Month: July 2008

Read this book . . .

Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007), a novella, is such a good book. The reader is the current Queen Elizabeth, who picks up reading in the years immediately preceding her 80th birthday and finds it liberating and elevating. It’s a book about reading and the life of the mind and coming to terms with oneself.

In the end she turns to writing, which leads to a stunning denouement better left unrevealed here. Writing her memoirs, that is, but not showing and telling with them: no gossip but “analysis and reflection,” as she tells her assembled privy councilors from her 50-plus years as queen, gathered for her birthday in a festive tea.

Proust weighs heavily in this decision. So does Ivy Compton-Burnett, whom she had “damed” some time back without reading a thing she had written. Wonderful, wonderful book.

Buy it here, through Google, or here, at ABE Books.

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It’s still news when one gets caught

It looks bad for this Chicago cop, caught taking money from a tow truck driver to whom he gave business:

The tow truck driver was a cooperating witness in the federal investigation and secretly taped phone conversations with [Officer Michael ] Ciancio. During one such phone conversation, Ciancio agrees to meet the driver on his way home in the Walgreen’s parking lot at Oak Park and Belmont avenues. “Beautiful,” Ciancio reportedly says when allegedly handed $600 cash. At that point the informant said, “Let’s get out of here. There’s too many eyeballs.”

In another phone call between the two in October, 2007, Ciancio, reportedly concerned he hadn’t received a weekly payment, said, “I didn’t hear from you, I say what the f*** happened, you know. I thought it was like, Christmas and I looked under the tree, there was no gift, know what I mean?”

But when the Trinity High School principal, Sister Michelle Germanson, heard about his indictment, she wanted “to go into our chapel and cry,” she considered him such “an absolutely great guy.”

He’s a Trinity basketball coach and also coaches girls’ basketball in River Forest and has so for years.  He is also the second Chicago cop caught in a 16-month investigation by the FBI, Chicago Police and the Internal Revenue Service,

charged with soliciting bribes of between $600 and $800 per week over a two year period from a tow truck driver in return for allowing that driver to work towing away cars involved in traffic accidents [he] handled.

He has to be proven guilty, but the pattern is Chicago, even to the point of the supposed offender being otherwise upstanding.  Public morality is one thing, personal another.  Many Chicagoans know or are related to someone in the same alleged boat.

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Inconvenient reporter

We know Big O. has thrown various people under the bus, but this time he threw one off:

The campaign received 200 requests for press seats on the plane.

Among those for whom there was no room [on the way to Mideast] was Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent of The New Yorker. The campaign, which was furious about the magazine’s satirical cover this week, cited space constraints in turning him away.

That’s how messiahs do it?

Later: See here for extended not-so-sure from the Huff Post man who gave us the above.  Or did he?  These gabby libs are something else.

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There’s something about a newspaper . . .

Went looking through The Quote Garden a while back and found these apt observations, which I hereby “share with you,” as people say these days:

* The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but the newspapers.

— Thomas Jefferson

* Journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.

— G.K. Chesterton

* We can’t quite decide if the world is growing worse, or if the reporters are just working harder.

— The Houghton Line, November 1965

* News is history shot on the wing.

Gene Fowler, Skyline

 * It was while making newspaper deliveries, trying to miss the bushes and hit the porch, that I first learned the importance of accuracy in journalism.

— Charles Osgood

* Newspapers: dead trees with information smeared on them.

— Horizon, “Electronic Frontier”

* I always turn to the sports section first. The sports section records people’s accomplishments; the front page nothing but man’s failures.

— Earl Warren [who hadn’t been reading about the Cubs at least since 1945], quoted in Sports Illustrated, 22 July 1968

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Anglicanism at risk

It’s  the “Summer of Schism” in Anglicanism worldwide, says Christianity Today.  “It’s all over but the lawsuits,” a west suburban Chicago-area priest told the magazine, which commented, “She may just be right.”

“The 400-year-old Anglican project appears over” to “evangelical” bishops attending the decennial Lambeth Conference, its correspondent, George Conger, wrote.

At issue is primarily the ordination in 2003 of the gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who was asked not to attend the decennial Lambeth Conference, a 20–day affair that began July 16.

So were disinvited a Zimbabwean bishop, for his ties to Robert Mugabe, and American bishops who have been ordained for breakaway conservative U.S. jurisdictions overseen by Africans, such as the Anglican Mission in the Americas, led by Rwanda, and the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), led by Nigerians,

American and Canadian bishops who ordained Robinson have not been banned, however; and bishops from four African countries will not be attending in protest.  Neither will the bishops of Sydney, the largest diocese in Australia, and other evangelical bishops — all in protest of these exclusions and inclusions, for a total of 200 to 250 recusants, of 880 bishops in all.

“Humanely speaking [sic], there is little hope for even a peaceful separation” between the liberal and evangelical Anglican wings, Bishop Gregory Venables from Argentina told the magazine.

The conference will not attempt to settle disputes, however.  Rather, it will try to encourage “the building of relationships” with a view to coming to terms with each other eventually, Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury told the conference.

But Bishop Venables’s telephone has not been ringing, he said.  “[N]o one has called me to say, ‘Let’s talk this over.'”

What has worked in the past for Archbishop Williams, asking conservative bishops to hold back in honor of the union, has been turned on its head this time, when Williams will be asking pro-gay Americans to hold back, says Conger.  But they are not willing to do so.

Nor were Williams’s own English bishops, who this month In their General Synod rejected his pleas to provide “legal safeguards for opponents of women bishops,” said Conger.

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A book for our age

This fellow has it right: “Right wingers love Friedrich Hayek.”  I do.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher cited his ideas as central to the social revolutions they hoped to spark.

Did not know that but am glad to hear it and am not surprised.

Antigovernment ideologues admire him as one of those few who kept Adam Smith’s fires burning during the dark reign of John Maynard Keynes in the West; his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, has sold more than 350,000 copies in the United States alone.

I bought it.  If that be ideologuism, make the most of it.

And the modern right has enlisted Hayek as a political weapon: Why can’t those loony lefties acknowledge the simple and obvious truths that he understood?

Wait.  This too is news to me.  Hayek is not quoted much in what I read.  As for why loony lefties don’t buy H., it’s because they are stupid, that’s why.

This fellow — Jesse Larner, author of Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered (Nation Books, 2002) and Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left (Wiley and Sons, 2006), writing in Dissent for Winter 2008 — has been reading up on Hayek, he said, “much as, in my twenties, I decided I really ought to read the Bible [because it’s] influential, whether I it or not.”

He has found him “a surprise, in several ways, nowhere near as extreme as his ideological descendants.”

But he makes “a powerful and far-ranging critique of state control of economic life.”  What makes for serfdom, in Hayek’s argument.

Keynes called it “a grand book.”  Orwell found in it “a great deal of truth . . . collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.”

But in Road, says Larner, Hayek “thoroughly, eloquently, and convincingly demolishes an idea that virtually no one holds nowadays.”

In 1944, however, when it was published?  The conventionally wise were horrified at it then and condemned it right and left.  In the U.S., nonetheless, it sold immensely well, because it shot down conventional (Keynesian) wisdom.

And today there are governmental meddlers who want so much to run things, thinking they know best, which they do not.

It’s a relatively simple, small, moving book, a sort of catechism or introduction to free-market thinking, based on the revolutionary notion that human nature “is what it is,” to use a catch phrase of our day, meaning you can’t get away from it.

Try reading it here.  Or buying it here or here.

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Cocky Locky unmasked

In an excellent summary of Obama as insufferably sold on himself, more than most, Krauthammer starts with the hubris manifested in his Germany ploy, asking

what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush 41—who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap—called “a Europe whole and free”?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It’s as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

He further asks:

has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

He continues:

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted “present” nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

And there’s more more more here.

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Hey buddy, can you spare a law?

Daily Herald discusses loan-capping from hard-luck-story perspective:

“It’s mainly desperate people and desperate people don’t always do the smart thing,” Alop says. “There are some folks who it works for, but in my experience … 90 percent regret ever doing it.”

How about hard-hitting reportage about the dangers of borrowing over one’s head?  How about asking schools what they do to warn students from their most tender ages?  Or do we say there oughta be a law in true statist knee jerk?

Arlington Heights business owner Bob Griffith [drinker of statist Kool-Aid] balked as soon as he read the letter from a payday loan company demanding that he garnish the wages of one of his employees.

“Is this even legal?” Griffith wondered. “If it is legal, then shame on our legislators.”

is the lede for this story, which quotes a retail lender in its middle:

Sitting in his Cash Now Loans office in a Palatine strip mall, Henry Magiera counters that charge with testimonials from recovering alcoholics, gamblers, cancer patients and others who say they used his service in the last eight years to keep from falling into further financial problems while they got their lives in order.

“My customers are very happy I’m here,” Magiera says. “We’re the last ones on the block who are going to give them money.” [Italics added]

When a bank charges $35 for bouncing a $7 check, “I’m the lesser of two evils,” Magiera says.

As if on a cue, a former customer comes in, thanking him for lending her some cash when she was down.

“This place has always been great to me,” she says.

but devotes the rest of the story to this lending as bad idea, even puffing Dick (Turban) Durbin’s proposed federal legislation “that would cap interest rates nationwide at 36 percent” — as a suggestion by the deputy director of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago.

This after noting the failure of state legislation — “The law only affects loans of 60 days or under, so [lenders] all went to 61-day products,”

Reminds me of anti-gun legislation that fails to eliminate guns in hands of bad guys.  So what?  Let’s have more of it, say libs.

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