The recovery that isn’t

In December, the federal government released information that the gross domestic product was up 4.1% for the third quarter of 2013, and that 203,000 people had been employed, bringing the unemployment rate to 7.0%. Time to pop the champagne corks; it finally appears the recovery is taking hold, right?

Jobs lost, October 2006 – October 2013

Increase in real disposable income, 1979 – 2010.
(Graphic source: Washington Post.)

Somebody forgot to tell the rest of us. While the Bloomberg consumer confidence level is the highest it’s been since August, it’s still not where it was in November 2007. A recent Gallup survey showed that almost twice as many Americans believe the economy is “poor” as believe that it is “excellent” or “good”, and that over half believe it’s getting worse. Over 4 million of the 8.656 million jobs lost from October 2006 to October 2009 are still missing from the economy; many of those who lost jobs left the market and haven’t returned.[1] Congress is shutting off extended unemployment benefits even though the average length of unemployment is still 37.2 weeks, over twice as long as in September 2007 (16.3). ABC News tells us, “While more than 2 million new jobs were created in 2013, a large share of them were low-income retail and restaurant positions.”

If that weren’t enough of a buzz kill: Alan Greenspan reminds us that businesses still aren’t making large investments in fixed assets or long-term Treasury bonds. While consumer spending is up, income isn’t rising to match. In fact, Peter Thiel shows us that the real average income of bachelor’s degree recipients has dropped over the last ten years even as student-loan debt and college tuition increased; and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) enjoins us to “focus like a laser” on the light blue line of the graphic to your left, which shows that the middle 60% of incomes has not increased as much as even the bottom quintile.

Phil Robertson's other controversial statement

Amen, brother.

Are we done hyperventilating over Phil Robertson’s GQ interview?

Actually, it’s been kinda fun watching the MSM clutch their pearls over Robertson’s unapologetic assertion that gay sex is unnatural. After all, these are people who have spent no little amount of broadcast time painting Southern Evangelical Christians as inbred, backwoods-residing, mouth-breathing Luddites with a penchant for “flat earth” theories; they have no room in their collective subconscious for Bible-thumpers who are technologically up-to-date and show quite a bit of marketing savvy. Robertson’s forthright citation of 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 is precisely the kind of thing they should have expected. So we no more believe in their overdone displays of rage and condemnation than we believe that Louis was shocked, shocked to discover gambling at Rick’s gin joint.

Amazingly, there has been little public support for A&E’s decision to suspend further appearances by Robinson on his own show. The comfort-food restaurant chain Cracker Barrel tried removing Duck Commander products from their in-restaurant stores, only to bring them back out when their customers protested the decision.

Even more strikingly, various gay activists have gone so far as to publicly support Robertson and cry “shame, shame” on A&E. Said Brandon Ambrosino in TIME.com, “G.K. Chesterton said that bigotry is ‘an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.’ If he is right — and he usually is — then I wonder if the Duck Dynasty fiasco says more about our bigotry than Phil’s.” And former NOW leader Tammy Bruce tweeted her followers, “The gay civil rights movement was about making sure we weren’t punished for being who we are. Time the left applies that same value to others.”

No “Christmas” without Christ

Who is your favorite Scrooge? (George C. Scott)

There are few things more pathetic than American Atheists’ annual billboard effort to piss on Christmas. This year, despite their attempt to claim the holiday for their own, is no exception.

Start with the group American Atheists, founded in 1963 by the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair of vile memory. O’Hair, an amazingly foul-mouthed harridan, was famous for her rants that were long on invective and short on subject-matter knowledge; if anything, she was the model for the internet atheist, the kind that makes classic atheists shake their heads and moan in despair. After her sad end in 1995 (abducted and murdered along with her son and granddaughter by a former AA office manager), the leadership of American Atheists were content to let their organization coast along unnoticed and unremarked by the general populace until atheist writers such as Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens raised a wave of public interest early in the last decade.

That is when they decided, with characteristic intellectual laziness, that Christianity could be advertised out of the public square.

Perhaps it was current public relations director, Dave Muscato, who came up with the notion that the average American attends church only out of social compunction and would quit doing so if only she were encouraged to break with everyone else. Maybe that was the case in the Catholic Church prior to 1968 — weekly Mass attendance slumped dramatically after Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae that year. That model might have obtained in the mainline Protestant congregations before they abandoned traditional Christian teachings for trendy lefty innovations. Nowadays, though, the only people who go to church without really believing in anything are Unitarians. Result: thousands of dollars spent on ads telling people who don’t go to church anyway to sleep in on Sunday. Bright … real bright.

The “starter job” myth and economic reality

After my post on Impractical Catholic, “Conservative ‘cafeteria Catholics’ on parade”, got linked into Facebook, my fellow Catholic Stand writer, screenwriter/producer John Darrouzet, asked me if I’d seen Jon Stewart roast the FOXNews business pundits on The Daily. Thoughtfully, he provided a link in case I hadn’t. I hadn’t, because I don’t follow either The Daily or The Colbert Report. (I just don’t watch a lot of TV anymore.)

If you haven’t seen it, go ahead and watch it now; I’ll still be here when you get done.

INTERMISSION

Stewart is at the top of his game; but then, morons of that caliber are almost too easy to mock. FOX must have some kind of satanic genius for picking commentators that liberals can laugh at; Megyn Kelly’s jaw-droppingly racist “white Santa” statement was an early Christmas — er, “holiday” present for left-wing wits all over the nation.

The one comment that really arrested my attention was made by — I’m sorry, I don’t know any of the players on The Kudlow Report, so I’ll just call her “Talking Head #2”: “I’m a big fan of ‘empowerment’ over ‘entitlement’, and these minimum-wage jobs aren’t meant to be life-long jobs; they’re supposed to get your foot in the door and get skills ….” Or, as a co-worker of mine spat, “They’re supposed to be ‘starter jobs’ for high-school kids, kids working their way through college!”

I don’t know where that myth got started. That it is a myth, a just-so story devised to confirm alrightniks like TH2 in their vocational superiority and material comfort, is incontestable. In the normal course of operations, businesses don’t create jobs to fit a particular kind of applicant; they create the job and then fit hiring criteria to it. TH2 and my coworker have the sequence exactly backward.

“Ecce ancilla Domini …”

From Genesis 3:9-15, 20:

After the man, Adam, had eaten of the tree, the Lord God called to the man and asked him, “Where are you?” He answered, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself.” Then he asked, “Who told you that you were naked? You have eaten, then, from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat!” The man replied, “The woman whom you put here with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.” The Lord God then asked the woman, “Why did you do such a thing?” The woman answered, “The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.”

Then the Lord God said to the serpent: “Because you have done this, you shall be banned from all the animals and from all the wild creatures; on your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.”

The man called his wife Eve, because she became the mother of all the living.

Blessed John Paul tells us that the story of Genesis contains not only the story of the first sin and Man’s fall but also “the first foretelling of victory over evil, over sin” (Mulieris Dignitatem 11, emphasis in original). Our enmity with Satan stems not from our being children of Adam but rather from our being children of Eve, the Progenetrix; and it is her remote offspring, the Son of Man, who will crush the serpent in retribution for his deception.

First Sunday in Advent

From Isaiah 2:1-5 NAB:

This is what Isaiah, son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. In days to come,

The mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills.

All nations shall stream toward it; many peoples shall come and say:

“Come, let us climb the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob,

That he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.”

For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between the nations, and impose terms on many peoples.

They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks;

One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.

O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!

What is Advent? Advent is the beginning of the Christian liturgical year. It’s a season of preparation for the Feast of the Nativity of the Lord. “Advent has a twofold character, for it is a time of preparation for the Solemnities of Christmas, in which the First Coming of the Son of God to humanity is remembered, and likewise a time when, by remembrance of this, minds and hearts are led to look forward to Christ’s Second Coming at the end of time. For these two reasons, Advent is a period of devout and expectant delight” (Roman Missal, p. 114, §39). In the words of the Catechism, “When the Church celebrates the liturgy of Advent each year, she makes present this ancient expectancy of the Messiah, for by sharing in the long preparation for the Savior’s first coming, the faithful renew their ardent desire for his second coming” (CCC 524; cf. Revelation 22:17).

In loving (and selective) memory

Dealey Plaza, looking at the grassy knoll (left) and the former
Texas School Book Depository Building (background).

How long can a city wear sackcloth and ashes for a crime it didn’t commit?

The memorial at Dealey Plaza was rather low-key, which could have been expected even without the bone-squeezing wet cold of the day. Some conspiracy theorists and some citizens protesting police brutality tried to horn in on the solemnities. It could have been worse, however: it could have turned into an anti-conservative bashapalooza.

 The fact is, a significant number of people younger than me — depending on where you place the cutoff, I’m either at the trailing edge of the boomers or in the vanguard of Generation X — tend to view the youth of the 1960s as supremely narcissistic, and the annual spasm of grief over the assassination of John F. Kennedy as just one more symptom of their emotional retardation. And, in all candor, the constantly reiterated “death of innocence” line is not only tiresome and melodramatic but inapposite, as cynics aren’t necessarily any more objective than are idealists; cynicism is merely idealism distorted by despair.

Nevertheless, this cross-generational impatience is too brutally dismissive. Even with a proper appreciation of Kennedy’s all-too-human failings as a Catholic, a husband and a politician, there is still no known sin in his life up to that point that made his death a poetic justice. Even Abraham Lincoln’s most vociferous opponents were astonished and mortified by his death, and Lincoln was a far more controversial man who held power during a more violent, agonized period of our history. By contrast, even given some of the tensions created by the civil rights movement during the time, nobody could look objectively at the events of 1963 and say that Kennedy’s assassination was inevitable. By any reasonable evaluation, it was a tragedy and ought to be acknowledged as such.

However, in the midst of the ritualized outpouring of nostalgia and mourning for a popular president gunned down in the prime of his manhood, there has been some effort to rewrite the history surrounding Dealey Plaza so progressives can draw parallels between 1963 and 2013 — parallels that are far-fetched and, quite frankly, inane.

What do we want from our schools?

Follow the link to The Anchoress’ page, and read as people bemoan the ignorance displayed by American College Students as Rhonda Fink-Whitman, author of the historical novel 94 Maidens, pounces on them with questions about World War II, the Holocaust, and genocide today. Not only do they moan, they also point fingers, search for causes, and wonder whether a legally mandated curriculum is an appropriate remedy.

One comment, from “Patrick”, didn’t attract attention from anyone but me:

Yeah, well; I aced the advanced placement European history test and was first place in the geography bee, and got the highest grade possible in Advanced American history ... And I can’t say that I’ve led a good life and certainly not a happy one ... So, you know — it doesn’t matter a tinker’s dam to me that I can tell you, in detail, about the Boer War or something.

I’m not surprised no one engaged this bit of educational heresy. Them What Has Bin Eddicated take it for granted that Knowledge is Power^®, that those who do well in school generally do better in other areas of life, that to have letters after your name like M.Sc. or Ph.D. will open more doors for you and make you a better person than will a mere G.E.D. If you can’t leverage your education into a good, happy life — oh, well; sucks to be you.

All of which is true in general terms; yet I can’t mock Patrick for expecting knowledge of the Boer War, the Treaty of Westphalia or the bimetallism question to lead him to Elysian fields. Why? Because then he would be well within his rights to ask me, “If it’s not guaranteed to make me a better, happier person, then what’s it good for? Why bother with it?”

How do we answer?

Pope Francis and the “issues trap”

Joanne McPortland’s amusing “Parable of the Papal Interview” expressed a simple truth: orthodox Catholics who have actually read the interview Pope Francis gave Fr. Antonio Spadaro, SJ have mostly loved it. Forget what you’ve read elsewhere: Pope Francis may be unorthodox in his style, but his substance is by no means heterodox.

So I had to chuckle when a troll popped up in the combox to say, “Not at all a good parable because it is so predictable. Right wing cognitive dissonance over the Pope’s interview prevents them from really hearing what he said.”

You see, this piece of complacent snottiness popped up after the rest of the progressive world was gobsmacked by what the AP’s Nicole Winfield, in her original lede, called Francis’ “bizarre U-turn”: a speech given Thursday to Italian gynecologists, in which he slammed abortion and euthanasia as parts of a “throwaway culture”. Talk about cognitive dissonance — Matthew Balan of NewsBusters observes that Winfield’s new lede still tries to preserve the “progressive” box in which media liberals have put Papa Bergoglio by calling it an “olive branch” offered to the “more doctrine-minded, conservative wing”.

This is what comes of not paying close attention to what the Pope is saying, of trying to pigeonhole any pope — hell, any major player. My buddy Frank Weathers, for instance, points us to a 2006 speech in which Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI also spoke of the “issues trap” to Swiss bishops on their ad limina visit. And Marcel LeJeune of Aggie Catholics includes other quotes that, taken by themselves, would lead one to conclude that B16 is a liberal. Quoth the wise man Thomas L. McDonald, “There is not a hairsbreadth of difference between the theology of Francis and Benedict.” Different styles, same substance.

The passion of Dan Grieco

SK Daniel J. Grieco: Beloved husband, father,
friend and brother Knight.

Dan Grieco (1948 – 2013) was in many ways the man I want to be when I grow up.

Dan was one of the first people I met when my brother Bob and I joined our parish’s Knights of Columbus council in 2007. If you met him only once, you might just write him off as a “nice guy”. As you got to know him, however, you learned just how shallow such an assessment could be.

Dan was singularly passionate about everything, from the Church and the pro-life movement to hardwood floors. Whatever he was doing, he was excited about it, and he did his level best to get you excited about it too. Commitment was not a dirty word to Dan; it was almost his motto. If there was a project, he would be the first person to arrive — ready to work — and the last person to leave.

So far as Dan was “nice”, it wasn’t just a general air of bonhomie: he took avid interest in other people’s lives, was warm, engaging and funny, and had no hesitation about telling other people — even other men — “I love you”. If you were in the hospital, you could pretty much count on a visit from Dan. His love for his wife and children was boundless, a shining constant in his life.

But the reason I write of Dan here is because that same vital combination of passion and commitment showed through in his religiosity. Dan’s love of God and the Church was just as fierce, devoted and fully committed as his love for his family and friends. You could almost use the word zealous, except that the idea of zealotry has been spoiled by violent nutjobs; Dan was disgustingly sane. Of all the people I’ve known, he was the best at “walking the talk”.