"Papa was a rodeo."

Your Zen lesson for the day.

Becky Benson, 56, traveled from Orlando, Fla., because, she said, “we believe in Jesus Christ, and he is our savior.” Jesus, she said, would not have agreed with what she called the redistribution of wealth in the form of the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/us/politics/29beck.html

Jesus said unto him, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, “Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

Matthew 19:21-24

3:13 am • 29 August 2010

On 18 August, 1920, the Tennessee state legislature met to consider the amendment, with local politicians subject to heavy lobbying to vote against it from various factions – including those who feared that women’s votes would make it impossible to repeal the 18th amendment that prohibited the sale of liquor. Previously, politicians in eight other states, mainly in the more conservative south, had voted against ratification. Tennessee’s house of representatives became the focus of national attention, and the anti-suffragist forces thought they had enough votes to scotch ratification. But then Burn, a young lawyer who had previously backed the anti-suffragist bloc, carefully weighed a letter from his mother, Febb Ensminger Burn, which read:

Dear Son, … Hurray and vote for Suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt…. I’ve been waiting to see how you stood but have not seen anything yet…. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs Catt with her “Rats.” Is she the one that put rat in ratification, Ha! No more from mama this time. With lots of love, Mama.

So Burn switched sides and voted for ratification – and the motion passed, 49-47.

— I’VE BEEN FEELING A LITTLE DEFENSIVE about my home state recently, so thanks, Richard Adams in today’s Guardian.

5:18 pm • 19 August 2010 • 1 note

"As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

— DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, “Consider the Lobster”, footnote 6.

2:54 am • 16 August 2010 • 2 notes

"Als unser erster Sohn geboren wird, wundern sich die Hausbewohner, dass man in unserem Alter noch Kinder kriegen kann. Unsere Nachbarin war gerade mit Anfang vierzig Oma geworden. Mit Kind ändert sich mein Blick auf die Schillerpromenade. Auf einmal stört mich der Dreck, ich will es schön haben. Die Veränderungen hier reichen mir nicht. Mir fehlen große Bio-Läden und Cafés mit Krabbelecken. Ich habe die Nase voll von Lidl, Aldi und Dönerbuden. Früher war ich tagsüber in Mitte, an der Uni, und abends zum Tanzen in Kreuzberg. Jetzt verbringe ich den ganzen Tag in meinem Kiez, plötzlich ist die soziale Realität hier auch meine."

— “EINE GÖTTIN IM JOGGINGANZUG”: Ocka Caremi’s fantastic essay about the street I live on.

1:29 am • 6 August 2010

nybooks:

Last Words

Charles Simic

Why the enormous interest in the final thoughts of men and women who were often guilty of committing horrific crimes? It must be the same morbid curiosity that brought huge crowds of Americans to public executions in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many considered these grim occasions so much fun they brought their families along. The spectators didn’t mind if the hanging they were watching was botched and the condemned struggled choking for a long while at the end of the rope, or if his body dropped headless to the ground, and greeted such horrors with “rude jests” and “rabid laughter.” They expected, as part of the program, to hear a public admission of guilt, expression of remorse, appeal for forgiveness from God and the assembled, and a warning about the evils of booze and company of loose women. They were rarely disappointed.

Photo: Spectators at a public execution in Kentucky, circa 1936 (FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

2:55 am • 9 July 2010 • 24 notes

"all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed"

OVER AT DISSENTISPATRIOTIC.NET, I have presented a special edition of the Declaration of Independence for your July 4th enjoyment.

4:19 pm • 4 July 2010

nybooks:

Apartheid’s Twisted Dream: David Goldblatt’s South Africa

Joseph Lelyveld

“Goldbatt’s way was always to go deeper, to find an oblique angle that went right to the heart of the matter: an image bespeaking loneliness, stunted aspiration, fragile pride on both sides of the racial divide, not infrequently with an intimation of imminent violence, or its result.”

Picnic on New Year’s Day, Hartebeespoort Dam, 1965
Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

4:16 pm • 4 July 2010 • 11 notes

"Wir lernen aus unserer eigenen Geschichte, wozu der Mensch fähig ist. Deshalb dürfen wir uns nicht einbilden, wir seien nun als Menschen anders und besser geworden."

Richard von Weiszäcker, Zum 40. Jahrestag der Beendigung des Krieges in Europa und der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschafti: Ansprache des Bundespräsidenten am 8. Mai 1985 in der Gedenkstunde im Plenarsaal des Deutschen Bundestages

4:57 pm • 1 July 2010

An original, crossposted to dissentispatriotic.net

5:25 pm • 29 June 2010

"Under this law, when President Jimmy Carter monitored the June 2009 elections in Lebanon, and met with all of the parties to advise them on fair election practices, he could have been prosecuted for providing “material support,” in the form of “expert advice” to a designated group, because he advised Hezbollah. It means that when the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post published op-eds by Hamas leaders in recent years, they were engaging in the crime of providing “material support” to a designated terrorist group, because doing so provided Hamas a “service.” And it means that my clients, a retired judge and a human rights group, cannot continue to work for peace and human rights on behalf of the Kurds in Turkey, as they had been doing before the law took effect, without risking long prison terms."

DAVID COLE in the New York Review of (Each Other’s) Books on Kagan, Obushma, and Supreme Court argumentation.

1:51 am • 29 June 2010 • 1 note