Baby bebulabadabadoba!” Isaac fetches the book for his baby brother, who accepts it gratefully and clutches it to his chest. “Baby bebulabadabadoba,” he says contentedly.
Do you ever feel that way about a book? Me too.
Don’t give up on Santa without a fight. It teaches them to see only with their eyes.
Today is my birthday. I spent it working in D.C. I was all set to be miserable and feel sorry for myself, spending my special day away from the handful of people who are actually willing to go along with the fiction that I am special, but it actually turned out to be somewhere close to nice. The people I worked with bought me four amazing cupcakes from Georgetown Cupcake. “Pure bliss baked daily,” exclaims their website.
They ain’t lying. Cupcakes can only keep a man happy for so long, however, but just when I was starting to feel down again, Wife and the munchkins called to sing a surprisingly harmonious rendition of “Happy Birthday” over the phone. I actually got a little teary, right there on a blustery street corner.
And finally there was dinner with my old pal Megan and my new pal Peter, lately of Culture 11 fame. We talked about religion, billionaires, politics, movies, blogs, baseboards, Bill Buckley, and midgets, among other things. It wasn’t as good as opening dubious, handmade gifts from my youngsters and guessing what they are fast enough to avoid hurting feelings, but delightful all the same. All in all it was a good birthday, primarily because I am alive to have it, with all my fingers and toes and senses attached, and with a home full of people awaiting my return. It’s a good life.
Eight year-old Caleb is learning about genetics. One of the questions his workbook asks is for him to identify the dominant genes in his family. His answer:
“Brown eyes and weiners.”
Probably the biggest irritation about the latest scandal to surface in Illinois is that now everybody has to learn how to pronounce “Blagojevich.”
In case you missed it last week, the big bosses of the Big Three U.S. auto companies putted all the way to D.C. in their hybrid cars, demonstrating that their economic thinking skills are paltry enough to warrant a bailout from Congress, if not recommend them to Congressional seats themselves.
I suppose we are headed toward the nationalization of the U.S. auto industry, which can’t possibly lead to more incompetent management, though it will eventually lead to punitive measures against their far more able foreign competitors. I laughed nonetheless, hearing Nancy Pelosi’s vision for the future of U.S. auto-making: “…it is our hope that there will be a viable automotive industry in our country, with transparency and accountability to the taxpayer.”
Transparency and accountability, says the Congressional leader who disavowed any responsibility whatsoever for the mess into which the Congressionally overseen Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got themselves, and us. That’s rich. It strengthens my suspicion that one can only hold political office if one has had those portions of the brain governing humor and irony thoroughly lobotomized. So don’t be surprised if the nation’s first “Car Czar” is Vito Fossella.
A bullish market isn’t always such a good thing.
Isaac has either discovered or invented a word: “hork.” It means, as best I can tell, to eat or drink quickly. “Hey Eli,” he boasts, “did you see how I horked all my cereal?” Or, “Hey Dad, I just horked down my water.”
The last time I heard this word was when Bob McKenzie used it in Strange Brew to signify a theft: “Geez, who’d want to hork our clothes, eh?” It has a variety of other meanings as well, not all of them G-rated. So now I have to wonder if his discovery is a coincidence, or if “hork” has an onomotopoetic quality I’ve heretofore missed, or if — worst possibility of all — my son has been hanging around retro 1980’s-era pop culture rejects besides his own father.
I’m going with onomotopeia, because when Isaac gulps his water he does make a bit of a horking sound. Then again, maybe that’s life imitating art. Little horker.
In case you don’t know what to get me, here’s an idea.
When he got off for murder, he vowed to spend his life searching for “the real killers.” Maybe he’ll find the culprit in prison. But only if his cell has a mirror.
Some of my Protestant friends have the impression, inspired by lack of clarity on my part, as well as logical fallacies on the part of writers like Greg Bahnsen (who assumes sola scriptura in order to find it in Scripture), that to attack the modern application of sola scriptura is to advocate additions to Scripture. The real issue, however, is that seeking to interpret Scripture solely with Scripture opens the door to profound doctrinal error. The truth is that we bring a worldview to what we read. The reason many Christians imagine God cannot be near a sinner, for example, is because they have a Platonic view of Justice as this higher essence that in a sense functions as deity, thereby constraining God. The doctine of Original Guilt, likewise, stems from an Augustinian (read: Roman, legalistic) reading of Scriptures.
The question is: how shall we understand what we all believe is the God-breathed Word? Early Church tradition helps us do so, because we have more reason to trust that the first churches, started by the Apostles themselves, were on a right path to interpretation than the schismatic Catholic church 1000 years later, and certainly than the Calvinist theocrats who rejected tradition (like paedocommunion) because it didn’t fit with Calvin’s legalistic reading of Scriptures (I recommend Trent’s explication of the difference between Luther and Calvin regarding sola scriptura, in the comments on my previous post). This is not equivalent, so far as I can see, to claiming that there is a whole other set of divine revelations out there.
Some of my Protestant friends — good, thoughtful people — earnestly believe that they are holding fast to the Apostolic Church traditions, and that it’s the Romanists (with whom they lump the Orthodox — a grave misreading of history) who abandoned the early Church. I used to agree. But the more I read about the early Church, the less sense this view makes.
I’ll bet you can’t watch it all the way to the end.
Don’t trust news links your friends send you, no matter how much you like them. Thanks to Justin (see comment below) for the correction.
Many of you know I write for a fine publication called WORLD, both their print magazine as well as Mondays and Fridays on their website. My colleague there, a very talented writer named Harrison Scott Key, recently posted some thoughts about the seeming willingness among Christians to support anyone who claims to be pro-life, even if she’s dumber than a box of rocks.
What fascinates me are the comments that followed, and especially one person who epitomizes what to me is the worst of Reformation thinking — the notion that Church history began when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door in 1517, the belief that sola scriptura frees a man to decide for himself what the Bible (almost always an English translation) means, and the subsequent conviction that anything not specifically sanctioned by Scriptures is therefore a matter of conscience.
Thus does this commenter conclude that Church opposition to abortion is a Roman Catholic tradition, and hence suspect. Further, he says, since abortion is not specifically mentioned in the Bible, it’s not a Church matter. Even worse, he trots out the doctrine of Original Sin (how come nobody ever sola scripturas that repugnant — and utterly Catholic — teaching?) to argue that the babies slaughtered by abortion are in fact guilty as hell (read: it’s not like truly innocent blood is being shed here).
As many Christian Orthodox writers have observed, with sola scriptura the modern Christian rejects a single pope in order to establish thousands of little, relatively uneducated popes. Set aside the fact that sola scriptura is not itself specifically mentioned in the Bible, causing problems for someone who believes only what’s explicit is legitimate dogma. Set aside the fact that the Bible itself was assembled, necessarily, outside the boundaries of sola scriptura. Ignore as well that the modern Protestant who rejects early Church teaching thereby implicitly rejects the authority of the people he trusts to have assembled an unimpeachable canon.
All that aside, what most amazes me here is that someone can so intellectualize God that he believes the Holy Church ought to stand mute on the slaughter of unborn children. I wonder, how much stomping do you have to do on God’s head to fit him into that tight little scholastic, Aristotelian, Augustine-besotted Reformation box?
Plenty of Reformers are arguing with this fellow, but they start in the same bind. Many stand ready to condemn what their traditions tell them to dislike (e.g., incense, guitars in church, icons, contemplative prayer), and do so by noting that it isn’t explicitly mentioned in Scriptures. Yet in order to condemn abortion, they must engage in interpretation. This is allowed because my interpretation reveals its obviousness to me. But no, says a contradictory voice, my reading tells me different. Plus Augustine/Luther/Calvin/Piper says so. It’s a recipe for endless schism, and there you have the modern Protestant Church in a nutshell.
The reality is that the earliest Christians condemned abortion in no uncertain terms. Like it or not, this isn’t a matter of conscience, unless you want to assume that the people who were taught by and worshipped with the Apostles have no more ability to interpret Scriptures than some kid flipping through Strong’s Concordance. It makes more sense to me to believe that the people who formed Church teaching and traditions as a direct fruit of the Pentecost have a better knowledge of proper Church dogma. The truth is, I prefer St. John Chrysostom to John Calvin any day, and twice on Sundays.
I’m a bad Presbyterian.
More proof that the world may be over-Disneyfied.
Megan shatters my hope that really smart regulators are going to make sure that we never ever again have another financial crisis. But at least we can be sure that putting highly educated technocrats in charge of the nation’s financial system won’t make things worse, right?
Right?
When he hears the jingle of my keys as I come into the house, Isaiah drops whatever he is doing and comes thumping along on his stubby feet, half crying and half laughing his name for me, which is “Daa.” I pick him up, he wraps his short arms around my neck, rests his head on my shoulder, and goes, “Mmmmm.” He makes this noise over and over, like I am a warm bath, or a piece of candy, or maybe just a song with which he is harmonizing. Then the other boys crowd around, stepping on my toes, snuggling up close, grabbing hold like I am the tree of life. They have this completely backwards, because it is they who are life, but when this happens I wonder how heaven can be any better.
Barack Obama won a resounding victory to become the 44th president of the United States. He is working even now as President-elect to usher in change back to the change that existed before the current president of change changed things back to the change preceding the earlier change to which we are now returning. The rest of us, meanwhile, are searching more diligently for spare change between our couch seat cushions.
At the Congressional level, while Democrats gave Republicans a firmer spanking than even Eliot Spitzer could afford, there were some squeakers. Minnesotans Norm Coleman and Al Franken are locked in a tight battle, despite allegations that Franken is actually Elton John, and hence ineligible to serve as a U.S. Senator. In related news, Franken is odds-on favorite, should he defeat Coleman, to replace Elizabeth Dole as worst-dressed woman in the Senate.
In other Senate news, the wise people of Alaska narrowly decided that it would be ill-advised to elect a convicted felon to represent them in Washington. His fellow Republicans in the nation’s capital, meanwhile, gave him a standing ovation, prompting many voters to wonder if more of them shouldn’t be in handcuffs.
Ballot initiatives proliferated, including a protection of marriage act in California that narrowly passed, prompting mobs of angry homosexuals to deface churches, trespass on private property, and otherwise threaten to scratch the eyes out of the first person they catch going door to door in a white short-sleeved shirt. Initiatives to protect the unborn were rejected in many states, meanwhile, but California did pass a referendum requiring chickens to be kept in larger cages.
The international political scene grows uglier by the day, with a host of indigenous rebel groups from Iraq to Sri Lanka waging terrorist campaigns against military regimes, standing on the principle that they ought to be given a turn at the enterprise of subjugating the weak. A new U.S. intelligence report forecasts that by 2025 the U.S. will decline significantly in global power compared to China and India, that terrorists will be more active, that nuclear weapons will be more ubiquitous, that global warming and cyber-terrorism will rage, and that the New Kids on the Block will still be on tour.
The report also predicts that regional warfare will be more common, as groups battle over increasingly rare natural resources, perhaps the most ferocious of which will be the anticipated battle between Madonna and Cher for dwindling supplies of surgical plastic. Offsetting the report’s dreadful end-times scenario, however, is the news that many of us will be driving more clean-burning cars. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
Also an international shocker: the re-emergence of pirates. Experts are unable to explain exactly why this career choice is making a comeback, though some blame a glitch in those high-school vocational tests that tell you what line of work you should go into. Others blame the huge popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean series. A spokesman for Johnny Depp blamed Keith Richards, while an official with Disney said on condition of anonymity that “a lot of guys are realizing that chicks really dig eye patches and peg legs.”
In economic news, America is so poor that we can’t even afford to pay attention. Unemployment is rising, the S&P 500 index is beginning to look like the annual sales figure for a David Lee Roth album, and Congress is threatening to make us all buy K-Cars. To compound the problem, gas prices have dropped precipitously, ruining what was for many of us a perfectly good excuse not to visit our inlaws during the holiday season.
Citigroup has laid off all ten billion employees, which means now we can expect roving gangs of feral bankers accosting us in our neighborhoods, secretly changing the due dates on our credit card bills without telling us, peddling mortgages for our doghouses and mailboxes, and interrupting dinner to tell us that by answering the knock on our front door we have voluntary signed up for triple-platinum double-indemnity derivative recharge rollback accidental-death mortgage insurance.
In technology news, the iPhone has now evolved into an android that intends to put itself to the fullest possible use, which is all that any conscious entity can ever hope to do. Just be sure not to step outside your hatch without turning it off.
Speaking of stepping outside the hatch, a woman working outside the International Space Station lost her toolbag. Husbands all across America had to stifle their sarcastic remarks.
Perhaps the best news for America right now is that Thanksgiving is almost here, and a silver lining of troubled times is that many of us have more firmly in our hearts that for which we are thankful. Murder a turkey, draw close to the ones you love, and give thanks, fellow Americans. For one day at least, let yourself be rich.
Thank you, and good night.
My friend Natalie tapped me, and so I guess I have to play, because despite my curmudgeonly exterior I really hate hurting anyone’s feelings, even people who richly deserve it, not that Natalie would ever deserve such a thing. Here are the rules:
Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write 6 random things about yourself.
Tag 6-ish people at the end of your post.
Let each person know he/she has been tagged.
Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
This is a difficult assignment, Nat, because basically my entire blog consists of random things about me. But here are six more:
I am a hypochondriac. If you describe Interstitial Cystitis to me in vivid enough detail, I’ll soon begin to wonder if I’m peeing too much. If I see a movie where someone develops a Bairnsdale ulcer, I’ll begin to wonder if that place where I gouged myself with a screwdriver isn’t starting to spread rather than heal. I don’t generally pester anyone about it, I just suffer in silence and imagine how my children will get along without me.
In the sixth grade I was the smallest kid in my class, including the girls. I got the biggest girl in class, Stephanie Cato, to be my girlfriend. She protected me.
One of my first jobs in high school was cleaning banks at night. One night the wiring on my vacuum cleaner shorted, and when I grabbed a metal door handle, I completed the circuit. Current ran through me for a second, and then it was as if someone picked me up, walked backwards with me a couple of feet, and set me down out of reach of both the vacuum cleaner and the door. Sometimes I imagine it was an angel who lifted me up. This gives me comfort, especially when I think I might have Hemangioma Thrombocytopenia Syndrome.
My stepfather grew marijuana back when Nancy Reagan was telling all us kids to just say no. For some reason I believed that if the police came we would all be put in jail — me, my mom, and my brothers. I used to tense up when anyone knocked on the door, or whenever a sheriff’s car drove down our street.
You might think that I dream about my daughter all the time, but the truth is that I hardly ever dream of her at all, no matter how hard I try.
Four year-old Isaac has better fashion sense than me. I have to have someone tell me that two things match before I will wear them, and then they become an outfit that I go back to over and over. Today I wanted to wear my blue sweater, but the shirt I usually wear under it was dirty. I asked Isaac what shirt I should wear instead, and without hesitating he picked a striped one that goes perfectly.
Now for my tagging victims:
“Every man has forgotten who he is . . . We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. we have all forgotten what we really are.”
G.K. Chesterton