Blithely, Blithely: July 2005

July 30, 2005

She passed

I can recommend I Passed for White, by Reba Lee as told to the late, insufficiently lamented Mary Roberts Rinehart (Longmans Green, 1955), whose title tells the plot. It’s a memoiristic account of an adventurous young Chicago woman, not yet 18, who takes the plunge into the white world. She looks the part and when necessary extemporizes and in general creates a barely credible white past for herself. She marries a suburban NYC WASP socialite and loves it but loses her charade when coming out of childbirth she asks, panic-stricken, if the baby is black.

Mary RR tells the story perfectly, eschewing sensationalism and changing names etc. where necessary to protect the innocent, including the family she marries into, which is decent in all respects except for its and its set’s overwhelming racial prejudice. The Chicago references are adequate for the story. The prejudice is probably a shocker for those who don’t remember how it was in those not-good old days. It’s a book that touches all bases, from white prejudice to black (“colored”) anger without beating the reader over the head. OP library has it; where else you get it I don’t know, though surely www.alibris.com is a good place to start.

July 25, 2005

Is there a God?

God may or not be in his heaven, but all’s not right with the world, said Eric Zorn, resident professed agnostic at Chi Trib, last January. He’s indifferent to the first question but not to God-isms he hears so often from "civic and religious leaders" and others, including his old friend who thanked God for post-tsunami safety of two other friends.

What about parents of dead children, victims of same tsunami, whose prayers were not answered? asks Eric. What indeed? Their children stand as proof positive of the foolishness of praying, he says. But what of trillions [? Reader Neil guesses billions] of other children who died before their time since the beginning of time? For that matter, what of the trillions of full grown adults or senior citizens who died violently or for that matter of natural causes, asleep in their beds? And the trillions yet to go, including Eric Zorn and me?

Zorn is a piker. He seems to let God off easy or to let the God concept alone until a big catastrophe which sets loose the sort of thanksgiving of which he does not approve. But if this God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, & Jesus were worth his salt, there would be no trouble whatever. The vale of tears would be a garden of bliss. Right away, without the folderol of suffering and death or even a protruding hang nail that upsets the busy man in the morning as he reaches for keys, catching on pocket’s edge.

You don’t start with God anyway. You start with the world as seen in a finger and its nail, that works so well 95% of the time for 95% of its owners. What, in the spirit of GK Chesterton, are we to make of that? GK’s idea was that we properly begin with amazement. The very idea that we have a finger with a useful attachment, useful for actions from prying lids (until nails decay with age) to self-defense! That would be GK’s attitude.

But Zorn has no interest in the issue of creation by "a superhuman force." "I don’t know . . . and I don’t care," he says. He does care about other people’s caring, however. Hence the column. It bothers him a lot, and that’s a good sign. It’s good that he cannot blithely ignore it.

I say this because we haven’t had a good non-believer in a newspaper for a long time. Mencken was one, 75 years ago, though Z. is not in M’s league. But we should be thankful for what we have, a daily newspaper columnist who is willing to let his doubts and denials hang out.

Indeed, in a letter to the Trib, Rev. Gino Dal Piaz thanked Z. for bringing the whole matter up, which in all fairness so should I.

As for Chesterton, who saw God in a blade of grass, the world was full of surprises: "One elephant with a trunk was odd," he said in Orthodoxy, "but every elephant with a trunk looked like a plot." So seek out the Plotter.

"Wonder leads logically to gratitude and so to God," commented Hugh Kenner. The thing’s the thing. "The post is wonderful because it’s there," was GKC’s thinking. That’s not the same as being wonderful because it has this or that quality – nicely shaped, of brilliant hue, for instance. "Man is . . . more awful than men," said Chesterton. "Death is more tragic . . . than death by starvation."

The objector says, if anything goes wrong, God’s not there, be it rain on parade or picnic, even if it does not lead to car skidding into bunch of little kids, killing them all. Zorn demands this kind of God – unrealistically and unreasonably. As if to say, if he were God, it wouldn’t be this way.

July 18, 2005

This politics is local

VMA VS. BLUE COLLARS, VMA VS. SELF: Twenty years ago, when Oak Park’s Village Manager Association lost its first election in its then thirty-some years, licensed sociologist and past and future school, township, and village government office holder Galen Gockel voiced a trenchant opinion in the matter.

"It was social class," he said in a guest essay in this very publication, adding, "Money. Occupation. Prestige. Status." The outs were saying, "We’ve been ignored. . . . The local elite is imposing its agenda on us," he wrote. "Oak Park’s dominant liberal group" was deciding things. Enough voters felt left out to swing an election, though not so sweepingly as last April’s, when no VMA candidate but the tried and true village clerk survived.

That was then. What does Gockel say now? Readers are warned: this is an exclusive.

The VMA slate, failing to grasp voters’ "hunger for change," never had a chance, in Gockel’s opinion. Too many disagreed with major decisions, from Whiteco subsidy to non-ban on smoking. There was extensive umbrage-taking at "arbitrary and unforgiving parking enforcement . . . chronic building permit delays," and other annoyances and indignities emanating from Village Hall. From unpopular decisions came a zest for "new leadership," a phrase shrewdly incorporated into the opposition’s name. From annoyances and indignities came a "coalition of the offended." New leaders and offended both gunned for the incumbent party.

It didn’t help that critics had been pegged as mere "nay-sayers" who would find out on election day how wrong they were. "Citizen unhappiness was wide and deep, and the local [VMA] elite [shades of Gockel ‘85 here] . . . didn't understand that." VMA candidates would have had to disown major board decisions of the previous four to eight years, when VMA people ran things. They didn’t, and voters themselves became nay-sayers. VMA had done the foul deeds, and VMA paid.

SANDWICH MAN: Man sits waiting in car in Osco parking lot, dinner time, while lady of the house buys greeting cards. Scruffy young man wants money "for a sandwich," asking around, pleading. You can buy it for him, he says, heading off the assumption that he will use the money for drugs or booze. Getting nowhere, he heads for Dunkin’ Donuts a few steps away, is turned away by another young man, its proprietor or of the proprietor’s family. This young man is triumphant: he got the panhandler out.

The panhandler returns to the parking lot. He’s in dirty shirt and pants, in his early 20s, not shaven but not bearded either, nor is his hair long and matted. But he smells of no-bath experience (not of booze). He pleads some more, of anyone in the lot. Aforementioned man waiting for wife resists as usual but finds himself vulnerable. The beggar is of his ethnicity, for one thing. He looks like people the man knows very well. He finds it less easy to ignore him.

He leaves his car, enters Osco, finds wife still looking for cards. He is deputed to buy one, does so, is told it does not pass muster. Distracted, he says buy it anyway, giving it to wife, who continues her search for the perfect card. Mind made up, he leaves the store, re-enters the lot, and strides toward the pitiful young man, not even looking at him, and slips two dollar bills into his hand. "Thank you, sir," the young man says. Both turn and walk away.

PRICKLY: Haughty shopper of the month award goes to woman 40 or so at Dominick’s speaking to man who indicates by body language that he wants out of line briefly and wants to get past her cart. She, failing or unwilling to pick up on the body language and not pulling her cart back, requires him to say he wants to get by: "You should articulate that," she admonishes. He agrees wholeheartedly and is let through.

If she had expostulated, "Why don’t you effing say so?" she would have sacrificed hauteur but would have gotten "A" for candor.HOW MAILMAN GETS ALONG WITH DOGS: He has a way with him, first, but second, he has goodies they go for. When they see him coming, he presents himself not as something to be eaten (chewed on, as soft flesh of calf, or at least barked at) but as someone who gives something (nice) to eat. Dog says not a word (barks not), liking this nice mailman.

Wed. Journal Column, 7/14/05

July 17, 2005

Onetime Clinton White House aide John Podesta on “Meet the Press”: The Rove business is “about Iraq.” To which says conservative blogger Trey Jackson, calling this new tack “backpedaling”:

what we learn today from the left's backpedaling on Karl Rove is that when you prove they are making inaccurate statements, they'll accuse you of "attacking" them and then change the subject. It is now "about the war in Iraq".

July 12, 2005

The face of militant Islam

The muslim who killed the filmmaker who criticized Islam said shocking things in an Amsterdam courtroom, where he is being tried:

Mohammed Bouyeri . . . turned to [deceased] Van Gogh's mother, Anneke, in court and told her: "I don't feel your pain."
"I can't feel for you because I think you're a nonbeliever," he said.
Bouyeri, 27, faces life imprisonment in the Nov. 2 killing of Van Gogh, who was found shot and stabbed. He has not mounted a defense.
"I did it out of conviction," Bouyeri said. "If I ever get free, I would do it again."

He prayed before he did it, with a Syrian spiritual leader who has since fled.

July 11, 2005

Pipes on Brits

Sent this off a while ago, noting that Daniel Pipes, my man for Islamic issues, sees British fooling selves, being "too politically worried to understand the phenomenon they are contending with,” adding that politics matter, especially in democracies, and asking if they (and we) are in danger of overdoing political caution.

I would like also to add that the term “Islamic fundamentalists” may not be useful, as Brits say in the memo, insofar as fundamentalism is a horse of several colors, including basics as in back to basics, as, frankly, may be seen in Christian and even Catholic fundamentalism. I betray myself here, but no matter. Rather, “fascist” seems a useful term, Muslim terrorists being troops serving the movement to Islamicize the world, achieving control that a Stalin or Hitler would envy.

In which respect, consider Political Islam in the heart of secular Europe from Butterfliesandwheels.com, which is dedicated to the worthy cause of “fighting fashionable nonsense.”

Blithely, Blithely