Xmas in July

Today is the feast of
St. Mary Magdalene and
the birthday of Willem Dafoe.

Journalism 101:

Meet D. B. Norton

In this touching sequel to the 1941 Frank Capra classic "Meet John Doe," the late, great Edward Arnold is replaced by media magnate Rupert Murdoch, publisher of Sun News.

Synopsis:

Thousands of "D. B. Norton" clubs have sprung up around the world, inspired by the genius of D. B. Norton (Murdoch) in combining socialist appeals to "the people," cunningly orchestrated by Labour Party head Tony Blair, with capitalist know-how, skillfully organized by U. S. President George Bush.

Threatening the success of the Norton clubs is troublemaker "John Doe," a nobody who must be dealt with before a new day can dawn for humanity, with Murdoch leading both the masses of the East and the investors of the West into the glorious future.

Required reading:

1. The Beijing Version,
   for the Masses
   
   
   
2. The Tony Blair Version,
   for the Investors
   
   
   
3. The Jayson Blair Version,
   for Aspiring Journalists
   
   
   
4. The Troublemaker's
   "Weapons of Mass Distraction"
   Version, for those few
   who prefer truth

Compare and contrast.

For Hemingway's Birthday:
The Hong Kong
Candidate

"Blair, on his first trip to China in five years, expressed his belief that the strengthened relationship between Britain and China would, beyond any doubt, continue to develop..."
-- People's Daily, Beijing, July 21, 2003

"Now he's poppin' the piano just to raise the price of a ticket to the land of the free...."
-- "Hong Kong Blues,"  sung by Hoagy Carmichael in "To Have and Have Not," a film based on a Hemingway novel.

"The U.S. government repatriated on Monday 15 migrants from a Cuban government vessel that was taken illegally from Cuba.... The island's communist government said the ship was hijacked and demanded the return of the occupants and the boat."
-- Reuters, Miami, July 21, 2003, 1:08 PM ET

As a review at Amazon.com notes,

"The movie concerns a brave fishing-boat captain in World War II-era Martinique who aids the French Resistance, battles the Nazis, and gets the girl in the end. The novel concerns a broke fishing-boat captain who agrees to carry contraband between Cuba and Florida in order to feed his wife and daughters. Of the two, the novel is by far the darker, more complex work."

Janet Reno's Birthday:

It's Not Just the Republicans

Waco, April 19, 1993

Miami, April 22, 2000

Years before the above actions,
Janet Reno's legal style was already formed.

See Janet Reno's Child Abuse.

None of the above seems to have made any impression on students at UC Berkeley, who invited Reno in 2001 to be a commencement speaker.

From an April 2001 UC Berkeley press release:

"Reno was among the most requested keynote speakers for Commencement Convocation in a survey taken last summer of more than 9,000 UC Berkeley students eligible to be seniors in fall 2001, said UC Berkeley senior Humaira Merchant.

Merchant cited Reno's 'liberal and progressive policies.' "

Your kind of love drives a man insane.

Political-birthday postscript of 4:15 AM:

The New Yorker magazine, in its issue dated July 28, has caught up with a quote in my July 16 entry ("The Tailor of Washington," for Rubén Blades's birthday) on "faith-based policy."  See "Faith-Based Intelligence," by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

"Ironically, the Bush strategy seems to mimic the most recent James Bond flick...."

-- The Straits Times, Singapore, July 19

Whereas the Blair strategy...

Hideous Strength

On a Report from London:

Assuming rather prematurely that the body found in Oxfordshire today is that of David Kelly, Ministry of Defence germ-warfare expert and alleged leaker of information to the press, the Financial Times has the following:

"Mr Kelly's death has stunned all the players involved in this drama, resembling as it does a fictitious political thriller."

-- Financial Times, July 18,
   2003, 19:06 London time

I feel it resembles rather a fictitious religious thriller... Namely, That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis.  The use of the word "idea" in my entries' headlines yesterday was not accidental.  It is related to an occurrence of the word in Understanding: On Death and Truth, a set of journal entries from May 9-12.  The relevant passage on "ideas" is quoted there, within commentary by an Oberlin professor:

"That the truth we understand must be a truth we stand under is brought out nicely in C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength when Mark Studdock gradually learns what an 'Idea' is. While Frost attempts to give Mark a 'training in objectivity' that will destroy in him any natural moral sense, and while Mark tries desperately to find a way out of the moral void into which he is being drawn, he discovers what it means to under-stand.

'He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one's own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him-something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to.'

This too, I fear, is seldom communicated in the classroom, where opinion reigns supreme. But it has important implications for the way we understand argument."

-- "On Bringing One's Life to a Point," by Gilbert Meilaender, First Things,  November 1994

The old philosophical conflict between realism and nominalism can, it seems, have life-and-death consequences.  I prefer Plato's realism, with its "ideas," such as the idea of seven-ness.  A reductio ad absurdum of nominalism may be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy under Realism:

"A certain kind of nominalist rejects the existence claim which the platonic realist makes: there are no abstract objects, so sentences such as ‘7 is prime’ are false...."

The claim that 7 is not prime is, regardless of its motives, dangerously stupid... A quality shared, it seems, by many in power these days.

British Intelligence:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html

"The British intelligence that we had, we believe is genuine. We stand by that intelligence."
-- Tony Blair

-- Reuters, July 17, 2003, 6:12 PM ET

The ad at left, from reuters.com,
links to a website titled

Building an Intelligent Organisation.

The ad at right, from cullinane.com,
links to a website titled

cullinane: create communicate connect.

Note the four C's.

A Constant Idea: 759

From Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 1919:

"Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture tomorrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

The number 759 is courtesy of Plato; the quotation 759 above is courtesy of Shakespeare.  The song that Shakespeare suggests is "A Day in the Life of a Fool."

A Constant Idea

"From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool [of daily life] is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. 'Hamlet' or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."

— Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past," 1939-40, in Moments of Being

Rocket Billie

"Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain."

-- Billie Holiday, who died at 3:20 AM on July 17, 1959.

For more on death, summer, and Lady Day, see the film Rocket Gibraltar.