Mad Men: The Lady Lazarus

That was an immensely unsatisfying show. It wasn't crap. There were some great moments in this show but it just added up to a huge mess signifying nothing. In that sense winding up with one the Beatles bits of audio gimmickry passing itself off as a song was appropriate.

I think the worst of Mad Men comes when it starts feeling too much like the lives of people in the entertainment industry. This, of course, is one of the prime traits of modernism, where the writing becomes about the artist grasping their moment in history rather than an artist being someone who writes about others. This episode we quite literally had Don trying to find his place in history. (I take it as a promising sign that he cut "Tomorrow Never Knows" off to go to bed.

Someone needs to tell the writers that this is supposed to be about other people's lives and not thinly disguised versions of their own aspirations. And note that Weiner wrote this episode. It's getting to be sadly predictable that when he gets the writing credit the episode will be unsatisfying.

Everywhere I saw false notes. The fact that Peter ends up in bed with Beth so quickly for example. All the plot needed was the recognition that they both wanted one another. It would, in fact, have been more convincing if they'd bonded emotionally and then come this close into exploding into sex. And then she'd pull back.

This has always been a problem with the show. Not that so many people have so much sex but that they have it too easily. Although it's worse when they try and drag it out as they did with Suzanne Farrell. The irony here is that the shows producers don't have the art to pull it off.

By the way, do you think Pete can pull off the same impregnate in one go trick with Beth that he managed with Peggy?

Beth's telling Peter to "Fantasize about it," also rang false. Not that people didn't fantasize about tings but they didn't talk about it that way yet. My Secret Garden wouldn't be published for another six years.

At first it seemed promising that Megan had a secret life especially the way they let us go through half the show without anymore of a hint about what it was than the name "Jack Shapiro". Then it turned out that her dream was to be an actress, gag, and then some dialogue between Don and Megan about her dream that was already a cliché when 42 Street was made. Don't believe me? Then go watch the movie—it parodies this sort of crap.

Aside from that we learned that Peter reads Pynchon in hardcover. I'm thinking this is a hint that Peter has more depth than Ken, who writes mere fantasy fiction. Or maybe that is wishful thinking on my part. The one good thing we've seen so far this year has been Pete acquiring depth and character and doing so convincingly.

The show is at it's best on miniatures, there was too much trying to connect with the big picture of history this episode. The writers all need to get themselves a copy of Joan Didion's The White Album and read it.

Final thought, too much cleverness. Like the way they played what I assume was the Cilla Black version of "September in the Rain" when looking for a song that sounded sort of Beatlesy. If you don't get that reference, look her up.

I know I'm not alone on this: For a lot of us fans the show's glory was it's style and that style was attractive because we were bloody tired of having the same stupid tales of the style-less 1960s shoved down our throats all our lives. That the show had to cover this era was inevitable but it didn't have to give us just  another wow sixties aren't drugs cool, story.

Creepy?

The Week has one of those absolutely useless pieces of journalism up in which some "experts" tells us what the future might be like. The subject is the possibility that robot dolls might one day replace prostitutes. The good folks at The Week asked the expert this gem of a question:

Hold on. Isn't having sex with a robot inescapably creepy?

You know, 'cause having sex with human prostitutes is like, totally non-creepy.


The answer is pretty telling too:

Perhaps. But the study's authors argue that robot sex "won't sound nearly as weird" in 2050 as it does today, and will likely be considered a luxury rather than a taboo. Still, a host of questions looms, says Lauren Davis at io9. Does having sex with a robot count as infidelity? Would it devalue human intimacy? And would laws be passed to ensure that sex robots aren't built to resemble children or racial stereotypes, such as submissive Asian women? 

Consider the question of creepiness when you look at that last sentence. Because we all know that there are no actual Asian women working in prostitution right now who will play up any racial stereotypes for customers willing to pay in that famously non-creepy sex trade.

And I love the question "Would it devalue human intimacy?" Gee, what would make you think that literally dehumanizing sex would devalue human intimacy?

My guess, however, is that all this is just wheel spinning. That there will never be a truly convincing sex robot. It's a purely academic question for me in any case as I never intend to find out.

A little light culture: Our masturbatory culture

In researching yesterday's post I read a bunch of pieces written by Alexandra Molotkow. Over the last twenty-four hours a couple of lines she wrote kept coming back to me:

As a woman in your twenties, you sometimes serve as a human Fleshlight, and you sometimes thank the guy for the privilege, and you sometimes pay for it when the STI or the pregnancy test, or both, come back positive. Our lives, like any, are made up of small humiliations. 

And I kept thinking of a quip of my grandmother's: "Are you complainin' or braggin'?" My grandmother never dropped her G's except with intentional irony and that irony would be well-placed here. That is bragging.

In another article, Molotkow writes at some length about her experience as a teenage cybersex obsessive. Here is the teaser published at the top of that article:

I’m among the first generation to come of age on the Internet. By 13, I was an expert at chat room sex, spotting cyber-pervs and hiding my secret life from my parents.

She is way ahead of me that is for sure. I had to Google "Fleshlight". Let me save you the trouble. It's a masturbatory aid for men (like we need one) that is shaped like a flashlight. It's the sort of thing that major losers buy. If you would like to contest that claim, here is a challenge: Google "Fleshlight", click on images, look at a picture of one of the things and imagine cleaning it after use. If that doesn't make you shudder with disgust, you need help.

But Molotkow is rather proud of her knowledge of this sort of thing. She talks, and talks quite knowledgeably, about cybersex she did as a teen. And she isn't shallow or stupid. There is a fair amount of wisdom in her article. For example:

Sex talk at our sleepovers invariably led to a discussion of cybersex. We’d start by agreeing how perverse it was. Gradually we’d work toward a list of circumstances in which we could see ourselves taking part. Eventually we’d agree that cybering wasn’t necessarily bad, just not something we would ever indulge in. And then one night we decided that cybering was something we might try, and “might try” quickly became “should do.”

That shows considerable self awareness. That is how we talk ourselves into these things and it is also a good illustration of how journalists help us down the primrose path. The first articles on the subject are about this weird and disturbing trend that has "experts concerned" but you can be sure that it will be only a few years at most before the journalists are writing that every twelve-year-old girl is already doing it and quoting experts telling us that we may as well get used to it because it can't be stopped and it isn't that bad anyway and a short while after that the articles will be about how much more savvy kids today are than their parents.

Here is another:

Chat rooms are full of people trying to get laid; they’re a lot like bars, if bars admitted children.

My buddy Steve made the same observation back in 1990 after reading an article about a then new service  that made it possible for people to call a single number and then connect anonymously for conversations with members of the opposite sex. He said, "This service is going to end up with a lot of teenage girls getting taught about sex by pathetic old men who've never managed a relationship and learned everything they think they know about sex from decades of reading porn." And that is pretty much what has happened.

There is one thing Molotkow didn't learn from all her experience however and that is how to actually connect to a man. If you read the whole piece it's really quite pathetic. I'd like to make what might seem like a crazy claim though and it is that the bitter complaint I quoted at the top—about being a human Fleshlight—is really at the root of why so many women, like Molotkow, can be so sexual and yet unable to bond with a man.

Come with me on a mental experiment. First, consider the effort a young woman puts into being a young woman.

• Think of the hours spent on clothes and make up. 
• Think of the years spent in school and university and all the studying she didn't feel like doing but did anyway and all the essays she didn't feel like writing but wrote anyway. 
• Think of the fitness stuff she does going to the gym or yoga class several times a week. Think of how hard it is to start exercise sometimes and how it always feels worth it after you've made the effort.
• Think of how she can feel like crap but make the effort to be cheerful and friendly for some people even though she doesn't feel like it. 
• And think of her job. Think of how she gets out of bed earlier than she would like every morning. Think of how she dresses up for the job. Of the long hours put into pleasing her boss and her clients.

It's a great bloody lot of work and she keeps doing it even though there are days she hates it. And, after all this, she regards sex that is more for her guy than for her as being like a human masturbatory aid?

And it's not just Molotkow. I've heard women in the third year of marriage or a relationship say, "It feels like we are just servicing one another?"

Okay, now that we have done the background, consider a hypothetical. Imagine a woman in a relationship. We'll assume she actually likes sex and is able to maintain enough interest in her guy that they have sex regularly. Suppose her guy asks, given the obvious difference the sex drives of most men and most women, that she consider doing it "just for him" twice a week above and beyond the sex she wants for herself. How much effort would be required for her to do a really first class job of this? She would have to,

1. Spend a few some time planning.

• She would have to think of the best time for this. 
• She'd have to find a time when they both would be free and when they wouldn't be too tired. 
• And then she could spend some time thinking through scenarios.

2. Spend some time preparing.

• She'd put a little extra time into dressing. Not much. She has to get dressed anyway, so all she has to do is pick her outfit and underwear with a little more care. It would take the same amount of effort as getting dressed for work or a party takes.
• She'd put a little time getting herself into a positive frame of mind. Again, this is the same effort she'd make when preparing to meet clients or to meet family.

3. Actually do it.

• Like exercise, sometimes the hardest part is getting started but millions of people manage it.
• It requires paying active attention to what he likes and his mood today.
• And it takes a certain amount of time. Begin with a little flirtatious chat and kissing to the moment when she could reasonable get up and do something else is probably about forty-five minutes.
• And she'd have to keep doing it and not let her efforts peter out.

That would be a gold-plate effort, more than most women in a settled relationship or marriage do. That plus the regular sex needed to meet her needs is way more than most men get or expect.

How much effort would this be? It's an hour and a half of actual activity, plus maybe ten to twenty minutes at most extra dressing time (she is getting dressed for work anyway) and lets say another half hour of planning and mental preparation time. That's less than three hours a week. That's less effort than a lot of women put into physical fitness. It's a lot less than you'd need to put into a job.

Heck, let's cut it in half and have her do it only once a week beyond the sex she wants for herself. Now we're talking about less than an hour and half effort per week. When you break it down like that, how does it get to be that a woman might bitterly complain that she feels like "a human Fleshlight" or like "we're just servicing one another"? Is that some crazy, unfair imposition to suggest that you might make this sort of effort for a person whom is going to unite his life to yours.

That is where our masturbatory culture has gotten us. It's not, as some moralists complain, that the fantasies that come masturbation are so ideal that real life can't keep up. It's more that we lose the ability to connect to other people. It's not an accident that as it has gotten easier and easier to get anything you want at a touch of a button it seems like it has gotten harder and harder for people to connect as a couple; it's not an accident that online porn and speed dating have popped up at the same time.

Anything you want you can have. Usually for free. The joke is that if you can imagine it, it exists. In fact, things you couldn't have imagined exist. In a world where all that is so easy, the really magical thing, the thing that gives the greatest erotic thrill is managing to build a real connection to another human being.

Here's a clue, a big part of making that work is serving one another willingly and joyfully.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Reality?

"Reality is one of those words we use as a synonym for authenticity. "Reality" doesn't have to be true, it just has to be "reality". Meaning it just has to confirm our beliefs.

I was thinking about this seeing that everyone is all abuzz about the revelation that Barrack Obama's "New York Girlfriend" is a "composite" rather than a real person.

We never would have known except that his real New York girlfriend kept a journal and biographer David Maraniss found the girlfriend and her journal and quickly realized that the "New York Girlfriend" in Obama's autobiography was pure fiction. Obama, confronted with this, fell on the old composite defence.

It's highly appropriate, by the way, that she should be a "New York" girlfriend and then the whole house of cards came tumbling down in Washington. It was New York Magazine that made the "composite" approach to journalism nonfiction fiction famous. And then the Washington Post made it infamous. A writer named Janet Cooke wrote a story called "Jimmy's World" about an eight-year old heroin addict in Washington. She won a Pulitzer for the story. And then it started to unravel.

Interestingly, the people who actually work with young heroin addicts were the first to blow the whistle. They'd seen lots of young heroin addicts but they had never seen one that young. That was why Cooke got caught. Her defense was that the character was a "composite" but even composites have to be based on a sliver of truth and there were no eight-year-old heroin addicts in DC. Cooke's story was very real, meaning it was very "gritty. It just wasn't true. Keep that in mind.

And then it turned out that Cooke had lied about other stuff too. Like her college record for example.

Oh yeah, if you like nice little coincidences that lend a feeling of symmetry to things, when the Washington Post ran the story on it's own scandal, it was written by David Maraniss.

But suppose for a moment that Obama had written not an autobiography but fiction? Suppose that he had written a story of a young man much like Barrack Obama and had been widely praised for that? Would that be any better? There are a number of such novels out there by young black men. The problem is they get their authority from a sense of authenticity. No one would read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man if it were not for the sense that there is something real about the book. That it, while fiction, is telling us something about Ellison's own experience. If some scholar were to turn up evidence now that Ellison created fiction largely at odds with the facts of his life, he'd disappear from our culture.

Let's jump to something else. The Globe and Mail's TV critic John Doyle writes this morning:

And another thing: There are too many rich, brawling, vacuous women on TV. Too much attention is being paid. Why?

I agree (although I'm not sure why either his or my opinion should matter as people are surely allowed to watch what they want to watch) but he nowhere gets around to mentioning Girls in his  tirade. For if there is a show on TV that features too many rich and vacuous women it is Girls. Do they brawl? Perhaps not literally but they sure were ripping at one another in the episodes I saw. (And another thing: there as still far more rich, brawling vacuous men than women on TV: football, hockey ....)

Why is Girls just fine and Real Housewives beyond the pale? You get a hint in Doyle's conclusion:

Men are almost entirely absent from Big Rich Texas, as they are from most of Real Housewives shows and their imitators. That’s part of the appeal. In these peculiar times, women are watching women unleashed, freed from mundane life and behaving badly. It’s about women of the 99 per cent being agog at the 1 per cent of women who get to be loud, lewd, rich exhibitionists.

The rich girls in Girls are the right kind of rich people and Big Rich Texas are the wrong kind. Obama's tales of a young black man dating a white woman in New York are most probably just stuff he made up but it gets accepted as reality because it confirms what college-educated upper middle class people want to believe. It's very real meaning that it's very gritty. (An odd feature of Obama's writing is that he tends to discount his mother who gave him so much comfort and support and play up his absent and useless father because he represents the sort of gritty realism that was mostly absent from the privileged life Obama actually led.)

That also answers the question of why people believed the story of an eight-year-old heroin addict to the point that Janet Cooke was awarded a Pulitzer for making him up. Because it confirmed the gritty reality that they desperately wanted to believe in.  

Similarly, Girls confirms what writer Alexandra Molotkow wants to believe about herself:

I’ve been there, give or take a few details. As a woman in your twenties, you sometimes serve as a human Fleshlight, and you sometimes thank the guy for the privilege, and you sometimes pay for it when the STI or the pregnancy test, or both, come back positive. Our lives, like any, are made up of small humiliations. 

It is telling that The Globe and Mail did not trust regular TV writer John Doyle to write about Girls but went to find an "authentic girl" to do so. And to give her her due, to scan Molotkow's internet record is to see someone much like Lena Dunham, meaning that these are young writers who have been training their entire lives to tell the awaiting world the sad story of their own sad experience in much the same way as Milton trained his entire life to write Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, albeit with a less glorious result.

Back in September 2010 Molotkow wrote about one of those small humiliations she shares with the girls of Girls. She told the whole world about how at 21 she moved out of her "parents’ home in the Beach" and into an apartment that had been occupied by another girl who had been known for her reputation as "party girl",

I could barely talk to her for thoughts of all the things she’d already done that I’d never have the guts to try. She was calling because she’d found an apartment on Palmerston Avenue, the downtown renter’s holy grail, and was quitting the place she’d lived in for the greater part of a decade, a local institution that had hosted so much sex and so many drugs that, an acquaintance joked, one could get high by licking the walls.

Notice how gritty all this is. (And how hackneyed it all is; that joke about licking the walls was already old by the time I first heard it in the 1970s. Do millennials have any experiences at all that amount to more than vicariously living lives of the past century?)

This pursuit of grittiness she describes is not unusual, some kids of every generation do this sort of thing. Typically, most come back to their senses and move out of their gritty downtown apartments and get real jobs. A few settle in downtown forever becoming "characters" and few others don't do so well and they and their lives spiral out of control. One day you may be walking, as I did, from a downtown lunch meeting and recognize the crumpled heap lying on the sidewalk as a guy from high school who was "really into" punk rock. What makes Molotkow different is that she didn't do any of those things but instead moved back in with mom and dad and now wants the rest of us to see her as a victim because it turned out that the living away from home was too hard for her the way math was too hard for Barbie.

Question: are vacuous upper-middle class girls like Molotkow less obnoxious than vacuous rich girls? "Sunny", the first commenter on her story of moving out of and then back home nails it:

I'm sorry, but this is a depressing read, and not something I'd want to be bragging about in public. I had thought this was someone who'd just graduated high school, and was shocked, shocked, to read that the writer was 21 at the time. Being 21 and wholly unable to look after yourself is something for both parents and child to be ashamed of.

Obnoxious and vacuous girls from the rich, upper-middle, middle-middle and lower-middle classes really do exist. They are reality. The difference is that the women who watch Big Rich Texas know they are watching a show about people who aren't like them. The women who watch Girls believe they are seeing their lives reflected and their pathetic humiliations on screen.

For guys, the take away is this, if a woman tells you with a straight face that it is the fate of a girl of her generation to serve as "a human Fleshlight*", you don't want to be with her.



* A Fleshlight is a sex toy for men that looks like a flashlight. Trust me on this: that's all you really want to know.

A couple of economic and social indicators for your consideration

Whiskey and lingerie

For the past couple of years the liquor stores here have been flogging whiskey (and whisky). They still are.

For the past couple of years lingerie stores have been flogging rather elaborate stuff. They still are:

Click on the picture to see it larger.

Okay, what do consumers who buy these things have in common?

Answer: They are purchased by people who plan to stay in rather than go out.

That is an important trend. It might be an entirely economic phenomenon due to disappear with the recovery. Or it might be a sign of something else.

Portrait: What time it is?

Fans of The Sun Also Rises will remember that near the opening Jake and a woman he has picked up go by the newspaper office where Jake works and she asks why the office has a whole bunch of clocks on the wall. Jake explains that the clocks are set to the time zones of different cities all over the world. She is incredulous and amazed at this. As she might well be as this was a very modern thing. For centuries people had lived without any awareness of other time zones for the simple reason that it took so long to send a message from one time zone to another that it didn't matter.

This internationalism is also a theme of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Young Stephen wonders how God's name can be "God" in English and "Dieu" in French. That is the kind of concern that arises when different cultures, like different time zones, are brought closer by better technology. He does not worry that his name is "Stephen" in English and "Etienne" in French. Why not? Because only God has a place outside the world to be contemplated equally by all.

Why would you set up a bunch of different clocks to tell yourself what time it was in different places? Only because you believed there was a frame of reference from which all these different time zones could be compared. Getting into and out of different frames of reference is a big modern thing. But what is the frame of reference that encompasses all other reference points? Is there such a frame of reference? The frame of reference point so comprehensive that all others can measured according to it but it cannot be measured according to any other? Why God is.

There is an in-joke in The Sun Also Rises, by the way, and it is that if we try and date the novel by using internal references. that is if we try and find the equivalent of clocks in the text telling us what time we are in, we find only a cloud of confusion. Some internal evidence tells us one year and other internal evidence tells us of another. It seems that Hemingway did this on purpose but who knows.

Which brings me to young Stephen in the infirmary. He has a fever and we follow his thoughts as he looks at the empty school grounds and then wonders why Brother Michael has not given him any medicine. Then he starts imagining he sees waves and then he sees Brother Michael on the deck of a ship who announces to the people that Parnell is dead.

Okay, it's a dream where Stephens various thoughts get crossed in his confused fever. Okay, but which parts of the dream are real and which are the products of the fever?  Did young Stephen look out through a feverish haze and really see Brother Michael mourning at the news of the death of Parnell and that real event was incorporated into his dream? I don't have the foggiest idea but lets go with a while and see where it gets us.

Parnell died on Tuesday October 6 1891. (Young James Joyce was a student at Conglowes from 1888 to 1892.) Let's suppose the news gets to the school on Wednesday October 7. That would put the opening day where Young Stephen is on the football pitch on the 6th and the day he is in the infirmary on the 7th. And there would be a nice parallel here in that Stephen's illness, like Parnell's death, is preceded by an injury visited upon him.

Okay, what other internal evidence to we have to go by? Well, we have the countdown to Christmas holidays that young Stephen is keeping:

Sitting in the studyhall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away; but one time it would come because the earth moves round always.

 Okay, let's do the arithmetic. From October 6 to 31 is 25 days. November uses up 30 more. That leaves us 21. Is December 21 a reasonable time for Christmas vacation to begin? Yes it is. I don't know what days they historically got but this is close enough to be credible.

Young Stephen is just starting school which makes him a few years younger than Joyce himself. This is true even if I am wrong in calculating the year as 1891 for we can say with certainty that it is at least 1891 for Stephen is aware of Parnell's death.

A mystery
Final thought for today. First a caveat: Conglowes would have used the 1570 Breviary and don't have a full copy of that so I can't say what follows with certainty. That said, there is something odd about the "night prayers" Stephen says.

Stephen goes to chapel for what are described as night prayers. And Joyce tells us that "his memory knew the responses:

O Lord, open our lips
And our mouths shall announce Thy praise.
Incline unto our aid, O God!
O Lord, make haste to help us!

Well, sorta. The actual opening with responses would be like this:

Dómine, lábia mea apéries.
Et os meum annuntiábit laudem tuam.
Deus, in adiutórium meum inténde.
Dómine, ad adiuvándum me festína.

But perhaps you think, "So what?" because all Joyce has done is to provide us with the translation. Okay, but those opening responses go with Matins a prayer said between midnight and dawn. Now that prayer could be said at night, although technically it belongs with the start of the next day as the name "Matins" suggests.


And later Joyce gives us the final prayer as follows:

Visit, we beseech Thee, O Lord, this habitation and drive
away from it all the snares of the enemy. May Thy holy
angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace and may Thy
blessings be always upon us through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

And that prayer definitely goes with Compline, which is the last prayer said before bed.


So one of two things are happening here. Either,

1. There was something very different about the Divine Office according to the 1570 Breviary, or
2. Joyce got it wrong (the mistake cannot be Stephen's).

I don't know.

Sorta political: Our secular paganism

Casanova told Voltaire that if religion was eliminated, something would have to be found to replace it. Chesterton seems to have thought that the problem then was that we would bounce to just about anything to replace religion. Although both have been partly vindicated, neither man seems to have gotten it entirely right. What has happened as Christianity recedes is that a very specific set of pagan beliefs—a set of beliefs that anyone who has studied the pagan superstitions of the ancient world would recognize—has sprung up.  The shift has not been nearly so random as was anticipated.

Saying the Office of Readings this morning, I came across a very clear example of the contrast between Christianity and the secular paganism that has replaced it in many people's hearts. The second reading is a special one for the memorial for Saint Joseph the Worker and it's taken from Gaudium et spes. That is interesting in itself for while many Catholics and non-Catholics talk about Vatican II, very few actually read the documents of the council. A lot of people prefer to just make stuff up and claim it's backed by the council (but that is a subject for another day).

The reading starts as you might expect, "By his labor and abilities man has always striven to improve the quality of his life." And then it goes on to a discussion of how the modern world has changed things:

Through the development of the many means of communication among nations, the human family is coming to see itself, and establish itself, as a single worldwide community. As a result, where formerly man looked especially to supernatural forces for blessings, he now secures many of these blessings for himself, thanks to his own efforts.

You may be thinking that the next step is condemn the modern world for this and say that men should abandon this and revert to looking to supernatural forces for blessings. In fact Vatican II went exactly the opposite way:

Those who believe in God take it for granted that, taken by itself, man's activity, both individual and collective—that great struggle in which men in the course of the ages have sought to  improve the conditions of human living—is in keeping with God's purpose.

Note that: the modern world and all its comforts and conveniences are in accord with God's purpose—this is the way God wants it to be.

On the other hand, and what I think is interesting, is the degree to which our secular paganism condemns all the mod cons. Think of literature and movies that paints the suburbs as awful, soulless places, of those who attack the American dream, of the  environmentalist movement. All these would have us believe that our attempts to make our lives better are the source of evil.

Of course, no one knew this yet when the documents of Vatican II were composed. There was fear of the bomb in those days but most still took modern technology as something to be optimistic about. New cars, new technology, new houses and new neighbourhoods were all taken to be good things. That optimism is gone now.

As I've said before, honour and shame morality and fatalism go part and partial with paganism. The fatality that drives so  much contemporary culture is not an accident. The incredible irony here is that, as the general culture becomes more pagan, it is in the documents of Vatican II that we find the clearest faith in and optimism for modernity:

So far from thinking that the achievements gained by man's abilities and strength are in opposition to God's power, or that man with his intelligence is in some sense a rival to his creator, Christians are, on the contrary convinced that the triumphs of the human race are a sign of God's greatness and the effect of his wonderful providence.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of Catholics who don't get that. Worse, the people who claim to be great fans of Vatican II are the ones most likely to be importing a lot of Gaia worshiping bullshit into the church and society at large.

On this day of Saint Joseph the worker, make a point of enjoying the benefits of modern technology: use your electric appliances, drive your car, get in your hot tub, read your e-reader and have a chilled beer with your dinner.