One of these days I’ll get around to writing about books in this space again. My problem right now is that I’m reading a very long book which I find amazingly boring. So you have my review of that book to look forward to eventually (perhaps sometime in August). Until then, I blog on whatever catches my fancy. Or my plain.

I say “plain” because I was looking at a wall calendar I got from Half Price Books last winter. It’s a freebie, and worth that price. Instead of pretty pictures, it features monthly calendars on both the top and bottom panels (to save paper), along with tips on how to live in a more environmentally friendly manner.

I looked at this austere, cheerless object, and I thought, “This would be almost a perfect design for the stricter sort of legalistic, low-church Protestant.” “We abjure all decoration, all beauty and all joy because they detract from the glory of ______.” For the extreme pietist, it would be the glory of God. For the environmentalist, it’s the glory of the Biosphere. But both groups find ugliness good, and for similar reasons. “Right living is true beauty.”

But I bet the environmentalists think the pietists are awful killjoys.

If you listened to Michael Medved’s radio show today, you may recall that he responded to this column from Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle, which suggests that Senator Obama is a “Lightworker,” a person of a higher spiritual order who has come to lead us into a “new way of being.”

Medved asked people who consider Obama a Lightworker to call in. He was surprised at the response. I was doing things around the office at the time and may have missed something, but I don’t think a single person called in to say they seriously considered Obama such a being.

Instead, most of the callers said they thought he was the Antichrist. (I don’t believe he cherry-picked the callers, either. His usual procedure is to move people he disagrees with to the front of the line. That’s why I listen to his show so rarely.)

Now I don’t think Obama is the Antichrist. In my view, the less we Christians call people antichrists, the better off we’ll all be. I should sit down someday and try to count up all the antichrists who’ve been identified in my lifetime.

But this overwhelmingly negative response to the much-vaunted Obama charm converged in my mind with this post by “Diamond Dog” which I’d read at the Minnesota Blog Freedom Dogs. Diamond Dog predicts:

By this coming October or so, Barack Obama will be seen by the majority of this country as a laughing stock candidate who is light in the loafers and not ready to be Commander-In-Chief. Oh sure, Keith Olbermann will claim that Obama was Swift Boated. Sure, MoveOn dot Org and will claim that the American people are stupid because they are easily distracted by the Republican attack machine rather than paying attention to the important questions of our day.

I’m beginning to suspect that there’s a lot less to Obamania than we’ve been led to think. Obama has his core constituencies, and they’re very enthusiastic. But we Americans have lived with overblown claims all our lives. We know all too well that that new car won’t really make us irresistible to the opposite sex, and that new diet won’t really allow us to eat all we want and lose twenty pounds in a month, and that we’ve probably already seen all the good parts of the movie in the trailer. We mistrust hyperbole.

I could be wrong. I think I’m pretty good a spotting broad cultural trends, but on individual events I’m often (or usually) entirely wrong. But this is my feeling.



I’m going out of town tomorrow, to play Viking at the Sons of Norway District One convention in Mankato, Minnesota. I’ll blog remotely if I can. But if I don’t manage it, don’t panic. If I’m still silent next week, then you have my permission to run in circles, scream and shout.