We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
He called Keller a prophet. (He refers to anyone who speaks difficult, deep Truths as "speaking prophetically.") On the subject of even good things becoming false idols, he used these Keller quotes which I took from an Amazon review:
"The human heart takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them." Thus anything can be an idol and, really, everything has been an idol to one person or another. The great deception of idols is we are prone to think that idols are only bad things. But evil is far more subtle than this. "We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case. The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes. Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life."
If you happen to be in NYC on a Sunday, you could do worse than to visit his Redeemer Presbyterian Church. (It's a church, ie not a fancy building but a congregation of God-seekers and worshippers.) They have five worship locations in Manhattan.
Pastor Keller usually preaches at their 6 pm service at the Hunter College auditorium.
Neither Jesus nor any of the twelve apostles could get a job in any self-respecting mainline church in America today; none of them had a degree from an accredited seminary.
Christ is my Pastor, my Lord, my teacher, my guide, and my friend. Happy Easter, readers. The Barrister team is off to occupy our (mainline but distinctly non-Progressive and verging on evangelical) New England Congregational church, then a long brunch-lunch with cocktails and champagne, oysters, clams, squid, lobsters, foie gras sliders, rare prime rib with horseradish and rare lamb chops, Halibut with caper and tuna sauce, ridiculous desserts, then (for me) naptime. Why not?
I am halfway through Helprin's* latest novel, In Sunlight and in Shadow. I've read most of his novels.
It's a love story in New York, but also has been described as a love song to New York. I think he also approached it as a chance to put all of his thoughts about what life is about into the words of his protagonist. Thus sometimes he lapses into "telling" instead of "depicting." His protagonist is Harry Copeland, a Jewish NYC leather goods manufacturer just returned from WW 2 who falls in love with an enormously wealthy and social WASP heiress.
Unlike his (I think) masterpiece, Soldier of the Great War, the new book could have used some vigorous editing but, like all of his stuff, worth the read because he is a very smart and observant fellow who just can't resist throwing all of his thoughts in there.
Helprin has an impressive and interesting bio. He had many adventures in life before settling down to write stories (and political commentary on the side). That's the best way to do it.
I like the detail that he does most of the manual labor on his farm in Virginia.
(* Note: Not to be confused with Mark Halperin, the Time Magazine politico)
Related: The Clock Ticks on Racial Preferences - The Supreme Court may soon rule that universities cannot anymore use race as a factor in admissions—some 15 years sooner than Justice O'Connor predicted in 2003.
On longer evenings, Light, chill and yellow, Bathes the serene Foreheads of houses. A thrush sings, Laurel-surrounded In the deep bare garden, Its fresh-peeled voice Astonishing the brickwork. It will be spring soon, It will be spring soon — And I, whose childhood Is a forgotten boredom, Feel like a child Who comes on a scene Of adult reconciling, And can understand nothing But the unusual laughter, And starts to be happy.
I saw a nice lady for consultation a few years ago. She was distraught, wanted help in rebuilding her life and her emotional strength. Her husband, age 54, had, after an evening of good sex with her, informed her that he had realized that he was gay, and needed to leave her to pursue a gay life style because he did not want to deceive her or betray her.
They cried together and held eachother. She cried for two weeks. After that, she began having panic attacks. He moved out, and the legal aspects of the divorce proceedings had been easy and mutually agreeable.
Six months had gone by and she still felt shattered. The reality of her life had been exploded. I told her that grief takes at least a year. Mind you, this was a sophisticated urban woman who had once been in the fashion business and who assured me she could readily identify gay guys at a distance. He had always been a loving, sexy, loyal husband with no hyper-macho ways, and no stereotypical gay interests or mannerisms. Good father, too. He worked in finance.
In the six months apart, she told me that he had seemed to transform himself from an ordinary fellow into a flamboyantly gay man who drinks too much, dyes his hair, spends weekends in Provincetown and weeknights in gay bars. He told her it took him 40 years "to find his inner fag." He says he'll love her forever, support her and the kids, but now has found his real self and feels happier than he ever had.
I thought to myself "That was a real gay marriage." I also wondered whether he was Bipolar, but it didn't matter because it was over and her challenge was to write what I term "a new chapter."
I had seen this a number of times before, in mid-life men and in women too. I can't say I understand it. Nobody really does, but I do understand the grief. Agonizing. I also understand the horror of wondering whether much of one's life has been fraudulently-lived in a fake reality.
In my line of work, I encounter plenty of people who live in fake realities of their own construction, but it's not ordinarily about sexual matters. It's usually about other things. I carry the burden of a thousand stories in my soul, but don't feel sorry for me. It's a privilege, and I get paid to carry them.
(nb: real details of this story are totally altered and combined - fake but true)
Smart move by Amazon. A heck of a lot more people read Goodreads than read the NYT Book Review or, God knows, the NY Review of Books or The London Review of Books. I do enjoy the intelligence of the London Review.
People still love books but, with the appealing Teaching Company DVDs, it's tough for me to do more than a book per week.
In March, our White Throated Sparrows and Juncos begin heading north to their breeding grounds, and our Song Sparrows begin arriving from their winter haunts somewhat further south in the US.
I am just back from my assigned 1- hour Good Friday vigil at church (4-5 AM). So quiet, peaceful, serious, in semi-darkness (but with an almost -full moon shining in the windows) with the black-draped cross. I imagined being one of those who kept him company during his execution. I prayed for the souls of all of those I care about, and I prayed that his death would indeed redeem my sinful nature and my flawed soul. Lay it all at the foot of the cross, Pastor advises.
We can't even be trusted to feed ourselves anymore. Who anointed these guardians? Aren't they just lowly politicos - a widely-disrespected class of people in America?
If marriage is primarily a legal contract, then why can't two elderly sisters marry? It might very well be to their advantage, and they may love eachother deeply. Or does marriage have to involve sex? If so, who from the government is going to check to make sure that sex is happening? God knows, the world is full of sexless marriages.
And, yes, what about polygamy? Why not? It's not Christian but it is Old Testament Jewish and it is modern (quietly) Mormon - and Islam. How many wives did David have? I read that Solomon had 200 wives and 800 concubines, or maybe the other way around. I do not know when the Israelites gave up polygamy.
The whole topic becomes more and more absurd and confusing as cultural traditions are undermined. Gays can get married while the heterosexual people are now up to 50% childbirth out of wedlock. Crazy world. It's called cultural change.
Then I noticed this: Kagan ’09: ‘There Is No Constitutional Right To Same-Sex Marriage’. That statement signifies to me that she is an unwise person. The Constitution does not set up government to dole out rights to the people, but rather to protect the mostly-unlimited rights of a free people. But I am repeating myself.
Freedom and privacy require no "penumbra." Back to the US Constitution, the American social contract:
This list of rights should not be read to limit in any way any other rights of the people.
The powers not specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution, nor prohibited by the Constitution to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Obamacare is not medical insurance in any real sense of the term "insurance." It is set up to pay your medical bills. It is no freebie, however. It's expensive.
I have two annoyed comments, and a few brief questions:
- Would my hernia repair have cost me $18,000 to the hospital if there were no insurance?
- Obamacare will render my medical insurace plan, an old-fashioned family Major Medical, illegal next year. So I can't keep the insurance I like.
- Will it be illegal for businesses, and rich folks, to self-insure under Obamacare? How would that work? And what about people like me, who like to pay their doctors themselves? Will that be permitted? What if I want to take Granny to Switzerland for herbal treatments for her dementia?
The tragedy of the commons requires that fisheries be managed, somehow. The ways to do it can be debated, but there is no doubt that the conservation measures for Striped Bass have resulted in a remarkable resurgence of their populations (along with cleaner breeding waters in their rivers and bays).
In recent years, factory ships have, in just a few years, stripped the Northeast of our vast schools of Bunker (Menhaden) with the use of helicopter spotters. Those schools are foundational to our big fish.
The fishing industry of the Northeast US cleaned out the George's Bank populations years ago, pretty much emptied out the inshore Cod and Haddock populations, and is headed in the same direction with the Grand Banks. Furthermore, their trawls vacuum the sea bottom of every living thing, leaving a desert behind. Like strip-mining.
While I admire professional fishermen very much for their skills and daring, just as with hunting wild animals there have to be sustainable limits or the Cod would go the way of the buffalo and the Passenger Pigeon.
I want a "leave me alone" society -- one where Christian schools can turn people away for rejecting their doctrine, just as gay rights groups can reject those who don't share their beliefs. I don't want us all to get along -- not because I'm misanthropic (well, not just because I'm misanthropic), but because I know that "consensus" is usually a fancy word for muting minority viewpoints. I want us all to be free to be annoyed with each other from our separate corners. Is that too much to ask?
1. Marriage. Everybody is writing about the gay marriage topic. How is marriage defined? Is the Supreme Court being asked to be a dictionary? To revise the dictionary? That's above their pay grade.
2. Is there a "right" to gay marriage? Isn't that the wrong question? The Federal government was never assigned the power to determine such personal things in a country in which the presumption of local and, most importantly, individual liberty is the centerpiece. We do not have, or need, delimited rights. Government has delimited powers (supposedly). I guess the issue had to become a federal case because marriage is not so much about a relationship, but, maybe unfortunately, about a legal status with many legal implications.
Reality must be faced. A generation has grown up rejecting the truths that its grandparents lived. And while population growth among our native born halted decades ago, scores of millions have come in from abroad to fill the empty spaces. And they are still coming. They like what Big Government has to offer, and seem uninterested in what the GOP has to sell.
In that case, you try harder to sell your product, change your product, or go out of business.
From Mead on 
I am halfway through Helprin's* latest novel, In Sunlight and in Shadow. I've read most of his novels. 
Bruce Walker: 
In March, our White Throated Sparrows and Juncos begin heading north to their breeding grounds, and our Song Sparrows begin arriving from their winter haunts somewhat further south in the US. 
"Obscurity and a competence—
If marriage is primarily a legal contract, then why can't two elderly sisters marry? It might very well be to their advantage, and they may love eachother deeply. Or does marriage have to involve sex? If so, who from the government is going to check to make sure that sex is happening? God knows, the world is full of sexless marriages.
