Month: April 2007

Carpentersville immigrants

Chi Trib uses both “illegal” and “undocumented” for immigrants without portfolio who live in suburban Carpentersville — six to four in favor of the latter, depending on point of view. 

When referring to the three newly elected or re-elected aldermen who favor the ordinance called the Illegal Alien Immigration Relief Act and its supporters, “illegal” wins.  When people apparently of Mexican origin are discussed, it’s “undocumented.”

I’d like to see a brief explanation why one and not the other.  As it is, we have Trib as split personality.

We also have wooden rhetoric such as one frequently does not find in blogs, for instance, which usually employ a more direct expression. 

Flippancy is there too, of course (as in newspapers), but that’s hardly the goal.  Rather a simple directness.  A copy editor could supply it if a reporter, pulling many things together for a story and in this case two of them, does not.

As for the reporting, I would have liked a response by Carpentersville authorities to a question, not asked, about long-time residents, presumably with clearance from our government, feeling unwelcome.

The response would have fit nicely after this, high up in the story:

“This was pretty bad,” Hilario Savedra, 62, said of Tuesday’s vote, pausing amid a flow of pedestrian traffic at a popular grocery store in the Meadowdale Shopping Center.

“I’ve been in this community for more than 20 years, and I hate to think someone will tell me I’m no longer wanted here. This is my community, too.”

At almost the end of the story, we have this:

Some longtime residents such as Mike Connolly search for middle ground. Carpentersville has plenty of legal Hispanics, and it would be unfair to lump them with the undocumented, he said.

This implies that somebody in Carpentersville is ignoring legality.  But legality is at the heart of the problem.  I think the story could have made that point more clearly, again in no more than a sentence, if that.  And again we look to the copy desk.

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By their surrenders we shall know them . . .

You can take the Democrat out of 1864, but you can’t take military defeatism out of the 2007 Democrat, as James Taranto shows with these two telling quotes:

  • “I believe . . . that this war is lost, and this surge is not accomplishing anything, as is shown by the extreme violence in Iraq this week.”–Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, April 19, 2007
  • “Resolved, that this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretence of military necessity, or war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the federal Union of the States.”–1864 Democratic platform

25 years murder-free in ‘Gun Town USA’

Heresy it may be to the controllers, but here’s evidence that guns don’t kill, people do, or they don’t when everyone has one:

In March 1982, 25 years ago, the small town of Kennesaw – responding to a handgun ban in Morton Grove, Ill. – unanimously passed an ordinance requiring each head of household to own and maintain a gun. Since then, despite dire predictions of “Wild West” showdowns and increased violence and accidents, not a single resident has been involved in a fatal shooting – as a victim, attacker or defender.  . . . .

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Thanks to Imus from a black guy

K.C. Star sports columnist, who happens to be black (that’s how you say it, right?), has crocodile thank you for the man who used to be from CBS and MSNBC but now should know it doesn’t pay to truckle to Sharpton and friends:

Imus isn’t the real bad guy
Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.
By JASON WHITLOCK – Columnist

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again. . . . .

Read it all, and hat tip (that’s how you say it, I think) to Just One Minute.

Two recommendations:

1. “The Chorus,” or “Les Choristes,” on DVD from OP Library and elsewhere, a marvelous story about teaching kids and being a human being.  Cinematically, if I may be so bold, it’s very intelligent.  For instance, we see someone beckoning another and are NOT given the face of the one beckoned.  Rather, the camera remains on the beckoner as we wait for the other to heave into view.  Small thing, but telling as the movie continues and you realize you are not going to be treated as a TV-viewer, with all spelled out for you.  Neither is this film wantonly mysterious (read dumb).  Nor is time spent on face shots nervously wondering when the damn camera goes to something interesting.  See “Les Choristes.”

2. The Dennis Miller Show on WIND-AM in Chicago, also national.  Mid-day, competing nicely with Rush Limbaugh on WLS-AM.  Miller went all conservative after 9–11.  He’s excellent with language and has decided it hurts only when you DON’T laugh.  Rush laughs too, but I think Miller will wear better over a longer period.  Of course, either one has its limits, when one is well advised to send them on mute, which is a killer on radio, of course, and pursue one’s Times Literary Supplement over lunch in the kitchen.  A word to the wise is sufficient, I hope.  In any case, it’s all I have to offer.

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The Reid-Pelosi Initiative

If you read your Instapundit before I did, you already know about Dems’ get-tough policy on governments that violate what’s good, true, and beautiful in human affairs:

WASHINGTON (APUPI) In a new attempt to finally bring a rogue regime to heel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced today that they plan to diplomatically isolate the White House.

It’s about time.  Read all about it at Transterrestrial Musings.

Verrrrry interesting items . . .

* Victorian sentimentality was the product of “an unnatural union of poetry and Puritanism.” – Hugh Kingsmill, Anthology of Invective and Abuse, Dial, 1929

* “Throwin’ up his little finger” means doing a lot of drinking, in fact coming home drunk, in Legends and Stories of Ireland, by Samuel Lover, an 1831 collection published anew in 2006 by Nonsuch (nonsuch-publishing.com). In story “New potatoes,” in which Dublin potato-seller Katty complains to herring-monger Sally of her Mike, who had come home drunk: He “was done to a turn,” she said, “like a mutton-kidney.”

* The word “dickens” = devil. My mother and her mother knew that when they called a kid “that little dickens” of said, “Isn’t he (or she) the dickens?” Thus James H. Montgomery, of Austin TX, translator of Don Quixote. In TLS letters 3/16/07.

* Time Mag worried about a coming ice age in its Nov. 13, 1972 issue. And again in its Jun. 24, 1974 issue. So did Newsweek on April 28, 1975 – “The Cooling World, by Peter Gwynne: “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically” etc.

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Worshiping without tears

The main character in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s 1957 novel based on his own experience published when he was 54, is a Roman Catholic who just when church leaders were urging worship as a corporate rather than private act, had “burrowed ever deeper into the rock” and when away from his home parish sought the “least frequented mass” and remained “aloof from” church organizations formed to meet the needs of the times. Called “a leading Catholic” by media, he was not conspicuous for his leadership. 


Some find that appalling, I’m sure, but I find it appealing.  Today’s RC worship represents capitulation to a personal, Protestant approach to piety.  Once the emphasis was on God and ceremony, now it’s on the priest.  He has become the main character, as performer.  We like this or that parish because the priest is a performer after our likes.  Once it mattered far less who said the mass.  Differences were muted by sheer force of ritual.  Personal, quirky additions or emendations were unheard of.  Now they are everywhere.  They are what give the priest-performer style.  He may not intend that, and he’s under the gun to perform.  So he does.


That said, the goal can still be there for the mass-sayer or celebrant if you insist.  He can ditch the folksy business, or the pseudo-scholarly or the innovative.  And he can be more matter-of-fact about it.  You wonder sometimes about the emotional stability of some.  They spill their guts and go all compassionate.  They are romantics when you get down to it.  But classicists have feelings too.  They just don’t go all sloppy about it.  Granted, the priest is in competition with a media-frenzied world, especially as on television.  But even there you can find clarity without bathos sometimes.  Even there the message is muted sometimes.  Priests should hit the mute more often, even sometimes shutting up, but at least toning things down.


And for starters, they should not open mass with that “Good morning” bit.  They are not running into us at the supermarket, they are leading worship.  Let them can the informality.


Later, from Reader D.:  I LOVE your suggestion that priests should hit mute. Hey, mute is Biblical: I must decrease so He can increase.  All the chummy baloney at Mass is the Phil Donahue syndrome. That’s when it started, and that’s when this generation of pastors were newbies. They learned to take their mikes down into the audience. Spare me!!!  I decided during the Triduum at the Monastery of the Holy Cross (which I enjoyed) that Gregorian Chant is over-rated. Who the heck hums Chant in their free time besides Brother Peter? It’s mathematics as music. Give me a little melody.  Watching a bit of the Easter vigil on EWTN with Pope Benedict, I discovered Latin is an equalizer. There was no German accent — just Latin.

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Muslim activist boldly answers critics in Chi Trib

Softball pitcher of the week award goes to Chi Trib’s Noreen Ahmed-Ullah for her 3/25/07 email interview with the Chicago CAIR director — Council on American-Islamic Relations. Her questions win her this accolade:

Why CAIR? What are CAIR’s projects? “Tell me a bit about you,” etc., all leading up to the really tough one, “What is the source of the latest criticism/accusations being against CAIR on the national level?” which have never been reported by Chi Trib (!) and which the CAIR man, Ahmen Rehab, answered with alacrity. 

Those are “urban legends,” he says, traceable to “a single and homogenous [sic, both as to misspelling and misuse: single things are always homogeneous] source of interlinked individuals and groups [some single source] with such deceptively benign names as the Investigative Project, the Middle East Forum, Jihad Watch and Americans Against Hate.”

They “typically flourish in the unmoderated [oh my], chaotic world of the blogosphere; they attempt to sell themselves to political and media circles as experts on Islam and terrorism and as patriots who are looking out for American interests.”

Not so, says Rehab, desperately seeking rehabbing with the help of Chi Trib.  Rather, they are “career Islamophobes who are deathly afraid of Muslim-American enfranchisement [they seek depriving Muslims of the right to vote?] and its possible effects on the Israeli lobby’s interests. [Italics added, and there’s the obligatory Israeli reference].

Chi Trib’s Ahmed-Ullah even gives a web address for further CAIR info.

Couldn’t she have asked him his favorite color or candy bar while she was at it? Do we maybe wonder if such amateurism might not be what Sam Zell has in mind when he speaks of his wanting his new property to be “relevant”?

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