DaveTown

Mark Shea is one of the few people I know who can reach down the throat of a typical hollywood tabloid scandal and come out with a profound truth about human nature and basic theology.

Enjoy a snippet, and do go read the whole thing:  

Thankfully, the vast majority of people (at least on the blogs) seem to have taken Gibson’s confession of guilt (a refreshingly manful one free of passive “I’m sorry if I offended anybody” BS and chockful of “I did *this*. It was a *disgrace*” honesty) at face value and forgiven him, as is fitting.

The big fart smell hanging in the air, of course, is the content of his tirade: all the swearing at Jews and the anti-semitic ugliness that came pouring out. As a good child of a post-Freudian culture, I was raised to believe that what people say when they are plastered, or insanely angry, or deeply afraid, or otherwise stripped of their normal rational faculties is Who They Really Are. We talk that way all the time. “I thought he was a good man until the mask came off and I saw the ugly Truth”. That sort of talk is natural as breathing for us.

That’s because, in America, everybody is a Calvinist, including the Catholics. We believe that the fall is identical with nature, and therefore believe that when you see a man in sin, you see him as he “really” is. Goodness is the mask, corruption is his nature.

I was corrected in this false and heretical belief years ago by my favorite priest in the world, Fr. Michael Sweeney, now president of the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. The reality is quite contrary. Sin is the mask. It is not what names us but what makes us anonymous. Sin, because of the fall, is normal. But sin is never “natural”. It does not constitute who we are, it *destroys* who we are. It is when the human person takes his place as the redeemed creature God made him that we begin to truly see his face and know his name.

And so, to Mel Gibson. Gibson tells us, “I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable.” It seems to me that we have a basic choice: to believe revelation or to believe Freud.

See, that’s why Mark is in the 1% Club. Also because he can use the phrase “fart smell” as a metaphor, in a serious essay, and get away with it, because it fits the context perfectly. You try it sometime; you’ll see it ain’t easy.

Back from the dead, it’s the latest edition of America’a favorite gameshow (among gameshows hosted on little-read blogs):

AP or ONION?

That’s right, it’s AP or ONION?, where you the reader decide whether the headline is ripped from a legitimate news source, or from the internet’s foremost satirical news website.

Ready? Hands on buzzers . . .

LOCAL BAPTIST CHURCH CONSIDERS REMOVING BAPTISM REQUIREMENT

There it is – is fact stranger than fiction, or is the art of satire on the road to recovery?

Join us next time, won’t you, when we play . . . AP or ONION?

KIDS! Don’t forget to pick up the AP or ONION? home version at finer toy stores and fish-markets everywhere.

AP or ONION? is a copyrighted production of DaveTown Industries, in assication with Mark Goodson/Bill Todman Productions, the United Council of Churches, and the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Is there anyone who didn’t already know this?

Buckley: Bush Not A True Conservative

Gotta hand it to CBS for coming up with these kinds of exclusives.

Terry Hull writes these wise and beautiful words, eulogizing his paternal Grandmother, who died Tuesday at the age  of 105:

Like all of us, she mellowed with age. She was cheerful. She had a way of enjoying life despite the circumstances. She loved to laugh. And she loved to eat. A trip to Denny’s was a treat. Her enjoyment of simple pleasures made simple pleasures more enjoyable for the rest of us. I know now that simple pleasures are the only pleasures this life has to offer. I didn’t learn that in the suburbs.

Contrary to popular belief among my friends and family, I categorically do not “sit around and do nothing all summer”.

Here’s a brief list of my summer activities:

• Looking for jobs. I have a lead on a part time tutoring job for the fall. No leads in the legal profession.
• Prepare for the upcoming school year
• • I studied for, and took, the Oklahoma Curriculum Test for teaching Spanish. If I passed, I’ll add that subject to the others on my teaching certificate.
  • Read books and articles on educational theory and practice, mostly, this summer, on foreign language teaching.
• Study the Spanish language. This is related to the last item, but also something that has been ongoing for the last several years.
• • Reading and translating back into English “El leon, la bruja, y el ropero”
  • Reading the daily mass Bible readings in Spanish
  • Working through “Spanish in 32 Lessons” by Adrienne
  • Reading “Spanish for Educators
• Trying to improve my chess game. My rating is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 when playing correspondence style (i.e., with time controls of 3-7 days). Over the board, closer to 600. But, then again, I rarely play over the board in tournament games that generate rating points.
• • Playing multiple games at gameknot.com
  • Reading Chess Life Magazine
• Writing
• • DaveTown blog – not updated nearly enough
  • Footballs Are Round blog – more activity than usual during the World Cup
  • 3rd Degree Website – Weekly column during the soccer season
  • Book project – getting started on a non-fiction idea that I’ve had knocking around in my head for a while.
• Getting in shape. I have made very little progress in this area. I blame my wife’s good cooking. And my total lack of enthusiasm for exercise. But I’m getting better at it. My goal is 100 sit-ups and 50 push-ups a day.
• Reading. This summer mostly the works of the Stoic Philosophers.
• House stuff. I’m not that handy around the house, but I can, in fact, clean and organize when the urge strikes me.
• Computer projects
• • I’m trying to learn a little about Linux by messing with Ubuntu and Edbuntu
  • I’m constantly trying to mess with the HTML and PHP settings on my blogs, but usually not very successfully.

So there.

There’s an old saying that “everybody hates lawyers – except for their lawyer”.

It’s the same with Congressmen. We complain in general about the low quality of our politicians, but give our hometown representatives a break, more often than not. To test this theory, and to guarantee your blood pressure will shoot sky-high in the next few weeks, go to http://www.congress.org/congressorg/megavote/ , and have all of your Senators’ and Representative’s votes sent to you via email.

After you’ve seen a few results, let me know what you think.

Unfortunately, this post is about Japan, not the United States, which doesn’t take its constitution seriously at all, in recent history.

They Japanese were all ready to take out North Korea’s missile sites, which no one can deny are threat to Japan’s security, when the backed off to examine the question of whether the Japanese constitution (written and signed pretty much by force in the aftermath of World War II) allows such an action. You see, the document doesn’t allow for Japan to have a standing army, merely a “self-defense force”. Would the act of destroying the missiles constitute self-defense, or an act of aggression? As a hypothetical, what if Japan took the same view toward the North Korean nuclear reactors, which are obviously there for the purpose of making nuclear weapons?

I tend to go with the former view, that destroying an obvious threat equals self-defense, but it certainly is a valid point of debate. The important thing, and the thing that our country needs to take a lesson from, is that the Japanese believe their constitution to be binding upon them.

What a refreshing point of view. Perhaps all three branches of government in this country should take it into consideration.