Isaac Williams on Trinity 5 and your arrogant presumption

... This is the important warning of this Sunday: the necessity of withdrawing all our affections, interest, and anxieties from the things of time, and fixing them without reserve upon Christ in God, that we may serve Him with joy. Let us apply this to the outward course of this world, in public matters. Many are anxious that these should “be so peaceably ordered,” that the Church may serve God in quietness; but then they seem to think that this is to be effected by their own governance, and not by the governance of God; for otherwise how could they be so full of manifold anxieties, so absorbed in the success of their own wishes and management? and from hence what a world of bitter thoughts and jealousies, low and mean joys, and still meaner fears? From the state of their hearts on this subject, one might think that God had given up unto them the government of His own world. St. Paul commands that we pray “for kings, and all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, in all godliness and honesty.” Observe what are the means for this end. It is prayer only; it is to God only that we are to look in this, as in all other matters. For it is by looking to God in such matters, that not only will the objects we desire be brought about, but also our own souls healed with respect to them. It is the only cure for our own anxious desires and private ends.

Such is the lesson which the Collect appears so seasonably to bring before us at this time with regard to the course of public affairs. But it applies no less forcibly to our own personal interests; for as we pray to God that He will so govern this world that His Church may joyfully serve Him in quietness, so also must we leave it entirely to Him alone, that the course of outward events may be so ordered- that the soul may serve Him without distraction. To serve Him with joy is quite impossible, unless it be with an undivided heart; to serve Him in godly quietness can never be, if we are disquieted and “troubled about many things;” and disquieted we certainly must be, so far as we are not deeply in our hearts convinced that the course of this world, with regard to ourselves, must be ordered by His governance, and not by our own. O blessed and peaceful knowledge, which His Spirit alone can give! hidden anchor of the soul which, amidst the storms of this world, binds it to the eternal shore !

And now to return once more to the Epistle. What can be more seasonable and valuable than that concluding exhortation of St. Peter, Who can harm you if ye be followers of that which is good? and if, for righteousness’ sake, ye suffer persecution, happy are ye. And be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled. Sanctify God in your hearts, and all will be well. Fear Him, and ye need fear nothing else. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,” and all will work together for your good, your great and final happiness.

...

Why then, it may be asked, do we pray that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered, that His Church may joyfully serve God in quietness; if this joyfulness in God may be in the midst of persecution, and He may be served in quietness amidst the storms of the world? The fact is, that this distraction of heart, which hinders us from the true service of God, does not so much arise from troubles and enemies that are without, as from the fear of them; and it is by prayer to God that we get rid of such fears.

Isaac Williams, The Peaceable Ordering of the World

h/t to KDN for LC

Barbara Kay, will you marry me?

Imagine if, instead of narrating the actual drama of the 1917 Halifax Explosion in his riveting 1941 novel, Barometer Rising, Hugh MacLennan had chosen to focus, as we are told February does, on the "swelling loneliness and eventual letting-go" of one woman bereft of a beloved husband in the conflagration. Zzzzzzz.

Not only are her characters plucked from her own experience, Moore boasts to Laidlaw that "she intentionally didn't interview any families affected by the disaster." Imagine: There are many people still alive -- though they won't be forever -- who actually remember the tragedy as it happened, yet in terms of "research," their doubtlessly compelling survivor experience is trumped by Moore's memories of the personal sadness evoked when her 41-year-old father "died of natural causes" (again, emphasis mine).

Me, me, me and my extraordinary capacity for sadness. Welcome to the unrelenting self-regard of CanLit, where it's all about nobly suffering women or feminized men: men immobilized in situations of physical, psychological or economic impotence (that is when they're not falling through the ice and nearly drowning), rather than demonstrating manly courage in risk-taking or heroic mode.

Barbara Kay, Unreadably Canadian

Open email to Mr. Toad

Good evening. In light of this, I was sort of wondering how you can be a Roman Catholic and a gay supporter at the same time?

I mean, not only do they deny homosexuals' very existence - they think you should be punished for appearing in any way supportive of them, or those like them.

It's your life and all that, but I was just wondering how you sleep at night?

As I've indicated before, if the Papists don't want you, the Anglicans--and just about every other dying Protestant denomination--do.

Faithfully yours,

EMG

What's he(mg) listening to?

New segment here at EMG: What's he listening to?

Today I'm listening to Dr. Octagon:

(aka Kool Keith)

And Beans:

(aka Beans)

Aiight?

SITREP

I do have an excuse for my long silence for once. My internet's been down. And now I'm working on a couple of things that aren't leaving me much spare time.

Meanwhile, though, why don't you drop by casa Borealis for the latest installment of Eric's brilliant-if-too-fitful series Hideous Public Art:

This monumental bronze excrescence is called "Universal Man" and was created by Gerald Gladstone in 1976. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Gladstone frequently complained that "his work was misundertood by the Canada Council's arts bureaucracy" - quite the statement considering the hideous art inflicted on the public by Canada's "arts bureaucracy" over the years.

It originally stood at the base of the CN Tower to "give a balance of human scale" to the world's tallest free-standing structure. It was removed in 1987 and re-erected in 1994 in a parking lot on the west side of the Yorkdale shopping mall, where it was unveiled by North York Mayor Mel Lastman (himself a living monument to bad taste). According to the accompanying plaque, Universal Man was created "to symbolize the earthbound human energies reaching towards a higher universal knowledge".

Here it is in its current location, reaching towards a higher universal knowledge outside the entrance to the Bay.

...

Poor Universal Man. Erected to give a human scale to Toronto's most prominent structure, removed from public view for seven years and then installed ignominiously in a parking lot outside a suburban shopping mall. Is this the fate of western culture?

The whole of Eric's HPA series is, it seems to me, the best kind of blogging and I recommend it highly. My particular favourite is this one.

Local flavour, local talent

I know, I know. The burning question on all of your minds is: what's EMG got on his iPod?

And the blistering answer, you weanies, is: what am I, a strawberry-flavoured-cigarillo-smoking tween?! The day I buy an iPod is the day I eat an iPod.

If it's not coming out of my stereo, it's the music of Toronto's feeble excuse for urbanity that serenades me through my various routines. My half-wit neighbour cursing out her kids for the seventeenth time today, for instance. Or the Super across the alleyway cursing out the bums who've made a jolly old common area of his orderly heap of bed-bug infested mattresses. (I know the mattresses are infested with bed-bugs because the Super spray-painted "BED BUGS" on them--in, what would be big, unmistakable letters, but for the bums' bums planted exactly there, so that they read BE[bum]GS now.) Or the hum and smash and (again) curse and crash of the economy-defying condo that's being built around the corner.

But I'll tell you what I've got in my stereo that's of note, both of them Toronto-ish bands:

The Junior Boys, from Hamilton. Part of the electronic scene here, which is, I gotta admit, pretty wicked.

And Timber Timbre, from Toronto. This is from their last album (Medicinals), which (album) I highly recommend:

--In spite, that is, of the tedious and twee theme of the video. (A better track is "Patron Saint Hunter", but for the life of me, I can't find a version of it anywhere.)

... Of course, there are three trays in my CD player, and the third still holds this album (by non-Canadians), with this still-awesome song.

Selley on what stinks

... Today, however, I’m not clear whether union leaders give a damn about public opinion—or indeed, the public. Whenever there’s a public sector strike, you’ll hear people say ruefully that Tactic X—say, blocking taxpayers’ access to municipal buildings, parking garages and the hell-on-earth waste transfer stations they’ve been forced to drive to precisely because of the strike—won’t win them any support. But surely even union leaders can’t be deluded enough to think it will.

...

[C]learly the labour movement is not on an upward trajectory. It’s in a corkscrew dive. Its automaking brothers and sisters are giving up salary, benefits and old age security like candy on Halloween. People urging CUPE members to surrender their obscene sick leave entitlements are citing precedent in cities all over the country and continent. The picketers I saw this week chanting “fee-fi-fo-fum, we won’t give up what we’ve already won” under the crack of an organizer's whip looked dispirited and embarrassed, and rightfully so. It’s difficult to see how any of this is helping The Worker, writ large. And yet these unions still have the time to operate as a sort of leftist pamphlet made flesh: Palestine this, abortion that, free sex changes for everyone! To people of my generation and younger, they might as well be alien life forms speaking in extraterrestrial riddles. We literally have no idea what the hell these people are on about.

In short, I think it’s incumbent upon the labour movement and its component unions to justify their continued existence to Canadians—to explain how they’re not, perversely, a force for inequality in society. If they’re around solely to protect their members’ entitlements (or, at least, their senior members’) no matter now ridiculous those entitlements are—if they’re just the last, scrappy vestiges of a cause that’s already admitted defeat, or perhaps even victory—then there’s not much reason for Canadians to support them. There’s sure as bloody hell no reason to support them if they actually turn against those Canadians, whose taxes, after all, underwrite the entitlements.

Chris Selley, The labour movement needs to justify its existence

Out of the mouths of babes and suckers

This year marks the 150th an- niversary of the Catholic Children's Society (West- minster) and the Mass was an opportunity to look forward, taking the theme of "Faith in the Future".

Children were invited to write a word on a paper brick which represented what they would like to change about the future.

One child said "family" another said "hope" and another "trust" and another "justice". The bricks were used by the children to build a wall before the altar, which was designed to symbolise the foundations their faith provides for the building of their future and the future of the world.

So, wait a second. These (very clichéd) children want to change family, hope, trust and justice? That's not quite right, is it?

Something dicky with the phrasing of the question, I think. And anyway, from a Catholic perspective I should've said that the little swots had already got their wish: the concepts of family, hope, trust and justice have all been irrevocably changed.

As has, apparently, the proper object of faith.

h/t Orwell's Picnic

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ADDENDUM (11:50 PM)

It just occurs to me: these words were written on "paper bricks"? Paper bricks? Indeed.

Cosh on the Taliban So-Cons

Colby Cosh is losing it I think.

It used to be that you'd have only one weird column for every, say, ten normal, good ones. You know the thing: these shrill, air-agitating protests-in-the-face-of-blank-stares, which only ever seem to amount to a plea that everyone recognize in him this rare new breed of political superman who is, get this, fiscally conservative but totally not socially conservative. (World-beating stuff, obviously, and, my God, can somebody help me clean this mess off the floor because my mind's just been blown out my ears!) But lately the ratio has been getting too close to even.

Today he makes the argument that Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan's invocation of "the family" as justification for his controversial legislation--giving terrifying new powers of investigation to the police--somehow reflects on the nation's social conservatives and their fetishistic (nay, theocratic!) notion of the sanctity of "the family". Rather, that is, than reflecting on the abuse of the term by "cynical" politicians. (Cynical? Even that seems like a stretch. Sounds more like political boilerplate to me.)

He says:

No bogus, ill-advised expansion of state power was ever perpetrated on this continent without "families" being hauled out as part of the pretext.

Oooookaaaaaayyyy ...

But Colby, couldn't we also say that no bona fide, well-advised expansion (or contraction--ha ha, just kidding) of state power was ever perpetrated without "families" being hauled out as a pretext, too?

I mean, surely the thing about politicians always (always, always, always!) using the welfare of families to advance their political ends is that ... everyone belongs to one! I mean, you may as well complain that no bogus, ill-advised expansion of state power was ever perpetrated without people being hauled out as a pretext. Goddamn social conservatives and their perverse obsession with fucking "people"!

He continues:

Maintaining a healthy, functioning, non-corrupt liberal democracy would be a simple matter if everyone were immune to the intramural passions that the appeal ad familiam -- the appeal to innocence, safety and the love between a parent and child -- stirs up.

Um. Sorry guy, but I think everyone already is.

I mean, I don't have the stats or anything, but the whole "Won't somebody please think of the children!"-Helen-Lovejoy-cliché is the joke that even Helen-Lovejoy-types make these days. Like I say: this stuff is conspicuously pro forma. (Or I should say, inconspicuously pro forma, as I doubt a single person noticed it apart from Mr.--sorry, Ms.--Cosh.)

He then goes on to compare social conservatives to the Taliban, then says he didn't, then he says this:

But maybe some of you so-cons out there reading this can see that you have a special responsibility to stand up for (and help "conserve") truly essential and time-hallowed "liberal" features of our society, like search warrants, when they are threatened in the name of the "family."

God damn! Yeah, because you can't fling tennis balls by the half-hour in any of Canada's more densely populated areas without hitting a raving, totally unashamed social conservative! But still, this is begging the question. Can somebody tell me who these legions of so-cons are that are so-vocally supporting the proposed legislation?

And please, please, please don't tell me that the Harper Tories are so-cons. Please.

One art, please!

James Howard Kunstler's most recent podcast on "art"--as "therapy" for "amateurs and children"--is brilliant. Indeed, his pronunciation of the word throughout the (20 minute) show is itself somehow evocative of art's present-day essence: a kind of unwieldy concretion of bubble-gum, bauxite and a few balled-up pages from Dadaism for Dummies.

Keep your commonplace book handy as there is much that is quotable here. For instance:

"[So much of the art in public spaces] is a make-work project for people on the margins of the economy, including the artists themselves."

"[This is] art that is not connected to artistry or craft. It is simply the banging together of modular materials."

"It's no longer OK to just protest through self-abasement that we're living in a crap culture. Now we have to get beyond the crap culture and build a real culture."

And note the coining of the phrase "Rape-o-matic public space". Highly recommended.

The Mayor on Letterman

Things have been getting a little sweary/crass around here and I apologize for that, but I can't resist this:

... Secondly: David Letterman is an ultra-liberal on an ultra-liberal television station, yucking it up with fellow ultra-liberals in an ultra-liberal state. Why bother trying to fight that nonsense? Pick your battles, you’ll never get through to them on this one.

Finally: look at the picture I posted. That’s Letterman’s wife. Ya. Imagine, he’s making fun of Sarah Palin, and every night he goes home and has to fuck the dead body of Boris Karloff. No wonder Letterman is angry. If you had to give tender kisses to a neck that has a bolt sticking out of it, you’d be mad too ...

Ah, the contrapasso!

For the record, I'm not a fan of the (I'm sorry, but) decidedly underwhelming, soi-disant "valley trash" Sarah Palin. But that Boris Karloff line kept me laughing for about ten minutes.

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ADDENDUM (3:50 PM)

Did I say underwhelming? I meant to say so stupid, so devoid of dignity, it's embarrassing. That, or just plain old: exploitative to the point of creepiness. The way she's handled this, I don't know if she isn't in fact worse than Letterman.

Not to speak of her dimwit husband:

Todd Palin issued a statement last week that said "any 'jokes' about raping my 14-year-old are despicable."

Yeah, Todd. That couldn't have gone without saying.

The politics of the personal

Listen to the fucking language coming out of these idiots' mouths:

Calling it an issue close to his heart as the child of an immigrant single mother, Mayor David Miller tonight threw his support behind a movement to extend the right to vote in Toronto municipal elections to non-citizens.

Politically enfranchising newcomers who reside in the city but have not yet attained their citizenship would be a first in Canada but not the world.

“It’s my view that those people who have chosen to make Toronto their home and live here permanently should have the right to vote in municipal elections in exactly the same way as Canadian citizens,” the Mayor said to applause from some 200 people attending a city-organized panel discussion on the topic that was held in the council chambers at City Hall this evening.

“From my perspective you can’t be an inclusive and open government unless all of the residents have an ability to choose that government.”

...

[C]ouncillor Janet Davis (Beaches East York) ... also approves of granting voting rights to non-citizens, saying it “goes to the heart of ensuring social inclusion.”

...

Author Alan Broadbent, chairman of the Maytree Foundation, the Caledon Institute of Social Policy and the Tamarack Institute ... [said] “The choice is really this: will we give them shackles or will we given [sic] them wings."

God damn!

And while I have no doubt that all of this is just so much cynical political maneuvering, I know too that somewhere in the back of these twits' minds there's this semi-formed notion that Toronto's "non-citizens" consist of a bunch of undernourished but impishly delightful pickpockets and chimney-sweeps clutching empty porridge bowls and singing in chorus "It's clear / we're / going to get along!" if only we'd listen.

I mean, why is Janet Davis talking about going "to the heart of ensuring social inclusion" rather than just "ensuring social inclusion"? And why is David Miller stressing the fact that his mother was "single" in addition to being an "immigrant"? And where the hell does Alan Broadbent get the idea that this "shackles" and "wings" business doesn't betray him as an hysteric and a fool?

Because they know that no matter how much question-begging puke about feelings they fling at us, we'll lap it up like dogs.

It's sooooo embarrassing.

(I'm reminded of this scene (advance to minute 5:47) from Armando Iannucci's--absolutely-must-must-see political satire--The Thick of It, where the character of Hugh Abbot (Minister for the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship) is caught in a bureaucratic impropriety. All is set to rights when, at the inquiry, he says of his scrotum-twistingly obvious opportunism, that "It's a personal thing ... But if government isn't personal then what the hell is it?")*

But I quite liked this panel member's contribution to the discussion:

Astrid De Vries, deputy consul-general at the Dutch consulate in Toronto, offered facts on the Netherlands’s three-decade experience allowing non-citizens present in the country five years to vote in municipal elections and even run for office.

She said the origins of the idea came from successive national governments and cut across party lines, gathering support on both the left and right of the political spectrum there and is considered quite successful.

Yes, indeed. Quite successful.

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*The whole series is available on Youtube. I strongly encourage you to watch it.

My Lady Nicotine

I think part of the delight of smoking for many teenagers is being able to moan on about how hard it is to give it up. Indeed, I think many of them acquire the habit for just that reason. When I was a teenager I remember being very impressed by these types. Such a grown-up predicament, I thought. Of course, I see now that only a teenager could get so little out of tobacco. (Them, and that breed of adult who don't experience adolescence so much as they are infected by it. Like tetanus.)