Illinois man wants to change his name to ‘In God We Trust.’
Monthly Archives: May 2008
Must I?
Must I be carried to the skies
On flowery beds of ease?
While others fought to win the prize,
And sailed through bloody seas?
Naipaul’s Way of Looking and Feeling
David Laskin reviews one of Naipaul‘s books.
Naipaul calls the book “an essay in five parts,” as if to impose some sort of unity or occasion on what is essentially a collection of musings on random irritants. The early success of his fellow countryman Derek Walcott, Flaubert’s exotic prose opera “Salammbô,” Gandhi’s mysterious hold over the soul of India — these are among subjects Naipaul swirls in his imagination like an after-dinner brandy. But in the end, the laureate leaves us more muddled than intoxicated.
Stuff Christians don’t like so much
The Civil War continues to take its toll. A man in Virginia, working on refurbishing a civil war cannonball, accidentally detonated it, and was killed.
I could say something about how a historical buff would choose to go, but that’s probably inappropriate. So I’ll just say that, as a reenactor myself, I understand his passion, and I salute him. I probably would have liked him.
The good folks at First Things put me on to this blog: Stuff Christians Like. And I do like it. There’s lots of truth there.
And yet it troubles me too.
Because all these jokes about how Christians make dorks of themselves just reinforce me in my habit of never saying or doing anything about my faith, for fear of looking dorky.
I wish it were possible to list the right things to do as easily as we’re able to list dumb things.
But of course that’s unnecessary.
Because the right thing to do isn’t usually a mystery. All you have to do is choose the most embarrassing, frightening, humiliating choice you’ve got, and that’s probably the right one.
And the real kicker is that two out of three times you’ll still be wrong, and you’ll still look like a dork.
Which, I guess, explains that “fools for Christ” thing.
Monster
Demonstrating once again that there is no evil beyond the reach of the human soul, we have the story of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in his cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.
People are shaking their heads, unable to imagine why a man would do this.
I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you right now. You watch the reports of the trial, when it happens, and tell me if I’m wrong.
Fritzl believes he’s the victim. He was himself abused as a boy, and he considers it horribly unfair that everyone is making a big deal out of what he’s done now, when nobody stepped in to save him when he was victimized himself.
He believes that he actually had his daughter’s best interests at heart, because if he’d let her have her freedom she’d have used it badly.
He believes he deserves some praise for installing mechanisms (or so it’s reported) that would release the captives in the event of his prolonged absence.
He believes that everyone who’s condemning him now is a hypocrite, because they’re doing things equally bad and just haven’t been caught yet.