Bad homilies

The inimitable Father Z has a typically good answer to a reader who asks what lay Catholics should do about bad homilies. I would add only two thoughts: 1) homilies aren't very terribly important and 2) because of the invitation to vanity that comes with the homily, it isn't much wonder that there would be bad ones. But, really, of all the parts of the mass, the homily is the least important. The sign of the cross that begins the mass is more important than the homily. I would cheerfully sit through a thousand bad homilies as the price for having a priest who doesn't rip through the sign of the cross like it was some meaningless formality that has to be gotten over to get to the real stuff. Ditto for a priest who would say the Nicene Creed slow enough that we can all follow what it is that we are professing rather than rushing through it because the homily was too long again.

The Wings of the Dove

(To make this a blog exclusively about the Wings of the Dove click here.)

Okay, it's time to move along. I've been going through this thing far too slowly. No one could possible be following this as it would be painful to do so at the pace I'm moving.

Chapter 21.

The people who made the movie version were attracted to the film noir elements in the book—which is to say the femme fatale (Kate Croy) who leads the hapless man (Merton Densher) into the awful act against the innocent victim (Milly Theale). And that, in their view anyway, justified disregarding much of the plot and sense of the novel as well as altering characters circumstances. Despite that, it's a good movie although it isn't a good movie of the novel, if you know what I mean. That granted, however, Henry James understands film noir better than they do and this chapter proves it. If the film makers had paid closer attention to what James does in this chapter and been faithful to that, they would have made a much better movie than they did, possibly even a great movie.*

The key thing in this chapter is that Merton goes to see Milly because Kate wants him to. He doesn't know, yet, what Kate's plans are. He has to suspect something but he may be excused for not guessing just what and just how mercenary Kate means to be.

At first he is tempted to just break the thing with Milly off.

He had talked with Kate of this young woman's being "sacrificed," and that would have been one way, so far as he was concerned, to sacrifice her.

But he does not break it off as he gets along easily with her and every just slides along. And that is how we make bad moral decisions isn't it? It's easy to just slide along.

But there is a moment that I have called the "And then it was night" moment. This is a moment that occurs in many tragedies when the plotters of evil could just stop. They could pretend it was all a lark and then go home and nothing bad would happen. But if they go past it, they are in all the way. This is the moment where in great film noir—see Double Indemnity or Body Heat—when the man gets on the trolley ride the woman has been preparing him for with her and after that he must ride all the way to the end.

James, doing a much better job than the film, shows us in this chapter how Merton gets on the trolley. And here is how he reasons part of his fall through.

The sharp point was, however, in the difference between acting and not acting: this difference in fact it was that made the case of conscience. He saw it with a certain alarm rise before him that everything was acting that was not speaking the particular word. "If you like me because you think she doesn't, it isn't a bit true: she does like me awfully!"--that would have been the particular word; which there were at the same time but too palpably such difficulties about his uttering. Wouldn't it be virtually as indelicate to challenge her as to leave her deluded?--and this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes--once they had gone a certain length--that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love. Loyalty was of course supremely prescribed in presence of any design on her part, however roundabout, to do one nothing but good.

*The best filmed version of Mansfield Park is a movie called Metropolitan. It changes the plot significantly—moving it to 1980s New York—but, for all that, is much true to the spirit of the book. It's a shame the makers of The Wings of the Dove didn't think of doing likewise.

Sort of political Monday: Sunlight

The Sunlight Foundation, a left-wing organization that calls itself "nonpartisan', has looked at the one percent of the one percent of political donors. The results have not been given as much attention as they ought have gotten.

That this is the case is entirely the fault of the Sunlight Foundation itself which puts everyone off the scent right off the bat with this highly misleading paragraph:

Unlike the other 99.99% of Americans who do not make these contributions, these elite donors have unique access. In a world of increasingly expensive campaigns, The One Percent of the One Percent effectively play the role of political gatekeepers. Prospective candidates need to be able to tap into these networks if they want to be taken seriously. And party leaders on both sides are keenly aware that more than 80% of party committee money now comes from these elite donors.

That this is not true, however, becomes apparent if we skim down and look at the top recipients of this money. If we go down to the chart in which they present the house members most reliant on the one percent of the one percent, for example, this is whom we get Pete Stark (D-CA), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Jerry Lewis (R-CA), George Miller (D-CA), Gregory Meeks (D-NY), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), Doris Matsui (D-CA), Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and John Kline (R-MN). The Sunlight Foundation notes, as it could hardly avoid doing so, that most are Democrats. The same is true of the Senators who receive the most from the wealthiest donors. But there are a couple of other details that jump out at you aren't there?

Perhaps the most important of these is that these people all have very safe seats. If Gregory Meeks is ever defeated it will be by another Democrat not a Republican. He has already established beyond a reasonable doubt that you can be stupid, dishonest and crass and that won't bother the voters of NY's 6th congressional district so long as you're a Democrat.  Doris Matsui's sole qualification for her position is that she was married to the former holder of the seat. And this tells us something very important about the way big donors select recipients: they want to fund proven winners.

The Sunlight Foundation gets the problem exactly backwards. You don't need big money to win, the big money seeks out proven winners. If you want to buy anything at all, you have to buy it from someone who has it; if you want to buy political access, you're going to buy from someone who already has it.

Anyone who really wanted to make our politics somewhat cleaner tan it is would promote changes that make it harder for incumbents to remain in power. They, and not big donors, are the real gatekeepers.

Mary Wolstencraft

Reading about her last night it struck me that a lot of Wollstonecraft's behaviour suggests something like fetal alcohol syndrome.

"Putting yourself in the other person's shoes"

This is a highly over-rated bit of advice and Robert Wright inadvertantly proves it:

[Ron] Paul is making one contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value. It doesn't lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I'm largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them. Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.

This is such a radical departure from the prevailing American mindset that some of Paul's critics see it as more evidence of his weirdness. A video montage meant to discredit him shows him taking the perspective of Iran. After observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about Iranians, "Why wouldn't it be natural that they'd want a weapon? Internationally they'd be given more respect."

Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about Iranian motivation? Wouldn't it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?

Well yeah. But the key thing here is that you can only make this move if you begin by unconsciously assuming that the other person's or nation's perspective is legitimate. As in, "Why shouldn't criminals want guns when they can see that the police already have them?"

This argument has often been used to justify terrorism. "Well, of course the Palestinians resort to terrorism because they keep losing otherwise." And built into that is an assumption—whether the person making the argument realizes it or not—that the Palestinians are supposed to win.

Here's a different thought experiment. Imagine that the United States and Israel didn't have nuclear weapons. Do you think that Iran would be trying to develop them then? Of course they would and probably with even greater determination knowing that this would allow them to strike harder than anyone could strike back against them.

Manly Thor's Day Special: How to enjoy coffee

 From Esquire's 1949 Handbook for Hosts:

When coffee was introduced to Europe in the 16th century, people thought it rendered women frigid and even barren; a law was promptly passes in Constantinople giving husbands the right to prevent the use of coffee by their wives. Maybe that's why the average woman, to this day, can't make a good cup of coffee. It must be that, basically, coffee is a man's drink. When subjected to the economies of drugstore waitresses or the casual inattention of wives, the cup that cheers but does not inebriate is apt to become a mean, thin liquid with almost unlimited capacities for discouraging real coffee lovers.

It's a shame we have lost this sort of gentle mockery between the sexes. And, old-fashioned as it may seem, there is something to it; to this day the average woman still makes and then cheerfully drinks a lousy cup of coffee. It is a sad sign of how badly male society has been degraded that many average men don't do much better.

I'll tell you why most women can't make good coffee: because they think of it as a drug. If you avoid making that mistake you can set your feet on the road to enlightenment.

Watch a woman in action and you will see what I mean. For the average female coffee drinker or feminized male, caffeine is either a morning jolt or the cause of insomnia. When she-he puts a cup of strong-tasting coffee to her lips, she thinks "Oh-oh powerful drug". She-he doesn't notice the taste as taste but rather she notices it as a warning the same way she might notice the smell of smoke and worry that her house is on fire.

On the other hand, when she-he is looking for a jolt, they want to get the stuff into their bloodstream in large quantities as that can be easily swallowed as quickly as possible. So they go to their drip coffee maker and pour the results into a really big mug. Or they belly up to the bar and ask for "Venti™"!

That's a problem because, while not all strong coffee is good coffee, all good coffee is strong coffee. (If you prefer a subtle coffee taste, dilute it with cream or hot milk. Do not brew weak coffee; "Café Americano" is an Italian term that means "serve this crap to the tourists because it is a sin to throw pearls before swine".)

So your first important tip is this: don't drink coffee every day. If you met someone at a party who said, "I love rum so much I drink a mickey of it everyday", you'd have no trouble figuring out what was really going on. The person who has four or five cups of coffee a day or orders a "Venti™" when they go to Starbucks is addicted to a drug and is no better qualified to judge good coffee than a crack addict.

The second important thing to know is that the best part of any drink is the first few sips. The returns diminish after that. This is true of many things; the greatest moment is when she first ... . So make something of that first moment. Sit down and anticipate. Pick the cup up gently and reverently and smell it. Take the time to enjoy it. Then take a taste. Miss this moment and you can't get it back.

An important tip for drinking coffee, whisky and brandy given me when I was a boy is to avoid the tip. Get the drink over the tip of your tongue onto the middle of your tongue. Then cradle it there. Wash it around your the middle of your tongue and only then, when it is slightly cooled and mixed with your own juices, let it slide forward over your tongue. As you do so, savour the tastes of coffee, for it has many tastes.

There is lots of good advice out there about buying and  making good coffee but it will all be useless to you if you don't know how to enjoy good coffee.

"Neutral" application of the law and racism 2

In Saint John, New Brunswick—one of the two mill towns I grew up in*—there is an historic courthouse. The main reason for visiting it is a self-supporting spiral staircase. Once you have marveled at that, there are a few historic exhibits.

One of the historic displays is a book with the arrest records from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth and early twentieth century. If you flip to any page from the last half of the nineteenth century forward, a curious fact will become obvious: for any given period there were many more Irish Catholics arrested than any other group. The number arrested far exceeds their proportion of the population of Saint John.

Some of this can be explained by bigotry. But in Saint John, as we find in most eastern cities, the police force became a route out of poverty for Irish Catholics and by middle of the twentieth century the majority of police officers in town were Irish Catholics and yet the majority of people arrested, charged and convicted of crimes remained Irish Catholics for as long as records were kept. Some other group has probably supplanted them at the top of this particularly hit parade by now but records are no longer kept to ascertain this. I'd guess that Irish Catholics were still at the top of the charts in the early 1970s when my family moved away.

The point being that while there was unquestionably discrimination against Irish Catholics when the city government and business was dominated by WASPs, there was also something seriously amiss with the Irish Catholic subculture that those fleeing the potato famine brought to eastern North America. And we can see evidence of this in all the major cities of the east coast where the Irish Catholics played a disproportionate part in crime, violent crime, criminal gangs and organized crime. The law had a  disproportionate effect on the Irish Catholics of Saint John partly because of discrimination but also partly because the Irish Catholics were simply more likely to be criminals. Even if the law had been administered perfectly neutrally, there would have been more Irish Catholics arrested.

The same remains true for some of the minority subcultures today.

In Saint John, things began to improve when members of a nascent Irish Catholic middle class took a long hard look at the subculture that they were raised in and began to be critical of it. They used their position of influence in Irish-Catholic institutions to change attitudes. My godfather spearheaded the movement to merge the Catholic Youth Organization or CYO with the larger YMCA because he believed that the isolationist attitudes promoted by the CYO were hurting young Irish Catholics who would benefit from more exposure to the more successful moral culture promoted at the YMCA.

Yes, there remains racism in North America, but one of the primary obstacles confronting young black, Hispanic and aboriginal youth (among others) are the pathologies of their own subcultures.



* the other being Gatineau, Quebec