I was away from my computer yesterday. I have received interesting comments and will be posting them later this morning.

The Democrats in Congress are committing “party-cide” by going ahead with the hugely unpopular transformation of American health care. Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, at Newsmax, write to Congress:

Civil rights, Social Security, women’s suffrage — all of Majority Leader Harry Reid’s metaphors — were popular and had broad approving majorities. This bill has the opposite: a nation paralyzed with fear for what you are about to do to its health care.

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As mentioned by Gail Aggen in the previous post, the industrial-grade pizza you find in your local supplier is a bastardization of the real thing. Italian bread, whether it be rustic pane Toscano, foccaccia, pizza, casatiello, ciabatta, or coccodrillo, carries a long and exalted tradition. It is the greatest bread, if not the greatest edible, in the history of the world.

The Romans learned to bake bread from the Greeks, who brought their immense dynamism to the art and worshipped bread through Demeter, the goddess of grain and abundance. In the Roman Empire, bread baking reached its zenith in the time of Augustus. In 25 B.C., there were 329 public bakeries in the city of Rome alone, according to Carol Field, a genius when it comes to Italian carbohydrates.

Field, in her wonderful book The Italian Baker, writes:

The big central bread market in Rome boasted round breads; breads notched into eight sections, which were easy to break off into individual pieces; breads shaped like keys, cubes, or braids; breads that looked like mushrooms; and breads that looked like wreaths. There was a bread for each social class – senators’ bread, knights’ bread, citizens’, people’s, and peasants’ bread. White bread was already a status symbol, even though some writers knew that darker, coarser loaves were healthier and gave sustenance to hard-working peasants and farmers. The rich ate siligo,the finest wheat flour, which was so white that the women of Rome powdered their faces with it. Pliny noted that “in some places bread is named after the dishes eaten with it, such as oyster bread, in others from its special delicacy, as cake bread, in others from the short time spent making it, as hasty bread, and also from the method of baking, as oven bread, or tin loaf, or baking pan bread.”

It is surprisingly easy to reenact the ancient traditions of Italian bread making in one’s own home. One doesn’t need a wood-fired oven or a fancy commercial mixer. One doesn’t need enormous wooden boards or the arm muscles of a 16th century peasant. One needs, at bare minimum, flour, salt, yeast and olive oil. I have made enormous loaves of peasant Italian bread that would look at home in a bakery on a side street in Tuscany, a place I have never visited beyond the confines of my own kitchen. They were a cinch. I used no fancy equipment to knead the dough beyond that with which God endowed me. I am very fond of kneading dough. It is a great form of release and if I were a psychotherapist I would write my clients’ prescriptions for bread recipes. I like throwing a wet Italian dough against the table. It does not mind in the least.

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Is pizza technically a foodstuff? I’m not referring to the artisanal pizza baked in wood-fired ovens and sold for $15 a bite. And, I don’t mean homemade pizza, which is easy to make and satisfying.

I mean the ubiquitous stomach-stuffers sold in pizza shops across America. In the town were I live, there are as many pizzerias as gas stations and pizza is the gastronomic equivalent of Regular Unleaded. These outlets sell the exact same product, which arrives on the table with pools of grease shimmering on the surface like petroleum residue on the road. It’s the Fix-a-Flat of the gastro-intestinal system, akin to cotton wadding or foam insulation blown into crawl spaces.

This material is too lifeless, too uniformly made, too commercially engineered to be anything but anti-food. Sad to say, it also invites anti-social behavior. Each diner grabs a slice from the table and then walks away. This isn’t just a post-food era. It’s post-meal.

Pizza has contributed to the quasi-destruction of the American body, to making us the fattest nation in the history of the world. Carbs kill, as a reader eloquently wrote in a previous post. Some people mistakenly believe pizza is relatively healthy because it’s not as fatty as meat. Pizza shops should team up with cardiologists and other medical specialists to offer package deals. Eat so many pizzas and get discount treatment in exchange.

There’s only three possible justifications for the existence of this nutritional simulacra. It’s cheap. It’s easy. And it’s fast.  It all ends forlornly with a large greasy box that doesn’t fit in the trash. We don’t have to do anything to produce it. We don’t even have to cut it. We just have to pay for it and get rid of the box. Our passivity is complete. Pizza is enslaving.

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Deborah Kerr’s portrayal of the English widow Anna Leonowens in the 1951 film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, The King and I, is a great depiction of an interesting woman and the play is an enduring examination of the mysterious and ambiguous attraction between a man and a woman of divergent cultures and races.  Anna is a widow with a young son who comes to the magnificent Siamese court, where she has been hired as a tutor to the king’s many wives and children. She arrives in  hoop skirts, dignified and yet not aloof, with a combination of  British refinement and maternal affection for her new students. The King, immortalized by Yul Brynner, is a charming tyrant.

With the death of her husband, Anna’s life has taken a difficult turn.  She exudes no bitterness. She is the antithesis of many contemporary female roles, such as the character April Wheeler in the vile 2007 movie Revolutionary Road. April has everything – beauty, two young children, an attentive husband, a roomy house in the suburbs – and yet she kills herself because her husband declines to move to Paris.

Anna and her son are essentially alone in a foreign land and yet in one scene, she gazes at a young couple and, in them, is heartened to find the counterpart of her past:

When I think of Tom.
I think of a night,
When the earth smelled of summer
And the sky was streaked with white,
The soft mist of England
Was sleeping on a hill.

I remember this,
And I always will…
There are new lovers now
On the same silent hill,
Looking on the same blue sea.
And I know Tom and I are a part of them all —
And they’re all a part of Tom and me.

Hello young lovers, whoever you are,
I hope your troubles are few.
All my good wishes go with you tonight,
I’ve been in love like you.

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N.W. writes:

I have been following the conversation on cultural relations at your site with great interest. It is heartening to see people discussing the matter in an honest straight-forward fashion. Perhaps we will prove Mr. Holder wrong after all.

I believe part of the problem in coming to terms with this issue is the common tendency to skip over the concrete particulars and instead firmly ground oneself in the cloudy abstracts. I may be tilting at windmills, granted, but nonetheless I shall begin my campaign against that stalwart bastion of the Enlightenment “the imperative to love all of humanity.” Now, this is a tall and dark fortress with innumerable passages, corridors and gates from which sally forth many a foolish knave, crying their challenge, “Halt foe, dost not thou love all and equally so?” to which I reply with a quixotic “How? How are we to love all of humanity?”

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  In this entry on marriage, race, and civilization, Kimberly, the preternaturally wise young mother, offers this advice to a man who says the war for traditionalism is lost: Like St. Augustine, I think he believes that the truth must be quite complex, beyond the reach of the common mind, and so he feels alone, and that would terrify anyone! But the truth is not complex. It is so simple, one must be very humble to understand it. His pride is blinding him, and in anxiety, he's banging on your door... Do you know who the army is? I'll bet you do. It's us. St. Louis de Montfort revealed this to me, I believe, but I'm no authority, so don't bet your soul on it. It's just my opinion. The way he describes the army that the Lord is building, it would make any housewife feel strong! The army is the heel of the Woman who is the Arc of the Covenant, the heel that "crushes the head of the serpent." This heel is unnoticed, unappreciated, and trodden upon.