A bad experience for Obama fans who waited for hours with their purple tickets, getting nowhere, until noon and the end of it.
And then, shear, crushing disappointment descends over the crowd. Unlike the smiles on all the faces you walked by on, say, election night, or in the metro last night, this crowd had to summon up all they had left after multiple hours in the cold to give a tepid ovation to the inauguration of a new president.
Symbolic of the presidency to come.
Let’s be calm about this, but not too calm. It’s 26 minutes past the two-hour window we were assigned two days ago in which the AT&T repair man was to arrive — between noon and two, the U-verse lady Ashley said. No, Eric tells me, full of apologies, it’s a four-hour window. He called our man (or woman), who will be calling me shortly on our trusty Verizon cell phone.
More to come . . .
OK. Ben just left, 3:37, and we have phones. I did not hug him but considered it. What he did was fix what James did wrong two days ago. James of U-Serve, that is; Ben is of regular AT&T (I think).
In any case, he pulled one plug from the huge all-purpose modem, from the slot called “Aux.” This Aux (auxiliary) connection was screwing everything up. This on top of leaving my office phone unconnected made a double boo-boo by the personable James, who should go back to U-Verse boot camp, I fear.
So now we are digital and will be informing Comcast not to send our $60 or so/month bill, and even our cheap LD service in Utah, and will be paying $90/mo. for a year, or would if we had only one line (we have two, and it’s up accordingly), for the Big Three: phone, ‘net, TV. Let’s see how it all works out.
RUSHING THINGS . . . . Reading Chi Trib, I found quite an item in the obits. Advice: always read the obits, an ongoing chronicle of comings and goings, emphasis on the latter, in which the noosepaper almost always gets it right, even dousing some of its endemic, genetic, inbred zest for gossip and other bad news.
This item, however, in the obit for an apparently admirable woman who died at 91 after a long life as wife, mother (of 5), widow, and school teacher, has the news that Oak Park has a “Rush West Suburban Hospital.” This encompasses a major change that no local paper has uncovered, since West Sub has been owned by the Resurrectionist Sisters for several years and Oak Park Hospital has been a Rush Medical Center affiliate for as many.
TELEPHONY . . . . Meanwhile, back at the old homestead, we are without landline telephone, having had AT&T in our house yesterday to digitalize us stem to stern. Painless as it occurred, painful in the aftermath, as James, who was a pleasure to have around for five or six hours, had not connected my desk phone to anything and (not his fault) had left us w/o a dial tone while central office finished the digitalization.
My subsequent mistake was to make two calls to the U-Verse help people when one would have been enough. The first gave me Ashley, who correctly decided our internal connection problems called for a repair person to make a house call, which he or she will do tomorrow afternoon, the earliest time available. The second, made for no good reason to tell them we had a dial tone (which turned out illusory) gave me Gregory, who incorrectly analyzed the problem and wanted to cancel my repair person, which I did not do, arguing that I still had the office-phone connection problem. More later . . . .
STIMULATING . . . . Again to Chi Trib, where Jonah Goldberg’s column leapt at me off the page with his quite readable notations about government knowing best (not) and “everybody” knowing what works (not). Everybody knew Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, for instance, everybody in Dan Rather’s CBS shop knew those Texas National Guard memos were legit — everybody knew until everybody didn’t.
So it is with the grand moguls of government-directed finance — or Citigroup– and Robert Rubin-directed, for that matter — how things will or would work. Stimuli don’t work, at least didn’t since World War II, Goldberg says, citing economist Bruce Bartlett. Why he doesn’t note its most famous failure, under FDR, I don’t know.
Some very good news from Fifth-Illinois, where the slaters could not agree on a new Rahm Emanuel.
That mea[n]s the March 3 primary will be an open one with no party endorsed candidate. State Rep. John Fritchey (D-Chicago) came closest, but could not quite reach the 50 percent (plus one) benchmark.
What, no Fritchey? Will his zoning business suffer, he “who handles City Hall zoning cases for private clients [and] has been a state legislator since 1996”?
The insiders, convened by State Sen. James DeLeo (D-Chicago) — “D-Howya doin’?” says John Kass — did not go along, they being city-suburban, including citizens from
much of the North Side of City of Chicago from Lake Michigan into the western suburbs [including] Schiller Park, Franklin Park, River Grove, Elmwood Park, Northlake, and Melrose Park.[3] Wrigley Field is located in this district, along with the Chicago neighborhoods of Lakeview, Uptown, and Lincoln Park.
It’s always nice to see disagreement among people whose nearest thing to a standard-bearer is a guy who does govt.-related business on the side while representing us in elective office.
“We dilute the strength of the party,” urged Ald. Patrick O’Connor, of the 40th ward, when “we” fail to slate someone.
Is that so bad in these scandalous times?
Trouble ahead, predicts Dick Morris:
Obama has given power to men and women who really don’t believe terrorism is much of a problem. They implicitly share the European view that an attack here or there is not worth turning what they regard as constitutional guarantees on their heads. The result is that we will be vastly more vulnerable and have a good chance of being hit again soon.
If nothing else, this indirectly highlights Bushies’ success in protecting us, which isn’t much discussed in these days of joy and happiness at the coming of The One.
NY Times says one answer to black-boys homicide rates, ten times whites’, is “getting them jobs.” Fine, says Heather Mac Donald. Jobs for all is an excellent goal.
But the biggest barrier to the employment of crime-prone inner-city youth isn’t lack of real or even make-work jobs; rather, it’s their own willingness to show up every day on time and accept authority.
Not that “many inner-city teens aren’t courteous and enthusiastic workers.” But:
Few teenagers from any background possess the self-discipline and reliability that employers seek; teens growing up in chaotic home environments are even less likely to have developed a work ethic.
Hard times add to crime rates, as NYT editorializes? Hardly, says Mac D:
The claim that crime results from a bad economy has limited empirical backing in general, but it is particularly ludicrous applied to juvenile violence. It is not the collapse of consumer lending that induces a 16-year-old to shoot a rival who “disses” his girlfriend; it is a failure of self-control and a distorted understanding of self-worth.
Missing from the NYT editorial is the M-word:
The marriage imperative civilizes boys. By contrast, in a world where it is unusual for a man to marry the mother of his children, boys fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility: you are responsible for your children. Freed of the social expectation that they will have to provide a stable home for their offspring, boys have little incentive to restrain their impulses and develop bourgeois habits.
Not that anyone knows how to change the culture that has little room for marriage, but wouldn’t big ideas about how to solve the black youth murder rate have something to say about the problem, even in the NY Times?
This review by a Jesuit teacher at St. Mary of the Lake seminary in Mundelein (IL) identifies another Jesuit, author of a history of the 2nd Vatican Council, as a proponent of a watershed view of the council:
“John O’Malley, a Jesuit professor at Georgetown University, is a prominent exponent of the view that Vatican II represents discontinuity,” says Rev. Edward T. Oakes, SJ, reviewing O’Malley’s What Happened at Vatican II.
At issue is whether a brand-new or mostly new agenda was presented in the 1962–65 meetings of bishops from around the world. Oakes concedes:
At least superficially, Father O’Malley has a point: The Mass is now celebrated in the language of the people instead of in Latin; liturgical translations avoid Renaissance cadences in favor of staccato syntax; thundering condemnations of the modern world (and of Protestants) have been replaced with openness and dialogue — and vocations to the priesthood and convent life have plummeted. [Italics added]
Ouch for that last item, which Oakes hastens to deposit in the “unintended category” dustbin that goes with any major historical event. This does not keep him from faulting the council, “at least to some extent . . . for the sin of imprudence if not of untruth.”
O’Malley does not see it that way, instead holding for the position that from the council came “unalloyed good, precisely because it marked a break with the past.” This would be the position that matters were so bad, a revolution was called for.
He employs “the standard ploy of Whig and liberal historiography” when he contrasts “two different visions of Catholicism,” the old in new, clearly giving the nod to the new, what the council approved. O’Malley here:
from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience,
etc. “The narrative might be Whig, but the history is fair — and rivetingly told,” says Oakes, giving credit where it’s due. O’Malley gives in to the yen to editorialize, but his account undercuts his thesis:
He openly admits that, without the advances made in church teaching during Pius XII’s pontificate (1939-58), Vatican II would have been inconceivable. Not only did Pius call on Catholic biblical scholars in 1943 to study the Bible as a set of variable documents conditioned by their respective cultural settings (thereby undercutting a budding Catholic quasi-fundamentalism), he also urged Catholics to promote democracy.
Again, etc.
It’s always good to see Jesuits going at each other, if only for the normally, as here, high level of discussion. But it’s especially good to see an opposing view to what has become conventional Catholic wisdom on a major church issue.
Blithe Spirit 