It’s still the wealth gap, stupid

Image source: Center for Financial Social Work, 2013.

According to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, some businessmen are looking at the economic data, and they’re worried. The problem, from their perspective, isn’t taxes. The problem isn’t regulation. No; from what they can see, the problem is that the middle class — the people who buy their products — don’t have enough money.

Mirabile dictu, some people are finally beginning to connect the dots.

As I’ve noted in this blog before, since 1999 real income has been declining for everyone in the bottom 80%. For those who need the explanation, you get paid today in nominal dollars; real dollars are nominal dollars after inflation has been taken into account. Theoretically, real wages stay flat when income increases match price increases, and rise when wage increases outpace price increases.

And in fact, nominal wage increases did outpace price increases throughout the Clinton Administration, such that the real wage increase by 2000 was 15.79% across the bottom 80%.[1] But from 1999 to 2012, real wages declined an average of 10.59% across the bottom 80%, until they were only marginally better than they had been in 1980; in the case of the bottom 20%, almost all gains were wiped out.

Real wages only tell part of the story. Between January 1983 and November 2013, personal savings dipped alarmingly, from 10.4% of disposable income to 4.2%, while the real consumer debt per household more than doubled, from $11,386 to $23,238. Between 1980 and 2012, the middle classes’ share of aggregate income diminished from 51.7% to 45.7%; as of 2010, the bottom 80% had only 11% of total net worth and 5% of financial wealth. And while median net worth and financial wealth decreased across racial lines, for the average black and Hispanic household such things practically disappeared between 2006 and 2010.[2]

Image source: Fed. Reserve Bank of San Francisco, 2013.

This post is for MEN ONLY!

It started life as a hashtag hoax, but
picked up some real agreement.

That’s right, ladies: I’m going to talk directly to men about man stuff. So I suggest you go read one of my friends (see my blogroll down in the right-hand column near the bottom). Or read Catholic Stand, or New Evangelist Monthly. If you do read this post, and you’re offended by anything I say — well, like the Piano Man said in the song "Big Shot", “Go and cry in your coffee, but don’t come b****in’ to me.”

*          *          *

Okay, gents, listen up: We have a problem, and it’s mostly a problem of our making. What’s the problem? Let me work up to it slowly:

I know some of you call yourselves “dogs”. Why? Because dogs can’t say “no” to sex. Dogs don’t want to say “no” to sex. A dog doesn’t care how he gets laid, when he gets laid, by whom he gets laid, or what happens after he gets laid. He gets a whiff of pheromones, and he’s going for it. A dog thinks with his gonads … if he thinks at all.

A man can say “no” to sex. In fact, there are times when he says “Hell, no!” to sex. He cares about the how and the when and the by whom and the what happens after; he thinks about these things; he thinks about what’s right, about whether the rewards are worth the risks, and what the consequences may be.

A dog is not a man. If you’re a man, you can’t be a dog about sex. If you’re gonna be a dog, don’t pretend you’re a man. Sex doesn’t make you a man. You can f**k? Congratulations; you’ve got something in common with every mammal on the planet.

Why don’t we try trusting the Holy Spirit?

I was going to hold my tongue, please believe me. I’d already written a “Circular Catholic Firing Squad” post last week. I’ve already written posts explaining what I find valuable and admirable about traditionalism, what I dislike about a certain kind of traditionalist, and what’s wrong with sedevacantism (which is not coterminous with traditionalism).

Nope; no matter how many spittle-flecked nutties the Usual Suspects would throw about Pope Francis praying with Patriarch Bartholomew I (Eastern Orthodox), Israeli president Shimon Peres (Jewish) and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (Moslem), I wasn’t going to say bubkes.

Then, a more popular blogger than I, with whom I’m “Facebook friends” and whom I’ll decline to identify, posted a quick status note: “Can we please stop showing love and concern toward false religions and start showing love to those who follow them?” This, taken by itself, wasn’t bad. But what followed was ugly:

But wait. That would imply that we care about their souls. The pope doesn’t seem concerned about that, so I guess I shouldn’t be either? … There needs to be a schism, so that people who want to be Catholic will have a chance to. We can get ourselves a Catholic pope, too.

That did it. I blew up: “Here’s a wild idea: Why don’t we try trusting the leadership and guidance of the Holy Spirit promised to the Apostles (John 14:36, 16:13) instead of nitpicking every act of the Pope for signs of apostasy? I’m not saying you have to love everything he does, or that he’s above criticism. I will say, though, that schism’s been tried before; you can see how well THAT worked out.”

Pope Francis and the libertarians

Cdl. Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga.

So far up to this point, I’ve been deafened by the lack of libertarian reaction to Cdl. Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga’s keynote speech at Catholic University of America’s conference on Catholicism and libertarianism. After all, it’s been more than forty-eight hours since Religion News Service’s David Gibson and Church whisperer Rocco Palmo broke the story.

Perhaps there’s some confusion among the ranks; as Kevin and Teresa Rice explain in Catholibertarian, “As it is uncommon to find two Libertarians who agree on very much, there is a wide room for difference of opinion and degree of commitment to at least the latter part of this composite.” Is what Cdl. Rodríguez condemned something that at least three out of four self-described libertarians assert?

Or perhaps libertarians and other conservatives have just stopped listening to the Church on economic matters. Cdl. Rodríguez cited an article in the National Catholic Fishwrap by Michael Sean Winters, who further references the ineffable Fr. John Zuhlsdorf: “I wonder how many people are still listening to [Pope Francis] seriously on this issue …. It comes across as naive, out of step with history.” This extract, partial and out-of-context as it is, is gentler than the nutty thrown by John Moody of FOX News:

By appearing to sanction what amounts to forced redistribution, Francis grievously exceeded his authority and became what amounts to a robe-wearing politician. He also exposed his Church, one of the wealthiest institutions in the world [one of the most pernicious myths in Western history], to inevitable charges of hypocrisy. And he put himself in a position of having to back up his frothy talk with ruinous action.

As I’ve noted in The Impractical Catholic, political progressives aren’t the only Americans who practice “cafeteria Catholicism”; not all conservatives and libertarians are above doctrinal cherry-picking.

“Mere Catholicism” vs. Real Catholicism™

Which one is the Real Catholic™?

The Circular Catholic Firing Squad found more bullets this last week. *sigh*

It appears that a Popular Catholic Blogger (whom I will not identify) called BS in the combox of another Not-So-Popular Catholic Blogger (ditto). After some vicious squabbling in NSPCB’s combox and on PCB’s Facebook page, joined in by other Well-Known Catholic Bloggers, NSPCB left the field of bloggery in a huff — or, per Groucho, in a minute and a huff — calling down divine retribution on all those who had the gall to correct him for their lack of charity.

In reference to this shindy, Scott Eric Alt commented on Facebook, “Pride is the most dangerous of sins because it is the least correctible — the very nature of the sin makes its victim feel himself to be above correction. The adulteress wept, and the Pharisee sneered.” Whether because of pride or narcissism or a particularly nasty combination of both, it’s very tempting for a Catholic blogger (Your Humble Blogger included) to make him/herself and his tribe the point of reference for Real Catholicism™.

The problem isn’t that there’s no normative or “mere” Catholicism, with distinct borders that define it as well as distinguish it from not-Catholicism. The first problem is that, while the Greek root katholikos means “universal”, Real Catholicism™ tries to make that universe smaller; it becomes more concerned with kicking “fake Catholics” to the curb than with correcting error or instructing the unknowing. The second problem is that, because Catholics are split politically by our god-awful culture wars, political language confuses and pollutes the competing monologues (very little real dialogue takes place). For example, see Hilary White’s diatribe in The Remnant  of a couple years ago, in which she condescendingly equates “neo-Catholicism” (almost-but-not-quite Real Catholicism™) with political progressivism. (EEK! RUN AWAY!)

GMOs and science for hire—UPDATED

I have this horrible suspicion that he's trying to be funny.

Comedian/activist Lee Camp asks, in the meme to your left, “Where is all the Christian outrage against GMO foods? The Lord’s creations weren’t good enough?” The most obvious answer is, “If Christians did get outraged about genetically-modified foods, we’d be written off as ‘anti-science’, so why bother?”

A better answer is that Christianity is more properly focused on us in our relations with God and other people. Proper stewardship of the earth, though not an irrelevant topic, is quite a bit removed from the “ground zero” of divine revelation and apostolic tradition.

Some Christians are against genetic modification; for instance, a fellow Catholic who contributes frequently to The Distributist Review, John Médaille, opposes GMOs. But I think it’s safe to say that the bulk of Christians who oppose GMOs can and do so without dragging the Lord’s name into it. An argument against GM foods could probably be made from Leviticus 19:19 (“You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds of stuff”). However, as I’ve noted elsewhere, Christians aren’t bound to observe the Law of Moses; ritual purity is less important than compassion and avoidance of sin.

For my own part, I’ve not read enough of the relevant literature to take a stand either way. But to slam GMO’s opponents as “anti-science” is both wrong and misleading. Monsanto is the main target, but the agro-biotech giant is also the symbol of corporate regulatory capture of federal watchdog agencies. The fear isn’t of science or technology per se, but rather of “science for hire” — the insidious influence over scientific research wielded by the dreaded, dreadful “one-percenters”.

Stress cards and trigger warnings

The "blues card", aka the "stress card".
(Source: Snopes.com.)

Let me ask all the military veterans that stumble onto this post: Do you remember the stories about the Navy’s “stress cards”?

I read about them but they weren’t using them when I was in. If I remember correctly, it was a little yellow card that they gave you. Apparently if things were getting tough for you in basic, you could flash the card and the DI would back off and give you a “break” so you could compose yourself. The standing joke was that the color of the card spoke for itself ... The idea, if I remember right, was heavily criticized (and rightfully so, what are you going to do in real life when the bullets start to fly, pull out the stress card and hope the bad guys stop shooting at you?) and the idea was eventually canned.

This is but one variation Snopes.com reports on the urban legend. In fact, the “stress card”, officially titled the “Blues Card”, was a listing issued in the early 1990s of resources Navy recruits could turn to if they were considering “giving up” or “running away”. Continues author Barbara Mikkleson, “Navy RDCs (Recruit Division Commanders) began reporting that some recruits had taken to raising their cards while being disciplined as a way of signaling for a ‘time out.’ It’s unclear whether any of those enduring basic training really thought that was the purpose of the cards or whether this was just standard armed forces jackassing, but the Navy took no chances and got rid of the cards.”

I was reminded of the “stress cards” by reading Karen Swallow Prior’s Atlantic essay, “‘Empathetically Correct’ Is the New Politically Correct”. Prior, following Neil Postman’s foreword in Amusing Ourselves to Death, contends that trigger warnings follow Aldous Huxley’s vision of “an internal form of control that becomes externalized — empathetic correctness.” The students themselves become the censors.

One hundred eighty seconds

° 2001 United Press Syndicate.

I’d seen the interview scenario before: Two team leaders, neither of whom had the power to hire me, asking boilerplate questions that the real decision-maker would use to determine whether I would have a future with the company. This pair were almost twins, nearly identical down to facial features, except that one positively brightened in response to my warmth and self-effacing humor, while the other remained determinedly serious.

Smileyface asked the question I dread at these kinds of interviews: “What would your supervisors say are your greatest strength and greatest weakness?”

“Well,” I replied cautiously, “my greatest strength is my ability to build relationships with customers. The downside of my approach, however, is that it’s a little more time-intensive.”

Frowneyface, who had been silent up to that point, pounced. “Oh, you take too long?”

This is precisely why I dread that question. On the one hand, I’ve never felt comfortable shading the truth, let alone outright lying. Generally, people have a right to hear the truth and an obligation to tell the truth, leaving aside extreme cases and questions of national security. On the other hand, this interview setup is designed to find reasons to not hire candidates, and I’d just given one to Frowneyface.

To an accountant, the customer service department is an expense; to maximize efficiency, the cost per hour of a phone line must be divided out by as many calls as possible. The word queue is used very much in the British sense: behind the customer you’re talking to, other customers are tapping their feet, impatiently waiting to be served.

One hundred eighty seconds. Or less … preferably much less. That’s the average time you’re given to verify the customer, dope out the issue, resolve it, and get him/her off your line.

Dancing with the Devil—UPDATED

Satanic Temple's proposed statue of Satan ... which is actually
based on a picture of Baphomet, which is probably a 12th-
century corruption of Mohammed. So much for research.

This post was rewritten for length and republished in Catholic Stand on May 15, 2014, at the request of my editor, Diane McKelva.

*     *     * 

The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.

—Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

In today’s academic milieu, you should expect that a Black Mass performed by a group calling itself “The Satanic Temple” under the auspices of an Ivy League university to be a bold, daring exercise in transgressing boundaries, right? Especially if the celebrants use a Host consecrated at a legitimate Catholic Mass for ritual desecration.

Well, not so much. For one thing, a spokesperson for the Temple, Priya Dua, officially denied the use of a real Host (after initially confirming it) in a conversation with Elizabeth Scalia (The Anchoress). Ms. Scalia also quotes an anonymous spokesperson, who told her, “Please understand, there is in fact, respect for the beliefs of others, and our intention was not to be in anyone’s face. We did not mean to mislead.” And Boston Magazine says the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club released a statement that read in part, “Our purpose is not to denigrate any religion or faith, which would be repugnant to our educational purposes, but instead to learn and experience the history of different cultural practices.”

But Doug Mesner, aka “Lucien Greaves”, supposedly the head of The Satanic Temple, doesn’t seem to be reading the same script. According to Kaitlyn Schallhorn of Campus Reform, Mesner asserted that the HECSC Black Mass “will mock rituals of other mainstream religious rituals [sic]”, so Catholics aren’t the only ones being dissed. On the question of the consecrated host, Mesner is suspiciously coy, telling The Anchoress that he doubted anyone would “waste time going to all that trouble” to get one (really? Only falling off a log would be less trouble), but telling Schallhorn “he couldn’t call it a ‘consecrated host’ as Catholics do” … which, The Anchoress points out, implies that Catholics could call their host consecrated.

Check your identity politics

Monster Privilege. (© 2013 garsedj)

Tal Fortgang is sick of being told to “check your privilege”.

Fortgang, 20, is a sophomore at Princeton, which is just liberal enough to suffer a paper/website for conservative students, the Tory. Now, for a student at an Ivy League school to tell another, “Check your privilege,” is at face value unexpected; it’s like two peers of the British realm blackguarding each other as elitists. However, much as G. K. Chesterton once said of Britain’s peerage, it’s precisely because schools like Princeton, Harvard and Yale are bastions of America’s aristocracy that they’re noisy hives of fashionable progressivism rather than museums to staid, stuffy conservativism. For class warfare, no one can make war on the rich like their own children.

Fortgang fumes, “The phrase [“Check your privilege”], handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. ‘Check your privilege,’ they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.”

Fortgang’s rant in the Tory ran April 2. Two weeks later, the progressive Princetonian fired back with a post from freshman columnist Mitchell Hammer. “Once I got past the irrelevant, anti-liberal rhetoric — comparing the use of the phrase ‘check your privilege’ to the descent of ‘an Obama-sanctioned drone’ did little to help me understand Fortgang’s argument — I realized that Fortgang wasn’t wrong. He just didn’t get it.” How Fortgang could “not get it” and still not be wrong, Hammer doesn’t bother to puzzle out; logic, as we will soon see, isn’t Hammer’s forte.