Mr. Potato Head Constitution

Jonathan has an article, "The Mr. Potato Head Constitution," up at The American Spectator Online. As the title indicates, it's both funny and scary.

"But I didn't mean to ..."

Here's Anthony Esolen's response:

Let us suppose I have a fancy revolver with twenty chambers. Suppose that we put one bullet in the revolver, in one of the chambers. Suppose also that I and my pal enjoy the frisson of terror and risk that rushes up our spines when we spin the chambers and hold the revolver to the other fellow's head and pull the trigger. Of course, I do not want to kill my friend, and he does not want to kill me. But we are both willing to incur the risk of death to have that spasm of glee and fright.

Now, it won't do to compare our actions to those of, say, a bridge-painter, who knows when he climbs up his ladder that there is a measurable chance that he will fall to his death (it is, I'm told, one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and therefore fabulously well remunerated). That is because the purpose of a ladder is that it be climbed, not that it be fallen from, whereas the very purpose of a gun is to shoot a bullet.

Suppose that my friend and I play this game of American Roulette once a year, on one of our birthdays. Now suppose that my friend's number comes up, and I shoot him through the head. By law, and by the moral philosophy that undergirds the law, I do not get to plead that I did not intend his death. Perhaps I did not want him to die, but I certainly did intend the chance that he would die: I intentionally used a weapon against him, a weapon whose purpose it is to kill, and I used it in a way that would ensure his death, if the right chamber came up. It would be up to judge and jury to assess the correct punishment in my case, but as a matter of fact I am a murderer.

Except in the case of rape, there are no "unintended pregnancies," none.

....pregnancies are the result of intention. The problem is that the children are not wanted, and that is a very different thing. For the question we should immediately ask is not, "How do we dispose of this child we do not want?" but "What is wrong with us that we do not want this child?"

The rest is here.

Work with your hands

In grad school I had a brilliant literature professor who loved to cook because, he said, it was hands-on and gave an immediate reward, unlike his professional life. He needed something concrete.

I understood that. About that same time Jonathan and I were both longing for children, longing for something to balance the cerebral world in which we spent most of our waking hours. Too much thinking, we'd learned, can drive you crazy--and I mean that literally. Too little contact with physical reality, with flesh and blood, laundry, dishes, gardens, and so forth, allows us to delude ourselves into thinking that everything is amenable to our clever manipulation, our spin doctoring, our slant.

Don't get me wrong: Ideas are real and have real consequences, but we have to exercise moral and intellectual integrity to remember that, to treat them as if they're real, logical, and not just malleable fodder for a publishable article. The physical world insists on its immutable truth more forcibly. When the washing machine breaks, it is broken; either you can fix it, or you can't.

This guy--Matthew B. Crawford--writes about this sort of thing. In discussing the benefits of hands-on, physical labor, he notes:

Work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions ...

In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

Crawford has a Ph.D. , but repairs motorcyles for a living (and, obviously, writes). Here's another one of his articles, this one about medication:

The semantic shift wherein “unhappiness” is replaced by “depression” has real consequences: Our self-understanding becomes infected by medical categories that may not be appropriate, issuing in a kind of moral inarticulacy. With this comes a different disposition toward one’s own experience.

Theodore Dalrymple, a former prison psychiatrist in Britain, suggests that an overly broad concept of depression implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.

Gotta love a man who quotes Dalrymple.

And Crawford has a book just coming out: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

Why Capitalism is the Solution, Not the Problem

Update: The Michael Medved Show streams here.

Our friend Jay Richards will be on the Michael Medved Show today talking about his new book, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. Jay will be during the show's third hour. If your station carries it live, that's 2-3 p.m. Pacific, 4-5 p.m. Central, and 5-6 p.m. Eastern.

Go here to see if a station in your area carries the show.

Social In-Security

It’s no mere accounting blunder that Social Security cannot fund the long retirements of the baby boom generation. It’s no mere regulatory glitch that these same retiring boomers will not be able to sell their homes at a delicious premium.

The boomers didn’t raise enough customers for all of those homes, didn’t raise enough workers to fund, build and service the retirement lifestyles many came to expect.

The rest of Jonathan's article is here. Jonathan quotes from an interesting article by David Goldman, newly available online.

Friday Fun with Garage Doors

Jonathan's dad called a couple of days ago and told us this story:

He was in the house when Jonathan's mother started hollering something incoherent from the garage. He dashed out to see what was wrong: The garage door was raised; so, therefore, was the cat-door that's set into the garage door; and so, therefore, was the cat, Elmo, whose tail was caught in the cat door.

Jonathan's mom had inadvertently opened the automatic garage door while Elmo was coming in the cat door.

The angry cat was hanging from on high, so reasonably enough, Jonathan's dad pushed the button to lower the garage door--but when it got near the bottom, the dangling cat triggered the automatic safety eye, and up went the door and the cat.

(I'd feel worse for her, but she's the cat who threw up all over me at Thanksgiving.)

Jonathan's dad tries again. Down goes the door. Dangling cat triggers safety mechanism. Up goes the door. And again--down, trigger, up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Elmo is screaming; Jonathan's mother is not amused.

Finally Jonathan's dad tries to lift the cat down by hand. The doctor says his wounds will eventually heal. Next, he gets a broom handle and pokes at the cat door, trying not to poke the flailing and screaming cat, until finally the door opens and Elmo drops to the concrete floor.

She lands on her feet, blinks, and strolls over to her food bowl. She, at least, is unscathed.

Friday Fun: Tim Hawkins

To get the next one, you first need to have seen Carrie Underwood's "Jesus Take the Wheel"--a song whose sentiment I appreciate, its sentimentality not so much.



Tim Hawkins' take is really funny:

Where did that come from?

Yep, we did it. We got chickens.

After three days, eight hens, and thirteen eggs, we have learned that:

Isa Browns like to play outside, only dashing in to lay an egg in a nesting box now and again. Then they go back outside and scratch around some more. They've tilled up almost all of our garden plot already.

Barred Rocks venture out to take a dust bath occasionally, but they much prefer hanging around in the hen house gabbing. When someone climbs into a nesting box they all gather round and peer inside. "What's she doing? Scoot over, I can't see. Oh look--it's an egg! Isn't she clever!" They themselves drop eggs wherever they happen to be--outside in the dirt, inside standing in the feed pan, whatever.

In short, though Barred Rocks are undeniably pretty birds, Isa Browns are smarter. Just in case you wondered.

Giving

From Rodney Stark's Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome:

In 362, when Emperor Julian launched a campaign to revive paganism, he recognized that to do so it would be necessary to match Christian "benevolence." In a letter to a prominent pagan priest, Julian wrote: "I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence ... [They] support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us."

But his challenge to the temples to match Christian benevolence asked the impossible. Paganism was utterly incapable of generating the commitment needed to motivate such behavior. Not only were many of its gods and goddesses of dubious character, but they offered nothing that could motive humans to go beyond self-interested acts of propitiation.

He is Risen!

Terrible Friday

Listen to the phrasing of our prayers: Please heal her--but if not, then your will be done. Please give me a job--but if not, your will be done. Please bring home my lost child--but if not, your will be done.

We are praying humbly. We are saying that we know that God knows better than we do. But many times our phrasing seems to imply that God's will is always the bad thing--malignancy, poverty, bereavement. We speak as if we think God wants to hurt us, and if we're lucky he'll give us our way and not wreak his terrible will on us.

Too often the conventional conception of "God's will" as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love....

We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our awakening ....

When we understand ... we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality. (Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation)

When Christ prayed in the garden of Gethsemane to be spared the agony of the cross and concluded, "Yet not as I will, but as you will," it turned out that God's will was indeed terrible to behold. Sometimes it will be so in our own lives. Yet even in such circumstances we must remember, as Christ surely remembered, that we pray for God's will to be done because His will is the best, most wonderful thing that could happen to us, even if it is also the most terrible thing we can imagine.

Meaningless, meaningless? Maybe Not.

Our preacher (who, by the way, has started his own blog here) often teaches me something I didn't already know. Last week he mentioned that the Hebrew word hebel literally means "vapor" or "a breath."

Hebel appears 38 times in Ecclesiastes, more than the rest of the Old Testament books together; and when hebel appears in Ecclesiastes, it's usually translated as "meaningless." That, as my twelve-year-old pointed out yesterday, makes Ecclesiastes one heck of a depressing book.

But what if the speaker of Ecclesiastes is not saying life is meaningless, but that life is fleeting? It utterly changes the tone of that book. It suddenly makes sense that the speaker turns right around and advises us how best to live, because life is not meaningless, but brief, and we must therefore make the most of it.

Where have I been?

Recent happenings in the Witt world:

1. We are attempting to convert an aging garden shed into a predator-proof chicken coop. This is more complicated than we first supposed. Jonathan is talking in his sleep about weasels and hawks. No, we have no chickens. That may come later.

2. My lit class is studying Macbeth. Last week I divided them into two groups and had them act out the scene where Macbeth and Banquo first meet the weird sisters. They had costumes and props, including a carrot for the "pilot's thumb" and a horse made out of a rolling AV table, a blanket, and a long gray wig. My twelve-year-old is sitting in on the class, and he somehow got nominated to be the Macbeth of his group. He memorized his lines and was altogether brilliant, except for one thing: He inadvertently acted the entire scene while holding a clothes hanger.

3. It snowed this weekend, but the spring peepers are still croaking merrily away. The rhubard is sprouting, as are the peonies and tulips.

4. Two weeks ago I planted lettuce seeds, figuring lettuce is a cool-weather crop, but nothing has happened. When I tell people this, they laugh and say I should know by now to never plant anything in Michigan until after Memorial Day. I am not amused.

5. Our daughter's bedroom in our 80-year-old farmhouse has myriad cracks in the walls and ceiling. I am patching the cracks, mudding the room, priming it, and painting it. This is not a problem. The problem is that my children, when left to their own devices, will play "Heart and Soul" duets on the piano, out of sync, world without end, until I scream for mercy.

6. The cats would like to get rid of the mice in our bedroom wall, but that unfortunately is up to us. We squeezed out the bedroom window, climbed out on the roof, and stuffed poison pellets in through a tiny hole, which seems way too small even for a mouse, but is the only hole we can find.

7. Two ducks--male and female--have set up housekeeping on our tiny pond. The kids have named them Paddlefoot and Jane. After two or three tastes of bread crumbs, Paddlefoot and Jane decided to be tame ducks. If we don't come to the pond often enough, they come toward the house looking for us. Our guard dog is not happy about this. She senses some profound danger that eludes the rest of us.

8. As part of our daughter's high school biology class, we have dissected a worm, a crawfish, a perch, and a frog. We also learned that moss has virtually no nutritional value, but reindeer eat it anyway because it keeps their blood from freezing. I do not know if moss is toxic for humans.

9. Our ten-year-old has discovered the video camera. Posterity can now watch me singing "Oh my darling Clementine" while simultaneously putting away dishes, tripping over the dog, cooking supper, breaking up a stand-off between the dog and a cat, and answering various questions about missing dog leashes and painful orthodontia. "Mommies can do lots of things at once," the budding filmmaker intones at the end of the clip.

10. And, finally, here's a great breakfast recipe we discovered in the latest Penzey's catalog:

Apple Pancake

1/4 cup butter (half a stick), cut in two
4 eggs
1/4 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup flour
3/4 cup milk
1/2 tsp salt
2 medium apples, peeled, cored, and sliced thin
3 T sugar mixed with 1 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Divide butter evenly between two 9-inch pie plates and put them in the oven to melt the butter. Rotate the pie plates to coat bottom and sides.

Beat eggs, vanilla, flour, milk, and salt on medium speed for 1 minute.

Toss sliced apples with cinnamon sugar. Arrange half the apples in each pan so they cover the bottom in pretty much a single layer. (Feed leftover cinnamon apple slices to hovering children.) Pour half the egg mixture over apples in each pan. Sprinkle remaining cinnamon sugar over top. Bake until puffed and golden, 20-25 minutes. Serve right away, while still puffy, with warm syrup.

Joy

"Something I constantly notice is that unembarrassed joy has become rarer. Joy today is increasingly saddled with moral and ideological burdens, so to speak. When someone rejoices, he is afraid of offending against solidarity with the many people who suffer. I don't have any right to rejoice, people think, in a world where there is so much misery, so much injustice.

I can understand that. There is a moral attitude at work here. But this attitude is nonetheless wrong. The loss of joy does not make the world better - and, conversely, refusing joy for the sake of suffering does not help those who suffer. The contrary is true. The world needs people who discover the good, who rejoice in it and thereby derive the impetus and courage to do good. ..."

Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI
from "Salt of the Earth: Christianity and the Catholic Church at the End"

(Patrick pointed me to this over at Happy Catholic.)