[A]ny visit to an awesome commercial center, teeming with life and full of human diversity, would be palliative. Or maybe it is a visit to a superstore to observe the products, the service, energy, the benevolence, of the commercial space. We can meet people, encounter their humanity, revel in the beauty and bounty of human life. Or it could be your local watering hole with its diverse cast of characters and complicated lives that elude political characterization.
. . .
In this extremely strange election year, escaping the roiling antagonism and duplicity of politics, and finding instead the evidence all around us that we can get along, however imperfectly, might actually be essential for a healthy outlook on life.
. . .
The message that politics beats into our heads hourly is that your neighbor might be your enemy, and that the realization of your values requires the crushing of someone else’s.
That’s a terrible model of human engagement to accept as the only reality.
. . .
What if the whole of life worked like the political sector? It would be unrelenting misery, with no escape, ever. As it is, this is not the case. We should be thankful for it, and remember that the thing that makes life wonderful, beautiful, and loving is not crushing your enemy with a political weapon but rather the gains that come from turning would-be enemies into friends in an environment of freedom.
. . .
A slogan passed around some years ago in academic circles was that “the personal is the political.” That sounds like hell on earth. The slogan should be flipped and serve as a warning to all of us: whatever you politicize will eventually invade your personal life. We should not allow this to happen. The less that life is mediated by political institutions, the more the spontaneous and value-creating impulses in our nature come to the fore.
Politics Is Poison to the Human Spirit
Many of us seem to have made an idol of politics.
Ozymandias and Statolatry
Tags: 2016, Clerisy, elections, false idols, idolatry, Ozymandias, political class, Statolatry
I cannot tell gentle reader how shocked (shocked!) I am to learn that Donald Trump talks dirty in private; or that Hillary Clinton says one thing to small paying audiences in Wall Street, and quite another to big audiences across the USA. This changes everything. It revolves my commitments 360 degrees. From a position of condemning both candidates, I come out giving my support to neither. Or perhaps the turn was only 359; for the shrieking hypocrisy of the international media, and the whole political class, has possibly moved me one point closer to Trump. It is hard to pick out, however, one-sixth of a second on the dial of a small watch.
. . .
How incomprehensibly strange is this world; how large, in the passing of trivial events. In thanksgiving for the peace that passeth all understanding, let us whisper deep to deep.
How strange
Clerisy. Ozymandias
Tags: Catholicism, Clerisy, elections, Ozymandias
Posted 2016/10/10, 7:07 am
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On the subject of abortion, Tim Kaine is a mess intellectually and a coward morally. That some people find his argument persuasive is only another sign of how attenuated we have become, nationally, in our facility for reasoned argument. The facts of abortion are the facts of abortion, irrespective of what any pope, president, governor, senator, or mere justice of the Supreme Court says.
Being a Catholic is one reason to oppose abortion. Being a human being is another. Tim Kaine, a cheap and shallow sophist, isn’t a particularly inspiring example of either.
Kaine’s Abortion Dodge
Kaine has also made an idol of government.
Ozymandias
Tags: abortion, Catholicism, elections, Ozymandias
Posted 2016/10/06, 7:07 am
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Mrs. Clinton’s nomination will have a similarly negligible effect on the lives of American women. It isn’t exactly a Muppet News Flash that women can run for high office in these United States: You can be Sarah Palin and be on a major-party ticket and be called a “c**t” by all the nice people who will be urging you to vote for Mrs. Clinton as a show of solidarity with women. You can be a woman and do a hell of a lot better job running PepsiCo than Mrs. Clinton did running the State Department. You can be a woman and be seriously considered for the Republican nomination in spite of a slightly short political curriculum vitae. You can be a woman and be a Marine.
If your daughter didn’t already know that she could grow up and make of her life whatever her dreams and abilities allow, and learned otherwise only upon seeing a dreadful politician take the next step in her dreadful career, that isn’t a failure of a patriarchal society. You’re just a bad father.
. . .
If you think Mrs. Clinton “cares about women,” ask Juanita Broaddrick or Gennifer Flowers.
Making hay out of ‘making history’
Ozymandias
Tags: bamboozle, Clerisy, elections, Ozymandias, political class, ruling class
Posted 2016/07/31, 7:07 am
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