FUN TIDINGS FROM GATEWAY PUNDIT:


1) Poor starving student Sandra Fluke needs $3000 to keep her from getting pregnant by a boyfriend who can afford to take her all over the world on exotic vacations but can't seem to cough up for the pills or rubber goods. Nice.

Ha! A Bill O'Reilly viewer writes in that with all her political activism and world travels, it's a wonder Ms. Fluke (that's pronounced "fluck", she tells us) will become "Sandra Flunk". Heh.

[totally unrelated network time killer:]




2) The Arab Spring and the Religion of Pieces -- bringing back crucifixion and penal amputations just in time for Easter.

[apropos of which:]





Not from Gateway Pundit, but from me:

CHRISTIANITY IS HARD

Spent most of the day in and around the sites of the mission and martyrdom of St. Jean de Brébeuf and St. Gabriel Lalement, near Midland, Ontario. A beautiful day, with sunshine and cool breeze amid melting remnants of snow at the foot of bare birches, next to a small but noisy river, as the ice was breaking up on nearby lakes and ponds and inlets -- just one day before the 363rd anniversary of that day of terror, torture, and murder, March 16, 1649.


We were a small group of pilgrims, mostly kids and seminarians, praying the Mass on the holy ground of St. Ignace, just a stone's throw from the wooden cross and the two upright tree trunks which stand on the site of the stakes that held up the clubbed, slashed, gouged, broiled and branded bodies of the two Jesuit missionaries.

It wasn't hard to picture who to pray for at the foot of those stakes -- those who suffer in all too similar a way to this very day: the Chaldeans, Coptics, Christians from Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Egypt all hounded, battered, and blown from the homes they've held for two thousand years in the cradle of Christendom; the innocents blown apart from Jerusalem to Gaza to Kandahar to Nigeria to Bali; the women [scroll down] burned, beaten, dissolved, stoned, and clitorectomied in the name of patriarchy; Menchaca and Tucker, and Danny Pearl mutilated and beheaded by Al Qaeda.

It's still hell on wheels at full speed out there, and it still tears into the flesh and makes rivers of blood. Christianity is still hard, and defending the right, and just getting by day to day in turbulent corners of the world, whatever one's faith or culture.

And prayer still helps, even when you're not standing at the foot of the stakes where the ground has been seeded with the blood of martyrs. At least I'd like to think so. Some days it's hard.

YES, THERE'S A WAR ON WOMEN

NO, YOU SILLY COW, IT IS NOT HAPPENING
IN NORTH AMERICA


Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compares American "extremists" trying to control women's "health" to those controlling, veiling, imprisoning, raping, selling, burning, stoning, beating, and dissolving with acid the women of the Muslim world, in her remarks at the hip and glamourous Women in the World conference now twinkling amid the bright lights of New York and Meryl Streep's Oscar. Wow.

All because a Georgetown Law-Student/left-wing-activist told the eager stenographers at a press event that she needs her student insurance (costing her $1,895 per annum -- while the average cost for an individual covered by an employer in 2011 was $5,429) to protect her from the consequences of three years of campus sex, after which she will graduate and make around $160,000 at her first job. Interestingly, her family did NOT subject her to an honour killing for bringing humiliation upon them through her public act of brazen hussy-dom.

Dear Mrs. Clinton: this is what it looks like to be a woman oppressed by the extremists in her society.

Below is one of the few photographs found at the links that follow which I dare put up for the unprepared visitor -- most of the others are too horrific to spring on any adult without warning. But do look at them -- look at what Secretary of State Hilary Clinton considers equivalent to a world with one less avenue for free contraceptives for the would-be-sterile American woman.


Here.

Here. [link corrected]

Here.

I now pronounce you man and baby-wife.

Today, while the glitterati self-medicate on their benevolent wonderfulness at the Women in the World confab, Afghan women contemplate their next move in the face of the Karzai government's acceptance of a throwback declaration from the council of leading Muslim clerics that women are a secondary species whose future lies in Sharia servitude.

Recall if you will: Mrs. Clinton proclaimed to the women of Afghanistan back in 2010, "We will not abandon you; we will stand with you always." And she gave them a photo-op in Bonn, Germany, last December. It was the ten-year anniversary of a conference convened ostensibly, risibly, so that the international community could work out a future for Afghanistan. In December they met again -- to plot the course for their craven crawl out the back door. Community organizing at its finest.


And from Instapundit:

Egypt celebrates International Women's Day by condemning the 1978 UN Convention on sexual discrimination as incompatible with Sharia law.

It made a nice symmetrical pairing with their aquittal of an army doctor accused of sexually assaulting female protesters by conducting "virginity tests".


In what tried very hard to be a related matter, cartoonist Gary Trudeau found his anti-anti-abortion comic strips getting booted from a number of newspaper pages this week, since they portrayed the new Texas pre-abortion ultrasound mandate as a form of rape (that comes in the Tuesday or Wednesday strip) because it requires a transvaginal examination.

Odd.

The abortion itself requires all kinds of transvaginal goodies, from such graduated laminaria, cannulas and scoops as might be needed, to the partial-birthing perforator and cranioclast, the uses of which are self-evident (brought to you by the Rhein Group, here in all their glory). If we are to believe that an ultrasound microphone constitutes invasion and rape, surely the potential abortion-mill customer has already implicitly agreed to a lot more serious indignities courtesy of the standard instruments of abortion.

The transvaginal ultrasound, I might add, can be used to examine those pregnant women who actually want their babies (I had one once) and later on in life it is useful for tracking the progress of uterine fibroids (had a couple of those too).

Get over it, Trudeau, and all your little clucking feminist acolytes along with you. There's nothing fun about a transvaginal ultrasound, but as invasions go, it's pretty much a tempest in my tea-pot.

Footnote: A caller to Mark Steyn (sitting in for the notorious Rush Limbaugh today) noted how the President of (we are led to believe) the entire United States managed to find time to call Ms. Fluke, the Georgetown former virgin, to express his sympathy that the big bad radio blow-hard blew her sensibilities a little too hard and called her nasty names. The caller wondered to Steyn why Mr. Obama had not yet found the time to call one single person who lost their entire life's goods, maybe their livelihood, and perhaps even some family members, in the recent tornadoes. Nor did he call to lend support and give due public recognition to the woman who lost both her legs while saving her own children from being crushed when a tornado destroyed their Indiana home. Maybe he'll remember her if he gets another shot at the SOTU. (God forbid. And I mean it, God.)

Odd. And Mr. Obama really didn't need to go out of his way to comfort Ms. Fluke -- he could have just hit speed-dial and passed on his message to Fluke's handler, former Obama Communications Director Anita Dunn, disgraced and bounced from her job after praising Mao Zedong in a strangely slurpy speech to high school grads. She seems to have landed on her purty liddle feet, and is now having public relations with Sandra Fluke, or something like that. It's all inside the Beltway to me.

Priorities, folks. Hopey Changitude.

Republicans want to steal your Lady-parts! Film at 11:00!

MINOR MILEPOST:

My counter just hit 25,000 views to date. I wonder how many thousand of them were only looking for the "hippie room" picture on these posts? Happens ALL THE TIME, and drives me nuts. Oh well, maybe those surfers picked up a little dram of wisdom on their way to the photo link. Anyhow, here I am at 25K, down a long road since I decided to have my say about Cindy Sheehan in 2005. (Wow -- I didn't even know how to do links when I wrote that.) Today, I jumped on board a Facebook page calling out for "One Million Breitbarts" -- to have done so makes me look almost as narcissistic as the President (who in the past 24 hours has compared himself to Gandhi and Mandella), but I guess we all have to nurture a little ambition.

OH NO.

ANDREW BREITBART, DEAD AT 43

What do we do now?


A great warrior for the cause -- perhaps the most warrior-like figure in the entire American conservative movement -- volatile, funny, abrasive, fearless, entirely at home in his own skin, always simmering and ready to boil -- it's probably accurate to say that he wore himself out in the cause of speaking the truth no matter how noisy and threatening the efforts to shout him down and shut him up.

Breitbart (it just seems natural to call him by his last name, like he was his own corporation or country) was a brilliant innovator in all the new media, and his pioneering work has changed everything about the way we must approach politics if we are going to survive the gummy shackles of craven political correctness which now rules.

Roger Simon has called him a whirlwind today, and indeed it's like a gale-force wind has gone out of our sails. Hard to imagine how we will survive what promises to be a bloody election year contest without his voice, cutting straight through the crap.

Good obit here.

Dennis Miller, for whom Breitbart was a charming and fun substitute radio host, has just called him a noble warrior who "killed it and ate it" -- ooh-rah.

I'm going to go out today and buy the book: RIGHTeous IndigNATION.




And watch for the movie, out soon, called (tellingly) Hating Breitbart.




Andrew leaves behind a wife and four young children. And masses of devastated colleagues and friends. And a monster contingent of bereaved fans.

Andrew Breitbart 1969-2012

Requiescat in pace.

Look out, Heaven -- you have no idea what's comin'.

HOW'S THAT HOPE AND CHANGE
WORKIN' OUT FOR YA?

NO SOUP FOR YOU!!

Nevada Health Inspector raids organic farm picnic, forces owners and certified chef to destroy all food with bleach.

Not fit to eat because the bureaucrat wasn't appeased -- not fit for pigs or composting because the bureaucrat ordered it poisoned.

As my old great-auntie used to say, "Ah, it was a darlin' wake!"


What's next, folks? Government mandated chicken nuggets?

Apparently so.





2012

I HOPE

WE CHANGE

PRESIDENTS

THOSE WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY,
THEY FIRST MAKE MAD

The origin of this little Greeky proverb is mysterious and misattributed -- we can at least give this English version to Longfellow. But there's something incredibly comic about the fact that one Latinized rendering is 'Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius.' That looks vaguely like bad Latin to me [I await correction] but what better title for an article on the overreaching arrogance of the sitting President than a line that contains the words 'Prius' and 'dementat'.

And indeed, up until the past couple of weeks one might have mistaken President O's flushing of untold millions down the plug-hole of so-called 'green energy' (you remember green energy and green jobs -- the grand scheme that has brought Spain to 24% unemployment) to be his craziest of all extreme crazy programs perpetrated under his administration.

But now, after a full-on assault against Freedom of Religion under the First Amendment to the Constitution, Mr. Obama has earned this well-written proclamation nailed to the door of today's American Thinker, by J.R. Dunn.

Money quotes:

...he has struck what was surely intended to be a lethal blow against the oldest organization on earth -- an organization with something on the order of a billion members, with a cadre of hundreds of thousands of highly trained and dedicated personnel, and a history of overcoming political threats that make Obama look like a kindergartner.

...a man of vast though superficial sophistication and little insight who has punched all the tickets available to him in his epoch and culture and truly believes there is nothing else. And now this man, afraid of revealing his own college transcripts, thinks he can take on the Church of Peter, founded a millennium before the appearance of any nation now existing on this earth...

History has its own rules that are not our rules. One of them appears to state that a man who overreaches himself will fall in proportion to the extent that he has overreached. Obama has overreached himself as far as any political figure in the American record, and his fall will be proportionate. He cannot avoid this or mitigate it. His action against the Church is an example of that small class of acts that cannot be uncommitted.

Ahem.

How many divisions does the Pope have?

The B-16 bomber, powered by Conclave!


J-P II -- Santo Subito!

I'll see your freakin' UN, and raise you a World Youth Day, Madrid 2011


Sisters of Life

MOP's, Jamaica

Friars of Renewal, The Bronx

Dominicans of St. Cecilia

Missionaries of Charity


etc., etc., and so forth.................................................

Ahem.

JEFFERSON, MADISON, ADAMS, & CO:

GET THE HELL OUT OF THE ROAD


We knew this was true, but even I am surprised that the Naked Emperor is so incredibly naked.




Apparently Madame Justice Gulch finds the Constitution kind of an obstacle too.



Oh great! She invokes the Canadian Charter of Rights and Entitlements! Egypt is doomed!

Is it just me, or did these people not take some oath or something, about upholding and DEFENDING the Constitution of the U.S.of A.? (Unless, of course, Justice Gulch only used the revised and abbreviated (pukey, weenie, New Castrati) 1990 version, which dropped the "defend" and added some drivel about the poor and the rich -- I smell the ICEL at work...)

THE EISENHOWER MEMORIAL PROPOSAL:

IT'S SO CRAPPY ITS CRAPPINESS HAS ITS OWN WEBSITE


Version 1: All Pompeii ruins à la mall parking lot, with Stonehenge center


Frank Gehry, one of the two 'hottest' modern architects in the modern world (along with that cheery old soul, Daniel Libeskind, who contributed a pointy tumor to Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum), has put on his tin-foil hat and come up with a design that resembles nothing so much as the underpinnings of an unfinished overpass.

It is (a) ugly, (b) meaningless, (c) appears to be constructed out of the same kind of cheesy materials that go into too many apartment blocks, only to rust out and look like they're crumbling within a decade, and (d) unrelated in any obvious way to its subject or the period of history that he shaped.

The remaining Eisenhower family hates it.

Join them! The website tells you what you can do about it.

Here's some more trash talk on this trashy 'Deconstructivist' design.

[hat-tip Daily Caller]


Version 2: Fewer purposeless columns, more 'minimum security prison exercise yard' appeal, Stonehenge knocked over


[tip of the beret to Arch Daily 'the world's most visited architecture website', where the first three comments on the article read:

-- Zzz

-- building a memorial for one person is so 19th century. get over it...

-- wait, there's going to be an eisenhower memorial? what in heaven's name FOR?


But, you know, artists are so much more sensitive than the rest of us. What's one charging horde of Nazis more or less, huh?

REJECTING THE KEYSTONE PIPELINE
IS AN ACT OF NATIONAL INSANITY




I didn't say it. This guy did.

But on behalf of both nations, I agree.

THE COPY OF NEWSWEEK YOU MIGHT CONSIDER BUYING

Over at RedState they're soliciting photo-shopped parodies of the infamous current issue of Newsweek magazine. Check them out. These are my personal favourites:

SPIRIT OF AMERICA

Self-explanatory.



President Bush gave recognition to Spirit of America and its founder Jim Hake, but never spoke out publicly about what he knew of their work. HUGE MISTAKE. Back then, all Americans wanted to know what they could do to help the war effort, and Mr. Bush said almost nothing.

President Obama shows no evidence of even knowing about Spirit of America, or any of the other civilian programs to give aid to people living under Islamist tyranny -- and if he did know, drawing attention to their work would not fit his strategy of retreat and kow-tow. Now Americans are depressed about foreign entanglements, forgetful of the threats against their well-being, and fearful for their own economic futures.

We'll survive all that (I hope), and there will be plenty of room for the absolutely amazing work of Spirit of America or Operation International Children and others. So dig in, cough up, hand over, speak out, and change the world one little warm kid at a time.

WHO'S THE BANE NOW?

This is just too funny: Newt is telling his PAC to fix or withdraw their film on the evils of Bain Capital under Mitt Romney's tenure, because it contains some, er, lies. But who is the real villain?

Who really turfed people out of jobs in Marianna, FL, AFTER Bain sold the successfully re-structured company? Who bought Unimac from Bain, shut the whole operation down and moved to Wisconsin?


Why, it was that most notoriously cut-throat of venture capital operations, 'Teachers Private Capital, the private-equity arm of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan', says the Wall Street Journal. That's right folks! The Ontario [that's CANADA] public school teachers' union -- those dog-eat-dog capitalists who own pieces of international airports around the the world, and who just sold their majority share in the Toronto Maple Leafs, because they do NOT like LOSERS.

So Bain helped the workers recover, get raises and promotions, and have a better life. Then Ontario Teachers (because it's all for the children, right?) laid them all off and took their jobs to another state.

[hat-tip to the Wall Street Journal -- subscriber only online, but trust me, I read it in the dead tree, and it's all there]

The NewtPAC's anti-Bain film trailer is here. It's short, but there are enough clichés to satisfy anyone's appetite for cheesy self-parody worthy of Saturday Night Live. I kept waiting for that nasty banker Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life to pop up, pulling George Bailey's money out of his newspaper.

Who is the 'bane' indeed?

OK AMERICA --

PLAYTIME'S OVER

Mitt takes the New Hampshire primary with gobs of votes. Now can we please move on to a state where the grown-ups are allowed to vote without proof of mental instability? -- voters who might have a glimmer of an idea that Ron Paul is totally batsh#t crazy, and John Huntsman is themost sanctimonious bore since Al Gore? Huh?

Unbelievable. And I predict, it ain't gonna hold. If it does, I'm moving to Canada.

Oh wait.... I already......y'know.


ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME, NEW HAMPSHIRE?

WHEN WORDS FAIL....

RAMIREZ ROCKS IT

Michael Ramirez has to be one of the finest satirical artists in the history of satirical art, and I'm talking all the way back to its 18th-century invention by such folks as Ghezzi, Hogarth, Rowlandson, and company.

He had recently been especially eloquent on certain unspeakable developments from the within the turgid imperium of Demander-in-Chief Barack Obama, as follows:




And, lest we forget:



Revel in the further wealth of Ramirez, Pulitzer Prize winner and contributor to Investor's Business Daily, here.

Buy his book.

RICK ROCKS IT

Iowa caucuses still tighter than a tick, but get seriously goosed by the little whiney guy on the end in all the debates. Rick Santorum comes from the far rear position to probably win the night, intruding himself into the coronation process -- will he be the Not-Mitt we've been waiting for? Open your wallets and fund the contrary voice for as long as it can be heard above or among the fray -- the genuine so-con with impeccable pro-life creds, who, by the way, could be made even more good-looking by standing next to Marco Rubio.............................

P.S. Dear Rick: Lose the sweater. Totally nerd.

2012 [updated]


Back in the olden days I used to sit alone by the Christmas tree (the family having packed it in) as one year passed into the next, and write down my reflections, usually melancholy, about the onward march of time. Later this habit passed from ink and paper to electronic media, but the ritual remained the same.

This year I decided not to think. I cast about on the internet for various things, went to Facebook and enjoyed the 6.5 minutes of a fine Te Deum a friend had posted, and then turned on the TV to see if there was anything worth watching before calling it a day and a year.

As luck (or something else) would have it, one station was playing what is probably an appropriate choice of film as we face the challenges of 2012: The Two Towers, part deux of the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- the one where adventure turns to near despair. I was tired and wondered if I had it in me to commit to watching out the end of it, since it was just at the moment when the Orcs, riding their bat-&-boar-faced wolverine/hyena/dingo-like Wargs, attack the almost defenseless Rohirrim. But I was drawn into the action, having had in mind for much of the day the prospect of the Western World backed into a corner like the denizens of Helm's Deep.

This desperate confrontation is always chilling and draining to watch, more for the palpable despair among the bravest of warriors than for the violence of the battle itself. Pile up a few of the day's global headlines in recent months, and one feels a similar sense of "the end of all things" looming closely as the fatter and less industrious hobbits and trolls of Europe and North America scramble about and squabble over acorns.

What just months ago might have had the potential for being the bold stand of the Fellowship against the tide of chaos -- that is, if you'll bear with me, the field of Republican Presidential aspirants preparing to face off against Obama -- risks devolving into a nasty quarrel among trolls and garden gnomes, all too small to reach the stature of the contested office.

Surely none of them so small as the incumbent -- small in character and empathy and imagination, if not in power and raw ambition. Small and bloodless and ideologically calculating while politically obtuse. Where we needed an Aragorn, or at least of Faramir of some ilk, to stand against this chilly, feckless little golem, we may have to make do with some blustering troll or wannabe elf all wrapped up in a shiny foil wrapper, bruised and tatty from a primary smackdown. Yuck.

Leaving aside all these cutesie little metaphors and analogs, what the replay of Helm's Deep really brings most sharply to mind is the image of the seemingly endless waves of slathering, blood-starved, malconceived Orcs, descending upon the noble remnant with its back against the wall. It was an image branded upon the turn of the year 2005/6, and again 2008/9, and once again suggests itself now in precisely the same terms.

Once again, the ORC, in all its threatening savagery, does NOT stand for the Nazis or the Taliban or the Muslim brotherhood or the drug lords, the pirates, or even the Democrats -- it never did. As it ever was, the ORC is the embodiment of the LIE.

I mourned its total triumph in 2008, even though, in a sense, the lies of 2005 were more insidious. The lies of 2008 were gargantuan, bloated, and almost comical in their obviousness, but in the end they have done more damage -- and if they are not laid to rest within a year's time, their consequences may take generations to undo.

Yet here we are, poised for another round of assaults by the armies of the LIE, prepared to double down their efforts and dig their roots deeper into the public landscape, out of stubborn refusal to admit their own madness of four years ago. When I read back to my 2008 Orc-based post, it almost seems naive in its under-estimation of the potential for the official and auxiliary (press) Obama administrations to wreak havoc on the American nation through hapless and rigid adherence to perverse ideology, and through its ruthlessly thuggish application. It is hard to fathom how anyone so fundamentally vacant could turn out, in his own way, to be so effective.

And if we thought we saw the Year of the Lie in full flower in 2008, we ain't seen nothin' yet. The pundits always say it, but this year it is true that we are in the political fight of our lives, and the future of the American nation (and that of all its allies and dependents) hangs in the balance. The stakes have not been higher since the Cold War got hot. The hordes are poised to descend, having laid down covering fire from their bunkers for the past three years -- sample it here among the Top Ten 2011 examples of Media Malfeasance. It's only going to get uglier.

UPDATE:
Further on the Media Malfeasance theme: wise fellow Victor Davis Hanson reflects on some "No News" stories of the recent past.

BREAKING NEWS:

KIM JONG ILL

no, wait---------


KIM JONG DEAD!

[I gleefully join the ranks of thousands around the globe who will make this too obvious joke today.]


Anybody got some cheese and crackers, and a boat? I bet there's 25 million North Koreans who'd really love a snack. And maybe some shoes and a coat. And electricity.


Sorry, President Obama -- one less guy to practice your bow on.













Oh my -- the world is full of surprises. Why can't we just get back to the business of campaigning? Why all these distractions?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS DIES --

GETS THE SURPRISE OF HIS LIFE


A noble mind, selectively o'erthrown, has found its final rest. We mourn the premature death of writer Christopher Hitchens, and will miss the thundering prose which continued to flow even when the physical voice had been stilled by disease. A verbal pugilist for the ages, reasoned and clear-thinking in so many areas save one, the one in which he was inexplicably blind and reasoned like a toddler, that of religion and God.

Oh, that we could hear what he has to say today!!!! Actually, I think he will be quieted and meditative. And I hope he will find that, contra his own book title, God is not only Great, but He is infinitely merciful, provided one asks humbly for mercy -- and nobody as smart as Hitchens could fail to see now where and how badly he got it wrong, and beg his editor's indulgence.

Mother Teresa, I expect, will even speak up for him, and advance the idea that, on occasion, Hitchens unwittingly did "something beautiful for God." Who knew?

Christopher Hitchens
1949-2011

Requiescat in pace (in spite of your best efforts...)

SAY BUT THE WORD,
AND MY SOUL SHALL BE HEALED


We like to chuckle if we toss out the hackneyed pseudo-profundity, "Today is the first day of the rest of my life" -- but sometimes the line is a statement of simple truth.

It happened a couple of weeks ago , at an otherwise unremarkable First Sunday of Advent Mass. In a quiet but definitive transformation, 45 years of substandard vernacular prayer were consigned to the ash-pot of history, and the English-speaking Catholic world welcomed back into use a mode of expression that at least attempts to praise and petition God with the humility and graciousness He is owed.

For those of us old enough to remember the days of a Catholic world united by the Tridentine Latin Mass, it was a long-awaited return to what had, for 45 years, stubbornly remained the norm, even as it disappeared from use; and it was a clear reminder of the suppressed truth that, back in the pre-vernacular days, those of us who attended Mass with a missal in our hands and read all the well-translated English on the right-hand page while the priest recited the Latin printed on the left, were engaging in ACTIVE PARTICIPATION on a scale barely imaginable to the Catholic who knows only the post-conciliar Church.

After 45 years, I stood ready to feel the balm of restoration when I first uttered aloud (on purpose, not by accident, as has often happened over the decades) the words "And with your spirit" in response to "The Lord be with you." My moment came -- and I blew it. The Novus Ordo reflex proved too powerful. I shocked myself. And it's a shock I have undergone several times since over the past two weeks -- damn! Some old habits die so hard.

[sidebar -- old Catholic joke: Priest steps up to the pulpit, looks around and fiddles with the mic, taps it, and mutters under his breath, "There's something wrong with this microphone." Mind-numbed Novus Ordrones reflexively chime in, "And also with you."]

However, some habits are older and die harder than others. When it came time to respond to "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world," I was primed and ready to say what I have always said at this moment, no matter what ICEL* monstrosity was printed on the Novus Ordo page: "Lord, I am not worthy that You [or Thou] should come under my roof; say but the word and my soul shall be healed."

This Biblically-based prayer [Matthew 8, Luke 7] makes use of concrete imagery, so favoured by Christ Himself, to reference the body as both the temple of the Holy Spirit and the physical receptacle of the Holy Eucharist. The mal-translated abstract banality "Oh Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed" is, to my mind, the ultimate embodiment of the *International Commission on English in the Liturgy at its most perverse. And never in the 45 years since ICEL put the liturgy into a choke-chain of "dynamic equivalence" have I been able to utter their version of that particular prayer.

So on the First Sunday of Advent, 2011, I stood ready to proclaim the old words aloud, and no longer be the one muttering something else under my breath. I got through "Lord, I am not worthy..." and I couldn't go on. I choked, and tears filled my eyes. I felt the balm of healing pour out over a near-half-century wound, but it could not diminish the emotional pang of realizing how much I wished my parents could have lived to see this day.

Heck, I wish they could have lived to attend their own funerals! Five years, and one year, ago we sang each of them out into the next world with funeral Masses in the musical and liturgical traditions they loved so dearly and had been denied for half their lives. (They were Novus Ordo, but we had full co-operation from the celebrants regarding the traditional forms and aesthetics.) My father was in the grip of advancing dementia when my mother died, but he was able to take some comfort from the beautiful Latin ordinaries and hymns, including a portion of the Dies Irae, which we sang for her sending forth. As his dementia worsened over the next four years, and he got to the point where he could barely identify family members as anything more than a familiar face, he was still able to join in with the Missa de Angelis, Gloria VIII, and Credo III when he was taken to churches where the tradition was being revived -- despite their long absence from his weekly Mass experience, they were burned into the deepest recesses of his memory, and he called them up effortlessly.

But the ghastly, grating, anti-euphonious "And also with you," along with all its nasty little ICEL-manufactured companions ["Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Savior gave us"] dogged my parents through most of the second half of their lives, and never, ever ceased to irritate.

On this day, however -- the first of days, Advent, 2011 -- a half-century's festering wound began to heal.

It is only a first step on the road to healing, and it is only a particle ingredient of the balms needed everywhere in the world to heal a thousand other festering wounds of every sort. But it is a start. And it was wonderful to stand next to two more generations of our family, one that is open and accepting of what is, to them, a new path; and the other so young that she will grow up knowing only the restored prayers and nothing of the paltry substitutions which gave miserly insult to the debt of worship for generations before. [And she will never get that old Catholic joke about the microphone - hooray!]

It was a good day. And despite all the tribulations that come with the bonds between parents and children, I was grateful to feel the tugs and jolts of those transformative moments in church, grateful to the parents who were the reason I learned to care about such things.

May the peace of the Lord be with them always.
And with their spirits.


Addendum: seems like an appropriate moment to re-post an oldie but a goodie:
Recovering the "Merry" in Christmas from 2006.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING DOWN THERE
FROM UP HERE, WHERE IT ISN'T THANKSGIVING

And here's the greatest Thanksgiving comedy bit in history. Bon appetit.

[UPDATE: Both videos below only visible through Mozilla Firefox]

Sometimes I could just grab Stephen Colbert by his crisp lapels and shake him, but other times he is completely redeemed because he takes the insanity of the present day by its rumpled lapels, head-butts it into submission, and

NAILS IT.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - The 1%
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Boo-yah.


And while we're at it, kudos to Jon Stewart for stuffing it to the Occupants. Biff, pow, it's over.

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