The symposium on book blogging has concluded, and I have all of the links in my original post. Please share your thoughts in that post.
Sweden Has Pirates in Government
The Pirate Party, a legitimate political organization in Sweden, wants to eliminate patents and make copyright a free-flowing breeze. How much does the Swedish government underwrite these people’s lifestyles for them to believe this nonsense? I think someone should propose to film a movie in Sweden and ask the pirates to volunteer, understanding they will not be paid or fed.
Norman Borlaug, R.I.P.
Norman Borlaug is dead. He is of particular interest to me because he was a Norwegian-American boy, and he came to Luther College, Decorah, Iowa (which claimed him, as I recall, for some reason. Maybe because he came from nearby Cresco. Apparently he didn’t go to Luther) to speak during the year I attended the school. I think I heard him speak. I’m not exactly sure (and no, I wasn’t on drugs. I just have a bad memory). Through the use of high-yield crops, he saved the lives of billions of human beings. Yet he’s almost unknown.
I remember that for years after I’d seen him at Luther (I think I saw him) I heard critics complain that his “Green Revolution” was a fraud. “It’s unsustainable,” the critics said. “It depends too much on chemical fertilizers and technology.”
For leftists, saving billions of lives isn’t enough. You’ve got to do it the right way.
And, preferably, kill some capitalists in the process.
Voting for Blogs
Not the same as blogging for votes. The Book Blogger Appreciation Week is taking votes for almost all categories, but you can’t vote for us. We didn’t make the cut. Naturally, that means we should seek out these awards over the coming year and nominate this blog for all of them.
On the other hand, you could give us advice on improving out standing in the world. On the other hand, you could create your own award to give to us.
On the other hand, though, you could go about your happy lives.
The Walls Still Stand
This is the Cité of Carcassonne in France, the largest medieval city with it’s walls intact.
Who remembers?
I saw it years ago, on the Minnesota State Fair grounds, in the area we call “Machinery Hill.” A bronze plaque on a low concrete base, if I recall correctly. It proudly proclaimed that the first group of Minnesota volunteers had mustered in this spot, on their way to fight in World War I.
“Our sons were here,” the message seemed to be. “They gathered solemnly in this place to put their young, hopeful lives on the line for a cause they believed in. We, their parents, dedicate this plaque so that their courage and sacrifice will never be forgotten.”
But of course it was forgotten, I thought. Who stops to read the plaque today? Who remembers those young men? Especially the ones who died in France and never came home to beget children, who might remember their names for a few generations?
It’s one of the tragedies and mercies of human life that (with rare exceptions) we always say “We will never forget,” but we always do. One of my ancestors fought in the Great Northern War. How many people today—even in Europe—know anything at all about the Great Northern War?
It’s obvious that we’re beginning to forget the 9/11 attacks. We say we don’t. The broadcast networks are making time for commemorations, but we can all tell that, behind the pieties, a lot of people consider it old news. It’s done. It’s over. What’s the use in opening old wounds?
That’s the way it is. That’s the way, in fact, it has to be. Because we’re transient beings. Our lives are too short to spend in constant mourning (and if they are spent that way, it constitutes a compounded tragedy). Our wounds heal, or at least grow over. Eventually we die, and our children can’t understand, and have commemorations of their own to mark. Our species has long-term memory loss.
So when we say “We’ll never forget,” we’re making a vow we can’t keep. We’re writing a check beyond the balance in our account.
But that doesn’t make it wrong.
It’s a matter of faith, really. When we use words like “forever” and “never,” we’re implicitly appealing to God (like it or not). The words have no meaning unless they cry for the attention of some Mind that can know all things, some Mind which doesn’t lose track, which marks the fall of a sparrow.
Christian theology doesn’t answer all questions concerning injustice and suffering, the whole theodicy issue. There are many questions to which our Scriptures simply give no answers.
But Christianity does present “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” a declaration that Jesus is the full expression of God. It proclaims that if we trust Him (who Himself suffered pain and injustice), we can trust that all things will be made right, somehow in the fullness of time.
Blessed be the memory.
Update: On re-reading this piece, I think I’ve committed my besetting sin of letting my head rule my heart. Just to avoid confusion, let me say that I don’t mean to suggest that it’s time to forget, or that there’s nothing we can do to remember that’s worth the trouble. It’s far too soon to forget. That would be a crime both against the victims of 9/11 and against victims of future attacks which would certainly follow from our neglect. My point is merely that we should not despair because we know we can’t remember as well as our hearts say we ought to.
(Cross-posted at Mere Comments)
Black Widow, by Randy Wayne Wright
I’ve been making the mistake recently of occasionally looking at reader reviews on Amazon when I set up the links for my blog reviews. Because of one of these lamentable lapses, I see tonight that reviews of Randy Wayne White’s Black Widow are decidedly mixed—and widely polarized. Some readers loved it. Others thought it signaled the demise of the “Doc Ford” series.
List me with the people who loved it. Approaching it as a pure escapist novel, I thought it was one of the best I’ve read recently.
I was particularly impressed with the opening. It’s a platitude (and becoming a cliché) that authors (thriller authors especially) need to grab the reader at the very beginning and keep things so tense that they can’t lose him.
In a single day and night in the first few chapters of Black Widow, Doc Ford (marine biologist and occasional government black ops agent) flies to Aruba to make a blackmail payoff on behalf of his goddaughter, Shay Money, who was guilty of certain excesses on a pre-wedding Caribbean holiday with three of her friends. Shay is engaged to an extremely wealthy and influential young man, and can’t afford a scandal. Then, instead of going to bed, he takes his boat, along with his hippie friend Tomlinson, to rescue a woman whose transmission they pick up on a short wave radio, who claims that she and her family are being attacked by sharks. This ends up involving an encounter (in the water) with hammerhead sharks. Then, again before he can get to bed, he’s attacked by a man with a gun in his own house. After handling this guy, Doc gets a call telling him that Shay has been in an auto accident, and one of her friends has attempted suicide. Then, after a hospital visit, he goes to bed with a different friend of hers.
And the next day he’s scheduled for a performance evaluation session with his government employers.
That got my attention.
The blackmailers come back for more of course, and Doc makes a trip to a very exclusive Caribbean island retreat, where a voodoo cult operates a health spa and resort which is actually a blackmail factory. He teams up with a too-good-to-be-true retired English secret agent. He gets drugged, gets beat up and imprisoned, and then kicks serious butt.
It was a lot of fun. Plenty of sex, but not explicit. Not up to the Klavan or Hunter standard, but perfect summer beach reading, in my opinion. It’s still warm down in the Bahamas, even in September.
Why Are So Many Jews Liberal?
I read about this book first in World Magazine, where Marvin Olasky gives it high marks. Now Seth Lipsky has a longer article on Norman Podhoretz’s book, Why Are Jews Liberals? I wish I could say political conservatives and Bible-believing Christians were completely innocent of the bigotry that encouraged many Jews to embrace what is now liberalism, but I can’t. Even some of our church fathers sinned against God by disdaining Jewish people. But of course, we/they aren’t to blame ultimately.
Lipsky states:
Early in the book he quotes a passage from I.J. Singer’s novel The Brother’s Ashkenazi about Nissan, the son of a rabbi who becomes a disciple of “the prophet Marx” and who, as Singer puts it, “never let his copy of Das Kapital out of his sight and carried it everywhere, as his father had carried his prayer shawl and phylacteries.” Podhoretz comes back to this theme toward the end, quoting G.K. Chesterton as observing: “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.” That was not true of the Jewish immigrants who came to America, Podhoretz writes. “Almost all the young intellectuals and political leaders among them had stopped believing in the God of Judaism, but it was not ‘anything’ they now believed, it was Marxism.” And when Marxism failed, Podhoretz writes, the “same process that had made social democracy into an acceptable refuge from orthodox Marxism now began making liberalism into an acceptable refuge from social democracy.”
Is Canada Still Civilized?
According to a study by The Canadian Council on Learning, “Literacy rate levels for adult Canadians are at a national rate of 48 per cent. Montreal and Toronto have 50 per cent literacy levels and the best results come from the west in Victoria and Regina.”
I’m not sure this report should be taken at face value, but maybe other reports giving Canada a higher literacy rate are weaker than this one. I can’t tell at this distance. But I have to ask the question in my headline. How illiterate can a people be before they are considered uncivilized, or does literacy have much to do with being civilized?
Don’t Criticize Those Peaceful People
If they want to abuse their women, let them.
Michael Weiss writes, “Misogyny as multiculturalism,” in response to media flak over an academic book on religious abuse and suppression of women. The left in the British press (at least some of them) are afraid of Muslims and will self-censor just to get along. “Cowardice gets dressed up as cultural sensitivity;” Weiss explains, “an eagerness to please semi-literate reactionaries becomes a form of willing internal exile, whereby independence of one’s own mind is held in suspicion, if not thought to be lethal in itself.”