Last night, my friend and I were sitting in the living room
and I said to her, ‘I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent
on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull
the plug.’

She got up, unplugged the TV, and threw out my wine.

She’s such a bitch…..

I just didn’t understand, I guess. I was raised with three sisters and the rule was that you don’t hit girls. That didn’t seem exactly fair when three of them ganged up on me, but that was the rule. Or, at least I thought that was the rule. Seems that there are times when there MUST be violence against women. Yep. Read it on the internet right HERE.

The first reform law respecting domestic violence against women in the Anglo legal tradition is the so-called “rule of thumb”. Until passage of that Act of Parliament, it was legal for a man to strike his wife, one of his possessions or “chattle”, with any size stick he could find. After the act, it was illegal to beat your wife with anything bigger around than your thumb. Don’t laugh. If it was you and the choice was get hit with a two by four or get hit with a stick the size of your thumb, which would you chose? Helped lots of women in their daily lives. Very compassionate at the time.

Bleedin’ heart ponces, them wot passed that, is wot I sez, now pass down that pint, willya?

Just jokin’ with you girls, just pullin’ your chain.

But, I did kind of want to write briefly about this article because it makes clear that one part of the problem that Islamic people have with Western cultures is that we try to incrementally change their culture to suit ourselves based on what seems to us like the self evident truths of our Declaration of Indepence.

For them, though, it’s not that simple. For them, their entire culture is organic and it seems to them that we are asking them to use salt as a substitute for sugar in their cake recipe. Sure the salt won’t be as bad for our burgeoning belly as sugar, but it would ruin the cake. For them, even parts of the society they don’t like are also necessary, it’s a gestalt and you take the bad with the good.

And, even those of us who are good old Western Rationalist liberal 1st Amendment red blooded patriots gotta say that, if we look at everything we do with respect to women, not all of it might look too good to someone on the outside. For example, are you really proud of America’s obsession with breasts and short skirts and buttcrack bluejeans? If you’re an Islamic mother or father — even “westernized” and civilized and literate and urban blah blah blah — do you really want your daughter running around like Brittany Spears and Lindsay Lohan and Nichole Richie? Now, imagine if you are a parent of a daughter and you live in rural areas of poverty in the Islamic Crescent and see American television and movies.

Let me put it to you another, I hope provocative, way. OK, World War II comes along and we have Rosie the Riveter and all that and going back to the kitchen was boring and so the 60s and 70s comes along and we get N.O.W. and millions of women who want to work go to work and your fate is no longer so limited and hooray for our side. Great. But, how about now when almost every woman MUST work either because she’s a single mom or it takes two incomes to keep a roof over your head. Is the life of the vast majority of American women so great that a women in Damascus in a harem room covered in silks might not say, well, this ain’t so freakin’ bad compared to standing on your feet 12 hours a day sloshing coffee in some trucker’s lap.

One more attempt to see rotary blades and defecation interact: the Yemen writer guy clearly sees this as a way to avoid divorce. I wonder how many divorces would be avoided if, for the first and only time in the relationship, a man could legally, ethicaly and morally get away with just slapping her face hard and telling her to get over it, divorce is a bitch and it’s a hell of a lot better to work things out. What seems like an unthinkable idea to you seems to me to be rational and defensible as long as one starts from outside our culture and in one where family relationships are much more horizontal.

What I’m trying to get to here is an understanding of their thinking, I’m looking for ways to cross this cultural divide in order to look for places of contact. The beginning of engagement must be to lose the flinch whenever the topic is raised and be willing to see things from a different perspective. If I understand the scheme he explains, it’s fight, sleep on the couch, fight, hit, go to your mother’s and get advice from everyone in the family before you split up. That doesn’t seem all that different than what happens here except that in America, the guy goes to the pokey and all your girlfriends get to call him a jailbird bastard.

Me? I don’t have a dog in the fight, personally. I like what we got here ’cause it’s what I’m used to. I still don’t hit girls and still think it is just wrong when anyone else does. I oppose personal violence across the board.

That said, we are engaged with the Islamic world and this, I think, gives us an insight into their way of thinking. Maybe the way to go would be an Islamic “rule of thumb” instead of entirely transforming their way of life? There must be some way to get the Prophet behind a little mercy when it’s all in the family even under the Sharia. Of course, if you’ve got three wives, it may not be advisable to hit one of them when the three of them can gang up on you in your sleep, like maybe younger sisters could maybe do to some fictional other guy older brother you know.

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POST SCRIPT: A Personal Aside

I don’t know bleep about attachments and such but I know when I’ve got it good, does that count? Just a few days ago, we were freezing without power in the dark after a horrible winter storm and today I’ve had the top down on my MidLifeChrysler. Tonight, I treated myself to sliced pineapple and cottage cheese early and I made a big pan of scratch brownies filled with pecan halves this evening. Today, I received not one but two missives from two very important people in my life and the good vibes from that shared love has me all goo goo melty inside. Perhaps it would be better to follow another path, but i’m content to be attached to my daughter and the feel-good I get from getting a note from her; maybe I’m bad to revel in the chocolate and nuts and the time when you eat the chocolate brownie batter with a glass of ice cold milk right after you put the pan in the oven, but you’ll just have to judge me bad, I guess, because I just couldn’t help myself; and, if finding simple pleasure in having the wind and the sun in my face, the joie de vivre of whipping in and out of traffic, the feeling of being released from a freezing corner of hades, well, if that’s wrong, as the song goes, I don’t want to be right. At least I was in the moment, dude. I wasn’t thinking about anything else but the brownie batter and the cold milk, I promise. I don’t mind getting all Marcus Aurelius but let me have a bit of my Epicurius as well, thankee very much.

Hedonism Rulz!

I look at a lot of stuff on the ‘net that I don’t bring here. That’s for lots of reasons, including that it’s not interesting or only interesting to me. One of the things I read a lot is FARK news. It’s kind of a snarky look at news events and it’s kind of hard to explain. One thing you get at FARK is double entendres. It’s a new year, but this may be my favorite for 2008 of actual journalism gone terribly wrong.

“Fort De Soto Park, Florida — New information has been released regarding the sperm whale that came into the mouth of Tampa Bay over the weekend.” From Tampa Bay’s Channel 10.com

I first saw this on Reddit, but it’s a sure fire FARK.

Speaking of coming into the mouth of the Bay, looks like Obama and Edwards are telling Hillary to suck their caucus.

Here’s my predictions from a Dec. 28 post with results as of midnight Thursday in boldface

GOP:

Romney 24% —– 25% 2d
McCain 23% —– 13% 3d-tie
Huckabee 21% —– 34% 1st
Ron Paul 17% —– 10% 5th
Guiliani 11% —– 3% 6th
Thompson 4% —– 13% 3-tie

Dem.:

Hillary 27.5% —– 29% 3d
Edwards 27% —– 30% 2d
Obama 26.5% —– 38% 1st
Richardson 9% —– 2% 4th
Biden 7% —— 1% 5th
Dodd 2%
Kucinich 1%

Hey, if I was any good at predicting the future, I’d either be a weatherman on TV or a stock broker, OK? Pretty sure I won’t be a political pollster. STFU. Yes, you, STFU. That’s actually not bad prognosticating, all things considered, but I was certainly surprised by results for one candidate on both sides of the aisle: Obama’s winning doesn’t surprise me, but this is a breakout win that I think will carry into N.H. next Tuesday and S.C. on Feb. 5; for the GOP, where did those Fred Thompson votes come from? In a related note, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd ended their vice presidential campaigns and Mike Gravel will soon follow while Richardson is hanging his vice presidential hopes on Nevada so 4th is good enough for him and Kucinich will again hang in to the end. Ron Paul’s folks must be stunned that only one in 10 Republicans in Iowa are out of their minds and, come to think of it, so am I. Not much else seems decided for the Republicans except that the Washington press is starting to talk about the Reagan coalition falling apart and the poor Repugs are fighting amongst themselves into oblivion in ’08. From their mouths to God’s ear, as the saying goes, but something tells me that GOP money won’t just give up and forfeit to the Democrats.

After last night’s OU debacle and tonight’s Orange Bowl, looks like Kansas may be the Big XII team that’s highest rated in the final polls even though they didn’t compete in the conference championship. If LSU beats Ohio State, Kansas will be the least defeated major college team in the nation. If I was a Jayhawk, I’d be claiming the national champtionship. Instead, as a Sooner, I’m trying to get my OSU friends to tell me exactly how you say “wait ’til next year!” without having your bottom lip quiver. That is, I’ll ask ‘em that after I hear in detail about their win over Indiana and their hooting and hollaring about OU getting thumped in the Fiesta Bowl for the second straight year. This is why I hate it when I let myself care about college football.

And the following, Barak Obama’s victory speech last night, maybe isn’t your cup of tea. Maybe you feel about politics as I do about college football, or, worse, as I feel about celebrity gossip. Even so, after this past 8 years, politics seems desperately important to me. I believe you will understand why I am an Obama supporter after you watch this. He strikes me as the Bobby if not Jack Kennedy of this generation. The enthusiasm of college students seems so familiar. The rhetorical heights, such echoes of the 1960s optimism of my Boomer generation. What more American thing can we do than replace that smirking prep school jerk with a man of color who grew up poor. I think the world needs us to elect this guy, not just beat the Republicans for being ignorant jerks. Anyway, he’s a good orator and please watch.

Or is it crossposting?
Anyway, MCARP comments in another post, below, about Wm. Kristol joining the NYTimes op-ed page. Thought he might like to look at this as a way of calming down and detaching. Jeez, that 3:40 a.m. guy is sure excitable. Chill, dude! Just chill!

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From the New York Times on New Year’s Eve:

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

Read the whole editorial here.

The “men” the editorial references were all lawyers. Alberto Gonzales, then counselor to the president, David Addington, counsel to the Vice President, and counsel to the National Security Agency met with the CIA to discuss the destruction of evidence amounting to obstruction of justice and subversion of the checks and balances of the Constitution. Even if not indicted by a world court for war crimes, even if not indicted for their criminal acts by an American court, these men must be disbarred, in my opinion, for bringing the profession into disrepute.

I can’t sit idle while evil triumphs. Something must be done. As John Goodman’s character keeps repeating in “The Big Lebowski”, this cannot stand. I hate these guys.

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happy birthday Mike and Dan. Love you guys. Many many many more.

The results are official:

The card sharps, layabouts and miscreants at the Edgemere Casino bilked, cheated and otherwise unfairly deprived me of $5.15 of hard earned cash last night. If it weren’t for the $6.28 in goodies I consumed, “comped”, I would consider seeking a federal investigation.

The bloodthirsty bastards are going to see an inspirational film today: Sweeney Todd. No meat pie for me, thanks.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Macy’s has decided to close Oklahoma City’s store in Crossroads Mall. Here’s the whole story, but if you haven’t spent all your Christmas money yet, you may want to wait for the closeout prices sure to come in a few weeks.

Hear a good one lately?

I’d personally like to hear a good one. One good idea about what the U.S. should do about Pakistan now that we’ve gone “all in” on Bhutto and she’s dead and the Islamic nuclear bomb sits on a much more slippery foundation. Just one, if you please. It seems to me that this administration is proved that there are no depths of incompetence to which it cannot drop, so I’m real optimistic about how this will all turn out. Part of the trouble is that there’s so little the U.S. actually CAN do. One stinking thing is an almost absolute certainty: the tribal territories of Pakistan that border Afghanistan will be able to assist the Taliban in Afghanistan with impunity, so we’d best get ready for that. I know that I personally took the principled course and went to see “Charlie Wilson’s War”. Julia Roberts is charming but never met a big-hair Houston big money momma, Tom Hanks doesn’t know how to play a cocaine and whiskey addled carousing Texas conservative, and P.S.Hoffman — well, I’m blaming Mike Nichols and wish he’d been 35 when he directed this movie. It’s a good film, but it also fails on many levels.

Gazing into the crystal ball

The following political prediction about the Iowa caucus/primary is provided to you by “gut check” accuracy. I’ve made a W.A.G., and here it is:

GOP:

Romney 24%
McCain 23%
Huckabee 21%
Ron Paul 17%
Guiliani 11%
Thompson 4%

Dem.:

Hillary 27.5%
Edwards 27%
Obama 26.5%
Richardson 9%
Biden 7%
Dodd 2%
Kucinich 1%

The New Hampshire primary a few days later is impossible to predict because there are so many undecideds and the effect of Iowa can’t be foretold, but what the hell?, it’s not like I have a national reputation to worry about, so here goes:

GOP

Romney 29%
McCain 27%
Guiliani 20%
Huckabee 13%
Ron Paul 8%
Thompson 3%

Dem.

Obama 28%
Hillary 26%
Edwards 24%
Richardson 10%
Biden 7%
Dodd 3%
Kucinich 2%

In other words, not much is going to clear up about the nominations until Feb.5 and the vote in South Carolina. When the S.C. vote comes down, Edwards and Guiliani will both need a win to stay in and that is easier for the southern Edwards than for the N.Y. Guiliani, although the Nation’s Mayor will do better with S.C. military families than most will expect. If Guiliani and Thompson leave, that helps McCain beat Romney on “Super Tuesday”. If Edwards and Richardson leave, that will help Obama against Hillary.

Of course, when W declares martial law and suspends elections just like his buddy Musharref in Pakistan, all that will become moot.

See you in the “retraining” camps, boys and girls!

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By JOHN ANTHONY McGUCKIN
Published: December 25, 2007
The New York Times
ST. NICHOLAS was a super-saint with an immense cult for most of the Christian past. There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place?

Well, it’s a New York story.

In all innocence, the morphing began with the Dutch Christians of New Amsterdam, who remembered St. Nicholas from the old country and called him Sinte Klaas. They had kept alive an old memory — that a kindly old cleric brought little gifts to the poor in the weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity. While the gifts were important, they were never meant to overshadow the message of Jesus’s humble birth.

But today’s chubby Santa is not about giving to the poor. He has had his saintly garb stripped away. The filling out of the figure, the loss of the vestments, and his transformation into a beery fellow smoking a pipe combined to form a caricature of Dutch peasant culture. Eventually this Magic Santa (a suitable patron saint if there ever was one for the burgeoning capitalist machinery of the city) was of course popularized by the Manhattanite Clement Clarke Moore published in “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” in The Troy (New York) Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823.

The newly created deity Santa soon attracted a school of iconographers: notable among them were Thomas Nast, whose 1863 image of a red-suited giant in Harper’s Weekly set the tone, and Haddon Sundblom, who drew up the archetypal image we know today on behalf of the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. This Santa was regularly accompanied by the flying reindeer: godlike in his majesty and presiding over the winter darkness like Odin the sky god returned.

The new Santa also acquired a host of Nordic elves to replace the small dark-skinned boy called Black Peter, who in Christian tradition so loved St. Nicholas that he traveled with him everywhere. But, some might say, wasn’t it better to lose this racially stereotyped relic? Actually, no, considering the real St. Nicholas first came into contact with Peter when he raided the slave market in his hometown and railed against the trade. The story tells us that when the slavers refused to take him seriously, he used the church’s funds to redeem Peter and gave the boy a job in the church.

And what of the throwing of the bags of gold down the chimney, where they landed in the stockings and little shoes that had been hung up to dry by the fireplace? Charming though it sounds, it reflected the deplorable custom, still prevalent in late Roman society when the Byzantine church was struggling to establish the supremacy of its values, of selling surplus daughters into bondage. This was a euphemism for sexual slavery — a trade that still blights our world.

As the tale goes, Nicholas had heard that a father in the town planned to sell his three daughters because his debts had been called in by pitiless creditors. As he did for Black Peter, Nicholas raided his church funds to secure the redemption of the girls. He dropped the gold down the chimney to save face for the impoverished father.

This tale was the origin of a whole subsequent series of efforts among the Christians who celebrated Nicholas to make some effort to redeem the lot of the poor — especially children, who always were, and still are, the world’s front-line victims. Such was the origin of Christmas almsgiving: gifts for the poor, not just gifts for our friends.

I like St. Nicholas. You can keep chubby Santa.

John Anthony McGuckin is a professor of religious history at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia.