Log24

American Heaven

Headlines from today’s Google News:

Singer Jan Berry, 62; Half of Surf Music Duo

Screeching for heaven at Mach 7

March 25 news story:

“The promise of 70 virgins in paradise and the equivalent of about $20 was all it took to convince a Palestinian teenager to turn himself into a suicide bomber…”

A more modest paradise, from a Jan Berry obituary today:

With Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, William Jan Berry co-wrote the lyrics for “Surf City” with its lines about taking the station wagon to a place where there are “two girls for every boy.”*

* Theological footnote for feminists:
In some other regions of American Heaven, there may be two boys for every girl.

Real Enemies, Part II

“Even paranoids have real enemies.”
— Saying attributed to Delmore Schwartz

Hamas leader says Bush
is the ‘enemy’ of God and Islam

— Headline, USA Today, March 28, 2004

Real Enemies, Part I

“Even paranoids have real enemies.”
— Saying attributed to Delmore Schwartz

According to the Washington Post and Newsday today, the President’s persecutors now include

Paul O’Neill,
   formerly Bush’s Treasury Secretary

Richard A. Clarke,
   formerly Bush’s counterterrorism chief

Rand Beers,
   Bush’s counterterrorism chief after Clarke

Flynt Leverett,
   former member of the Bush national security staff

Richard Foster,
   Bush Medicare accountant

John DiIulio,
   former director of Bush’s faith-based initiatives

“Others who have fallen out of favor over Iraq include former economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. All voiced concerns about either the expense or number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. All were treated dismissively by the White House. All are gone, but their estimates proved accurate….

Not every White House attempt at damage-control works. Last summer, White House officials tried to pin the blame on CIA Director George Tenet for not waving Bush off his State of the Union claim that Saddam was seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.

Political analysts rushed to proclaim Tenet a goner, but those obituaries proved premature.”

— Tom Raum in Newsday today

President Queeg

“Over the weekend, Richard A. Clarke, Bush’s former counterterrorism coordinator, said Bush focused too little attention on al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and too much on Iraq afterward.

Clarke detailed his allegations in a book released yesterday. In it, he echoes criticism of Bush’s judgment and fixation on Iraq that were leveled by former Treasury secretary Paul H. O’Neill in his book, which was published in January.”

— Jim VandeHei, Washington Post,
    March 23, 2004

“Pity poor George Bush. For some reason, he has been beset by delusional aides who, once they leave the White House, write books containing lies and exaggerations and — this is the lowest blow of all — do not take into account the president’s genius and all-around wisdom.”

— “Bush, Clarke and A Shred of Doubt,”
    Richard Cohen, Washington Post,
    March 23, 2004

“He was no different than any officer in the wardroom — they were all disloyal. I tried to run the ship properly, by the book, but they fought me at every turn.

… Naturally, I can only cover these things from memory…  If I’ve left anything out, why, just ask me specific questions and I’ll be glad to answer them… one-by-one…”

— The Caine Mutiny

(With apologies to Paul Krugman… See Krugman’s column on President Queeg from March 14 last year — abstract or full text.)

The Hairy Palm Academy

The previous two entries were prompted by a picture in the Washington Post of Spain’s Interior Minister, a member of the secular arm of the Legion of Christ.

Both entries mentioned a school run by the Legion of Christ, the Royal Palm Academy.  As the following excerpt from my March 20 entry indicates, a different sort of palm might also be honored by the Legion — the hairy palm.

“Los Legionarios de Cristo…  es una organización fundada en 1941 en Méjico por el padre Marcel [Marcial] Maciel (rehabilitado por el Vaticano en 1958 tras ser acusado de ayudarse en sus visiones con ampollas de morfina; también fue acusado de pederastia, le gustaba masturbar a jovencitos y que ellos le masturbaran a él).”

— PPnuncamas.org

Related readings from The New York Review of Books, issue dated April 8, 2004:

God in the Hands of Angry Sinners, by Garry Wills, on the Legion of Christ and on Mel Gibson flogging his God,

and a related article, a review of

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.

It seems the founder of the Legion of Christ, like many other Catholic priests, may have regarded masturbation as a group sport rather than solitary recreation.

For further details, see an ABC News 20/20 story dated April 26, 2002:

Priestly Sin, Cover-Up

When approached by ABC News’s Brian Ross in Rome with questions of allegations against Father Marcial Maciel, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became visibly upset and actually slapped Ross’s hand. — ABCNEWS.com

Quid Pro Quack

(Headline of today’s
Maureen Dowd column)

Quiddity:

The essence, nature, or distinctive peculiarity, of a thing; that which answers the question, Quid est? or, What is it?

-Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)

The above rather cryptic sequence of pictures may be regarded as a memorial to Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, who died at about the time I found the central picture, “Royal Palm Student.”  For further details, click on the individual pictures, each of which is taken from a past log24 entry.  Also of some relevance: the palm at the end of A Mass for Lucero and the Stevens poem on The Palm at the End of the Mind.

Rainbow’s End

From the
Norma Ballistics Calculator:

See also
Readings for St. Patrick’s Day.

State of Grace

Saint Mercedes McCambridge, who won an Oscar for “All the King’s Men,” died on March 2, 2004.

From an entry for that date:

From today’s New York Times:

Charlotte Mercedes Agnes McCambridge was born on March 16, 1916, in Joliet, Ill. … She began giving her birth date, though, as St. Patrick’s Day 1918. In explaining the discrepancy, a spokeswoman said, “She’s an actress,” adding: “She was a little bit Irish. And she decided she wanted to be two years younger.”

What the hell, she’s younger now.

William H. Pickering,

Dec. 24, 1910 – March 15, 2004

The Spaniard

On Opus Dei in Spain:

“Two of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar‘s children went to Opus-run schools.

Notable Opus members include Defense Minister Federico Trillio, Justice Minister Jose Maria Michavila, Attorney General Jesus Cardenal and former National Police Chief Juan Cotino.”

— AP report, Oct. 3, 2002, according to a web page at rickross.com

Those who prefer their religion in fictional form may enjoy the following related reading:

The Da Vinci Code.

More Bush Crookedness

Who is “reporter Karen Ryan“?

Lenten Meditations:

The Logos Trilogy

1. Logos and Logic
2. The Word in the Desert
3. The Line

The Fog and the Fury

Headline and opening sentence of a column in the Washington Times:

“Job creation fog . . . and fury

Something must be done [to] restore jobs in U.S. manufacturing….”

So far, so good.  But the columnist goes on to explain the recent loss of manufacturing jobs:

“Let’s be honest. Some of these manufacturing jobs will not be coming back because of structural changes in our economy. Manufacturers have been reducing payrolls, in middle management and on the production line, because they have found ways to produce more goods at far less cost, boosting profits for further expansion and fatter investor and worker pension dividends.”

Uh-huh.

Here is a different explanation (the “fury,” as opposed to “the fog”), from a March 10 column:

“Last week’s jobs report, with hundreds of thousands giving up the search for work, and manufacturing jobs disappearing for the 43rd straight month, jolted the White House. What is going on?

They’re calling it a jobless recovery. Wrong. Millions of jobs are being created. They’re just not being created here in the United States.

The reasons can be traced to these four acronyms: NAFTA, GATT, WTO, PNTR. These are the trade treaties and global institutions that have permitted the historic substitution of foreign labor for American labor, to the enrichment of the transnational companies that look upon the Congress as a wholly owned subsidiary….

For the Bush Republicans, the chickens are coming home to roost….

At a weekend conference on immigration and jobs hosted by The American Cause, which this writer chairs, one speaker blurted out that while he voted for Bush in 2000, he would never do so again. The room erupted in applause, though virtually all there were conservatives, and all had once been Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Republicans.”

— Pat Buchanan, author of
A Republic, Not an Empire

Happy Ides, Caesar.

The Line

From a March 10, 2004, entry:

By the Associated Press,
Saturday, March 13, 2004:

“Dave Schulthise, known as Dave Blood during his career as a bassist with the 1980’s Philadelphia punk-rock band the Dead Milkmen, died on Wednesday [March 10, 2004] at the home of friends in North Salem, N.Y. He was 47.

‘David chose to end his life,’ Mr. Schulthise’s sister, Kathy, wrote on the band’s Web site.”

I walk the thinnest line
I walk the thinnest line
I walk the thinnest line
Between the light and dark sides of my mind

— The Dead Milkmen, Beelzebubba album

Related material: The Word in the Desert.

A Game of
Texas Hold’em

From Lou Dobbs Tonight, March 12, 2004:

St. Howard’s Day

In memory of Howard Fast,
author of Spartacus, who died
one year ago today:

George W. Bush (left) and
John Kerry (right) discuss the
upcoming presidential campaign.

Bush’s Stalinist Justice

From Ashcroft the Nihilist:

“… victims had no idea just how rigged the federal court system really has become until they actually were in the dock, protesting their innocence (which federal law also has deemed a crime – see the Martha Stewart case). They had no idea that federal prosecutors can legally suborn perjury (called “statements of interest”) and that judges are sickeningly pro-government to the point where they are simply another arm of the prosecution. And they had no idea that their trial would differ only in name but not in substance from the famed Stalinist show trials of the late 1930s.”

This note commemorates Communist author Howard Fast (Spartacus), who died one year ago today. 

“In the memoir Being Red, published in 1990, Fast wrote: ‘In the party I found ambition, narrowness and hatred; I also found love and dedication and high courage and integrity — and some of the noblest human beings I have ever known.’ “ — CBS News

“Fast wrote critically about Soviet leader Josef Stalin and left the party after the Soviet Union’s crushing of an uprising in Hungary.” — CBS News

Howard Fast was twice the man George W. Bush is, since Bush’s Stalinist justice department makes him, at best, half-Fast.

(See, too, yesterday’s entry A Half-Right Leader.)

A Half-Right Leader

For more details, click here.

Sequel

From an entry of July 27, 2003…

Catholic Tastes, Part I:

Catholic Tastes, Part II:

A Catholic priest on “The Passion of the Christ”:

“By the time it’s over, the make-up artists give his skin the texture of spaghetti marinara.”

— The Rev. Richard A. Blake, S.J., professor of fine arts and co-director of the film studies program at Boston College, in America magazine, issue dated March 15, 2004.

Related material:

“I’m waiting for Mel’s sequel:

‘He’s back. Christ Almighty!
The Resurrection.
This time, it’s personal.’ “

— Bruce Feirstein in The New York Observer