Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Jimmy Breslin’s Forgotten Christ

Salon.com Books | The gospel according to Jimmy Breslin: “When you look back over the career of New York’s consummate common-man columnist — one of the best at cramming characters, emotion and sense of place into a 650-word rectangle of newsprint that Gotham has ever seen — his break with the Roman Catholic Church has been a long time coming. It wasn’t exactly the sexual abuse scandal itself that sent Breslin over the edge, although he’s been covering it with intense and deepening anger for the last two years. Instead, he says, it was one of the scandal’s side effects: discovering that one of the American church’s most prominent men of God was a niggling, pedantic little man.”

This is from Salon.com’s interview with Jimmy Breslin. Breslin is publicizing his new book The Church That Forgot Christ.

I have to say, I think anyone who would abandon his religion because of the activities of the Church’s leaders– well, that’s a person who never understood what his religion was about to begin with. There have always been times when bad or weak men have been in charge of the Church. It’s the hazard that comes with the Church being an institution run by human beings. What you do is work within the Church to improve it.

Breslin goes on to criticize Cardinal Egan of New York: “Egan objected to the opposing attorney’s reference to the young man in the case as a child, since he had been a college freshman at the time. “He was testifying, Egan, and he wondered whether they should call this kid a child or a young man, because he was a student at Sacred Heart College. Basically, he was quibbling over the classification of a young man who was involved in a sexual act with a priest.”"

I don’t understand why this should offend anyone. It’s a legitimate concern. If the person with whom the priest had been involved were a child, then you’re looking at criminal child abuse. Since the person was a college student, it’s far more likely that the relationship was consensual. Granted, you don’t want priests having sexual contact with anyone but there’s a world of difference between child abuse and sex between consenting adults. Breslin is being a bit of a niggling, pedantic little man himself, here.

“Later in the same testimony, Egan went even further. He proposed the novel idea that bishops and other figures in the church hierarchy could not be held responsible for crimes committed by priests, because priests were private contractors rather than employees.”

Even referring to priests as “private contractors” is a little weird, I think, though in some ways it does come closer than “employee”. The position of a priest is unique. He is an intermediary between humans and the Divine and that’s a personal quality (if you believe in this sort of thing) imbued through the grace of God. It’s not like a regular job. Retired priests are still priests. They can still celebrate Mass. How much responsibility does the Church as an institution bear when one of its priests commits a crime? Sure, individual bishops who know of a priest’s criminal behavior and don’t do anything about it are guilty of abetting him. But the institution of the Church itself? I’m afraid I just can’t see penalizing all Catholics for the criminal behavior of a few priests. When these huge financial settlements are forced on the Church, that’s exactly what they’re doing: penalizing all Catholics.

“Conservatives within the church, including some truly frightening reactionary elements who view Pope John Paul II as a softhearted liberal,…”

Gee, do ‘ya think they might be talking about Mel Gibson and/or Opus Dei here?

“…have seized on the scandal as an opportunity to drive leftists and homosexuals out of the priesthood. They are not just willing but eager to jettison undesirable Catholics like Breslin, who are insufficiently committed to the church’s sexual and moral agenda. They seem to want a smaller, narrower faith obsessed with fighting abortion and gay marriage, rather than a big-tent religion that encompasses family-values conservatives, fervent opponents of the death penalty and Latin American socialists alike.”

Breslin wasn’t “jettisoned”. He’s quit. Loudly. Publicly.

(But good riddance to him anyway.)

Here’s my thing. I think Christianity in general–not just the Catholic Church–needs to come up to modern times on this whole homosexuality thing. Back in biblical times, it just freaked people out (and besides, it was counter-reproductive AND it was something those filthy heathen Greeks did) so it was seen as a sin. We’re past that now. We’re a wiser. Homosexuality is a normal (albeit relatively uncommon) variation on human sexuality. All Christians (and all other humans) need to recognize this and quit making such a big deal out of it.

As for the idea of a Church that’s more committed to fighting abortion… Some of you will be dismayed to recall that I am in favor of that. I think the legalization of abortion is just one more sign of a society that takes all life (not just human life) for granted. There are better, cheaper, life-affirming ways of preventing the birth of unwanted children. Contraception. Know about it. Use it.

Breslin goes on, “The war in Iraq, they hardly whisper about it. The pope says he spoke out against it. Well, I’m unfamiliar with the stridency of his demands that the war end. I don’t see any social good they do these days.”

What an idiot! He doesn’t see any social good that the Catholic Church does?!? Then he’s either blind or he’s not looking. The Catholic Church runs innumerable charities ranging from homeless shelters in the US to “rebuild the village in Africa” type programs. As for the Pope’s lack of ‘stridency’. Hell, what does he expect? The Pope is an old and very sick man. He can hardly stand by himself. How much ‘stridency’ is he expected to produce?

Dick Cheney, Boogieman

The New Republic Online: Taking a Chance: “This is still a democracy; and one of its true merits is that people can assess whether their war leaders are wise, prudent, or need replacing. They can weigh domestic issues against foreign ones; and they can judge the likelihood of their imminent demise after deciding not to support George W. Bush. So, thanks for your concern, Mr. Vice President. But, after observing your administration closely for the past three and a half years, I think I’ll take my chances.”

Jerks on Wheels

Counting The Beefs On The N.J. Turnpike – September 9, 2004

Ah…The Smoking Gun. Don’t you just love The Smoking Gun?

You might be surprised to read that I’m actually pretty much on the side of the toll collectors in these reports. People in cars can be such colossal jerks. Paying for your own toll and the toll of the car behind you with a hundred dollar bill? Paying with pennies? Holding up the line to ask for directions? Honking your horn because the line’s not moving fast enough??

Hell, I’d threaten to slit your throat, too.

Those of you who read my old blog–back before I went to blogger.com–will perhaps recall my many rants about the way people drive. It’s taken a real act of will on my part to not post more of them, I’m telling you.

People who, I’m assuming, would be perfectly nice and reasonable if you were to meet them in any other way, become complete assholes behind the wheels of their cars. Why is that? Truly, I think it would be an interesting study for a social psychologist. I’m guessing that it’s because, when they’re in their cars, people feel like they’re in a protected cocoon of some kind where the social niceties don’t apply. They can be completely selfish. It’s like a return to the womb. And there’s the anonymity factor, too, I suppose. Apparently lots of people revert to their true–selfish and obnoxious–selves when they feel anonymous.

I find that very strange.

Don’t these people realize that the world just works better in general if you’re courteous to other people?

See someone trying to merge into traffic? Lift your foot off your accelerator long enough for them to get in safely. What does it cost you? Not a thing. But it saves the person trying to merge a few seconds of anxiety. On the same note, if you see that someone’s leaving space for you to merge, take advantage of it. Don’t be one of those dumbshits who ride the merge lane out to the very end and then force their way in to traffic–requiring that everyone stop so they can get into the lane.

I could go on and on. I’ll spare you.

Sigh. I really need to get working on that Disintegration Beam I keep threatening to invent. (Though, as my father-in-law has noted, disintegration really may not be painful enough for some of these people.)

The Spirit of Robespierre?

Salon.com News | French students face new head scarf ban: “French authorities contend Muslims are turning increasingly militant and failing to integrate. They see banning head scarves in schools as a solution.”

Idiots.

How in the name of Zeus’s left earlobe is offending and alienating France’s Muslim population going to motivate them to integrate?!? See…this is the sort of thing that inspires people to join extremist groups. I’m not saying that joining an extremist group is the answer. (It’s not.) But it’s a predictable response.

Idiots.

Gimme

The iMac G5

Oh man…. don’t you just want one of these right now? It has a slot-loading DVD-CDRW drive. How cool is that? And if you outfit it with Bluetooth, you can use a wireless keyboard and mouse.

This would be a fantastic desktop machine. It takes up so little space! It would be even better as a kitchen computer. I don’t use a desktop machine much anymore, you see, but I do have an older “snow” iMac set up in the kitchen. I have the charging/syncing dealie for my Palm attached to it and we use the Palm Desktop software to keep our lives organized. We’ve got all of our addresses/phone numbers and stuff on it, we use the calendar to keep track of appointments, and I even keep the grocery shopping list on it as a memo. (I’m the hippest grocery shopper ever—consulting the list on my Palm as I stroll down the aisles with my cart.) The iMac is also connected to our wireless network, so Mark uses it every morning to check the weather forecast and the news before he heads off to work.

The old iMac takes up a lot of space on the kitchen counter. This new machine would be so much better. What would we do with the old machine, though? And–space issues aside–can we really justify spending the money on a faster processor when we don’t make use of the processing-power we’ve got on the old iMac now? Probably not.

As it is, we’ve had to be a little creative in finding uses for the computers that we already have. (We do so love computers!)

Upstairs: Rebecca’s Dell Windows machine. It has a really nice big Planar flat panel monitor that’s great for web design work. That’s what I mainly use it for. Oh…and I’ve got my SmartMusic software installed on it. I’ll probably write about the glories of SmartMusic in another post sometime in the future. Check the Music: Flute & Oboe link.

Main Floor: Kitchen computer–I just told you about that. We also have a Mac Cube that I set up in the livingroom and connected to the stereo system. The Cube has my collection of 2500+ mp3s on it and I wanted a good sound system to play them on. I’ve also got my iPod dock connected to it.

Downstairs: Mark’s got his own Dell Windows machine (with a dual-boot Windows/Linux setup on it) and his own Cube down there. He rarely uses his Dell. Once in a while he’ll need it for something related to school or he might play a game on it once or twice a year. He uses the Cube to keep track of our finances on Quicken.

Besides these computeres, each of us also has a Mac iBook that we use as our main computers.

All of these machines are connected to one another and to the internet on a wireless Airport network.

So…my point with all of this being…we really don’t need a new iMac.

But….it’s so cool!