Log24

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Retired pastor William W. McDermet III on the editorial page of Saturday’s Buffalo News (Warren E. Buffett, chairman):

“In the 1940s, there was no Internet or television, so after school I amused myself with a snack of graham crackers and milk, maybe a comic book or a Tinkertoy project. Yet what was really exciting was a frequent ring of the doorbell, which mother answered, followed by the request: ‘Can Billy come out and play?'”

Excerpt from Fritz Leiber’s
“Damnation Morning,” 1959:

“Time traveling, which is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when this woman with the sigil on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me,

Our Lady of
Judgment Day

 ‘Look, Buster,
 do you want to live?'”

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“Obama stands revealed as a typical Democratic politician with the same laundry list of suppositions and policy stances that all his predecessors have shared: there’s an unbroken line from Obama’s speech all the way back to FDR.”

— Mark Heuring, conservative Catholic writer, on August 28, 2008 (St. Augustine’s Day)

“The United States presidential election of 1932 took place as the effects of the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression were being felt intensely across the country. President Hoover’s popularity was falling as voters felt he was unable to reverse the economic collapse…. Franklin D. Roosevelt saw that Hoover’s failure to deal with these problems could be used as a platform for his own election….”

— Wikipedia today

On John McCain’s presidential campaign eight years ago:

“He always pauses a second for effect and then says: ‘I’m going to tell you something. I may have said some things here today that maybe you don’t agree with, and I might have said some things you hopefully do agree with. But I will always. Tell you. The truth.’ This is McCain’s closer, his last big reverb on the six-string as it were. And the frenzied standing-O it always gets from his audience is something to see. But you have to wonder. Why do these crowds from Detroit to Charleston cheer so wildly at a simple promise not to lie?

Well, it’s obvious why. When McCain says it, the people are cheering not for him so much as for how good it feels to believe him. They’re cheering the loosening of a weird sort of knot in the electoral tummy. McCain’s resume and candor, in other words, promise not empathy with voters’ pain but relief from it. Because we’ve been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It’s ultimately just about that complicated. It hurts.

We learn this at like age four– it’s grownups’ first explanation to us of why it’s bad to lie (‘How would you like it if…?’). And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks– that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if experience seems to teach that everything you’re supposed to believe in’s really just a game based on lies….

… It’s painful to believe that the would-be ‘public servants’ you’re forced to choose between are all phonies… who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they’ve just got to believe you’re an idiot.”

The Fuehrer's wisdom seems especially appropriate today, in light of John McCain's recent "sex education for kindergarteners" and "lipstick" ads:

"… thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously…. The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down."

— Mein Kampf

"I'm Joseph Goebbels, and
   I approve this message."

On author Madeleine L’Engle:

“Madeleine’s adult books– including the autobiographical titles that eventually would be grouped together as the Crosswicks Journals– A Circle of Quiet (1971), The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), The Irrational Season (1976), and Two-Part Invention (1988)– were edited by Robert Giroux. If Roger Straus was FSG’s [Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s] worldly sophisticate presiding over editorial meetings, Bob Giroux was the white-haired, rosy-cheeked favorite uncle (if you happened to have an erudite uncle who had edited T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Isaac Bashevitz Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy).”

— Sandra Jordan, School Library Journal, November 1, 2007

On Robert Giroux, who died early this morning:

“the gold standard of literary taste.”

For a less demanding standard, see today’s previous entry.