Al Franken is a Big Fat Liberal… and other truths the media don’t tell you…

Well, it turns out Al Franken, the pudgy Saturday Night Live comedian and now U.S. senator from Minnesota, got elected the way most Democrats get elected: through voter fraud.

If you’ll recall, the rabidly partisan Franken’s election in 2008 was so close the Democrats did a re-do of the 2000 election: They kept re-counting and re-counting the votes. This time, their candidate won after the third re-count.

And as they did in Florida, it appears the Democrats were willing to look for votes anywhere they could — from dead people, children under age 10, illegal aliens, and convicted felons. As John Lott put it:

Senator Al Franken likely owes his Senate victory to felons. With a razor thin victory over Senator Norm Coleman in 2008 of just 312 votes, felons convicted of crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults may have given Democrats the filibuster proof sixtieth vote that allowed Obamacare to be passed. Americans have good reason to ask how this could happen. Consider this:

–A conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority has gone through voting records reportedly finding that at least 341 convicted felons voted illegally in just two of Minnesota’s 87 counties during the 2008 general election. Undoubtedly other felons voted illegally in other counties.

– After culling through 500 initial allegations of felons illegally voting, the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office told The Minneapolis Star Tribune Monday that they are seriously investigating about 180 cases. Another 28 felons have already been charged. Hennepin county, which includes Minneapolis, winnowed 451 initial cases down to 216 that they are still looking at. Some other felons have already been charged. Both the Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys are Democrats.

The Democrats wonder why Barack Obama’s poll ratings are lower than those of Jimmy Carter and why most working people think of politicians as little more than professional parasites, sponging off of taxpayers. Well, it’s just this sort of corruption that feeds public rage — and why the American public is going to do to Democrats in November what fed-up Britons just did to the surveillance-happy British Labour Party.

The rotund Franken, who’s put on about a hundred pounds gorging himself in the Senators’ dining room, clearly stole the election. He should go back to writing jokes for TV instead of writing jokes for Congress.

We don’t need another corrupt politician in Washington. We have enough already.

Evolution, Creation and Adam & Eve, Part 1

The debate over Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve is one of my least favorite topics.  That’s because I’ve accepted the theory of evolution ever since fourth grade, when it was first explained to me in science class by a Dominican nun.

As a result, debating evolution feels a lot like debating the Pythagorean theorem: It’s something I studied 40 years ago… long ago accepted… but makes my head hurt even thinking about.

This is one of the many differences between Catholics and Protestants, I’ve found.  Catholics rarely if ever think about evolution.  For Protestants, it’s one of their favorite subjects, a principal “litmus test” for theological orthodoxy in many churches.

It took the agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrmann nearly 20 years of rigorous graduate education before he could finally come to accept what I learned in fourth grade:  that human beings have existed on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years… and their physical bodies likely developed out of more primitive animal forms.

When I was in high school, one of my Jesuit teachers showed me a copy of Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis in which the pope explained that “the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter” is not incompatible with Christian faith as revealed in the Biblical texts.  Here is the key section (36):

For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.

The key point for Catholics, the pope explained, is that human beings are all descended from a real, historical, single human pair (called in Hebrew ha-adam and Hava, Adam and Eve), however they may be conceived.

Theologically, this belief is known as monogenism, the view that human beings are descended from a single couple.

Ironically enough, scientists in the 1950s were leaning toward another viewpoint, that of polygenism, the belief that the human race developed from many different independent groups.  I have to admit, to my teenage mind, the theory of polygenism seemed much more plausible.  After all, doesn’t it make more sense that there were many different groups of primates all over the world and humans “evolved” independently from those groups?

Nevertheless, I’ve never had any problem believing in both the Genesis account of creation and in various scientific theories of evolution.  Neither of the twin fundamentalisms in this debate — that of some evangelical Protestants or that of atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins — appealed to me.

Pope Pius XII’s explanation made more sense to me:  The first 11 chapters of Genesis, the pope explained, do not conform “to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time” yet constitutes history in “a true sense.”

The inspired text, he added, “in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people.”

Precisely:  Genesis is …

(1) a “popular description of the origin of the human race,” using

(2) “simple and metaphorical language,” that nevertheless contains

(3) “principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation.”

Godblock: Those Open-Minded Atheists!

I had to laugh at this one:  A browser plugin called GodBlock that blocks any reference to God or religious beliefs on the Internet.  It’s like a porn filter in reverse.

Here’s a quick description:

GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions. When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.

Ah, those tolerant, open-minded atheists… so cosmopolitan, so wise, so willing to engage in intellectual debate. They’re such a hoot at the neighborhood block party — not like those intolerant Mormons or Conservative Jews pushing their strange fruit salads on all and sundry!

Today’s Golden Age of Philosophy

Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy.

When I was in college 30 years ago, philosophy was strictly an academic exercise and there were few resources available for people, like me, who view philosophy more as a way of life or avocation than as a job.

Today, however, all that has changed.

There are three or four excellent “magazines” about philosophy – such as Philosophy Now and The Philospher’s Magazine – that are filled with funny, off-beat, irreverent articles about philosophical topics. A number of top-rate publishing houses, mostly in the UK, such as Routledge and Blackwell Publishing, produce books aimed at a general philosophical readership.

There are philosophy radio programs such as Philosophy Talk… coffee houses… salons… adult education classes… and literally hundreds of websites for the interested reader. There are even philosophy comic books, such as LogiComix about the life of British logician Bertrand Russell. It’s simply amazing. It’s a golden age of philosophy, I think.

The irony, however, is that there is still no solid consensus on what, precisely, philosophy actually is. In its historical and etymological sense, philosophy is literally “love (philia) of wisdom (Sophia),” and that is always how I have looked upon it. Philosophy, for me, is the attempt to reflect upon experience in order to understand more about life and how we are to live. My aims, like those of Socrates, are primarily practical: I want to understand the world and myself to live better.

Today, there are three, perhaps four major “schools” or approaches to philosophy, each with their own journals, intellectual heroes and methodologies. It is one of the scandals of contemporary philosophy that these schools are somewhat incommensurable, meaning they are so different in their approaches and ideals they are almost incapable of speaking to one another. It’s as though organic chemistry and 17th century French literature are forced to share the same offices and pretend they are the same discipline (I exaggerate but you get the point).

The first approach may be called, for lack of a better word, Traditional Philosophy: this is the approach now largely taught only in Catholic universities. It is primarily historical in orientation, a “history of philosophy” style in which students study the thought of, say, the ancient Greeks, and Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel and so on. There is very little attempt to think through how the thought of these philosophical greats can be reconciled. The idea appears to be that by working through all of these great thinkers, eventually the student will come to his or her own philosophical conclusions — although there is really no fixed “method” or approach given for doing so. I always think of this as the University of Chicago or Great Books approach. A variation of this approach is Catholic philosophy, including various schools of Thomism (such as the Transcendental Thomism of Merechal, Karl Rahner and, my guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan)

The second major approach to philosophy today is what is known as Continental Philosophy. This is the philosophy that is most commonly taught in Europe and, again, in some Catholic universities in the U.S. In practice, it means primarily the philosophical systems of phenomenology, existentialism, so-called “critical theory” and their postmodern descendants. When I was in college, this is what I studied (in addition to traditional philosophy). We read the classic texts of phenomenology as well as such trendy philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Edith Stein and others. Today, those names have largely been replaced by those of postmodern French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard. While classical Husserlian phenomenology does attempt to “solve” major philosophical problems and actually be a descriptive science, in practice students of Continental Philosophy, like their Traditional Philosophy counterparts, spend much of their time studying the works of individual thinkers and writing papers on aspects of their thought. (There is a greater interest in Continental Philosophy in social and political questions, however.)

The third and allegedly dominant approach to philosophy today is Analytic Philosophy. This is the philosophy most commonly taught in the UK and in major U.S. universities. Built upon the infrastructure of British empiricists such as David Hume, Analytic Philosophy appeared in the early 20th century through the work of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. When I was in college, I found Analytic Philosophy to be mostly unintelligible gibberish. The emphasis on symbolic logic and the solving of trivial intellectual “puzzles” was, to me, an absurd waste of time.

In the past few years, however, I’ve been reading more about Analytic Philosophy and I am now much more impressed. Analytic Philosophy has matured over the past few decades and is now more of a philosophical “style” than it is a collection of doctrines. The style is more like that of my hero, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, in that Analytic Philosophy is much more interested in actually solving philosophical problems than it is in clarifying the thought of past philosophers. Thus, Analytic Philosophy is characterized by a thematic, rather than a “history of philosophy,” approach. It uses or creates a specialized technical vocabulary to elucidate the various “options” available in any given philosophical issue… marshals the evidence in favor or against those options… and then attempts to actually “settle” the issue. It’s actually quite refreshing.

The only problem with Analytic Philosophy from the perspective of a traditional philosopher or “lover of wisdom” is that it’s still focused primarily on trivial problems or mere puzzles (perhaps because those are the easiest ones to “solve”). Academic analytic philosophy is often little more than “chloroform in print,” boring to the point of dispatching its readers into a catatonic stupor. The cure for this tedium has been, over the past several years, the appearance of those popular philosophy journals and publishing houses I mentioned earlier. Precisely because they are aiming at a wider audience, the popular philosophy authors have to turn their attention to the Big Issues that interest real people – and thus are forced by the market to abandon the tedium beloved by academics and use their philosophical skills to address topics people actually care about. An example of how wonderful this can be is a book I am reading right now, Michael Sandel’s magisterial Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? It’s clear, concise, lays open the various options available on contentious issues, concerns serious subjects (what is justice?) and doesn’t resort to pretentious displays of symbolic logic to make its points.

These days, I mostly read good Catholic philosophy (such as can be found in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly or Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies) and “popular” analytic books such as Justice or those produced by Routledge.  I still can’t read academic analytic philosophy journals.  I tried subscribing to Faith and Philosophy, the (mostly analytic) journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, but found it deadly dull and exhibiting the worst aspects of analytic pretentiousness.  Here’s a sample, taken from John Turri’s essay, “Practical and Epistemic Justification in Alston’s Perceiving God” (July 2008, p. 290):

“Alston’s thesis is that putative perceptions of God often justify beliefs about God.  A subject S has a putative perception of God when S has an experience e in which it seems to S that God appears to S as P.  If, based on e, S forms the “M-belief” that God is P, then S has a justified belief that God is P.  An M-belief is a belief that God is P, which is based on a putative perception of God.  (I will often substitute ‘q’ for the proposition that God is P.)

I dunno. My reaction to writing like that is the same as George Will’s: Just because life is absurd that doesn’t mean philosophy should be as well.

I don’t mean to pick on John Turri, whom I am sure is a great guy and a lot smarter than I am. But this sort of stuff is meant solely for professional philosophers in universities… and is largely what turns people off to philosophy as an academic discipline.  If Socrates had spoken like that, they probably would have forced him to drink hemlock much earlier and philosophy would never have gotten off the ground.

Benedict XVI’s Visit to Great Britain Will Bring Out the Lunatics

The Vatican announced today that Pope Benedict XVI will visit Great Britain on September 16-19. “Accepting the invitation of Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, and of the bishops’ conferences of England and Wales, and of Scotland, His Holiness Benedict XVI will make an apostolic trip to the United Kingdom from 16 to 19 September,” the Pope’s spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said.

The theme chosen for the papal visit to England is “Heart Speaks Unto Heart,” Cardinal Newman’s motto.

According to Inside the Vatican magazine, following the pope’s arrival at Edinburgh airport on September 16, he will be driven to Holyrood Palace where he will be welcomed by Her Majesty the Queen. “He will then travel through the center of Edinburgh in the Popemobile, and the Scottish bishops are encouraging ‘as many people as possible’ to attend and line the Pope’s route and to attend the public Mass in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park.”

Given the official welcome by the Queen, it is doubtful that the British government will permit the threatened legal action against the pope planned by the UK’s infamous village atheists, the Oxford biologist and town crank Richard Dawkins and U.S.-based journalist Christopher Hitchens.

The two men have allegedly been scheming for months — with the help of two British lawyers, Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens — to have the Crown Prosecution Service arrest the pope for “crimes against humanity.”

Dawkins and Hitchens think that the can make a case against the pope for his alleged “cover-up” of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. They point to the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998 as a example of taking action against foreign leaders.

Last year, Palestinian activists talked a British judge into issuing an arrest warrant for the Israeli politician Tzipi Livni during a visit to Britain.

“There is every possibility of legal action against the Pope occurring,” said lawyer Stephens. “Geoffrey and I have both come to the view that the Vatican is not actually a state in international law. It is not recognised by the UN, it does not have borders that are policed and its relations are not of a full diplomatic nature.”

It is doubtful that Hitchens, at least, will be on hand for the legal fireworks as he was recently diagnosed with cancer.

The Debunking of Wicca

In the 1990s, a new generation of young, less ideologically-driven, often female anthropologists and scholars made it their business to investigate prehistoric European religious cultures and, when they did, they made an astonishing discovery: the religion of the Great Goddess was all made up out of whole cloth.

“The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult, and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply flawed,” wrote Charlotte Allen in The Atlantic. “Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication, either archaeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever worshipped a single, archetypal goddess…”

In fact, according to Phillip G. Davis, professor of religion at the University of Prince Edward Island and author of The Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan Feminist Spirituality, much of what passes for “feminist spirituality” today is largely the creation of just one man (not one woman), an eccentric British bureaucrat named Gerald B. Gardner (1884-1964).

An avid Rosicrucian and occasional nudist, Gardner claimed to have learned the “Old Religion” from an ancient “coven” near his home in Highcliffe, Dorset, but Davis and other scholars who examined his unpublished papers now conclude that no such group ever existed. Rather, Gardner synthesized the Romantic musings of such 19th and early 20th century cranks as Charles G. Leland (author of Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches), Margaret Murray (author of Witch-Cult in Western Europe), Robert Graves (author of The White Goddess) and the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley.

What’s more, when women scholars began searching the records and relics of ancient societies for the peaceful religion of the “Great Goddess,” they discovered (to their dismay) that ancient pagans were a far cry from the feminist encounter groups they encountered at Harvard Divinity School, lighting incense to “the Divine Sophia.”

“Searching for female images of the Divine, [religious feminists] inevitably turned to ancient pagan goddesses such as Isis of Egypt and Ishtar of Babylonia, and, in the process, adopted the romantic notion that the societies that worshipped them held women, sexuality, and nature in high regard,” writes Judith Antonelli, a religiously observant Jew and feminist author in Boston. “There’s just one problem: The fairy tale isn’t accurate. It whitewashes the male supremacy and militarism of ancient paganism, falsely attributing the origin of these phenomena to ‘the Hebrews.’ In the new goddess myth, Egypt and Babylonia are portrayed as benevolent, peaceful, and matriarchal societies, despite the fact that sexual abuse and exploitation, ritual castration, phallus worship, and even human sacrifice were all integral aspects of their religious traditions. Do women who are enchanted by Isis, for instance, know that worship of her involved the annual drowning of a young virgin girl in the Nile to assure a plentiful harvest? Do devotees of Ishtar realize that many of her priestesses were simply temple slaves who were branded with a star (Ishtar’s symbol) just like the animals that were dedicated to her?”

Actually, it gets worse.

Mainstream anthropologists now concede that there is no historical or archaeological evidence whatsoever that a true matriarchal society – one in which political power lay primarily in the hands of women – ever existed anywhere on earth, even among goddess-worshiping pagans.

There have been matrilineal societies, of course – such as traditional Judaism, ironically enough – in which children are identified primarily from the mother’s line. But even in matrilineal societies such as traditional Judaism, males have dominated.

In fact, it was only after Christianity was introduced in Western Europe – with its egalitarian ethos and pervasive cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary – that women first gained the respect and dignity which, Christian theologians insisted, God ordained from the beginning of creation.

“One of feminism’s irritating reflexes is its fashionable disdain for patriarchal society, to which nothing good is ever attributed,” writes the iconoclastic feminist scholar and lesbian intellectual Camille Paglia in her now-classic text, Sexual Personae. “But it is patriarchal society that has freed me as a woman. It is capitalism that has given me the leisure to sit at this desk writing this book. Let us stop being small minded about men and freely acknowledge the treasures their obsessiveness has poured into culture… we could make an epic catalog of male achievements, from paved roads, indoor plumbing, and washing machines to eyeglasses, antibiotics and disposable diapers… If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

Sentiments such as these are, of course, heresy among today’s aging gender feminists for whom “patriarchy” is the original, if not the only, sin.

It is certainly debatable whether testosterone-driven male “obsessiveness” was a necessary stage in the development of human civilization, but what is not debatable is that the status of women significantly improved (and almost exclusively in western Europe) as Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. The reason for this was the example set by both the Jewish and Christian scriptures.

The Rights of Women in the Ancient World

The truth that many contemporary feminists don’t want to face is that, with a few rare exceptions, women never had anything close to equal rights with men throughout the long history of the ancient world.

The evidence for prehistory is mixed. Certainly, small tribal groups may well have exhibited a more easy-going familiarity between the sexes and consequent quasi-equality. Then again, there is also evidence that some prehistoric societies were, like gorilla societies, brutally patriarchal, dominated by the strongest (alpha) males who simply took what they wanted – food, women, the best cave — with nary a please nor thank you.

Once we arrive in the period when records were kept, however, the status of women was definitely more limited.

In the Homeric epics, there are numerous powerful female figures – the goddesses and characters such as Circe and even the long-suffering, eternally chaste Penelope. But in Greek society itself, women had few if any rights. In the famous democracies of classical Greece, women had no vote. They could not sue in law courts. They couldn’t own property. They were rarely seen in public. As in ancient Japan, the Greeks expected their wives to be seen and not heard… although they did appreciate the company of prostitutes (hetaira) and concubines (pallakai) who appear to have had some influence.

As we saw in another essay, male children were more highly valued throughout the ancient world than female children who were frequently killed through the widespread practice of infanticide – a grim sociological reality that gender feminist, through their grim advocacy of abortion-on-demand, have unintentionally brought back. Strangely enough, ancient Egypt — with its powerful queens — seems to have granted women more equality. Late Egyptian marriage contracts give women more rights.
In Rome, women had more rights than in ancient Greece, including the right to divorce; but very little political power. There were no female Roman senators or emperors. Not until the legalization of Christianity in Byzantium did true empresses appear — Irene (A.D. 752-803), Zoe (978-1050) and, of course, the formidable Theodora (984-1056). (The wife of Augustus, Livia Drusilla, functioned as “co-empress” in a sense and was an adviser to her son, Tiberius, but was not a true emperor.)

Women in the Hebrew Bible

Women were generally treated better in ancient Israel and in early Judaism than in most pagan societies but patriarchy still reigned supreme. There are passages in the Hebrew Bible in which women are portrayed as seductresses (Delilah in Judges 16, Pharaoh’s wife Potiphar in Genesis 39), or as inherently untrustworthy.

Many feminists insist that the story of Adam and Eve places most of the blame on Eve… even though it’s clear from the text, and from their mutual punishment, that the blame lies on both equally. Part of the punishment for disobeying God is that the man will “rule” or “dominate” his wife – although this also makes clear that such male domination was not what God willed in the beginning but is a consequence of sin. Certainly, the Mosaic Law contains many provisions that strike modern people as unjust and discriminatory against women… such as the provision that a bride (but not a groom) discovered not to be a virgin be stoned to death (Deut. 22: 13-21)… the fact that men (but not women) were allowed to have multiple spouses… the rule that property be passed on to male heirs but not to female ones (Numbers 27: 8-11)… the provision that an oath by a man is legally binding but not that of a woman if it is contradicted by her father or husband (Numbers 30)… and so on.

On the other hand, however, there are many passages in the Hebrew Bible that emphasize the fundamental equality of women with men – as well as their ingenuity, compassion and courage.

In the Hebrew Bible, women routinely outsmart the men and take the initiative. You have to be a singularly ideological feminist not to see the humor and pathos in the story of Abraham and his beautiful, powerful, rich and determined wife Sarah. She is a woman of such beauty that, when Abraham and she flee to Egypt, Abraham tells the Egyptians that she is his sister, not his wife, because he fears the Egyptians will simply kill him and take her for themselves – and indeed, Sarah attracts the attention of none other than the Pharaoh himself. Yet Sarah remains childless into her old age – and so she, and not Abraham, proposes that her tired old husband Abraham sleep with the young Egyptian servant-girl Hagar (the first recorded act of surrogate motherhood) so Abraham will have an heir and all their property not be deeded to their bondservant. Inevitably, the nubile Hagar begins to act haughtily towards her old mistress – and Sarah is not a happy woman. “You are responsible for this outrage!” the Bible records Sarah screaming at Abraham. “I myself gave my maid to your embrace; but ever since she became aware of her pregnancy, she has been looking on me with disdain. May the Lord decide between you and me!”

Hardly a docile wife.

Finally, when Abraham informs his wife that God will perform a miracle and that she will conceive a son after menopause, she laughs – a bit at her old husband’s expense. Sarah says, “Now that I am so withered and my husband is so old, am I still to have pleasure (edna)?”

Working at the Beach

It’s true: There is a strange tribe of people, myself included, who can and sometimes even do work at the beach. It’s mostly writers, true, but freelance professionals of many stripes can make it work. It helps to have a good smart phone… a sand-resistant laptop with a bright screen… and access to a flat space to set up shop. One of the beaches near my house has these great concrete picnic tables and a small burger cafe nearby that keeps me supplied with french fries and coffee.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek just ran an article about people like me:

While you’re Dilberting away in your cubicle, there are people taking conference calls in board shorts and flip-flops. While you’re saving your two weeks of vacation to hit the sand, they’re getting paid to be there. There are people—even respectable people—who have somehow turned a folding chair into a place of work.

Aided by technology, pioneers are now converting the beach into a fully functional office. People who work from the beach in non-hotel, non-burger-stand, non-pot-dealer capacities are still rare enough that no agency tracks the phenomenon. Brooks Brothers does not yet make a three-piece bathing suit; Herman Miller doesn’t sell an Aeron chaise.

It’s not like these beach workers are slackers; they just don’t like being controlled. It’s the same reason why we TiVo shows or e-mail and text more than call. When you can work from wherever you want to be—especially if it’s the place where everyone wants to be—work isn’t so bad.

Now, just to be completely honest about this, the beach is not really an optimal place to work. Truth be told, the WiFi reception can suck… monitor brightness can be a real issue… and sand really isn’t great for electronic technology. Plus, there are many distractions… bikinis or no.

Still, for the right type of work… certain kinds of mindless or repetitive tasks… working at the beach can be perfect. I was inspired by a story that human potential guru Tony Robbins once told. He came back from a business trip and was exhausted. He was greeted with an enormous pile of phone messages — and answering phone messages was the last thing he wanted to do. As a result, he decided to turn lemons into lemonade. He got into his hot tub and proceeded to answer all of his phone messages that way. Sitting in his hot tub overlooking the Pacific, he turned an act of work drudgery into a kind of celebration. With every returned call he made, he said, he felt how incredibly lucky he was to be able to live that way.

I like to do the same thing. I actually write far less on the beach than I do other administrative tasks, especially phone calls. When I was promoting a recent book of mine, I insisted on doing all of my radio interviews via cell phone — and usually at the beach. I get a little nervous doing radio interviews and I found that sitting at my favorite spot on the beach, talking to a talk show host in New York City or Chicago or some other place, really relaxed me. After all, how horrible can it be? Here I am, sitting on the sand and watching the waves, sitting my cafe latte, and talking to radio listeners a continent away.

In any event, I heartily recommend a similar strategy for all freelance professionals, especially writers. Working from the beach isn’t something you can do all the time… but it definitely helps you keep work in perspective and can turn some less pleasant work tasks into real celebrations.

NCR Blogger Rebuts Biased New York Times Attack on Pope

It’s not often you read someone in the National Catholic Reporter defending the pope.  After all, with the exception of its excellent Vatican correspondent John Allen, Jr., the NCR is to Catholicism what The Nation is to the Republican Party:  the official organ of opposition. For decades, it’s been the primary forum for angry ex-priests, angry ex-nuns and even, in the case of uber-liberal Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, angry ex-archbishops.  It regularly features columns by the usual collection of geriatric Sixties liberals, such as Richard McBrien of Notre Dame, ex-priest Eugene Kennedy, Joan Chittister, Charles Curran, and so on. For a “NCR Catholic,” the papacy is not a “charism of unity” that has held an international community of believers together for well neigh 2,000 years but merely an archaic medieval institution that should have long ago been jetisonned by a “progressive” church (small C).

Thus, it was something of a surprise to read new NCR blogger Michael Sean Winters actually step up and defend Pope Benedict XVI (the arch-villain for the NCR for literally decades!) against the assorted imbecilities and logical incoherence of the New York Times. “This morning’s New York Times “expose” regarding then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s role in the Vatican’s response to the clergy sex abuse crisis exposes more than it intended,” Winters writes. “It exposes the fact that the authors, Laurie Goodstein and David Halbfinger, and their editors, do not understand what they are talking about and, at times, put forward such an unrelentingly tendentious report, it is difficult to attribute it to anything less than animus.”

Amen. Here’s some of the good bits:

The Times article comments, this is not reporting really, that, “Yet throughout the ’80s and ’90s, bishops who sought to penalize and dismiss abusive priests were daunted by a bewildering bureaucratic and canonical legal process, with contradicting laws and overlapping jurisdictions in Rome, according to church documents and interviews with bishops and canon lawyers.” Have Ms. Goodstein and Mr. Halbfinger ever seen a rerun of “Law & Order”? Legal processes are complicated and sometimes bewildering. The authors note that some cardinals were worried about maintaining the presumption of innocence in ecclesiastical tribunals. The horror. Shame on them. Worrying about a silly thing like the presumption of innocence in a court of law. Hell, it is only one of the cardinal (no pun intended) principles of a civilized society.

But, the sentence that most betrays the bias of the Times has nothing to do with the sex abuse of minors. In making the case that Cardinal Ratzinger found time to pursue other matters of lesser importance, they write: “As Father Gauthé was being prosecuted in Louisiana, Cardinal Ratzinger was publicly disciplining priests in Brazil and Peru for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed, which the cardinal saw as a Marxist-inspired distortion of church doctrine.” This reads as “Bad Cardinal Ratzinger, persecuting those justice-loving liberation theologians.” The operative word in that sentence is “for.” Cardinal Ratzinger did not, in fact, punish liberation theologians “for preaching that the church should work to empower the poor and oppressed.” He took steps against Liberation Theology because it was built on a faulty anthropology, entailed a materialist analysis of the human person, and reduced the idea of the “Kingdom of God” to a more just earthly regime.

How such a clear and intelligent analysis got past editor Joe Feuerherd is difficult to say. But it’s a hopeful sign.

The Nature of Existence

For a beach philosophizer like myself, it doesn’t get much better than “The Nature of Existence,” the quirky little documentary on the Meaning of Life that is opening this weekend in Los Angeles and Irvine, California. Filmmaker Roger Nygard wrote down the 85 toughest questions he could think of about the meaning of life — and then set out with a camera crew to ask them of such luminaries as Indian holy man Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (The Art of Living), professional atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), 24th generation Chinese Taoist Master Zhang Chengda, Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind (co-discoverer of string theory), wrestler Rob Adonis (founder of Ultimate Christian Wrestling), confrontational evangelist Brother Jed Smock, novelist Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), director Irvin Kershner (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back), Stonehenge Druids Rollo Maughfling & King Arthur Pendragon and many more. The result is his interesting little film:

The Nature of Existence - Original Trailer from Roger Nygard on Vimeo.

Mel Gibson’s Latest Rant

Not that he needs my help, but I’ve long defended Mel Gibson from accusations that he’s a bigot.  I thought a lot of the rage directed his way over his film, The Passion of the Christ, had less to do with any real or perceived anti-Semitism in the film than it did over its depiction of the Gospels as they are actually written.  In other words, the people attacking The Passion were often really attacking the historicity of the Gospels themselves, often with little scholarly or historical justification.

As for Mel’s arrest for drunk driving and subsequent rant about “the Jews,” my feeling was that, yes, Mel probably inherited a little anti-Jewish feeling from his old man, but that, really, he was more needling the cop than anything else.  Had the cop been black or Asian, he might just as well started dropping other racial epithets, I felt.

Well, if the most recent story is to be believed, he is certainly capable of those as well.  According to Radaronline.com, Mel was surreptitiously recorded during an argument with his apparently now-ex girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva and said some pretty nasty things — using racial and demeaning female epithets that he probably wouldn’t use in an audience with the pope.  It sounds to me like he was set up:  Grigorieva’s lawyer probably wanted her to get some more “dirt” on Mel to use as leverage for a bigger financial settlement.  After all, how many women carry around a digital tape recorder, already running, to record every word in an angry argument?

But I must say, I’m a bit embarrassed for him.  It’s not that he used vulgar language or swore.  I swear.  My wife swears.  We’ll use coarse language in private.  We do draw the line, however, over words that are inherently demeaning to any racial group or gender.  I was raised to never, ever, EVER use the “N word,” and, similarly, I’ve never used any other racial epithets that many New Yorkers, say, use as a matter of course — like “guinea” for Italian, say, or anti-Jewish or Polish slurs.    When I lived in Hawaii, I was shocked by how the Hawaiians routinely use expressions like “Flips” for Filipinos or “tight Pakes” for Chinese.  I’ve taught my own children the same linguistic discipline.

Clearly Mel’s a troubled guy — an enormously talented and, in some ways, thoughtful guy, but troubled nonetheless.  But then again, a lot of people are troubled.  A lot of people have their demons.  A lot of people harbor racist sentiments that just are never recorded on tape.

I’m sure the breakup of his longtime marriage really unhinged him… and he is full of regret and wants more than anything to get back together with his ex-wife.  (Contrary to media reports, he did not marry Grigorieva.)

I still wish Mel the best.  Like most people, in his better moments, I’m sure Mel isn’t a racist.  Or maybe he’s just an occasional racist.  That description would fit a lot of people.  What will really be sickening will be the pile-on of politically correct media sleazebags, like TMZ.com, who will run with this story for weeks, maybe months.  Sometimes it’s just better to keep your mouth shut.  Especially when arguing with your ex-girlfriend.

UPDATE July 15, 2010: Well, it just keeps getting uglier and uglier, doesn’t it? I am naturally skeptical of anything “consensus” the lamestream media produce these days since, in my experience, anything the media agreed upon as obviously true (e.g., Barack Obama will be a great president, global warming) usually ends up being anything but.

And it’s also obvious that Gibson was completely set-up by what appears to be a conniving, fairly obvious gold-digger.

That said, however, I draw the line at hitting a woman. There is no justification for a tough guy like Mel punching a woman half his weight, let alone the mother of one of his children, in the face. For that, he deserves whatever scorn he gets… even if Whoopie Goldberg is right that he’s probably not a true racist in his heart. I feel sorry most for his kids… for the shame that this talented but tormented guy is bringing on his seven adult children. I know there is redemption, even in Hollywood, but I can’t see how Mel’s kids will ever live this down.

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