Our Funny Media
This cracked me up:
Wheat & Weeds - Bold Prediction
The Pope’s coming in April and the Vatican Sec. of State says he will stay out of our electoral politics. However, it’s a good bet:
• If he preaches about the dignity of human life and the importance of traditional marriage for human freedom, or talks about the importance of religious faith for maintaining freedom, or suggests that the United Nations should reject relativism, the MSM will attack him for “interfering” in our politics. The nation’s media will feature snarky coverage that reads like a Maureen Dowd/Christopher Hitchens collaboration.
• If the Pope says that peace is preferable to war, or that developed nations must be good stewards of the environment and show concern for developing nations, he’ll be extolled for “rebuking Bush policies.” Hillary & Obama will be quoted approving of the Pope’s enlightened remarks, and the strong impression given that all good Catholics embrace the platform of the Democratic party.
Hilarious. And true!
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
You’re assuming that by April anyone will still care what Hellary has to say.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Are you kidding? You think she’s going to go home and finally bake those cookies? Man, if she loses these primaries, it’s gonna be great.
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I should have added that in the first scenario, everyone will say the Pope is reverting to his Hitler youth past. In the second, everyone will have the revelation that he’s much nicer than they thought.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Hmm, I don’t know that they’d say he was reverting, more like Pope Benedict, formerly Joseph Ratzinger, a member of the Hitler Youth, said today that dot dot dot”.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:41 am
You’re so right RC2. I wonder precisely when it was that the US MSM decided it would construct its own Pope, in its own image and likeness? Such a narrow way of looking at the world. Speaking from experience, you can’t beat having a pope drive past the end of one’s street. Good shepherd and all that, taken to the nth degree. Throw in some serious teaching about love and what it means to be fully human, well, you’d not expect the MSM to cope, would you?
January 4th, 2008 at 7:53 am
Completely off topic, but I’m afraid you won’t see this question on the post where it belongs. Red (This is apropos of your decision to not read “A Dance….”), what do you think of Alexander McCall Smith? Just read a review that made him look interesting, but I need a second before I make the effort.
And: are you a Brideshead fanatic? I just read it for the first time and think I would have appreciated it more if certain friends hadn’t oversold it.
January 4th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Alexander McCall Smith is wonderful. His books are wonderful. His speaking voice (he’s been serialized and podcasting readings in The Scotsman) is wonderful.
January 7th, 2008 at 3:14 am
I don’t think I can argue against a ninme endorsement like that! I haven’t read much of him at all, just dipping in and out of his serial novel, “44 Scotland Street” which is published in our local rag. One has to admire the industry, for one thing. For another, he writes for readers, not himself, which might sound a bit middlebrow but given the state of the “literary” novel is really rather welcome. Thirdly, he is “moral” in the old-fashioned sense - baddies get caught, wisdom prevails, there’s a humour based on character and insight. So, yes, were I to take up reading contemporary novels, I might well start with him.
I’m a major Evelyn Waugh fan and consider him the best novelist in English of the 20thC. I don’t necessarily feel that strongly about “Brideshead”, however. As he himself pointed out, he wrote it in the depths of the privations of World War 2 and possibly overdid the quail’s egg factor. An over-cooked Oxford didn’t work for this grammar school oik in a straitened Cambridge, and some of the minor characters - the Irish priest, the nanny, the ghastly tutor - just don’t work. The central female character doesn’t work all that well either, but Waugh wasn’t all that good at women. His bores are however very true to life and, for a cradle Catholic, the “twitch on the thread” chapter is very powerful. It’s not however a book I’ve re-read for maybe twenty years.
The books I do re-read regularly are “Decline and Fall” - because it makes me laugh out loud, sufficient enough reason I’d say - and the Sword of Honour trilogy, much the best novel to have come out of World War 2. Crouchback’s military career, from a romantic idealism and comradeship, through cowardice and betrayal to a final act of Christian self-knowledge and self-abnegation I find intensely moving. The characterisation is strong, even of nameless recurring characters, and the comic set pieces - the Isle of Mugg dinner, or his mystified brother-in-law - are as funny as anything he ever wrote. Oh, and as a stylist his prose is just wonderful to listen to, as it were. And I can’t pass the hotel at Glasgow Central station without tipping my imaginary hat.
Oh, and “Scoop” is very funny too. Boot was in part modelled on Bill Deedes, as everyone knows.
More than the novels, I often re-read his collected “Letters” (written during the day when sober) and “Diaries” (written in the evening when drunk). Both are superb and hugely recommended. (My favourite entry in the latter is at the end of July 1939, when he visited the country house that was at the end of the garden of the cottage I grew up in. It’s understated but, as far as one can tell, absolutely accurate. These things count.)
I read “A Dance” as a student during an enchanting affair, and so it has a certain reminiscential attraction. Later I took it as my special subject on a telly quiz called “Mastermind” and it didn’t stand up at all well to re-reading. Hence my toying with re-reading it over Christmas.
Golly, is that the time?
January 7th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Heheh.