It's starting to look a lot like Brezh-nev . . .

If George Bush has been doing his best impression of a doddering Soviet dictator overseeing a Near Eastern debacle, and an increasingly beleaguered U.S. military is starting to develop Red Army ethics . . . does that make us the new Evil Empire?

After reading this Associated Press account, you have to wonder. That is, after you read it and, first, weep:

In a survey of U.S. troops in combat in Iraq, fewer than half of Marines and a little more than half of Army soldiers said they would report a member of their unit for killing or wounding an innocent civilian.

More than 40 percent support the idea of torture in some cases, and 10 percent reported personally abusing Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Friday in what it called its first ethics study of troops at the war front. Units exposed to the most combat were chosen for the study, officials said.

"It is disappointing," said analyst John Pike of the Globalsecurity.org think tank. "But anybody who is surprised by it doesn't understand war. ... This is about combat stress."

The military has seen a number of high-profile incidents of alleged abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of 24 civilians by Marines in Haditha, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl and the slaying of her family in Iraq and the sexual humiliation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

"I don't want to, for a minute, second-guess the behavior of any person in the military — look at the kind of moral dilemma you are putting people in," Christopher Preble of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank said of the mission in Iraq. "There's a real tension between using too much force, which generally means using force to protect yourself, and using too little and therefore exposing yourself to greater risk."

The overall study was the fourth in a series done by a special mental health advisory team since 2003 aimed at assessing the well-being of forces serving in Iraq.

Officials said the teams visited Iraq last August to October, talking to troops, health care providers and chaplains.

The study team also found that long and repeated deployments were increasing troop mental health problems.

But Maj. Gen. Gale Pollock, the Army's acting surgeon general, said the team's "most critical" findings were on ethics.

"They looked under every rock, and what they found was not always easy to look at," said Ward Casscells, assistant secretary of defense for health.

THIS UNJUST, UNNECESSARY WAR has tainted everything it has touched. The home of the free -- this "nation of laws" -- tortures "enemy combatants" to dubious effect.

The "war on terror" has been a boon for . . . terror. The "freedom" we brought to those once oppressed by Saddam turned out to be the freedom of the grave. And the peace? That of the dead.

Iraq is a bloody debacle. Our military is broken -- materially, bodily, ethically and spiritually. Some 3,358 American soldiers have died.

At home, we are less free and dubiously secure.

Iran is gonna get The Bomb.

BACK IN 2000, a lot of us voted for George Bush, and prayed for his victory in the disputed election because, frankly, we despaired over abortion and our country's worsening embrace of the Culture of Death and desperately wanted to buy ourselves some time via the shortcut of presidential politics.

Judgment is nigh, we thought. After all, God is just, we are wicked and He could not and would not forever stay our comeuppance when we'd sooooooo been asking for it. At least that was my metaphysical reasoning.

I wasn't thrilled about Bush, but he was spouting the social-conservative party line. Maybe he could hold the line on depravity. Maybe he could appoint the justices needed to start rolling back Roe v. Wade.

Maybe if in politics we trusted, we could be a little less death loving. Maybe we could stay God's hand. Buy some time for turning around the culture. ("How?" you ask? I dunno. Politics? More Catholic and evangelical media projects? Blowing up MTV? I dunno.)

In hindsight, it all sounds pretty damned stupid and presumptuous. Now, it sounds like we "saints" were tempting the Almighty as much -- if not more -- than all Planned Parenthood's shrieking pro-abort storm troopers.

But that's what I was thinking, and that's what millions of others will admit to thinking, if they're honest. Redemption through politics was tempting when you looked at the long, hard and dirty slog required to effect true cultural change.

Give us another chance, Lord. See? We'll elect this nice Republican man. Well, yeah, he'll probably suck up to the rich and do nothing for the poor, but he talks right about abortion and sodomy!

WHOM DID WE THINK we were fooling? Obviously not God.

And, I fear, in trying to stave off judgment by voting right, instead of by living right and witnessing right, we brought upon ourselves the very instrument of divine judgment.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion . . . .

Justice is blind. Stars are jailed.

Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer of Los Angeles County is my new hero. Idiot socialite Paris Hilton dared him to throw the book at her . . . and he did.

All hail Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer. God save this honorable court!

MSNBC has the cellebrity scoop:

Hilton, who parlayed her name and relentless partying into worldwide notoriety, must go to jail on June 5 and she will not be allowed any work release, furloughs, use of an alternative jail or electronic monitoring in lieu of jail, Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer ruled after a hearing.

The judge ruled that she was in violation of the terms of her probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case.

“I’m very sorry and from now on I’m going to pay complete attention to everything. I’m sorry and I did not do it on purpose at all,” she told the judge before he announced the sentence.

She was then ordered to report to a women’s jail in suburban Lynwood on the set date or face 90 days behind bars. The judge’s ruling excluded her from paying to serve time in a jail of her choice, as some are allowed.

As a city prosecutor said during closing arguments that Hilton deserved jail time, Hilton’s mother, Kathy, laughed. When the judge ruled, Kathy Hilton, then blurted out: “May I have your autograph?”

Paris Hilton was among a series of witnesses who took the stand during the hearing. She testified she believed her license was initially suspended for 30 days and that she was allowed to drive for work purposes during the next 90 days.

She said that when an officer who stopped her in January made her sign a document stating her license was suspended, she thought he was mistaken and did not actually look at the document.

Also called to the stand was Hilton’s spokesman, Elliot Mintz. Hilton and her attorneys characterized Mintz as a liaison between Hilton and her lawyers.

Mintz testified that to his knowledge Hilton did not drive during the 30-day period. He said he then advised her that he believed her license was no longer suspended.

The judge called Mintz’s testimony worthless and expressed disbelief at Hilton’s lawyers.

“I can’t believe that either attorney did not tell her that the suspension had been upheld,” the judge said. “She wanted to disregard everything that was said and continue to drive no matter what.”

Hilton looked forward and didn’t speak to news media as she left court. Her mother looked upset.

When a reporter asked what she thought of the judge’s decision, a visibly angry Kathy Hilton responded: “What do you think? This is pathetic and disgusting, a waste of taxpayer money with all this nonsense. This is a joke.”

One of her attorneys, Howard Weitzman, said he would appeal.

“I’m shocked, I’m surprised and really disheartened in the system that I’ve worked in for close to 40 years,” Weitzman said.

A COUPLE OF QUICK COMMENTS . . . first, can His Honor throw Paris' sorry excuses for parents in jail, too? Just because?

Second, this, the world's smallest violin, is playing "My Heart Bleeds for You," attorney Weitzman.

SO FAR in Paris Hilton's 26 years, her mark on the world -- more of a skidmark, actually -- consists basically of a bad TV show, a bad record, a bad movie and being very, very bad on videotape. (Nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean? Know what I mean? Say no more, say no more!)

As she cools her jets in not-so-splendid isolation, learning to love chicken -- lots and lots of chicken . . . no beef or pork served to inmates -- may God grant her a really miserable 45 days, and the major attitude adjustment she so desperately needs.

If they were selling cigarettes to kids, you know there would be hell to pay

What do you suppose would happen to some male employee of Verizon Wireless or Universal Music Group if he wandered through Corporate Cubicle Land serenading female employees thus?

I see you windin' n grindin' up on that pole,
I know you see me lookin' at you and you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know, girl

Money in the air as mo feel grab you by your coattail, take you to the motel, hoe sale,
Don't tell, won't tell, baby said I don't talk Dogg but she told on me, oh well,
Take a picture wit me, what the flick gon' do, baby stick to me & ima stick on u,
If you pick me then ima pick on you, d-o-double g and I'm here to put this d*** on you, I'm stuck on p**** n urs is right, wrip riding them poles and them doors is tight and tighter
And ima get me a shot for the end of the night cause p**** is p****, and baby you're p**** for life.

I see you windin' n grindin' up on that pole,
I know you see me lookin' at you and you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know, girl

Shorty I can see you ain't lonely handful of niggas n they all got cheese,
So you looking at me now whats it's gonna be? just another tease far as I can see,
Tryin' to get you up out this club if it means spendin' a couple dubs,
Throwin' bout 30 stacks in the back make it rain like that cause I'm far from a scrub,
U know my pedigree, ex-deala use to move phetamines,
Girl I spend money like it don't mean nuttin' n besides I got a thang for u.

I see you windin' n grindin' up on that pole,
I know you see me lookin' at you and you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know, girl

Mobbin' through club in low pressing I'm sitting in the back in the smokin' section (just smoking),
Birds eye, I got a clear view, you can't see me but I can see you (baby I see u),
It's cool we jet the mood is set,
Your p**** is wet, you rubbing your back and touching your neck,
Your body is movin' you humpin' n jumpin' your t****** is bouncin', you smilin' n grinin' n looking at me.

Girl n while your lookin' at me I'm ready to hit the caddy right up on the patio move the patty to the caddy,
Baby you got a phatty the type I'd like to marry wantin' to just give you everything, that's kinda scary,
'Cause I'm loving the way you shake your ass, bouncin', got me tippin' my glass,
Normally don't get caught up too fast but I got a thang for you.

I see you windin' n grindin' up on that pole,
I know you see me lookin' at you and you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know, girl

I see you windin' n grindin' up on that pole,
I know you see me lookin' at you and you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know
I wanna f*** you, (f*** you) you already know, girl

HE'D GET FIRED for sexual harrassment, you say? I'm sure you're probably correct.

Now watch the video below (and viewers be advised, this is highly vulgar, sexually explicit content) and tell me what would happen if some male employee tried this at the Verizon Wireless or Universal Music Group corporate "holiday" party.

HE'D GET CANNED, you say? Quite possibly get the hell beat out of him . . . before somebody called the cops and he got arrested for sexual assault?

I think you'd -- again -- be correct.

But if the first f'rinstance was a hit hip-hop single and the second f'rinstance was a "dance" onstage -- with a 14-year-old girl, no less -- at a concert in Trinidad, well, that's just show biz. And the soulless little men in the conservative suits at Verizon Wireless and the Universal Music Group won't be letting niggling matters like extreme vulgarity or sexual assualt on a juvenile get in the way of making a buck off the popularity of ex-con R&B star Akon.

From World Net Daily:

Hip-hop superstar Akon is touring the U.S. with the help of major U.S. corporations, including a partnership with Verizon, despite being under investigation for a simulated rape of a 14-year-old preacher's daughter caught on video last month at a concert in Trinidad.

Patrick Manning, prime minister of Trinidad, called for a formal investigation of the explicit April 12 performance at Trinidad's Club Zen, which has since been closed by authorities.

"I have taken very careful notice of this matter and the owner of Zen owes it to the public to take responsibility," said Manning. "I will be interfacing with Zen because that kind of thing should never be allowed to happen in this country."

Security Minister Fitzgerald Hinds described the on-stage antics with Danah Alleyne as "lewd." He insists Akon should be prosecuted.

The girl is the daughter of Flaming World Ministry pastor David Alleyne. She came forward, with her father, to apologize for going on stage with the Senegalese-American Akon, saying she regrets attending the concert.

The shocking video has been pulled from the popular video site YouTube, though copies of it can be found on many other Internet sites.

The teen said she was permitted into the club despite being underage. She was part of what was characterized as an impromptu dance competition announced by the singer. The competition featured seven girls. Akon promised a trip to Africa to the winner. After the teen "won" the contest, Akon announced the Africa prize was actually him.

"I got carried away, I started to dance as well, but I never thought it was going to be like that," Danah Alleyne told the Trinidad Express. "I was shocked. My head was hitting the floor.

Other officials in Trinidad have called for Akon to be banned from further public performances on the island.

The video shows Akon throwing Alleyne on the floor like a "rag doll" and simulating violent sex with her in various positions. The crowd cheers the entire ordeal.

Though Akon and his managers have refused comment on the incident, his defenders on the Internet have attacked the girl for her provocative dress and alluring looks.

"This whole hip hop thing is a guise and I don't want any part of it," said the girl later. "I don't want any part of it. Look at what I have to go through with one mistake that I made. My Dad warned me every time and I didn't listen. I am sorry."

She says now her only dancing will be in the dance ministry of her father's church.

(snip)

Besides the controversy in Trinidad, Akon has served jail time for armed robbery and drug sales. But that hasn't stopped him from appearing recently as a guest performer on "American Idol" and receiving corporate support from companies like Verizon.

Earlier this year, Verizon Wireless announced a partnership with him on a marketing campaign to promote mobile music phones and appear in a TV ad currently airing throughout the U.S.

"Akon has emerged as one of the world's most compelling and exciting stars," said John Harrobin, vice president of marketing and new media for Verizon. "His commitment to his artistry and the community enables us to take our partnership with music industry innovators in yet another direction by collaborating on this unique TV advertising campaign."

Recently Akon participated in a Verizon Wireless event celebrating Black History Month coinciding with the launch of a new store in Harlem.

Akon's recording "Konvicted" was near the top of the Billboard album charts for weeks. He's a best-selling performer in more than a dozen countries including the United Kingdom, France, Canada and South Africa.

This is not the first time Akon has been criticized for dirty dancing. In his video for his hit "Snack Dat," Akon hits actress Tara Reid on her behind and then sandwiches her in a sexually provocative way between himself and another man.

Police officers were in the club during the act but did not intervene. Leela Ramdeen, chairwoman of the police service commission, said an investigation into why is under way.

WE ALWAYS SEEM to look for evil in the form of madmen flying jetliners into skyscrapers or, perhaps, unhinged gunmen slaughtering innocents on some unsuspecting campus. Or maybe you're looking for abject evil in the specter of George W. Bush or, alternatively, Hillary Clinton.

Rarely do we look for evil in the faceless corporate executive who'll sell any poison to anybody's kid so that share prices will soar heavenward. We think abject evil is some scary, macabre and twistedly dashing thing. We think the Devil still dresses in a red cape and carries a pitchfork.

I firmly believe in the banality of evil. I believe the Devil carries a BlackBerry.

I believe Satan is pulling overtime at Verizon Wireless and at the Universal Music Group. I believe Satan was physically present in the cheering Trinidadian crowd, the one egging Akon on as he molested a child.

I believe Beelzebub books guests and schedules videos on MTV. And at BET. I believe ol' Screwtape had a hand in slating Akon for a guest shot on American Idol.

I believe the Master of Lies is in charge of a big chunk of American radio. And I believe the Evil One is hiding out in all our hearts, particularly when we look upon his handiwork in the culture all around us -- in the office all around us, in the classroom all around us -- and we stare upon it slackjawed (or worse) and do nothing.

Unlike some other bloggers and commentators, I don't think the New Dark Ages are just down the road.

I think they're here.

Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

Just making extra sure?

This just in from the Department of Redundancy Department: Rage Against the Machine -- the politcal-rock band, not how I deal with computers -- is back, and lead singer Zack de la Rocha has a prescription for what ails us. Well, at least for the part of what ails us that is the Bush Administration.

The San Jose Mercury-News fills us in:

He also railed against the war in Iraq and likened Bush administration officials to Nazi war criminals.

"This current administration is no exception. They should be tried and hung and shot," he said.

Drummer Brad Wilk, bassist Tim Commerford and guitarist Tom Morello, who wore a hat with the word "UNITY" on it, completed the lineup.

"They changed my life. They made me a liberal," said sweat-drenched history teacher Rafael Ramon, 25, who had waited in a crowd packed shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the stage all day.

"All of America needed Rage to come back. They've been missing," he said.

Tried.

And hung.

And shot.

Well, Rage just believes in being thorough, I guess.

I'M NOT SURE who's the bigger idiot, Zack de la Rocha or the history teacher who thinks that kind of hate speech -- and don't tell me publicly advocating the violent death of the president isn't hate speech -- is what's needed today.

Contrary to half-witted 25-year-old schoolteachers' opinions, such talk -- even by idiot rockers -- probably merits a serious tete-a-tete with Secret Service or FBI agents, just on the principle that that's what surely would happen to me if I crossed that rhetorical line. Apart from that, however, I have a serious question that I intend to ask, and ask, and ask, and ask again . . . .

WHAT'S THE DEAL with a society when the only thing everybody can agree upon is that the solution to one problem or another -- we tend to disagree on which problems -- involves somebody getting killed?

As far as key members of the Bush Administration go, I would be perfectly happy with impeachment, indictment, trial and imprisonment. Of killing, we've had a gullet full.

Do you actually have to die to earn a Darwin Award?

BLESS THEIR HEARTS, some folks seem to keep on living through no fault of their own whatsoever.

Since any further introduction I might offer would just wreck the story, I'll throw it to George Sells of WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge, La. You can read the story here, but that hardly does it justice. Click on the picture above to watch the story.

Counting it all as joy

Unless you're Christopher Hitchens -- who has made hating Mother Teresa a sacrament in his very urbane, very clever worship of nothingness -- the more you learn about the little nun from Calcutta, the more you are convicted that you're a really, really crappy human being.

Not to mention Christian.

Hitchens, being a first-rate atheist, doesn't have to worry about being a crappy Christian. But I do. And, thus, yours truly stands double convicted of rottenness and sloth.

All it took was an article from Godspy.com. Here's a snippet:

In one of those long-secret letters, from 1957, she bared her soul to a spiritual director:

"In the darkness . . . Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? . . I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer. . . Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul . . . I am told God lives in me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul."

Other saints have confessed feelings of abandonment by God. In the sixteenth century, St. John of the Cross coined a phrase that now describes the experience — "the dark night of the soul." But we would be hard-pressed to find another saint who suffered a darkness so thick or a night so long as Mother Teresa.

To quote again from those long-secret letters:

"They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God... In my soul I feel just this terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing. That terrible longing keeps growing, and I feel as if something will break in me one day."

But why would God permit such suffering in one who had given her life so completely to do his will? The answer may lie in the question.

We learned from her letters, that in 1942, while still serving as principal at a private girls' school in Calcutta, Mother Teresa had made a secret vow — "to give to God anything that He may ask, 'not to refuse Him anything.'"

God apparently took her at her word, and put her vow to the test. In 1946, when her locutions began, Jesus told her to quit her comfortable job and go serve the poor: "There are convents... caring for the rich and able-to-do people, but for my very poor there is absolutely none." She did what she was told. Then she didn't hear his voice again for another half-century.

As harsh and dreadful as it sounds, it's a pattern familiar in the Bible and in the lives of the saints. The servants of the Lord often undergo an ordeal, some test of their commitment and faithfulness. Think of Jeremiah or Hosea, or how much of the New Testament concerns suffering for the Lord's sake. "When you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trials," the Book of Sirach says.

From her letters, we see that Mother Teresa understood herself to be enduring such a trial—a martyrdom less physical than psychological and spiritual.

So, what are we to make of her happiness and joy—was it all a front, an act? There's no evidence of that. She appears to have been giving us a modern day, flesh-and-blood lesson in the meaning of Christian joy. The fact that while she was alive we never had any inkling of how much she suffered only makes her witness that much more challenging to our complacencies.

Mother Teresa wrote a lot about joy. It comes, she said, from being close to Jesus. Or as she put it: "Joy is a sign of union with God—of God's presence." Knowing what we now know about her feelings of divine rejection, this sounds like an inside joke, or a deliciously dark irony. But she had no guile about her. She always told us that joy wasn't a matter of attitude adjustment or putting on a happy face. Joy was hard work: "It is always hard, all the more reason why we should try to acquire it and make it grow in our hearts."

In the logic of the saints, which is the logic of the Scriptures, this makes sense. We're supposed to strive to get closer to Jesus, to become more like him. To imitate Jesus means to offer ourselves in love to God—to accept suffering and even death, as he did on the cross. St. Paul wrote that we should offer our bodies as "living sacrifices" to God.

That's how Mother Teresa lived. Even the littlest task could be a beautiful sacrifice she offered to God. And she came to believe that her spiritual anguish was a sign of her deepening union with Jesus, a sharing in his experience of being forsaken on the cross.

This growing awareness, too, is reflected in her letters: "I have begun to love my darkness, for I believe now that it is a part, a very small part, of Jesus' darkness and pain on the earth."

HAT TIP: Parousian Post

Money for nothing . . . and death for free

Think of it this way: Take a dollar, throw it away. Take a dollar and throw it away every second.

Never take a break. Do it 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Keep at it for 15,855 years, roughly.

Congratulations. You will have pissed away as much money as George Bush has on the Iraq War.

From the McClatchy Newspapers bureau in D.C.:

WASHINGTON - The bitter fight over the latest Iraq spending bill has all but obscured a sobering fact: The war will soon cost more than $500 billion.

That's about ten times more than the Bush administration anticipated before the war started four years ago, and no one can predict how high the tab will go. The $124 billion spending bill that President Bush plans to veto this week includes about $78 billion for Iraq, with the rest earmarked for the war in Afghanistan, veterans' health care and other government programs.

Congressional Democrats and Bush agree that they cannot let their dispute over a withdrawal timetable block the latest cash installment for Iraq. Once that political fight is resolved, Congress can focus on the president's request for $116 billion more for the war in the fiscal year that starts on Sept. 1.

The combined spending requests would push the total for Iraq to $564 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

What could that kind of money buy?

A college education - tuition, fees, room and board at a public university - for about half of the nation's 17 million high-school-age teenagers.

Pre-school for every 3- and 4-year-old in the country for the next eight years.

A year's stay in an assisted-living facility for about half of the 35 million Americans age 65 or older.

Not surprisingly, opinions about the cost of the war track opinions about the war itself.

"If it's really vital, then whatever it costs, we should pay it. If it isn't, whatever we pay is too much," said Robert Hormats, author of "The Price of Liberty," a newly published book that examines the financing of America's wars.

Before the war, administration officials confidently predicted that the conflict would cost about $50 billion. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey lost his job after he offered a $200 billion estimate - a prediction that drew scorn from his administration colleagues.

"They had no concept of what they were getting into in terms of lives or cost," said Winslow Wheeler, who monitors defense spending for the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan research institute.

(snip)

As wars go, Iraq is cheap. World War II cost more than $5 trillion in today's dollars. Korea and Vietnam each cost about $650 billion in today's dollars, but spending on those wars took a much bigger share of the economy when they were fought.

"For the average American, there's really been no economic consequence of the country being involved in a war," said Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (International). "It doesn't have as much impact on the economy as those previous wars did."

Water into blood, frogs, gnats, flies, pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, three days' darkness, death of first-born . . . the Bush Administration

The Washington Post recounts -- in agonizing detail -- how the Bush Administration is the governmental equivalent of the hapless and hopeless underclass Republicans so like to perform their social Darwinism on because, well, they can.

That's right, my children, your government and mine is too bloody incompetent, incoherent and inured to common sense to take advantage of the help offered to it. Unbelievable. Un-be-lievable.

You know, I not only miss Bill Clinton, I miss Jimmy Carter. And that's coming from someone who cast his first presidential ballot for Ronald Reagan in 1980 . . . because he wasn't feckless, can't-do Jimmy Freakin' Carter.

I can't write anymore. I was born and raised in South Louisiana, and I'm just too furious to "go there" right now. You know?

Just read this excerpt from MSNBC.com and weep:

As the winds and water of Hurricane Katrina were receding, presidential confidante Karen Hughes sent a cable from her State Department office to U.S. ambassadors worldwide.

Titled "Echo-Chamber Message" -- a public relations term for talking points designed to be repeated again and again -- the Sept. 7, 2005, directive was unmistakable: Assure the scores of countries that had pledged or donated aid at the height of the disaster that their largesse had provided Americans "practical help and moral support" and "highlight the concrete benefits hurricane victims are receiving."

Many of the U.S. diplomats who received the message, however, were beginning to witness a more embarrassing reality. They knew the U.S. government was turning down many allies' offers of manpower, supplies and expertise worth untold millions of dollars. Eventually the United States also would fail to collect most of the unprecedented outpouring of international cash assistance for Katrina's victims.

Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.

In addition, valuable supplies and services -- such as cellphone systems, medicine and cruise ships -- were delayed or declined because the government could not handle them. In some cases, supplies were wasted.

The struggle to apply foreign aid in the aftermath of the hurricane, which has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $125 billion so far, is another reminder of the federal government's difficulty leading the recovery. Reports of government waste and delays or denials of assistance have surfaced repeatedly since hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005.

Administration officials acknowledged in February 2006 that they were ill prepared to coordinate and distribute foreign aid and that only about half the $126 million received had been put to use. Now, 20 months after Katrina, newly released documents and interviews make clear the magnitude of the troubles.

More than 10,000 pages of cables, telegraphs and e-mails from U.S. diplomats around the globe -- released piecemeal since last fall under the Freedom of Information Act -- provide a fuller account of problems that, at times, mystified generous allies and left U.S. representatives at a loss for an explanation. The documents were obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a public interest group, which provided them to The Washington Post.

In one exchange, State Department officials anguished over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medicine, gauze and other medical supplies spoiled in the elements for weeks after Katrina's landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and were destroyed. "Tell them we blew it," one disgusted official wrote. But she hedged: "The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded."

In another instance, the Department of Homeland Security accepted an offer from Greece on Sept. 3, 2005, to dispatch two cruise ships that could be used free as hotels or hospitals for displaced residents. The deal was rescinded Sept. 15 after it became clear a ship would not arrive before Oct. 10. The U.S. eventually paid $249 million to use Carnival Cruise Lines vessels.

And while television sets worldwide showed images of New Orleans residents begging to be rescued from rooftops as floodwaters rose, U.S. officials turned down countless offers of allied troops and search-and-rescue teams. The most common responses: "sent letter of thanks" and "will keep offer on hand," the new documents show.

Overall, the United States declined 54 of 77 recorded aid offers from three of its staunchest allies: Canada, Britain and Israel, according to a 40-page State Department table of the offers that had been received as of January 2006.

"There is a lack of accountability in where the money comes in and where it goes," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the public interest group, which called for an investigation into the fate of foreign aid offers. She added: "It's clear that they're trying to hide their ineptitude, incompetence and malfeasance."

Hi, I'm the Mighty Favog (Hi, Favog!) and I'm a . . . .

OK, time to work the steps.

First step: Own up to the behavior. Admit it.

All right. My name is the Mighty Favog, and I like disco. Some of it.

I went through high school and college yelling "Disco sucks!" I was living a lie. I liked -- OK, I LIKE -- some of the stuff. I adore Yvonne Elliman, and I did back in the day. "If I Can't Have You" is one of my favorite songs, and it was on the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack.

I can't get enough of it. OK, ARE YOU FREAKIN' HAPPY NOW! I LIKE IT! I LIKE IT! I LIKE IT!

I WAS LIVING A LIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE . . . .

The only secret I have left is that the suit I was married in was very, very polyester . . . OHMIGAWD!!!!

The horror . . . the horror . . . I can't believe I said that! Ohhhhhhhh . . . .

EDITOR'S NOTE: His Imperial Favogitude, I am sure, would want you to know that this week's episode of the Revolution 21 podcast can be accessed at the top right of this page, or go to www.revolution21.org and click on "podcast." Thank you.

Bog-trotting Paddy producer cries in his ale

Don Imus' shanty-Irish producer has dragged his mackerel-snapping arse off his barstool long enough to cry in his figurative beer -- as opposed to his real one back at the pub he crawled from -- about getting canned along with Imus for using racist and sexist slurs against the Rutgers women's basketball team.

In addition to "hos," I do believe Bernard McGuirk used the word "jigaboos" to describe the team. But what do you expect from a stupid Mick, you know?

According to The Associated Press, here's what Paddy O'Dumbass said on Fox News Channel's Hannity & Colmes show:

McGuirk, in an interview on Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes," said he "didn't get the memo" that the phrase 'hos' had reached the level of the n-word in offensiveness. But apologies to the Rutgers team were appropriate, he said.

But McGuirk said he and Imus had engaged in the same locker-room humor for many years, and received pats on the back and raises from their superiors before CBS Radio fired them this time.

He sharply criticized the Rev. Al Sharpton, who led the campaign to get them fired.
"It seemed like he terrorized broadcast executives," he said. "It seemed like they were in a fetal position under their desks sucking their thumbs on their Blackberrys, trying to coordinate their response."

The concept of "crossing the line" is hard to understand when it's not clear where the line is, he said.

OK, LET'S GRANT McGuirk what he says about the broadcast execs being craven hypocrites, Sharpton being a publicity-loving race-baiter and no one knowing where "The Line" is on any given day.

But like everybody's mother or teacher (or both) has lectured a million times, "I don't care what (fill in the blank) did. I care about what YOU did."

And what Imus and McGuirk did for far too long was to act like a couple of horse's asses, slurring innocent people for kicks and giggles. Which they got away with.

Until they got their comeuppance.

What goes around, and all that rot.

AND SPEAKING OF "THE LINE" McGuirk couldn't find until he and Imus crossed it . . . I'll bet he'd think I crossed it pretty good by using every Irish stereotype and slur I could fit into a short blog post. I think I crossed it pretty good, too.

In fact, if I were McGuirk, I'd want to knock my block off. God knows, I'd have some justification in doing so.

The question is, how would what I just did to Bernard McGuirk be any different from what he and Don Imus did for a living? On the public airwaves. Just like any number of other "shock jocks" on the air from Maine to Malibu.

That the jerk McGuirk and his pal Imus were egged on by amoral and spineless radio execs means nothing, except that we're overdue for another Day of Reckoning. And when that Electromagnetic Enema of the Airwaves takes place, God willing, it will be every bit as deserved as the one just administered.

I'm on the Monitor beacon . . . NBC Monitor beacon

Bloop. Bleep. Bleep. Bleep. Bloop.

If you are of a certain age -- and I am of a certain age -- you well remember the "Monitor beacon," and the "kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria" of a weekend radio program that it announced for almost 20 years from 1955 to early 1975 . . . the National Broadcasting Company's Monitor.

I loved Monitor when I was a kid, listening to it over WJBO, 1150 AM, in Baton Rouge, La. Monitor was big-time network radio. Monitor was exotic and sophisticated and brought the world into the living room -- into the transistor radio -- of our blue-collar, refinery-worker household someplace physically and sociologically far, far away from NBC's "Radio Central" at 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

New York City, that is. Skyscrapers . . . Broadway stars.

YEAH, the music folks like Gene Rayburn and Joe Garagiola played was pure middle-of-the-road "parent music," though it had its moments. But Joe Garagiola was my favorite sportscaster, and Gene Rayburn was the avuncular host of The Match Game on TV.

I remember one time, when I was little, we were watching The Match Game on TV and they made a random call to somewhere in the country. The phone rang in our kitchen. Fellow said he was Gene Rayburn. My mother didn't believe him (you'd have to know my mother).

The conversation went something like this, from the Baton Rouge end of Ma Bell's phone network:

"Hello?"

(Mama listens for a while.)

"Yeah? Weyul, ah'm Jimmy Durante, and you can kiss mah ass!"

(Click.)

SHORTLY AFTERWARD on the television, Mr. Rayburn, laughing, announced that the callee didn't want to play The Match Game today.

Oops.

I'm truly sorry that Gene Rayburn passed away some years back. I never got the chance to apologize to him on my mother's behalf . . . and to ask whether I might play The Match Game in her stead.

BUT WAIT . . . this post is about Monitor.

Anyway, to me, Monitor, was magic. It had a little bit of everything -- news, talk, music, features and comedy. And it went all weekend long -- 40 continuous hours at its height. For a while, it ran from 8-10 (Eastern) weeknights, too.

Monitor probably was the most ambitious thing ever done on radio. And Monitor was NPR's All Things Considered long before there was even a National Public Radio to put it on. Only funner.

I've been thinking a lot about Monitor the past couple of days -- lamenting the loss of radio like Monitor is more like it. And I've been spending some time on the Web, at the Monitor Tribute Pages, reading . . . and listening.

Monitor was radio as run by the "grownups," of whom there are only a few in broadcasting these days. Radio like that wasn't usually my default when I got to be a teen-ager -- just before Monitor's demise -- but it was always good to drop in now and again, you know?

It was good to know that there was a place on the dial where the adults were in charge, and where they were smart, and witty, and serious when they needed to be. And where the grownups weren't quite as square as we would have liked to imagine at the time.

BACK IN THE DAY, Monitor represented -- in a radio-broadcasting kind of way -- the best of us. It was radio that played to our curiosity, to our intelligence and, ultimately, to the best aspects of our God-given nature. In tragic contrast, radio today sometimes strikes me as some sort of cross between a fart joke and a hate crime.

I miss the days when we were almost as smart -- and almost as "grownup" -- as Monitor.

* * *

UPDATE: Reader, and major Monitor fan Louis weighs in with more on the show:

I'm also of an age that I remember Monitor. In fact, I listened to it every weekend on WDSU in New Orleans. But, when WDSU carried the Chicago White Sox games (for whatever reason), I'd listen to Monitor on WJBO which was just 90 miles away. I liked Monitor for all the reasons that you mentioned. And I even liked the music.

Monitor was the brainchild of Pat Weaver, the creative president of NBC in the 1950's who created Today, Tonight, the Home show, and the TV spectacular. This was an era when broadcasters had high hopes for the medium as an educational tool.

Monitor included broadcasters like Dave Garroway, Henry Morgan, Hugh Downs, David Brinkley, Morgan Beatty, Jim Fleming, and a bunch of other broadcasting legends. It truly was the kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria that Pat Weaver and Jim Fleming envisioned.

And you're right. It was funnier than NPR, much funnier. It had Nichols & May, Bob & Ray, Selma Diamond, Ernie Kovacs, and Jonathan Winters. How could it miss?

And Louis seconds my motion that you go forthwith to the Monitor Tribute Pages. Follow the links in this post.

The Gospel of Neal (or, Who Needs Nicaea?)

I probably need to study it more.

I'm not sure exactly what the Arians

believed. I think that the Council of Nicaea

was not a godly event. I was

watching the History Channel . . . .

IF YOU GO to the "About" page on the Revolution 21 website, you'll run across this in the "whats and wherefores":

Revolution 21 is countercultural, and that includes a lot of the music we play. Revolution 21 -- while a radio station run by Christians -- doesn't obsess about playing only "Christian" artists. Revolution 21 believes music has meaning and validity above and beyond the particular artist.

In other words, art can stand on its own merits. So Revolution 21 intends to leave art to the artists.

Format? We don't have no stinkin' format.

Well, actually, we do. But not like you're used to in the age of Corporate Radio. Instead, Revolution 21 features a more-or-less "freeform" mix of "Christian" and "secular" rock and alternative music.

Also, you'll hear some punk and hip-hop, as well as "Christian" rap. Then add some singer-songwriters, some neo- and classic soul . . . plus a pinch of folk, and you start to get a whiff of our revolutionary brew.

Unlike the rest of the radio world -- "Christian" or "secular" -- Revolution 21 believes there are just two kinds of music . . . good and bad.

The bad, we don’t mess with.

THERE'S A REASON we don't play just "Christian" artists, and there's a reason why we'd prefer that the musicians worry about their art and not about being evangelistic associations. And there's a reason why we're not placing all our bets on the music being the entire message of Revolution 21.

And that's why this blog is here.

Prog-rock heavyweight Neal Morse used to be in the band Spock's Beard. Then -- and you know it's coming -- he found Jesus. Which meant he got out of Spock's facial hair and became a "Christian" artist, making music about Jesus and . . . aaannnnnnd . . .

When I prayed to the Lord and asked what my gift was, I felt more like my gift was that of an evangelist. But these albums take on more of a teaching kind of mode, but they also could be considered evangelism. If I were to come to your church, my gift would be more of an evangelist. I testify a lot about what God has done in my life. I usually don't get into the meat of the doctrine. I guess I save that for the albums. I'd like to open people's eyes to more of God's truth, if God will allow it. He has to do it. The Spirit of the Lord has to reveal things and draw people.

BUT WHAT WOULD Morse try to sell poor pagans when he's in "more of a teaching kind of mode"?

How about something really close -- if not identical -- to one of the oldest and nastiest of all heresies?

From Christian Music Today.com:

Your message board has a long, ongoing discussion about your views on the Trinity and the nature of Jesus, but can you give a thumbnail sketch of what you believe?

Morse: I believe there is one God the Father, that he has a son, Jesus Christ, the only begotten of the father; and the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of God. I'm neither Trinitarian nor Oneness Pentecostal. I think I'm something different. I simply like to say that I'm a disciple of Christ. I believe that the best thing to do is to stick with Scripture—sola scriptura.

Do you believe Jesus was a created being?

Morse: I wouldn't put it that way. I think "begotten" may be distinct from "created." I don't want to make less of God's Son than some people say I do. He is the unique Son of God, and all power has been given to him in heaven and earth. But a son comes from a father. In 1 Corinthians 15:28, it says that in the end times Jesus is subjected to the Father. In the Gospel of John, Jesus doesn't do anything except what the Father tells him to do. I don't see in the Scriptures how Jesus and God can be co-equaI and the same person. I'm just trying to acknowledge what the Scriptures say—that all power has been given to him, and that we should worship him and serve him.

Weren't these issues settled for Christians at the Council of Nicaea, when the Arian view of Jesus as a created being was rejected and the Trinity affirmed?

Morse: I probably need to study it more. I'm not sure exactly what the Arians believed. I think that the Council of Nicaea was not a godly event. I was watching the History Channel where it showed that Constantine really didn't care how it came out; he just wanted unity so he could conquer other nations. So it seems to me that the spirit of conquering was very present there, but I wasn't there, and I don't want to pretend to be an expert on the Council of Nicaea.

WELL, NEAL, so you don't have to sprain your pickin' fingers by typing "Arianism" into a search engine, let me do it for you:

A-R-I-A-N-I-S-M

And what does The American Heritage Dictionary have to say about Arianism?

The doctrines of Arius, denying that Jesus was of the same substance as God and holding instead that he was only the highest of created beings, viewed as heretical by most Christian churches.

OK, how about . . . N-I-C-A-E-A

Let's try Wikipedia:

The First Council of Nicaea was convened by Constantine I upon the recommendations of a synod led by Hosius of Cordoba in the Eastertide of 325. This synod had been charged with investigation of the trouble brought about by the Arian controversy in the Greek-speaking east.[3] To most bishops, the teachings of Arius were heretical and a danger to the salvation of souls. In the summer of 325, the bishops of all provinces were summoned to Nicaea (now known as İznik, in modern-day Turkey), a place easily accessible to the majority of them, particularly those of Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, and Thrace.

Approximately 300 bishops attended, from every region of the Empire except Britain. This was the first general council in the history of the Church since the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, which had established the conditions upon which Gentiles could join the Church.[4] In the Council of Nicaea, “the Church had taken her first great step to define doctrine more precisely in response to a challenge from a heretical theology.”[5] The resolutions in the council, being ecumenical, were intended for the whole Church.

WELL, IT SEEMS that Neal Morse -- studiously avoiding the influence of "corrupt" church bodies, a subject that frames his latest album, Sola Scriptura -- just might have sola scripturaed himself into being a bald-faced heretic. An Arian, even. Or at least something really, really close.

And he intends to "evangelize" folks into his heretical view of salvation. Into a well-established lie.

But, hey, once you're born again and get yourself a Bible, and though a neophyte -- a baby -- in the faith, have just decided you're qualified to be Pope . . . .

After all, didn't somebody in one of them Gospels say somethin' about "What is truth?" Hell, maybe you can pull something out of your butt -- or your own interpretation of the Bible -- and make it so. And "evangelize" and "teach" that newly defined dogma -- let's call it the Gospel of Neal -- to all those folks looking for the gospel on the radio, or in a record store, instead of in a church.

I mean, once you've come to the conclusion that you're smarter and more insightful than all those brilliant minds and spiritual giants who've gotten together, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, to decide lots of big questions over the past 2,000 years . . . what the hell!

Yes, what the Hell, indeed.

* * *

THE NICENE CREED

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father.

Through Him all things were made. For us men and our salvation He came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary , and became man. For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; He suffered, died, and was buried.

On the third day He rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures: He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son, He is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets.

We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Amen.

The return of Kristy

Here's the April video in the ongoing chronicle of Kristy Dusseau's journey back toward health and a "new normal" from a two-year encounter with a rare, virulent form of leukemia -- and the aftereffects of her life-saving treatment.

I've said this every month, and I'll keep saying it: What Kristy has been through, you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. You wouldn't.

And while racking up $5 million-plus in medical bills, Kristy also has lost her home, car, job, etcetera, etcetera.

So, even though Lent is over, go to www.kristyrecovers.com and give what you can. Donations have been falling off, but the need doesn't flit away . . . as does our collective-ADD attention span.

If God exists, denying Him is, like, nuts

WHAT IS TRUTH? Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has some thoughts on that, and what it means for society in these times.

He writes today in the journal First Things:

Nietzsche might enjoy the fact that he’s the kind of thinker young college men quote to impress young college women. He has some of the same rebel appeal that Milton gave to Lucifer and Goethe gave to Mephistopheles. He’s bold. He’s radical. And the fact that he also went mad adds just the right touch of drama. In other words, he makes a great cultural icon for Americans to eat as a candy bar, because most Americans will never read a word of what he actually said.

The trouble is, once upon a time, some people in Germany did read him. And they did take him seriously. And they acted on what he said. Ideas have consequences. When Nietzsche asks us on the back of a Will to Power candy bar, “Is man merely a mistake of God’s, or God merely a mistake of man?,” we Americans can swallow our chocolate along with our Starbuck’s and grin at the irony from the comfort of 2007. Sixty years ago, no one would have gotten the joke. There was nothing funny about the Holocaust.

In other words, ideas have consequences—which brings me to today’s topic. When Cardinal Rigali first invited me to come to Philadelphia to talk about religion and the common good, I accepted for two simple reasons. First, I’m tired of the Church and her people being told to be quiet on public issues that urgently concern us. And second, I’m tired of Christians themselves being silent because of some misguided sense of good manners. Self-censorship is an even bigger failure than allowing ourselves to be bullied by outsiders.

Only one question really matters. Does God exist or not? If he does, that has implications for every aspect of our personal and public behavior: all of our actions, all of our choices, all of our decisions. If God exists, denying him in our public life—whether we do it explicitly like Nietzsche or implicitly by our silence—cannot serve the common good, because it amounts to worshiping the unreal in the place of the real.

Religious believers built this country. Christians played a leading role in that work. This is a fact, not an opinion. Our entire framework of human rights is based on a religious understanding of the dignity of the human person as a child of his or her Creator. Nietzsche once said that “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

In fact, the opposite is often true. Convictions can be the seeds of truth incarnated in a person’s individual will. The right kinds of convictions guide us forward. They give us meaning. Not acting on our convictions is cowardice. As Christians we need to live our convictions in the public square with charity and respect for others, but also firmly, with courage and without apology. Anything less is a form of theft from the moral witness we owe to the public discussion of issues. We can never serve the common good by betraying who we are as believers or compromising away what we hold to be true.

Unfortunately, I think the current American debate over religion and the public square has much deeper roots than the 2006 and 2004 elections, or John Kennedy’s 1960 election—or the Second Vatican Council, for that matter. A crisis of faith and action for Christians has been growing for many years in Western society. It’s taken longer to have an impact here in the United States because we’re younger as a nation than the countries in Europe, and we’ve escaped some of Europe’s wars and worst social and religious struggles.

But Americans now face the same growing spiritual illness that J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Romano Guardini, and C.S. Lewis all wrote about in the last century. It’s a loss of hope and purpose that comes from the loss of an interior life and a living faith. It’s a loss that we can only make bearable by creating a culture of material comfort that feeds—and feeds off of—personal selfishness.

No one understood this better than Georges Bernanos. Most of us remember Bernanos for his novels, especially The Diary of a Country Priest and Under Satan’s Sun. Some of us may remember that he was one of the major European Catholic writers to reject the Franco uprising in Spain. He spent the Second World War in South America out of disgust with European politics, both right and left. He didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. He criticized Catholic politicians, Church leaders, and average Catholics in the pew with the same and sometimes very funny relish. But he loved the Church, and he believed in Jesus Christ. And exactly sixty years ago, in 1946 and 1947, he gave a final series of lectures that predicted where our civilization would end up today with complete clarity.

Regnery published the lectures in English in 1955 as The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos. I hope you’ll read them for yourselves. They’re outstanding. Bernanos had an unblinkered vision of the “signs of the times.” Remember that, just after the Second World War, France experienced a Catholic revival. Recovering from a global conflict and the Holocaust, the world in general and France in particular seemed to turn back—briefly—to essentials. It was during that hopeful season that the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council gave us Gaudium et Spes.

But Bernanos always saw the problems beneath the veneer. He wasn’t fooled by the apparent revival of Catholic France. And so his work is a great corrective to the myth that our moral confusion started in the 1960s. As Bernanos makes clear, our problems began with the machine age—the industrial revolution—but not simply because of machines. They were the fruit of a “de-spiritualization” that had been going on for some time.

Bernanos argues that the optimism of the modern West is a kind of whistling past the graveyard. The Christian virtue of hope, he reminds us, is a hard and strong thing that disciplines and “perfects” human appetites. It has nothing to do with mere optimism. Real Christian hope comes into play as the obstacles to human happiness seem to grow higher.

Bernanos takes it upon himself to show us just how high the obstacles to real human freedom have become, even in liberal democracies. He argues that our modern optimism is a veneer over a despair bred by our greed and materialism. We try to fool ourselves that everything will turn out for the best, despite all the evidence to the contrary—crime, terrorism, disease, poverty—and we even concoct a myth of inevitable progress to shore up our optimism. American optimism in particular—Bernanos refers to the United States bitterly as “the Rome, the Mecca, the holiest sanctuary of this civilization”—is really only the eager restlessness of unsatisfied appetites.

Two themes dominate these last essays by Bernanos. The first is man’s eagerness to abolish, forget, or rewrite his own history in favor of determinisms like liberal capitalism, which makes society nothing more than a market system, and Marxism. For Bernanos, the attack on human memory and history is a primary mark of the Antichrist.

As Bernanos explains it, big ideological systems “mechanize” history with high-sounding language like progress and dialectics. But in doing so, they wipe out the importance of both the past—which they describe as primitive, unenlightened, or counterrevolutionary—and the present, which is not yet the paradise of tomorrow. The future is where salvation is to be found for every ideology that tries to eliminate God, whether it’s explicitly atheistic or pays lip service to religious values. Of course, this future never arrives, because progress never stops and the dialectic never ends.

Christianity and Judaism see life very differently. For both of them, history is a place of human decision. At every moment of our lives, we’re asked to choose for good or for evil. Therefore, time has weight. It has meaning. The present is vitally important as the instant that will never come again; the moment where we are not determined by outside forces but self-determined by our free will. Our past actions make us who we are today. But each “today” also offers us another chance to change our developing history. The future is the fruit of our past and present choices, but it’s always unknown, because each successive moment presents us with a new possibility.

Time and freedom are the raw material of life because time is the realm of human choice. Bernanos reminds us that the Antichrist wants us to think that freedom really doesn’t exist, because when we fail to choose, when we slide through life, we in effect choose for him. Time is the Devil’s enemy. He lives neither in the eternity of God nor in the realm of man. Satan has made his choice against God and he is forever fixed in that choice. But as long as man lives in time, which is the realm of change, man may still choose in favor of God. And, of course, God is always offering the help of his grace to do just that. If the Devil can sell us the idea that history is a single, determined mechanism; if humanity’s freedom of will can be forgotten or denied; then man will drift, and the Antichrist will win.

(snip)

One of my favorite passages from Frank Sheed is this:

It’s incredible how long science has succeeded in keeping men’s minds off their fundamental unhappiness and its own very limited power to remedy their fundamental unhappiness. One marvel follows another—electric light, phonograph, motor car, telephone, radio, airplane, television. It’s a curious list, and very pathetic. The soul of man is crying for hope of purpose or meaning; and the scientist says, “Here is a telephone” or “Look, television!”—exactly as one tries to distract a baby crying for its mother by offering it sugar-sticks and making funny faces.

The tidal wave of our toys, from iPods to the Internet, is equally effective in getting us to ignore history and ignore our own emptiness. The struggle for real human freedom depends upon the struggle for human history. Unlike the ideologies that deny the importance of the past and the present and focus on the illusions of a perfect future, Christianity sees the most important moments of the human story to be the past event of the Incarnation and the present moment of my individual opportunity to love.

HAT TIP: Crunchy Con

Truth, hell! We can't handle the Fall.

Well, this is going to get ugly.

As if it weren't already, what with the PC and gay storm troops ready to blitzkrieg whomever has the temerity to point out that, in the case of homosexual unions, the parties (and the parts) don't fit.

Then again, it's been a hate crime to be a professing Catholic for a while now. And the Gaymacht ain't going to like what it reads in newspapers like The Sunday Times in Perth, Australia:

The Vatican's second-highest doctrinal official says homosexual marriage is evil, and abortion and euthanasia are "terrorism with a human face".

The attack by Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was the latest in a string of speeches made by either Pope Benedict XVI or other Vatican officials as Italy considers giving more rights to gays.

In an address to chaplains, Archbishop Amato said newspapers and television bulletins often seemed like "a perverse film about evil".

He denounced "evils that remain almost invisible" because the media presented them as "expression of human progress".

He listed these as abortion clinics, which he called "slaughterhouses of human beings", euthanasia, and "parliaments of so-called civilised nations where laws contrary to the nature of the human being are being promulgated, such as the approval of marriage between people of the same sex ...".

Archbishop Amato spoke at a time when the Vatican and Italy's powerful Catholic church are at loggerheads over plans for a highly controversial law that would give unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples some form of legal recognition.

The church and Catholic politicians, even some in Prime Minister Romano Prodi's centre-left coalition, see the proposed law as a Trojan Horse and say it could lead to gay marriages.

Archbishop Amato, who is said to be very close to the Pope, criticised the media's coverage of ethical issues.

After denouncing "abominable terrorism" such as that carried out by suicide bombers, he condemned what he called "terrorism with a human face", and accused the media of manipulating language "to hide the tragic reality of the facts".

"For example, abortion is called 'voluntary interruption of pregnancy' and not the killing of a defenceless human being; an abortion clinic is given a harmless, even attractive, name: 'centre for reproductive health'; and euthanasia is blandly called 'death with dignity'," he said.

IT'S UNVARNISHED. It's blunt. It will give offense. It's also the truth, the honest exposition of what the Catholic Church has taught since they pulled Jesus Christ off the cross. And what Judaism taught before that for, oh, 4,000 years or so.

It's also what many in the American Church don't have the cojones to talk about much anymore.

You don't have to go far in American Catholicism to find serious dissent from plain Catholic doctrine, unchanged since . . . forever. Just go into the pews. Heck, go up to the pulpit.

And, most certainly, go to a meeting of a Catholic youth group.

IT IS A NORMAL CONDITION of adolescence and young adulthood to be absolutely certain of your own unappreciated genius and moral superiority. There has never been any generation quite so clever as one's own, and only the imposition of "fairness" lies between ourselves and the establishment of the New Jerusalem.

Thus, there can be no quibbling with something so naturally just and lovely as the nuptials of Adam and Steve (Yes, Jerry Falwell can be a jerk and a blowhard, but "Adam and Steve" belongs in the Bon Mot Hall of Fame) because God Made Them That Way (TM) and not letting them wed Just Isn't Fair (c) 1967, Down With The Man, LLC.

I heard the God Made Them That Way (TM) argument just this past Sunday. At a Catholic youth-group discussion on You Know What. Yes, God Made Them That Way (TM) and who are we to argue with God, right?

Well, except when God is speaking through Scripture . . . or Tradition . . . or Reason . . . or through Nature. Then we can argue with God, because who the hell does He think He is, telling loving homosexual couples that they can't Be Happy (c) 1,000,000,000 B.C., Beelzebub Publishing, Inc.

At the point of the inevitable God Made Them That Way (TM) moment, I turned to the youth minister -- we adults weren't allowed in on the discussion unless invited, which we generally weren't -- to vent.

"God forbid that we might have Catholic youth with opinions formed by the Catholic Catechism," I said. Sarcastically, of course, Because God Made Me That Way.

Not that my expectations are high, you understand. I am the guy who is always prepared to helpfully direct, when met with blank stares when asking Catholic teen-agers to turn to Matthew, "It's the first part of the last third of the Bible."

It was at some point after this that it all hit me . . . again, being that I have this thought every now and again: We just don't understand the reality of The Fall. At all. Particularly today's kids.

We affluent Westerners, amid all our wealth and all our distractions, Just Don't Get It. At all. Amid almost daily horrors and sordid suburban minidramas and broken families -- and Seung-Hui Cho -- we still fail to understand the consequences of Adam and Eve's disobedience.

We look at ourselves in The Fall's fun house mirror, see a warped and distorted image of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, then think we've gazed upon the Beatific Vision in full.

We are good. Evil is quaint. What is truth? Gays can marry. What the hell.

Almost 6,000 years of human experience, taboo and divine revelation? Worthless amid the wonderful insight and wisdom that is ours since, oh . . . 1967. We don't need no stinkin' Savior . . . Do what thou wilt. It's all good.

OF COURSE, every good postmodernist thinker has a perfectly fine answer for the Nature argument against gay marriage. Also for the Church's argument that the purpose of marriage is twofold --unitive and procreative -- and that a husband and wife, coming together to create new life out of marital love, is the closest human beings can come to modeling the Holy Trinity . . . We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.

And that fine answer is to smugly plunge a knife into the heart of infertile heterosexual couples -- faithful husbands and wives -- who have played by God's rules, followed their physical and metaphysical natures and still rolled snake eyes in this post-Fall "vail of tears." Yes, in the name of the Great God Fairness, if gays and lesbians cannot live in wedded bliss, neither then should I live as such with my dear wife of nearly 24 years. Because, physically, our marital union is just as fruitless as those of gays and lesbians.

See, my wife and I understand a bit about The Fall and, too, about the brutal unfairness of life. We had trouble conceiving, and then she got cancer.

And that was that.

Meanwhile, some folks -- including not an insubstantial number of professed Catholics -- openly defend the murder of defenseless children in utero as "choice." We Americans see choice as good, as did God when He gave Adam and Eve free will.

And look what they did with it:

1
Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the LORD God had made. The serpent asked the woman, "Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?"
2
The woman answered the serpent: "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;
3
it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, 'You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.'"
4
But the serpent said to the woman: "You certainly will not die!
5
No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad."
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The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Genesis 3:1-6

SEE, I don't think what made God furious was the mere fact of Adam's and Eve's disobedience. What I think made God furious was the why of their disobedience -- "'your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods . . . .'"

Do you think the real sin here -- the Original Sin -- was more one of pride or one of avarice? Me, I think it could go either way. Perhaps a draw.

Whatever the case, it is indisputable that our postmodern society treats traditionally capital sins like lust, pride and avarice as ersatz virtues, encouraging hallmarks of worldly sophistication. And we tut-tut those hoary old men in the Vatican as they prattle on about the "evil" of homosexual marriage and "slaughterhouses of human beings."

"We," of course, being the West's cynical sophisticates and the young people who drink their Kool-Aid, thinking it a fitting substitute for the living water of Christ.

"We," in the name of the Autonomous Self, the Almighty Choice and the Inconsequential Orgasm seek perfection out of perversity and "fairness" out of pridefulness, achieving only the further perfection of our fallen iniquity.

"We" could care less about the utter unfairness of people throwing away their children before they're born -- or neglecting them after they're born -- while others can't have the children they desperately wanted to love and raise. In America, adoption is damned long odds when you're exterminating millions of fetuses a year, and not many of us can afford to trek to China, now, can we?

AND "WE" DON'T USUALLY have to suffer the unthinking cruelties of teen-agers' defense of sanctified sodomy, nor have "we" seen the look in my wife's eyes, the one she gets when I know she's thinking about the children she will never have.