"Sairy Camp" [SIC]

I got a comment from a Sairy Camp this morning. It was just someone pushing a porn site so I deleted it. But I love that name. It comes, of course, from Dickens' alcoholic nurse Sairey Gamp. It's the perfect name for a spammer.

Christmas freedom

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to things that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather have been known by God, how can turn back to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? You are observing special days, and months, and seasons and years. I'm afraid my work for you may have been wasted. (Galatians 4:8-11)

I remember the first time I realized an adult was full of it. I don't mean that they were lying or bluffing or teasing but that they were deeply fraudulent not just in what they said and did but in what they were. It happened just as my friends and I were figuring out the truth about Santa Claus. One of my friends had discussed it with his mother and she, thinking he needed something to fill the Santa-Claus-sized hole in his belief system, told them that there was something called "the spirit of Christmas" that definitely did exist.

That's idolatry. Pure and simple. She may as well have carved a mask with a big smile and hung it on the wall and insisted that her family prostrate themselves and make burnt offerings to it.

Idolatry comes about when we take what is human and project it into the heavens. You can tell it's idolatry when people start to talk as if the "spirit" is something that comes about because of what humans do, say or think. And there is a huge dose of shame that comes along with it. You'll be given the impression that if you don't participate with enthusiasm and joy in your heart the whole thing may fail and it will be your fault. Other people will suffer because you refused to be part of the Christmas spirit.

There is a lot of that about Christmas as we now celebrate it.

Here is the thing: Christmas already came two millennia ago. You don't have to make it come again. And if it doesn't come, meaning that magical feeling doesn't happen this year, or next, or the next ten years in a row, that's okay. Jesus already came and, because he did, you're free. That's why we celebrate.  Don't make it a duty or a burden because, by doing that, you make it into a superstition.

If you are capable of being joyful, cut loose, have a great time. Your freedom begins tonight.

"All cruelty springs from weakness"

That's from Seneca. I thought of it when I read that Pope Francis had used an annual pre-Christmas meeting with the cardinals and bishops who run the Vatican bureaucracy to issue what has been called a scathing critique. The assembled churchmen only applauded "tepidly" according to the Associated Press newswire. That would be as opposed to all those people who hoot and holler and stomp their feet when they are attacked.

It's not that the criticism is unwarranted, quite the contrary. The problem is doing it during an annual pre-Christmas address. That is the cheap, snivelling act of a weakling.

The Curia needs to be reformed. So reform it! Decide what needs to be done and then do it. Haranguing people just before Christmas is crass and cruel and, more importantly, ineffective. This is the way a weak man in over his head responds.

Pope Francis needs to man up.

A scout's virtues: cleanliness

A scout is clean: He keeps clean in body and thought, stands for clean speech, clean sport, clean habits, and travels with a clean crowd.

That's a familiar enough sentiment but it is mostly familiar to us as the subject of mockery. To enter into a discussion of is to enter a target-rich environment.

But can you think of anything good to say about cleanliness?

By way of analysis, I'm going to juxtapose and comment on a couple of other quotes.

First, here is Jesus as quoted in Mark's gospel (7:15):

Nothing that goes into a person from the outside can make him unclean. It's what comes out of a person that makes a person unclean. 

That's from the International Standard Version. Most of the better translations say "defile" instead of "unclean". That's sort of helpful because we read "clean" in a relatively value-free way. The Jews of Jesus's time did not. (It should also read "man" and not "a person".) 

Scholars always tell us that the Jews of Jesus's time did not wash their hands before eating because they worried about germs. They did it as part of a ritual and believed that the person who did not wash their hands before eating committed an affront against God. Likewise, the person who would share a table with someone who did not wash their hands.

And we're not like that? We don't worry so much about affronting God anymore but we do have all sorts of superstitious rituals about cleanliness.

A man goes to a public washroom. He goes to a urinal and not into a toilet stall. He washes his hands even though he did not accidentally pee on them. He showered and put clean underwear on that day. There isn't a surface in that washroom that is even close to being as clean as the skin on his penis. The dirtiest, most germ-laden surface in the room is probably the handle on the door he will grab on the way out. After he was washed his hands! Because he has just washed his hands he has cleaned competing bacteria out and left them all clean and slightly damp and, therefore, the ideal surface for the germs he will pick up from the door handle.

Not that there is anything unusual about the door handle of a public washroom. Every other door handle he will touch that day is at least as dirty. But he washes his hands because he handled his penis. Later, he will take it for granted that the woman he loves and cares about most in the world will put it in her mouth. Weird, wouldn't you say? 

Please, keep washing your hands but realize that a man washes his hands after peeing for reasons that have much less to do with disease prevention than we tell ourselves. He washes his hands after he touched his penis because it's a simple act of respect driven by a sense that one does not share such intimate contact casually, even at second hand. 

Dorothy Day did more for poor people than you and everyone you know put together. Here is what she told young idealists who showed up wanting "to help the poor".

There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.

You might just convince yourself, reading Luke's version of the beatitudes, that you should be poor (although you'll probably be a complete hypocrite about it even if you do). You probably won't convince yourself that it would be morally better for you to be smelly and ungrateful.

Is cleanliness related to gratitude? You might say not but taking the trouble to be clean for others is a way of showing them respect and respect is part of gratitude. That can sometimes remain true even when the cleanliness in question is merely a social convention and has nothing to do with any actual risk of infection.

Why do all these great TV series end badly? (part 1)

We're coming up on the finale of the finale of Mad Men and it's going to be disappointing. Most probably. They might pull it out and ...

Except they won't.

Why am I so certain?

Short answer: Sex and the City, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Hamlet (whoops, not a TV show) all end unconvincingly.

The obvious counter to that is that Mad Men could be different. But it won't and the reason it won't is because it started badly.

You can already see this in the way the show has wallowed since the end of Season three. It doesn't know where to go. The initial tension points—nostalgia, Dick Whitman, Peggy's child, Betty—have just gone away. If, in the final episode, Don either dealt satisfactorily with the Dick Whitman issue or the MPs showed up and arrested him for desertion, we would feel cheated. We would feel cheated because that issue has disappeared from the narrative.

We might be tempted to argue that Don has merely repressed the problems that go with Dick and that they are waiting to explode onto the surface. But it's not just Don who has made the problem go away. It's the narrative that has dispensed with Dick.

Another way to ask the question might be: What's wrong with Don Draper? And the answer to that would have to be more than a list of normal human failings. There has to be some deep problem that requires resolution for a happy ending or leads to a sad end if it is not resolved.

And we can't beg the question. That is to say, when we ask "What's wrong with Don Draper?" we have to be open to the possibility that the answer might be "nothing is fundamentally wrong with Don; he has the same ordinary faults the rest of us do."

I think I know the form the answer must take. It must be about manliness. The thing that Don Draper, Mr. Big, Tony Soprano, Walter White and Hamlet (I put him in here for a reason) have in common is that none of them have grown up and assumed the responsibilities of manhood.

They all have obvious character, but not story, precedents:

• Don Draper descends from Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith in Hail the Conquering Hero
• Tony Soprano descends from Michael Corleone
• Mr Big descends from Mr. B in Pamela
• Walter White descends from Goethe's Faust

I'll take them backwards.

Walter White is the easiest. He sells his soul and that has consequences but, like Goethe, Vince Gilligan wants Walter to be a redeemable character despite his selling his soul. The interesting new detail is that he doesn't sell his soul in pursuit of a romantic ideal but simply acquire some manly dignity.

Mr. Big withholds himself from the heroine and, just like in the original, eventually marries her, turning from cad into knight in white armor. The story is told from the heroine's perspective and she too, has challenges, but no essential flaws she needs to overcome; she just has to persistently be herself until he stops trying to just bang her and swoops down and picks her up. The interesting new detail is that ... oh yeah, there isn't one.

Tony Soprano is sort of the story of Michael Corleone dragged out of its manly trappings. It asks the question: What would it be like to follow the story of this man and see how he deals with all of the ordinary domestic challenges and not just the big, manly drama of assuming responsibility for the mob family.

Don Draper in a desperate, crazy moment participates in a deception that puts him in another man's uniform. Unlike Truesmith, he doesn't get off the train, but the hero's role gets hrust on him anyaway. He is passively swept up by others eager to believe that he is a hero but lives with the knowledge that he isn't really the person others believe he is; that, at heart, he is still the Dick who runs away.

Okay, let me add another twist. Mad Men is really the story of "I'm Peggy Olson, the new girl", which is obviously intended to make us think of Jimmy Olsen, the newsboy. It's really the story of Peggy the same way that Dawson's Creek was really the story of Joey Potter or, if you prefer a more exalted precedent, The Great Gatsby is really the story of Nick Carraway.

Peggy, like Jimmy, is thrust into a world populated by giants. Don is her Superman, Joan is her Lois Lane and Roger is her Perry White. She, and not Don, is the real nostalgia-driven character for she knows that none of these people really fits the legendary roles assigned to them. And she is the one who will have to go on living after the superheroes have left the earth.

But she embraces the legends and the legend. Think of the way she responds to Peter outing Freddy Rumsen after he gets so drunk he blanks out and wets his pants. Peggy thinks that Pete should have covered for Freddy and then he could have been a legend. She can see the problems with this legendary era but she still wants it and perhaps needs it.

Which makes her a stand in for us. We also need that world. Mad Men is a lot like Downton Abbey. Both shows are re-examinations of how the world changed. That the world had changed for the UK was driven home by the 1920s.  That the world had changed for the US was driven home by the 1960s. The weird straddle the show is faced with is that everyone loves that era that preceded the new world.

You might sum it up in a very short dialogue:

"You can't be Don Draper and he couldn't either."
"Sorry, could you repeat that. I was picking out cufflinks to go with my new shirt and gray suit. You should see them. I  actually bought them from Brooks Brothers."

No matter how plucky and determined little Peggy is, she will always be little Peggy in a world of giants. Which is especially odd when you consider how very hot Elisabeth Moss is in real life. Like Betty versus Wilma or Mary-Ann versus Ginger, no boy would have to think longer than two seconds to decide who he really wanted.

And yet, there is something about that era that is more compelling than our own.

It's not the actors playing the roles but the roles themselves. It's not just that Jon Hamm, John Slattery and Christina Hendricks are all disappointing when compared to the role they play in the series, it's that January Jones is! Betty, who sums up everything that was supposed to be wrong about pre-feminist womanhood, is so much more interesting than the actor who plays her that it is embarrassing.

The consequence of that is that, even if this is really a show about Peggy, and it is, we still need a satisfactory end for Don Draper. He has to have some problem with his character and that problem has to be faced and dealt with for a convincingly happy ending or not dealt with for a compellingly sad ending. And the sow just can't do that. It hasn't done the ground work.

A scout's virtues: bravery

A scout is brave: He has the courage to face danger in spite of fear and has to stand up for the right against the coaxings of friends or the jeers or threats of enemies, and defeat does not down him.

You can see Alasdair MacIntyre both affirmed and refuted in that. 

On the one hand, you can see, even in this scout handbook, evidence that the tradition of virtue ethics is deep and that it runs along lines that only superficially resemble the way academic ethics operate. Academic ethics would look right past "face danger in spite of fear", "coaxings of friends", "jeers or threats of enemies" and "feat" that "does not down him" and say, "All these things are good but how do we define bravery?"The scout outlook is that we already know what bravery is. We might worry about refining our definition to deal with weird cases at the margins but the simple fact that the word exists and is commonly used in our language says that we have a good grasp on the concept. The problem, as I have said many times before, is training ourselves to actually be brave. (Academics have degraded ethics by making it entirely about making moral decisions.)

The refutation lies in the very existence of this text. Here is a tradition of passing along virtue ethics in a meaningful way that continued long after the collapse that McIntyre wrote about. 

You might be inclined to sneer at that. You might be inclined to say that it is so commonplace and light as to be insignificant.

That sort of move has a long history in philosophy. The Greco-Roman moralists—figures such as Cicero and Seneca—were similarly brushed off. In more modern terms, people study Kant's ethics at university, even though Kant has virtually nothing to teach us about how to actually live our lives, while regarding his contemporary Jane Austen, who can teach us a lot, as merely a source of entertainment.

There isn't much more that needs to be said. We know what bravery is and we have a list of small things that we need to train ourselves to overcome. Once we have mastered those small things, we will be ready to deal with bigger ones.

That—the realization that being trustworthy in small things means we could be assigned bigger ones—requires bravery all by itself.

A scout's virtues: thrift

A scout is thrifty. He does not wantonly destroy property. He works faithfully, wastes nothing, and makes the best use of his opportunities. He saves his money so that he may pay his own way, be generous to those in need, and helpful to worthy objects. 

He may work for pay but must not receive tips for courtesies or good turns.

That is a manly virtue. You might miss that because thrift, as it used to be described when I was a boy, can be pretty girly. I say "when I was a boy" because nobody talks about thrift anymore.  Probably because it became such a girly virtue.

It became girly because thrift came to mean crap like saving wrapping paper, finding new uses for elastic bands and being the sort of busybody who makes everybody wait while they get out a pen and paper or a calculator out to work everyone's exact share when it's time to pay the bill at a restaurant.

But look at that text and see this: "He saves his money so that he may pay his own way, be generous to those in need, and helpful to worthy objects." That's old-fashioned manliness.

All of that "thrift" is about spending or giving away money! This may see contradictory if you're used to girly thrift, but manly thrift is a big, generous, overflowing virtue.

I'll continue this by going somewhere that might seem weird. A while ago we had a crazed, wanna-be terrorist shoot one of the soldiers standing guard at the national war memorial. Here's how an article in the latest issue of Anglican Journal starts:

As Canadians grappled with how to respond to the unprecedented violence that rocked Ottawa and the rest of Canada Oct. 22, the Anglican Journal asked leadership within the Anglican Church of Canada to reflect on the role of the church in troubled times.

I have a crazy suggestion. How about we respond by doing nothing at all?

Nothing happened to us! A good man, who'd dedicated his career to serving his country was killed. His family are devastated. But we suffered nothing. We should do nothing.

That is very unthrifty and very umanly writing. It's full of empty words. For starters, what was "unprecedented" about this violence? And was Ottawa, indeed the whole country, "rocked" by a senseless killing? Yeah, I wish that these things didn't happen but do you know what, they do happen. They happen all the time. If you were rocked by it, you're worthless bit of jello masquerading as  a man. Get over yourself. This wasn't about you.

We think of thrift as an economic concept but it's an emotional thing at base. An impulse buy is an emotional response. On strictly economic grounds, we already know it's a bad idea to make the impulse buy. We do it anyway because we haven't learned to manage our emotions.

Manage doesn't mean to suppress. It means to have the right kind of emotions, at the right time, in the right way.

Think about big gestures. What's the difference between a big gesture that comes of as manly, magnanimous or meaningful and one that comes off as trying to prove something, defensive or empty?

Thrift.

He works faithfully, wastes nothing, and makes the best use of his opportunities.