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Will blog as available.
This is quite possibly the greatest thing I have ever read.
As a Rodevacantist, I echo William Shatner’s statement that “Gene Rodenberry created the Star Trek of the ages,” and that any change is obviously the result of directors and writers who no longer have the inspiration and guidance of the Rodenberry spirit. Any change is inorganic. All change is inorganic. This Novus Trek is an abomination and I – and those few who have not drunk the Targ-aid – will show you JUST WHY THIS IS SO.
After the death of Gene Rodenberry, Jews, Freemasons, Protestants, and Communists influenced the creation of the abomination “Star Trek XI.” Many people welcomed this “New” Star Trek, saying it was more “accessible” to non-Geeks and encouraged a spirit of dialogue. Puh-lease. The beauty of Star Trek lies in its mystery and not in its comprehensibility. Why else do you think Chancellor Gorkon, in Star Trek VI, said “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon”? Do youunderstand Klingon? No. Do *I*? No! Ergo – mystery. QED.
As much as AOL is a hideous program that takes over your computer and turns it into some sort of monster, I have very fond memories of it. It was my first look into the world of the Internet, years before it became ubiquitous, a sort of special, closed environment. Unlike the heady days of the early internet, when Usenet dominated the earth, AOL was civilized internet. It was the age of chatrooms and dialup, a walled-off world where the internet was social in a way it isn’t anymore; few people use the internet to make friends the way they used to, and the message board, which had been sidelined in the era of AOL into the lesser partner of the real-time chatroom, has once again asserted its dominance.
So it’s somewhat sad to read news of AOL”s decline. I mean, what can I say? It’s the internet for people who don’t know better, and by this point, everybody knows better. Their dialup service is a joke in a world that’s moved past 56k connections, and the garden plot they maintain is barely necessary; the web is a wholly different beast than it was back in the day.
A part of me is nostalgic for that sort of internet, though, for those independent services struggling to be the whole internet world for millions of people before the Web was integrated into their clients. Back when the web was smaller.
I had something of a conversation with my old roommate last night; she’s been increasingly angry with God for a number of reasons. It’s difficult to try and enunciate everything, of course, as such conversations tend to fly from memory and into myth, at least for me, but it’s worth bringing up something that did arise over the course of it: she’s been increasingly of the opinion that God is a jerk, primarily because she’s been listening to the arguments of a mutual acquaintance, I’ll call him Bob, who is terribly and unstintingly Calvinist. He happens to be quite biblically literate, and his arguments tend to be sweeping with the Scriptures, which intimidates me, because my own biblical literacy is comparatively limited, which is to say I’m read in the Scriptures and know their broad arguments, but he’s pretty much got the bloody thing memorized.
Now, this old roommate, let’s call her Janice, has long been in something of a difficult place spiritually, and as much as I’ve advised her not to listen to him, she has, which is, I suppose, her right. And so she’s confronting the notion that the God she’s known is a god she built up in her mind, and not the God of the Bible, who is, once again, apparently a complete tool. Of particular distress is the notion of predestination, that God has chosen some people to be saved and others to be damned, which seems to fly in the face of everything she’s ever learned about God. And yet, there this guy is, quoting Scripture and making his arguments which she simply lacks the education to refute.
Last night, then, in discussing this, the conversation turned to the notion of magisterium. I made the point that, while, no, I don’t have the same intense biblical backing as, um, Bob, that doesn’t mean the things I believe are less valid. I told her that, while no, I don’t have prooftexts off the top of my head, I do have some basic principles that contradict Bob’s vision of God, namely that a God who damns in the manner he proposes is contrary to the commands of Christ to preach the Gospel and to human reason regarding God’s nature. But he didn’t hear it; somehow, during her arguments with Bob, Janice got the notion in her head that the Bible is and must be the only way we can have any knowledge of God, which is patently false. The whole point of reason, the reason we reason, is to come to knowledge of God through the world around us. Our sentience is, in fact, a direct line to God that is unfortunately smudged and cloudy, but very much still present.
At some point, every objection anybody could ever have to the Scriptures has been raised and considered and refuted, probably many times over. At some point, predestination has come up and been rejected. It’s inevitable, and part of what I like about antique religion; it’s simply seen everything. Part of, I believe, the problem is that it’s so easy not to take the Church seriously. It’s very easy to be unconsciously dismissive of it as, not behind the times, but certainly interested in perpetuating itself. “Oh, of course the Church says that. That’s what it believes. But what’s the truth?” with no conception that the truth could be what the we believe. So Janice asks me “Where in the Bible does it say the Church has the authority to interpret it? I’d think God would let us know what to do with his Word.”
Of course, the Church wrote the New Testament. We wrote the New Testament in response to the Word of God, Christ, who had come into the world and done a bunch of crazy, ridiculous things and somehow turned everybody upside down; as Peter would have said to anybody who asked him if he thought this was where he’d end up, “Well, I was gonna be a fisherman, but then I met this dude, and he messed all that up.” Christ is the Word, more than the Bible; he’s the source and force of Revelation toward which all the Scriptures point and in whose light they must all be interpreted. But where dos it say any of that in the Old Testament? Where do the Hebrew Scriptures allow for the Christian? For that matter, where does the Torah allow for the Psalms? The Bible is a built on a web of authorities, which seems to me one of the great strengths therein, because it frees us from the shibboleths we construct around it; all of those authorities ultimately lead to Christ and are through the Spirit understood and interpreted.
Christ is the key to the whole Bible; can we look at what Paul wrote without taking into account what Christ had to say? Without the Spirit?
I’m not sure what this is all about.
I get that it’s satire, but satire of what?
The adherents of feisty religions, on the other hand, are reproducing in record numbers. Roman Catholics, Christian evangelists, and Muslims, are fertile as minks. Some of these frisky believers find it odd that I, an atheist, am as fruitful as they. Just last week a Mormon with five wives and 27 children said to me, “Mike, how is it that you, a materialist more staunch than Marx, a Darwinist more strict than Dawkins, and an atheist on a par with Hawking, are not a desiccated old tuber, but overflow with life’s juices and drool life’s nectar and can’t leave your equally spiritless wife alone to the tune of nine godless brats?” I replied, “I really don’t know, my friend, why atheists like me sing the body electric, hear America singing, and rock endlessly like cradles. But we do. I know there is no God, and I am hot to trot.”
I’ve had, today, a fairly busy day; from daily mass to working in the library, where I recieved a very interesting, if hushed, phone call from my mother. I had told her some time back that I was going to be using her address on a piece of foreign mail (with her permission), as I needed to make sure the response went to a place where I’d have access to it, and I didn’t know either how long it would take or where I’d be living when it arrived. Today, out of the blue, something unexpectedly arrived for me. Stamped “Comune di Stigliano,” it had arrived with my name (and some illegible stuff in front of it which I cannot even begin to understand) scribbled above the address. She opened it, looked at it, and called me. She had no idea what it was.
Longtime readers of Saint Superman will recall that I’ve been, for some time, trying to attain my Italian citizenship, and the most important document was the one that was the most difficult to obtain: my great-grandfather’s birth certificate. The process is complex, but for the most part centers on the acquisition (and subsequent translation) of documents establishing descent from one person to the next. Italian citizenship law is quite generous, allowing the descendents of citizens to establish their citizenship without limit to the number of generations that can pass between them. Italy, like Israel and Ireland, has placed such laws on the books due to the wide diaspora of their nationals; they have scores of children living overseas who might want to cement their connection to their heritage.
I found out I was eligible just under a year ago, and began pestering Stigliano, my ancestral hometown, a small village in Matera, way in the south, for the birth certificate. The rest of the documents are here in the United States, largely in New York, and should be relatively easy to acquire, and only get more recent. The volume of documents required is horrific, including birth certs, death certs, marriage records, divorce records — for four generations of descent! But getting them should be easy, especially when there’s a licensed genealogist giving you a hand.
No, the hard part would be finding the most important link. I could prove my descent from Prospero Visaggio all I wanted, but if I couldn’t prove that he was an Italian citizen, it would amount to nothing. But today, in the mail, it arrived. The birth certificate. I had my stepfather scan it and email it to me so I could confirm that it was, in fact, exactly what I needed; my mom doesn’t speak a lick of Italian and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. But there it is. Shining from my computer screen, made of light — the first link, the most important piece: Prospero’s 1882 birth in rural Italy to Giuseppe and Anna Maria, sealed and stamped and certified, all nice and legal.
Progress has, for the first time since last summer, been made.
As Mark Shea would say, the world of good keeps turning.
On Sunday, 49 students from low-income families became the first four-year Sidney E. Frank Scholars to graduate from Brown, owing virtually nothing except gratitude to the late liquor magnate.
“The world of difference that he made for each and every one of us is unbelievable, incredible,” one of the Frank Scholars, 22-year-old Shane Reil, said Sunday.
Frank – who left Brown after one year in the late 1930s because he couldn’t afford to stay — gave the school a $100 million endowment in 2004. He stipulated that the fund’s income go exclusively to covering all tuition and expenses for the neediest of Brown’s admitted applicants.
I’ve often said that, had I the means, I’d do the same thing. Glad somebody else had the idea, too; I myself owe most of my college education to generous donors who asked nothing in return.
Love is a splendid thing, especially when its entirely selfless.
Hey! Remember this?
Soon, I shall be one with the Huxtable.
You may recall I graduated weekend before, um, yesterday. I’ve been rocking the six-year plan, and I’m glad to have seen it come to its end. I’ve got a roommate lined up, it looks like I’ve got work lined up; through the grace of God, my life is coming together. Not only that, I was able to host, and grateful for that, a number of my dearest friends (two of whom will be leaving Virginia in a week) for a last hurrah, a night drinking and talking and generally communing with each other most eucharistically, if you catch me, on Saturday night. I received from a couple of them gifts, among them the John Adams HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti, my allotted mancrush.
I seriously love Paul Giamatti.
Anyway. If you aren’t familiar with John Adams, I suggest you go read your history. He was the second president of the United States, and as far as I can tell, that’s the most anybody really knows about the man. You’d think for a figure so integral to the formation and foundation of this country, we’d have a better acquaintance with the man, but he has the misfortune of being bookended by two titans of the era, Washington and Jefferson, and of being the first one-termer. Not a popular man by any measure, he was principled and prudent, neither a great general like his predecessor nor philosopher and ideologue like his successor, he’s never stirred the same sort of passion. But he’s a man who has always interested me to some extent.
Part of it is the fact that I’m a natural and deliberate contrarian; I believe in disagreeing. Throughout my life I’ve made a point of flying against conventional wisdom and taking stances which were often not supported by others. This isn’t to say I’m studiously principled, tooting my own horn on my steadfastness, but that I tend to shout praises for things about which few shout praises. I’ve spoken well of Hitler’s art and aesthetic sense. I’ve been a firm supporter of both Poland and France’s military history. I admire John Paul I. I question the justness of most American wars, and I can’t really say I “support our troops” because nobody’s ever told me what it means. I maintain the best president of the modern era was George HW Bush. I liked both the Aztek and the Element. I even own two Spice Girls albums. Clearly, these all aren’t on the same level, but on each, I’ve made a point of going against the grain, almost for the sake of doing so. Such with Mr. Adams.
Another part of it is the fact that we’re distantly related, and there is, in that, the fierce loyalty of family, even if broadly split.
A final part is his being played by Paul Giamatti.
Watching this miniseries is strange. The events that led to the Revolution and our subsequent independence are difficult and tense topics, and to this day can enflame passions among those who think it was an unjustified tax revolt and those who believe it was a brilliant and necessary move to escape a despot. We rarely consider what it meant, though, at the time, how painful and complex a process and decision it was, how arguments swayed, and how evenly the blame could be applied. I remember thinking, last night while watching “Join or Die,” the first episode, that this history influences us to this day. We as Americans are often dreadfully dead in our knowledge of the past, of how ideas that have been kicking around for our entire run, our “timeless values,” got their start. In John Adams, our hero is sort of an incarnation of civil society, an advocate for the rule of law, concerned for justice on all sides. “I am for the law,” he says at one point; neither for King or Colony, he is for the broad and just application of honest justice. At first skeptical of the rabble-rousing of his cousin, he grows instead skeptical with the ability of a monarch to govern justly; he becomes a rebellion against government because he is for the law.
His chief opponent at the Continental Congress is John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (and later Delaware), a staunch and emotional advocate for reconciliation, who preaches against bloodshed as is in addition to the benefits of loyalty to the Crown. Neither man, it seems, values the seemingly inevitable war, but each has wholly different conclusions as to how to approach a king neither believes governs well. Dickinson’s belief in reconciliation, akin to the Franklin or Galloway Plans which would have seen the Colonies granted some sort of representative in Parliament, seems to me the most just of the two principled positions.
What does it mean to be for the law, to be for good government, if the end result of that is war over the forms of government? I cannot help but compare the American revolution to the Revolutions of 1989, the slow process of revolution in Poland, in which changes were demanded and changes were achieved, not because they had arms, but because they understoof who they were and what they deserved. It was fundamentally a religious and social revolution, a change in national consciousness, after which the reins of the PZPR could no longer remain; they were no longer suited to the horse that Poland had become. In contrast, the American revolution, before Lexington and Concord, was driven by radical and violent elements, a rabble making demands by force instead of a movement assuming its own. I cannot help but think a nonviolent solution was possible in America as much as in Poland; we simply lacked the moral force to seek it. And to this day, I don’t believe we have yet found it.
