"THE DECLINE OF DECADENCE": I wish I had seen Damsels in Distress before its closing night here in DC, so I could tell you all to go see it! It was terrific--funnier and more wide-ranging in its satire than Metropolitan, I thought. In When Sisterhood Was in Flower, Florence King's obvious love for the '70s feminism she satirized made the satire itself sharper and brighter. WSWIF:70's feminism::Damsels:"Beauty will save the world."

...The paradox is that although war is waning in the classic configuration of brigades fighting an enemy on foreign shores, we are not rid of its specter, burdens, threats, costs and restrictions. What should we make of wartime that has the appearance of peacetime?

Mary Dudziak’s new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is a crucial document. Dudziak, a legal historian at the University of Southern California, argues that we are experiencing “not a time without war, but instead a time in which war does not bother everyday Americans.” Her smooth foray into legal and political history reveals that in not just the past decade but the past century, wartime has become a more or less permanent feature of the American experience, though we fail to recognize it. She doesn’t say so explicitly, but we are experiencing a reverse Orwellian situation, in which the state, rather than elevating war to perpetuate itself, obscures war to perpetuate itself.

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"SO WHOSE 'SWAN LAKE' IS IT?" Original Petipa choreography for the position they talk about on page one is obviously much better, yes? (Also: NYClean, so you can read the article.)

SIMCHA FISHER, FOR MOTHER'S DAY.

Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.
-Graham Greene, The Quiet American

"THE CHILDREN'S SUBLIME." My piece on Maurice Sendak. The New York Times obituary was also quite good. RIP.

I'LL BE IN DENVER! On Monday, May 14, at Theology on Tap, doing my thing. Here's a rundown from the Denver Catholic Register. I hope to meet some of you there!

THIS IS PRETTY FASCINATING. Via The Fix.

All aridity of spirit results from sublimations that are badly assumed, from the forced maimings of a vocation that was poorly understood, from a disguised, paralyzing refusal.
-much more here

But the right to revise traditions is not everybody’s right; it has to be won by learning their moral truths as deeply as they can be learned. Those who have difficult vocations to explore need the tradition to help the exploration. The tradition may not have the final word, but it is certain they will never find the final word if they have failed to profit from the words the tradition offers. And if it should really be the case that they are summoned to witness on some terra incognita of “new” experience, it will be all the more important that their new discernments should have been reached on the basis of a deep appropriation of old ones, searching for and exploiting the analogies they offer. No one who has not learned to be traditional can dare to innovate.
-Oliver O'Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion

This is a little heavy for me, a bit stolid, especially if it's taken outside the context of Christian Tradition-with-a-capital-T. Traditions can arise from misunderstandings, accidents, and jokes, and yet over the years they can come to illuminate various truths and signal belonging. But O'Donovan's point is basically true and our lives would be vastly more beautiful if what he recommends were standard practice. ...Quotation via CC.

HOUSTON IS SAFER TODAY:

...Think about what you’re putting on the air. There’s no law that requires you to accommodate the police every time they want to flex their muscles on the evening news. In one of the videos linked above, the news team shoves a camera into a woman’s face as she’s stepping into the wagon. The reporter then shouts questions at the woman—this just after the reporter points out the possibility that the woman she’s humiliating and zooming in on may be a sex slave.

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10 BEAUTIFUL BUILDINGS INSPIRED BY FAMOUS BOOKS. A lot of these are terrific--and can I just say that I love that the Hobbit one is a motel? My only disappointment is that it isn't somewhere in Lolitaville, USA.

HOW AMERICA CAME TO TORTURE ITS PRISONERS:

...They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.

They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.

And they conspired to cover up their crimes. They did this from the start, by creating secret facilities and secrecy regimes to keep what they were doing from the American people and the world. They did it by suppressing and then destroying evidence, including videotapes of the torture. They did it by denying detainees legal process because, as the CIA’s Inspector General put it in a 2004 report [pdf], when you torture someone you create an “Endgame” problem: You end up with detainees who, “if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.”

They managed all this, for a time, through secrecy—a secrecy that depended on the aggressive suppression of two groups of voices.

Over and over again, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, in secret CIA black sites and at CIA headquarters, in the Pentagon, and in Washington, men and women recognized the torture for what it was and refused to remain silent. They objected, protested, and fought to prevent, and then to end, these illegal and immoral interrogations. While the president and his top advisers approved and encouraged the torture of prisoners, there was dissent in every agency, at every level.

The documents are full of these voices. ...

Alongside the dissenters, another group of voices surfaces in these once-classified materials: the men we tortured. Theirs are the voices the entire system of incommunicado detention and closed tribunals was constructed to censor, and it worked: To this day, few Americans can identify more than a handful of detainees by name. Fewer still know how far from the “worst of the worst” the vast majority of those we tortured turned out to be.

Torture dehumanizes. But that only extends a process of dehumanization that must take place in order for abuse to happen: It is impossible to torture those whose humanity we recognize. In joke-filled letters to their attorneys, in frank and vivid testimony in tribunal transcripts, in startlingly naive and in powerfully emotional exchanges with interrogators, images emerge not of the maniacal and monolithic and monstrous, but of distinct and recognizable individuals. To hear these voices is to begin to reverse the terrible dehumanization the documents chronicle.

more (via Mark Shea)

FRIENDS IN NEED: At the pregnancy center, we see how certain norms which are destructive for everyone, but which may make some utilitarian sense from an upper-class perspective, have filtered down to poor women. The most obvious one is the idea that marriage is the final stamp of approval on a life well lived, the last item on the to-do list, to be checked off only once you've achieved economic stability. Marrying before economic stability has been achieved is actively stigmatized, because economic independence and stability are major markers of grown-up status, and the new model of marriage is that you complete the growing-up process first rather than letting your marriage form the bedrock of your adult identity.

You can see how this causes difficulties when economic stability is a far-off goal which may never be achieved. (And which becomes even harder to achieve once you start having kids out of wedlock.) Marriage is simultaneously an immensely longed-for honor and an endlessly-receding finish line.

What I didn't notice until more recently is that destructive upper-class norms of friendship may also be changing poor communities. This study basically argues (this is from memory, so I apologize if I misstate anything) that upper-class friendships are looser, based on common interests and personal compatibility, easier to shrug out of, and less tightly-tied to mutual aid, while working-class friendships are nosy, impose sometimes burdensome obligations, and are based mostly on proximity or similarity of life situation. Looser friendships offer independence, but are prone to atomization and alienation; tighter friendships foster generosity, but are prone to gossip and to resentment when perceived obligations aren't met.

I've been struck recently by how many of my clients are ashamed to go to their friends for help: both material or financial help, and emotional support, the love in time of distress which might be thought of as one of the key purposes of friendship. I've written before about my own struggle with the temptation to keep my troubles to myself and not seek help because I don't want to burden others, so I totally sympathize with this dilemma. But as I'm trying to teach myself, love in a time of need is what you have friends for. St. Aelred's emphasis on transparent honesty with one's friends may be considered an antidote to the shame we feel at exposing our own needs and weaknesses.

One of the biggest tasks at the center, at least for someone with my style of counseling, is to help the woman find the sources of love and support already available to her in her own life and community. I try to help her identify and strengthen those connections. And I've been startled by how often people will identify a friend as a possible source of desperately-needed strength, and then admit that they're ashamed to rely on that friend. "Well, if she were in need, wouldn't you want to know?" I ask, and that helps a bit. But the tight old relationships--not only friendship but the fictive kinship relations of godparenthood and godsisterhood, and maybe even the extended-family relationships of cousinhood--seem to be weakening. A renewal of friendship would be good for everybody, but maybe especially good for the poor.

"You've turned into a log of wood," he commented. "You've not only lost contact with reality and lost all interest in world events, in your civic duties, in yourself, in your friends (and you did have friends), you've not only lost all goals in life, except for winning at roulette--you've even renounced your memories. I remember you at an intense, vivid moment in your life, but I'm certain you've forgotten the best and strongest emotions that you experienced at that time, and your present dreams and aspirations do not go beyond pair, impair, rouge, noir, the middle twelve numbers, and all that. I'm sure of it."

"That'll do, Mr. Astley. Please, don't remind me of it!" I cried with annoyance, almost spitefully. "And for your information, I haven't forgotten a thing. I have only temporarily emptied my head of everything, including even my memories, until I've radically improved my situation. Then you'll see, I'll come back from the dead!"
--The Gambler

UNEQUALLY YOKED IS DOING A SECOND ROUND OF THE "IDEOLOGICAL TURING TEST." Talk to her about it here! (I infest the comments box.)

FACES: A PET PEEVE. See also the comment of a friend of mine, after seeing the cover of a new book on Gay Catholic Whatnot, "Oh no--not the bandaged heart!"

LETTING GO AND HOLDING ON: As we walked back from seeing Kid with a Bike, my friend and I passed a car with a bumper sticker reading, "I believe in unicorns, good men, and other mythical creatures." I joked that it was especially appropriate for the movie we'd just seen, a Belgian drama about a boy trying to find someone to parent him. But the movie isn't at all cynical or harsh. The kid is really lost and angry, and it's hard to watch him being rejected by his father, or remoraing himself to a hairdresser just because she was minimally kind to him once. The story is hard, and even the hope in its ending comes through the boy's defeat and resignation as well as through his foster mother's tender acceptance. Very, very recommended if it's playing near you.

SING YOUR LIFE: Recently watched Kiss of Death, a bleak and sometimes grimy little noir about a small-time robber who eventually gives in to the cops and turns state's evidence so that he can go home to his daughters. The story sets out to tug your heartstrings and succeeds (the guy was only robbing jewels at the start of the movie because no one would give a legit job to an ex-con, and his kids needed Christmas presents!); it's much better at portraying misery than joy. The nuns who take in the two little girls are stock characters from the Cath-symp era of Hollywood described in Ross Douthat's new book, and the romance feels very standard-issue as well. What stands out are the casual cruelties--the district attorney and his employees mock their prisoner for being a stool pigeon, even as they're urging him to sing!--and the truly scary performance of Richard Widmark as a Joker-grinning sociopath.

THE MIND ANSWERS THE BELL LIKE A SERVANT: A quick, necessary postscript to my recent long post about conversion--and I meant to say this earlier but got blown off-course by events! Anyway it would be easy to think that if you can become Catholic for reasons as intellectual as the ones I describe in that post, your faith would remain a papery husk, a bunch of moral laws rather than a passionate relationship with Jesus Christ. That kind of faith is certainly not what I was advocating. I think people generally move beyond their initial reasons and motives for conversion; and it's necessary to do so, as we begin to step into the areas of Catholic faith and practice which initially felt the most remote to us. People who accept Catholicism as a groundwork for morality can, I hope, now revisit the music, the prayer practices, the ascetic practices, and the corporal works of mercy, and love the Lord their God with all their heart, mind, and strength.

Post title is a nod to this.