Month: June 2008

Girl, don’t talk that way!

Steve Rhodes takes the inimitable Dawn Taylor Trice to task for fatuous observations on “the air waves” the other night about the future of newspapers.

Can you imagine the civil rights movement without newspapers? Trice asked. If the Internet was around, certainly! [Rhodes commented]  Can you imagine! YouTube video of Bull Connor and Internet fundraising for SNCC and MLK blogging directly to the people. Progress would have come much sooner.

He’s down on “Old World journalists” in general.

The very idea that the facts of a new media world – and the underappreciated facts of the newspaper industry’s gross negligence and essential journalistic malpractice of the last three decades – are still dawning on our nation’s newsrooms is just incredible. The time to ask how and why is long past.

This is in Rhodes’s Beachwood Reporter, which rocks — that is, pleases me greatly — and will you too, I bet.

Tags: , ,

Making news fit

I pass this on unvarnished, from a reader:

A biker is riding by the zoo, when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion’s cage.

Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents.

The biker jumps off his bike, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch.

Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and the biker brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly.

A New York Times reporter has watched the whole event.

The reporter addressing the biker says, “Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I saw a man do in my whole life.”

The biker replies, “Why, it was nothing, really, the lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I felt right.”

The reporter says, “Well, I’ll make sure this won’t go unnoticed. I’m a journalist from the New York Times, you know, and tomorrow’s paper will have this story on the front page… So, what do you do for a living and what political affiliation do you have?'”

The biker replies, “I’m a U.S. Marine and a Republican.”

The journalist leaves.

The following morning the biker buys The New York Times to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on front page:

U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT AND STEALS HIS LUNCH

Tags:

The devil you say

Hawthorne and Emerson did not see eye to eye when it came to “what evil lurks in the hearts of men.”

In one of his stories, [Hawthorne] has the devil say, “Evil is the nature of mankind.” [he] didn’t go that far, but argued time and again for the “evil impulse” in us all. “Oh, take my word for it,” his devil taunted reformers, “it will be the old world yet!”

Emerson, on the other hand, found The Scarlet Letter a “ghastly” book, apparently recognizing it as an attack on his feelings-based morality.

Read all about it in The Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest, out today, with special attention to “three discarded Oak Park school namesakes” — these two plus James Russell Lowell, whose paean to June — “what is so rare”? — gets special billing.

Tags: , ,

Docs find torture

There’s a “gotcha” quality to this AP story about torture in Iraq and Gitmo, and they may have got us with it:

“Some of these men really are, several years later, very severely scarred,” said Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University who conducted psychological tests on six of the 11 detainees covered by the study. “It’s a testimony to how bad those conditions were and how personal the abuse was.”

But there are also qualifications:

One Iraqi prisoner, identified only as Yasser, reported being subjected to electric shocks three times and being sodomized with a stick. His thumbs bore round scars consistent with shocking, according to the report obtained by The Associated Press. He would not allow a full rectal exam.

Why wouldn’t he?

President Bush said in 2004, when the prison abuse was revealed, that it was the work of “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” Bush and other U.S. officials have consistently denied that the U.S. tortures its detainees.

Gotcha.  However:

Because the medical examiners did not have access to the 11 patients’ medical histories prior to their imprisonment, it was not possible to know whether any of the prisoners’ ailments, disabilities and scars pre-dated their confinement. The U.S. military says an al-Qaida training manual instructs members, if captured, to assert they were tortured during interrogation.

The U.S. military, yes.  Can we trust it (them)?  In any case,

Most former detainees are out of reach of Western doctors because they are either in Iraq or have been returned to their home countries from Guantanamo.

Which left the examining docs with the Abu G.-Gitmo Eleven here discussed.  Docs are with Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass. 

[Their] report came [at the same time?] as the [Democrat-controlled] Senate Armed Services Committee revealed documents showing military lawyers warned the Pentagon that methods it was using post-9/11 violated military, U.S. and international law.

Is there a skeptic in the house?  Raise your hand.

Tags: ,

St. Sabina, pray for us

Fr. Pfleger is saying he won’t change, now that he’s back in his St. Sabina pulpit.  At any rate, he’s still going to bus kids and others downtown to protest what he apparently views as random acts of violence, as in this emailed announcement:

On Thursday, June 19, 2008, from 11 am – 12 noon, we will meet at the Thompson Center to continue our fight for Common Sense Gun Laws.

“To continue our fight”: Fight?  What fight?  These are junkets for people in various degrees of funk and frustration about the lousy neighborhoods they live in. 

Does Fr. P. think these rote demonstrations make a particle of difference to the quality of life on their blocks or in the bosom of their families?  Who in his right mind would think so?

On Monday, Ulysses Simmons a student of Beasley Academic Center was gunned down on 92nd Street.

By whom, for God’s sake?  By a neighbor or at least someone who roves his neighborhood with impunity.

We must continue to fight for our children’s lives, we must end the
easy accessibility of guns on the streets.

There you go, the quick fix provided by government.  Always look to the government to protect you from your neighbor and yourselves or for that matter from yourself.

If you need a ride downtown on that day call the Rectory, there will
be a bus leaving from the church at 10 am. The number to call is
773-483-4300.

No thanks.

Tags: ,

Call in the cops

Big O. practicing politics as usual — I’m shocked! — with this tit for McCain’s tat.  Republicans, he said,

“helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9-11.” He said Osama bin Laden is still at large in part because of their failed strategies.

Now that’s pre-9/11 talk — a narrow-gauge approach to international criminals.

On the other hand, he must be happy for us all that there’s been no repeat of 9/11.  It’s just that he thinks it’s because we’ve been stupid and lucky.

Tags: , ,

From the streets a message

A very good Chi Trib rundown on Rev. Michael Pfleger has a neighborhood co-worker offering him some very bad advice:

“Father Pfleger has always been a community activist first and a Catholic priest second,” said Tio Hardiman, a longtime Chicago activist who has worked with Pfleger on anti-violence campaigns. “The black community accepts Father Pfleger as one of their own. But now I think he’s going to have to make a decision about whether he’s going to be a black community activist or a Catholic priest.”

Why bad?  Because Fr. P. ain’t nothin’ without holy mother church as his sponsor, and with all his fulmination and histrionics he knows it.

Meanwhile, if there’s a fellow member of the cloth who can get through to him, he has not done so as far as the general public knows.  Except the cardinal, who seems somehow to have made his point.  Maybe, maybe not.

Or maybe there’s no getting to him by anyone.

Tags: ,

Let us now praise a famous man

You knew an orgy was on its way, when this man died.

Here’s one thing you can say about journalists: Surely no one loves us as much as we love ourselves.

That’s one lesson of the Tim Russert coverage.

A friend told me Sunday: “I now know more about Tim Russert than I do many members of my family.”

After Russert’s shocking death Friday at age 58, television kept serving up witnesses to his expertise, intelligence, diligence, kindness, faith, love of family, Buffalo and the Buffalo Bills. The self-indulgence was breathtaking.

On Monday’s “Today,” Matt Lauer interviewed Russert’s son, Luke. The show basically gave over the first half-hour to the Russert story. Presidential candidates aren’t questioned at such length on morning programs.

And the children of America’s fallen heroes don’t receive such a platform, either.

Etc.

On NBC yesterday, the gathered commentators seemed eager to cover themselves with Russert glory.  The more they praised him, the better they looked.

Tags: ,

Latin for everyone

No exceptions, apparently:

The traditional Latin Mass – effectively banned by Rome for 40 years – is to be reintroduced into every Roman Catholic parish in England and Wales, the senior Vatican cardinal in charge of Latin liturgy said at a press conference in London today.

And sems will have to teach future priests how to do it, said the senior Vatican cardinal in charge of Latin liturgy, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, in London.  Not just England and Wales either:

[A]sked . . . if the pope wanted to see “many ordinary parishes” making provision for the Tridentine Mass, Cardinal Castrillon, a Colombian, said: “All the parishes. Not many, all the parishes, because this is a gift of God.”

He also said:

his commission . . .  was in the process of writing to seminaries not only to equip seminarians to celebrate Mass in Latin but to understand the theology, the philosophy and the language of such Masses.

It would take as few as “three or four people who were not necessarily drawn from the same parish” to request it, at which point the priest would be required to do it.

===========

Later, from Reader M: 

Re the work of seminaries to teach the Latin Mass:
 
If it was true, as Father Rick Simon said at Catholic Citizens Forum last week, that in the years after Vatican II seminaries concentrated on teaching priests-to-be how to help Catholics in confession side-step the precepts of Humanae Vitae — they shouldn’t have problems teaching seminarians the Latin Mass. It’s less subjective — less work for the right side of the brain.
Tags: ,