Tag: Blithe Spirit

Wheeling Jesuit in court

Wheeling Jesuit responds in Catherine Smith termination case [here and here]:

Wheeling Jesuit’s response, filed in Ohio County Circuit Court in February, argued the school is a private entity and receives less than 35 percent of its funding from the state and thus is not subject to whistleblower laws.

The school also denied misusing the federal grant money, saying that “… the federal grants were administered in accordance with and in compliance with contractual agreements.”

In addition, Wheeling Jesuit also denied allegations that the school consolidated departments as a pretext for terminating Smith’s employment. It denied allegations that Smith had been slandered by her superiors, that she had been unfairly terminated or that the school had acted with the intent of inflicting emotional distress.

Whistleblower law does not apply, no misuse of NASA funds, no wrongful termination.

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Rahm v. Barack's altar servers

Jonah Goldberg in Chi Trib discusses the clash of idealism and realism in the Obama White House, where the true believers clash with Rahm Emanuel. Obama

wants to be “transformative” like Ronald Reagan. But such a transformation requires an electorate willing and capable of being transformed. Obama and his acolytes misread the public, thinking voters were as worshipful as they were.

Some of us never were, but lots were. Trouble is for the true B’s,

Emanuel’s understanding of the political landscape puts him in the reality-based community. And that is a community the Obama cult refuses to join.

It’s just as well.  Either way, it’s bad for the U.S., whether more or less socialism.  The former is not passing, as we know.  The latter might, and that would be very bad.

Changing the Eric Zorn subject

‘Swipe fees’ a hidden tax on the poor, most of all,

says Eric Zorn in Chi Trib, according to his columnar headline, which engages me not, mainly because I find myself distracted by a theme that pops uncontrolled into my head, namely that so many things are hidden taxes on poor and rich and us in between that I cannot count them.

Start with inflationary spending and money-making, that is, printing of it, by federal govt.  It’s such an old issue that I hesitate to raise it in such august company as Eric Z., but inflation cheapens the money we have and we lose buying power, which I can safely aver is what the economy is all about.

I surely missed Z’s earlier column about inflation and when I get a minute or two I will find it . . . .

Inspired by experience

Sun-Times corrected this boo-boo, which can be found here, at a Google search page and was not wrong in hard copy: “It was Devine design.”

Yes, there was a state’s attorney named Devine, but no, it was not his design for Otis McDonald to become lead complainant in the case v. Chi’s gun ordinance in the U.S. Supreme Court.  McD had divinity in mind, not the immediate past state’s attorney.

He and the ordinance and why he’s fighting it with help of “gun lobby” people is told in a quite good piece today by Mark Konkol, one of S-T’s hard-at-work conveyors of hard reporting.

McD has had enough and isn’t taking it any more, that’s why.  He’s a 21st-century urban hero who looks back on his sharecropper mother in Louisiana who cashed in her piggy bank, all $18, to buy him a ride to Chi in 1951, when  he was 17, so he could find, that is make, for himself a better life.

He became a janitor at U. of Chi, making “waves on campus” by applying for a promotion to building engineer when no blacks were applying because it just wasn’t done.  Now in his S. Side, Morgan Park neighborhood home, where he lives with his wife and daughter and has grandchildren as visitors, he is standing up to be counted as one who would be armed.

As a kid in Louisiana — seven years old — he went into the woods and bagged all manner of wild creatures who could be eaten and skinned.

Out there by myself. I’d get me some rabbits, squirrels, ‘coons, opossums,

he told Konkol.

When a kid tried to break into his garage, he levelled his long gun at him and counselled him henceforward to stay away, which the kid did.

But when three guys blocked his car on his way to the Jewel, “cussing … saying, ‘I’ll put you down, you old gray-haired mothers-and-such; I’ll put you down,” because he’d done the good-citizen thing as Mayor Daley recommends, calling cops on gun-toters earlier, he had no way to defend himself.  He wants that to change, so it’s McDonald vs. the city (and my own Oak Park, piggy-backing on Chi) at the high court.

The mayor?  He wishes he could get him to “feel and see what” he sees.

”Maybe he could come here and spend the night, especially during the summer, and listen to what I listen to out my window. If he could, and he was open to that, he would see what’s really going on in his city … and maybe he would understand where I’m coming from.”

Something like that would win some votes too.  Daley should take note.

Let no person call it father

The longtime resident priest at our parish has his own way of saying the mass, subbing out references to God the Father, for instance, as in this “doxology” or invocation of the Trinity:

P: Through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.

To which the people say “Amen.” This is the “Great Amen” meant to affirm our trinitarianism.

The resident, however, says it this way, and the pastor today said it this way too, apparently brought around by the example of the older man:

P: Through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in, all glory and honor is yours, almighty God, for ever and ever.

This version sidesteps the fatherhood of God in favor of the politically correct non-reference to gender.  Irksome and annoying, to say the least.

Read it and weep

Toy Monster: The big, bad world of Mattel, by Jerry Oppenheimer, is scored by reviewer Eric J. Iannelli, in the 9/4/09 Times [of London] Literary Supplement for its triteness.  (On-line only for subscribers)

“As befits such a seedy, tabloid-style expose, the writing is cliched and hyperbolic,” writes Iannelli, giving some juicy particulars:

Investigators are “hard-nosed”.  It is the “tired,poor, huddled masses” who immigrate through Ellis Island.  Japan is “the Land of the Rising Sun,” Germany is “the Fatherland” and Hollywood is “La-La Land.”

Etc.  A main character in this non-fic account “always got what she wanted” and “never took no for an answer.”  Her rise is twice described as “meteoric,” she “goes ballistic.”  And especially good are the verbs used instead of “say” or “said”:  “Very few . . . say anything. . .  they observe, maintain, intone or opine.”

Ianelli still found the book “engaging,” even if “sensationalist” and “one-sided,” because it raises “legitimate concerns” such as “lavish executive bonuses . . . in the face of scandal and falling profits.”

And nobody kept inserting “you know” in the middle of sentences or between them.  If you heard them talking live, ah, that would be a different matter, I’m sure.

Mass transit misunderstanding

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

Bruso is a 67 year-old  Vietnam veteran, who apparently has some history of mental illness. While riding the bus in Oakland, he was talking to someone about getting his shoes shined for his mother’s funeral and a black man named Michael—whose last name is unknown—managed to get offended because the words “shoe shine”, “boy”, and “brother” were used in the same sentence. He confronted Bruso, who initially misinterpreted the man as offering to shine his shoes. Michael yelled “Why a brotha gotta spit-shine yo’ shoes?” and “Why a white man can’t shine his shoes?”

The rest is on tape.  This blog reports, you decide.

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Trip down academic lane: Boccacio vs. Chaucer vs. church

At Dominican U in RF last night, Robert Hanning from Columbia U. on confession in the middle ages.  Title led me to expect a socio-cultural explication but he was about close reading of Bocaccio and Chaucer. 

I found the former heavy-handed in his slashing attack on church practice, producing cartoon characters — opera boffo? — none of them credible or noteworthy.  The latter — dear Geoffrey — produced memorable people and made same points with relative understatement.  Subtlety, thy name is not an Italian one.

Considered a q. during post-lecture q&a, where was holy mother church during all this?  Besides indexing Bocaccio.  But H. was not attuned to that, or seemed not to be, or had simply ruled that out a la monograph-style, not to mention journal-ready text with references and attributions right and left.

Appropriate, in that he was keynoting a joint meeting of the Illinois Medieval Assn. and the Midwest body of medievalists, this in DU’s near spanking-new Parmer Hall on west side of burgeoned if not still burgeoning campus. 

From which I exited on Thatcher, by the way, using the easement much disputed by tree-huggers and forest preservers.  The trees did not cry out at me as I hung a left and headed south.

A nice evening, for $10 that included a sip of wine and bite of something beforehand, sitting and watching medievalists chatter in clumps.  A look at the ivory tower, you might say, without prejudice. 

But I had to think about what Ezra Pound would say, he who moved ever in the mainstream of (literary and other) life and preferred jumping to (fascinating, engaging) conclusions.  Takes all kinds.

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Opus pokus

Yesterday an editorial about Opus Dei hosting lib RC (“heterodox”) Cokie Roberts at its DC bookstore led to cancellation of said talk-diva.  But old-world defensiveness delayed things:

The Washington Times called the Catholic Information Center on deadline Tuesday seeking comment and asking if the Cokie Roberts event had been cancelled, but we were repeatedly sent to voicemail. Putting someone on the line could have clarified the situation.

That is, Wash Times publicized the much-protested near boo-boo but would not have done so if it only knew.

This long-ago religion reporter had a similar no-talk response from Chi Opus D people in the 70s, when they were much newer kids on the block, followed by letter of correction after the story had run, about what I do not recall.

Look.  Talk and ye shall be saved at least a little embarrassment.  You might be anyhow.  You could make things worse, of course.  This guy in Pittsburgh threatened to sock me over the phone.  Speaking for the diocese. 

Had he succeeded, it would have been a story that wrote itself: easy to write but hard to research.

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