Complaint received, taken seriously

Third Sunday Lent has Jews thirsty in the desert, complaining to Moses.  Fearing violence to himself, M. asks God what to do.  God says, hit this rock with your staff, and make sure the elders of Israel are watching.  Do it and from the rock will come water.  He did it, and out came the water.  They had quarrelled with Moses and tested God; so the place was called Massah (testing place) and Meribah (quarreling place), apparently as a memorial to the experience.

 The second reading, Romans 5:1-2, 5-8

Brothers and sisters:
Since we have been justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have gained access by faith
to this grace in which we stand,
and we boast in hope of the glory of God.

And hope does not disappoint,
because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
For Christ, while we were still helpless,
died at the appointed time for the ungodly.
Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person,
though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die.
But God proves his love for us
in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.

is not a commercial from Barack Obama, nor did he approve this message, about hope — though there are times when some of us think he thinks he did.

Tomfoolery aside, this hope business is very important.  Believers can be cast down by their belief, holding for God and afterlife but either giving up on Him and it or nervously putting them out of our minds.  This from Paul is to buck us up.  Jesus died for the ungodly, he says.  That’s us.

The third reading, from John 4, offers high drama in its account of Jesus talking with a low woman.  It has one of the top Gospel punch lines, when after Jesus tells her to call her husband and she says she has none, he replies,

“You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’
For you have had five husbands,
and the one you have now is not your husband.
What you have said is true.”

The air fairly crackles with tension.  What can she say?  Nothing in direct response, but instead a shot at religious history:

“Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.
Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain;
but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.”

How this much-wed woman getting water at the village well knew enough to say this — just the right thing to advance the discussion — is better left unwondered at. 

Jesus goes on to predict a new way to worship, on no special mountain but “in Spirit and truth.”  He tells her he’s the Messiah.  Convinced, she runs to tell others, just as his followers arrive, amazed that he has engaged her.  You can see the movement, the stage business.

The followers can’t even get him to eat something.   “I have food to eat of which you do not know,” he says, on a roll now with his coy semitic folk talk in which questions call forth riddles.  The harvest has arrived, etc. 

Meanwhile, the people of the town are convinced he’s the real thing.  He is “truly the savior of the world.”

Flash back to the desert, Moses trying to corral his reluctant fellow travelers on their way to the promised land.  We are supposed to get a connection here.  This is Jacob’s well, in Samaria.  The woman calls him “our father Jacob.”  It’s all one history, John’s Gospel tells us, as the other gospels and epistles also say.  It’s bigger than all of us.  Let’s get off our high horses and act that way.

Update: One preacher couldn’t abide the five-times-married part, a reader relates:

At MY parish, the Gospel was sanitized. The priest at the 7;30 read nothing about a woman married 5 times. She was just a woman. So the story had little point at all, except the back and forth about wells and living water.
 
Fortunately, I had prepared before Mass by listening to the Lutheran minister on WGN. He gets it. “Why is this woman going to the well at high noon? Everyone else would have been there in the early morning or the cool of the evening. This woman is trying to avoid people!

Then after he mentions Jesus chiding her about her 5 husbands he ends by saying, her witness was so profound when she ran to tell the villagers, that everyone believed her.

 

I think the feminists have gotten to my pastor (or to the liturgists). Maybe they don’t want negative things said about females. Maybe Adam and Eve bit into the apple at the same time, etc.

Tsk, tsk.

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Tip-top reviewing

Chi Trib books section, demoted some time back to a Saturday feature and on a diet with other book sections in recent years, repays rather close attention, I am finding in recent weeks.  Today, for instance, It talks up a mystery book about Chicago written not in recent years at all:

Sixty years ago, Chicago newspaper writer Fredric Brown, a Gary teenager who’d started his career as a proofreader on a Milwaukee paper, won an Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America. His book was “The Fabulous Clipjoint,” and it’s still considered one of the best crime novels about Chicago.

The reviewer, Dick Adler, reviews crime fiction for Publishers Weekly and other publications and blogs at The Knowledgeable Blogger, “for lovers of crime fiction — which he’d better update, since it calls him “a former” reviewer” for the Trib.

I have already ordered The Fabulous Clipjoint — set in the Tip Top Tap, atop the Allerton hotel on Boul Mich in 1948 at the latest — from ABE Books.  The book aims to “preserve forever, like bugs in amber, the seedy pleasures of our shared pasts,” Adler tells us — invitingly to a Chicagoan who was then in his late ‘teens.

 “We walked north two blocks on the east side of Michigan Boulevard to the Allerton Hotel. . . . The top floor was a very swanky cocktail bar. The windows were open and it was cool there. Up as high as that, the breeze was a cool breeze and not something out of a blast furnace. We took a table by a window on the south side, looking out toward the Loop. . . . ‘Beautiful as hell,’ I said. But it’s a clipjoint.”

That sort of stuff is not great, but it’s clean and clear.  So is Adler’s discussion of it:

Ed [one of two prime protagonists] knows he has to find out what happened [to his murdered father] but can’t do it himself. So he heads for Janesville, Wis., where the J.C. Hobart carnival is doing business and looks up his uncle, Ambrose Hunter, a barker and roustabout who is the smartest man Ed has ever met. They head back to Chicago, where they pick up Wally’s trail, bribe a friendly detective, act like tough guys (not easy for the boyish Ed or the short and tubby Am), meet a swell dame who loves Ed and lies to him, and actually solve the murder.

Adler sold me, and his brief account of Frederic Brown’s writing life — “a man who often told his wife he hated writing” — did the same for a man he compares to Hammett “and other crime icons.”  I look forward to the ABE copy, which I’m getting for under $5, shipped.  An excellent service, that.

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Man or Superman?

Here’s a site devoted to B.O. as Him Whom We Have Been Waiting For, spouting in millenarian fashion and being received in the same spirit.  Prominent is this quote:

“… a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany … and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama” – Barack Obama, Lebanon, New Hampshire.
January 7, 2008.

[Frantic update: If he said this in New Hampshire or anywhere else, this web site is the only one who reported it, or heard it, for that matter.  In short, it’s a gag.]

[Another update: Hillary does it too:

In Rhode Island, Hillary Clinton took on the Obamamania that has swept Democratic primary electorates by directly ridiculing the speeches of her opponent as unrealistic appeals by someone posing as a secular saint. “Now I could stand up here and say: Let’s get everybody together. Let’s get unified. The skies will open. The lights will come down. And you know the celestial choirs will be singing. And everyone we know will do the right thing. And the world will be perfect,” Mrs. Clinton said with bitter sarcasm.

[Peas in a pod, she and the Obama-as-Messiah fellow]

Reader Nancy Thorne:

What Obama really is is a throw back to a period of unenlightenment.  His change and reform are but camouflage for 1920 – 1930 hard core socialism and isolationism.   His campaign has become a dangerous movement.  Obama is wholly unqualified and is as radical as any person who has ever run for the presidency.  He’s a 1960’s anti-war war radical with the template of a college student.  His success would not bode well for the land of the free and the home of the brave. 
Two other readers so far (responding to my earlier e-mail blast), have wondered if he’s antichrist.  That’s not language I use, but to one of them, I replied:
As they say in far lesser circumstances, it’s scary.  The guy’s self-esteem is at the heart of it, I fear.
That is, he may really believe what he’s saying about himself.
 
Here’s quite a rundown and sampling of what others worry, including a lede item from Mother Jones magazine, in “Barack Obama’s Messiah Complex.”
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The girl who couldn’t talk straight

To paraphrase Maurice Chevalier, thank heaven (Barack does) for little girls (as in go-girl), little (not real little) Afro-American girls like Mary Mitchell, who can come to the aid of their Afr-Am heroines, getting them out of hot water.

I  understood exactly what Michelle Obama meant when she expressed a renewed pride in America. Look at what’s happening.

Michelle committed a hugely self-revealing boo-boo born of some sort of frustration, digging deep in her psyche for her undifferentiated angst about being you know what in America, but to the rescue came Mary, not only columnizing but commandeering the entire multi-color front page of the splashiest newspaper west of the New York Post.

Michelle: I’ve always been proud of U.S.

PRIDE IN AMERICA | No reason to apologize — she had it right the first time

Go girls!

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Snowbound but unbowed

In today’s Wednesday Journal of OP & RF:

Do Whittier students know he crusaded against slavery? John Greenleaf Whittier, that is, namesake of the Oak Park school across from the Dole Branch? He was a friend of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who published him for the first time, in 1826, when Whittier was 19.

Do they know he wrote “Snowbound,” his 1860s poem featuring his parents, his brother and two sisters, bachelor uncle and unmarried aunt, and the local school teacher, who boarded with them?

I hope so. I hope they memorize it or some of its 759 lines, for reciting in February, especially this one, when it is specially appropriate.

And more more more about poetry as

what we want for our boys and girls, what fires the imagination, insulates them against the brittle plasticity of popular culture.  . . .  a firewall of the poetic.  None should leave school without one.

============

UPDATE:  Reader Who Remembers has this to say in an email:

You bring back memories of 1st year at Mercy High School and Sister Hyacinth (6 feet tall with a face like Lewis Stone [Judge Hardy, Andy’s pere]). On the occasion of the first snowfall of the year, she brought out this poem by James Russell Lowell, and we were told to memorize it and recite it — we went over it that day — I memorized it and can recite most of it by memory still today — phrases like “Came Chanticleer‘s muffled crow” we learned a different name for rooster! And I probably had never known what “Carrara” was, before this poem. The beauty of language: snow as “ermine.” And every first snowfall, the poem comes to mind, and I see that classroom on Prairie Avenue, with all the girls in their navy blue uniforms, moaning silently because of the assignment.

The complete Lowell poem:

“The First Snowfall” by James Russell Lowell

The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch deep with pearl.

From sheds new-roofed with Carrara
Came Chanticleer‘s muffled crow,
The stiff rails were softened to swan’s-down,
And still fluttered down the snow.

I stood and watched by the window
The noiseless work of the sky,
And the sudden flurries of snow-birds,
Like brown leaves whirling by.

I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn
Where a little headstone stood;
How the flakes were folding it gently,
As did robins the babes in the wood.

Up spoke our own little Mabel,
Saying, “Father, who makes it snow?”
And I told of the good All-father
Who cares for us here below.

Again I looked at the snow-fall,
And thought of the leaden sky
That arched o’er our first great sorrow,
When that mound was heaped so high.

I remembered the gradual patience
That fell from that cloud-like snow,
Flake by flake, healing and hiding
The scar of our deep-plunged woe.

And again to the child I whispered,
“The snow that husheth all,
Darling, the merciful Father
Alone can make it fall!”

Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her;
And she, kissing back, could not know
That my kiss was given to her sister,
Folded close under deepening snow.

UPDATE 2:  The Whittier and Lowell snow poems are paired in a McDougal Littell textbook, in a section on “the Fireside Poets.”  From an ML editor:

The latter poem describes the first snowfall on the grave of a child taken by illness. The pairing offers nice opportunity for comparison and contrast of snow imagery, as you might imagine. Nice poems, both.

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Writers alert: big noises in Winnetka and elsewhere

Oh to be in Winnetka, now that Cynthia’s there signing her book:

Come out to say hello and support Cynthia Clampitt when she talks about her book, Waltzing Australia, and does a signing, 7 p.m., Tuesday, March 4 at Chestnut Court’s Book Stall, 811 Elm St., Winnetka, 847-446-8880.

says Midwest free-lancers’ last, best hope, Midwest Writers Association.  Ditto Wilmette, where another MWA member, Helen Gallagher,

 

author of Release Your Writing: Book Publishing Your Way, will present “Your book is being published: Now what?” about marketing a book through retail outlets, book clubs, and online resources. She will also discuss other marketing strategies.

That’s at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 3 at the Wilmette Library, 1242 Wilmette Avenue. Cost: $5. Call the library for directions at 847/256-5025. E-mail your RSVP to Jodie Jacobs.

And there’s “The New Media,” at the next Illinois Women’s Press Association breakfast, 10 a.m. Saturday April 19, downtown Chicago, 2nd floor of the Chicago Methodist Temple, 77 W. Washington St., across from Daley Plaza, where Northwestern U.’s

Medill Graduate School Director Janice Castro, a former long-time Time-Warner reporter and web-site developer, will talk on the changing world of today’s media so we can better understand how to continue working as writers, editors, communications experts. IWPA Members, full time students and guests $15; Nonmembers $25; cash or check at the door; RSVP to 312/458-9151 or e-mail iwpa@comcast.net

Info cheerily provided by MWA website manager Jim Bowman at www.midwestwriters.com — check it out.

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Obama appeal

INSPIRED BY CHANGE MAYBE? — An Oak Park letter writer has warmed globally to Sen. Obama as reminiscent of JFK almost 50 years ago with his stirring “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” But O’s message is just the opposite, consisting entirely about what your country should do for you, though admittedly details are vague even about this.

In any case he calls for no burst of generosity, as of Peace Corps commitment or embrace of national defense vs. our cold-war enemy the Soviet Union. Instead he would have us rally ‘round the flag of statism and dependence on government. He captures support by his looks and demeanor, not by any call to arms or service, except vaguely in a Rodney King-like plea to get along.

With all respect, isn’t this the Democrat way? When Democrat candidates gathered together at the Oak Park Library during primary season two years ago, they talked government aid, in sharp contrast with Republicans a few weeks earlier, who talked job creation through entrepreneurship.

For the Dems the cause of the moment was job training by a government agency — old-time Democrat religion of government aid. For the Republicans it was about tax relief and other diminutions of government activity — a far cry from asking what government can do for us.

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Do we dare think it?

If you have dared in your heart of hearts to wonder what if a student had plugged the maniac on stage at NIU with his legally concealed Luger, Ruger, or what-not, know that you are not alone:

Even before a gunman killed five people and injured several others in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, a small but growing movement had been under way at universities and state legislatures to allow students, faculty and staff to carry guns on campus.

Twelve states are considering bills that would allow people with concealed-weapons permits to carry guns at public universities. The efforts were sparked by the Virginia Tech massacre last April.

Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, an Internet-based organization with 11,000 members in its Facebook group, is calling attention to the issue with a protest from April 21 to 25, a week after the one-year anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech on April 16.

Are we really satisfied with our policy of restricting weapons?  Or is NIU another instance of its abject failure?

Update:  Reader D. notes this in the above linked story:  

Samaha [whose younger sister, Reema, was killed at Virginia Tech] says guns on campus are a risk in an environment where young people drink and fight and are not always able to control their emotions.
and adds this: 
I think the way to get around this possibility is to temporarily “deputize” certain students who pass a rigid test. And maybe there should be some prohibition about drinking for those allowed to conceal carry.
 
In both these college cases, it seems the shooter came in blazing — but the reloading part would have been a good moment to get him.
 
Also not knowing how many or who the “deputies” are on a campus, just public knowledge that they are there, might cause a gunman to choose a different campus.
 
AND, the “deputy” would have to be presumed acting in the line of duty if he unloads on the shooter, so the family doesn’t sue him/her for unlawful use of a weapon, etc. after the fact. 
 
The rest of the students have to respect the fact the deputy is there to protect [them], and not try to “out” him or steal his weapon for a joke, or provoke him, or pretend to be a terrorist, etc. as we know class clowns are wont to do, especially after a 12-pack.
 
It would give some peace of mind to students on certain campuses and might even draw attendance to such colleges. All in all, it is devastating to parents who thought all they had to worry about was pregnancy or drunk driving.
Yes, depends on how great the threat they perceive and how willing to take or tolerate admittedly harsh measures.  In any case, the question remains: how well do present gun-restrictive measures work?  And may we talk about that?
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Barree, Barree . . .

Is this David Axelrod’s idea, for women to swoon and Barack to toss them bottles?

There seems to be a trend at Obama rallies … women fainting. And interestingly enough the Senator responds the same way every time, almost as if … naah, couldn’t be.

Connecticut DJ Jim Vicevich did some research.  In Hartford, New Hampshire, Seattle, LA, and Madison, the emotion of the moment overwhelmed them.

when a woman appeared to faint in the standing-only VIP section in front of the podium, Obama paused his speech for over a minute as he directed the crowd to make way for an EMT team and tossed a bottle of water from the stage.

In New Hampshire he reached beneath the podium top, found a bottle, and handed it to someone before they wheeled the woman out on a gurney.

Climate change, the Iraq war and Obama tossing a bottle of water to a woman about to faint all received big cheers [in Seattle]. As Obama told the crowd to part so that the woman in question could leave and called for help, a young girl in the crowd shouted out, “What a man!”
 
The audience roared with laughter (although the press that has seen this happen before rolled its eyes).

In LA:

A woman standing in front of the stage appeared to faint as Obama spoke about Iraq. The candidate paused and asked the crowd to make way for firefighters.One supporter shouted, “You’re a good man,” leaving Obama momentarily at a loss for words.”Well, I’m not the only one stopping to help her,” he said, sounding almost embarrassed.

Before he even got to the Madison crowd,

students were tossing around an inflatable cow above the crowd. Three people fainted in the midst of all the enthusiasm.

“This could be a really swell game,” commented the DJ.  “Count the number of people on the campaign overcome by the “vapas”.

James Taranto was more serious about it:

What exactly are we to make of this? A cynic might wonder if the whole thing isn’t staged, given how often it happens and how well-honed and self-serving Obama’s standard response seems to be.

But if it’s spontaneous, that’s in a way even more unsettling. . . . . 

Obama has a talent for eliciting intense emotion–an ability that can be dangerous in a politician. What more does he have to offer? That’s a hard question to answer . . .

And he could be The Man.

 

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Letter from Dick

In further Adventures of the Ed Page at Chi Trib, we see or may surmise that State’s Attorney Dick Devine went for top billing for an op-ed with this, beginning thus:

In recent weeks the Tribune has mentioned prosecutorial “misconduct” in its editorial pages. This is a term that grabs the public’s attention, so it is important that the efforts of our office on this issue be stated.

Nothing doing, as the world turned.  Instead, unlike Mayor Daley yesterday and Congr. Jesse Jackson Jr. the day before, he is awarded no such encomium.  His Voice of the People contribution, on the other hand, is a mere letter, albeit the lede.

No surprise there.  He’s county, neither city nor congressional district, and lame duck besides.

Substantively speaking, he offers this as part of his defense of his office, recently criticized in a primary campaign and already criticized in the general:

Our office handles 70,000 felonies and more than 200,000 misdemeanor cases each year.  . . . .   In 2007, the last year for which full numbers are available, the appellate courts in Illinois heard a number of appeals from guilty verdicts in Cook County. Our examination of the public record shows that of those appeals, only four even mention prosecutorial error and only one was sent back to the trial courts for reconsideration based on that error.

And if Tony Petraica has something to say about that, he can write a letter too.

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