On Fashion

In addition to facebook while procrastinating for this paper, I've taken up fashion blogs. I hate fashion. I am in the Oakeshottian camp on this. In his essay, "On Being Conservative," he maintains that all activities require a conservative disposition except fashion--"wanton delight in change for its own sake no matter what it generates." (This essay also has the not-to-be-ignored line: "Heaven is the dream of a changeless no less than perfect world.") Due, however, to my roommates's netflix choice of The Devil Wears Prada and my boredom with other procrastination methods, I was drawn to fashion blogs (such as http://daddylikey.blogspot.com/ and http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/). But if we take a definition of art like Eric Gill's--"the object of art is the use of skill in the making of good things"--I'm not sure why fashion can't be an art. I'm 90% sure I'll regret that statement later, but for now, I'm open...

The Sanjaya Phenomenon

The conventional wisdom underlying democratic institutions is that the people know best, and, given open discussion, the truth and the best people will rise to the top. What about times when this isn't the case? For instance, when a candidate deceives people and gets the vote. Or an even more interesting case is when a candidate who is not the obvious choice for a job, but appeals to other characteristics when asking for one's vote. Possibly other things, such as interest groups, could interfere and skew the vote, as well.

Shouldn't people be glad that democracy is functioning no matter what the outcome? I found people's emotions raised by Sanjaya's continued place on American Idol to be an interesting reaction. Some people got really frustrated, as if they thought that democracy wasn't working in that case. Does democracy, then, have some relationship to truth that can be undermined by interest groups and factions? Or is it just a conversation that should be allowed to continue unobstructed, any outcome of which is correct? (this is a more Oakeshottian read)

Just a couple of small points on "Zelary," an impressive Czech film on which it would be appropriate to devote books:

First, the ubiquity of slivovitza (traditional, often home-brewed Slovak plum brandy). Everyone--men, women, old people, had a bottle of slivovitza and used it at appropriate times (which seemed to be every moment--times of celebration, times of stress, times of sickness [often poured on the wound or taken through the mouth], etc.).

Second, the film shed light on the question of women and work, in the sense that it wasn't a question in the film: women worked along side men--everyone in the community laboured together. The main character had been in medical school and a member of the resistance to Nazism; an old woman played the role of community mid-wife and holistic doctor; a young woman with no husband raised her daughter on her own. Basically, families worked together to do what they needed to do to survive--no job was more or less glamorous. All were somewhat tedious. It seems like the women and work issue is one faced primarily by elite women and less often by people in villages in rural areas.

Finally, on the wedding night of a marriage of convenience, the man says to his new wife: "I have been unfaithful to you." He is referring not to something recent, but to something in his past. This includes a profound conception of marriage that doesn't hold it just to the present, but rather acknowledges that it extends to the past and to the future (just as a thick conception of community includes those not yet born and those who have died).

On Loyalty

When the sun shines, we'll shine together.

Told you I'll be here forever.

Said I'll always be a friend.

Took an oath, Ima stick it out till the end.

Now it's raining more than ever.

Know that we'll still have each other.

You can stand under my umbrella.

The point of friendship, even political friendship, is that it endures. Loyalty, a social virtue, is singularly important. I wonder what the implications of our increasingly mobile, unencumbered individualism will be on the political order. Roger Scruton points to geography as the only thing preserving the nation-state. Will we eventually transcend even geography through technology? Clearly loyalty is something that both the church and the state have an interest in promoting. And yet loyalty and the accompanying tendency to prefer what is closest to one easily morph into a scary nationalism. Additionally, loyalty necessarily includes an exclusion--two people under an umbrella implies people outside of it. Politics must be comfortable with this love of the particular, for it is as natural to humans (so John Calhoun tells us, at least) as society is for us.

On the Attraction of Wit (or Worse)

I think that this won't rise to the level of rant. It is more like a musing. The question for contemplation is why men love bitchy women. Last night, I heard the (possibly apocryphal?) story of how one of my professors met his wife: he was teaching a class in a room immediately after she taught a class in it. Her classes always ran over and one day he was fed up and evidently let her know he was. She gave it right back.

Does this contradict the idea of machismo? Do men secretly long to be bossed around? Intuitively, I would think that men would like a quiet, flexible woman. But does that mean that a woman has no personality? Perhaps this just all falls in the category of "the way of a man with a maid," which even Solomon never hoped to understand.

On Alienation

"Most things you consider evil or wicked are only lonely or lacking in social niceties." --Edward Bloom

My mom's ubiquitously offered explanation of any rude action has always been that the perpetrator is insecure. But what about the Walker-Percy-loving suggestion of embracing and locating yourself in this necessary loneliness and alienation. Now I do not advocate immanentizing the eschaton, but why shouldn't we fight to overcome the alienation and instead seek harmony and peace between ourselves and the world. Sure, this is impossible to have perfectly until the eschaton, but love requires that we fight for as much resolution as is possible. Indeed, by our very strivings toward holiness, we are asking the grace of God to break into this world again and continue the work of restoration. I'm sick of the Calivinist uber-deep understanding of sin that results in a reluctance to hope for anything more than a deeply conflicted inner nature and relationship to the outer world until the end of time. It is one thing to resolve to endure the tension of existence, it is another to stop fighting for resolution to that tension.

On Easter

Three sacraments: Baptism. The waters of baptism rush over my Easter hairstyle. The switch from the extraordinary means of salvation to the ordinary means is confusing. I am born anew and yet I had been born anew. It is like the move from the Old Testament to the New Testament in my person. Before I followed the cloud by day and the pillar by night. Now I have the Church as well. I'd been baptized into His body in a way before, and now I'm baptized into His whole body (into His Church with all the saints).

Confirmation. So soon; no fifty-day lag. The oil marked my grace for maturity almost as soon as I'd been "born." And sealed with oil--keeping my baptism sticking.

The Eucharist. Receiving the Eucharist is like a little Incarnation announced with lillies at Easter: God comes in His real presence to our bodies. As Rudolfo Anaya writes, "Don't go bite on God. ... I wondered how God must feel to go into Horse's [a young boy] stinking mouth." And again: "Out of the corner of my eyes I saw Bones [a young friend] jumped up and push his finger into his mouth. The host had stuck to the roof of his mouth. He was jabbing God with his finger, trying to free Him, choking on Him."

And bringing up the gifts--for the first time really being part of the body of Christ in that parish--serving as a representative for all of them in coming to the priest.