THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I am responding to “Simplicity is More Fun,” but my topic, not entirely unrelated, is Wine and Civilization: I remember being twelve or thirteen years old when at dinner my paternal grandmother Nellie or my great aunt Herminie would set before me at the table “one finger of wine and one of water” in a glass.  My mother, whose background was Protestant, would become perturbed, but the Catholic Nonnas had their explanation: Wine was a civilized custom to which children as they grew older needed to become accustomed.  That was how they did back in the “Quarter” in New Orleans.  As a consequence, I learned how to drink wine without becoming drunk, an achievement which I consider a social boon and not from an exclusively negative viewpoint.

When once in a while I teach freshman composition, I offer the students a list of two hundred carefully phrased essay-topics, two of which are “wine as a civilized custom” and “beer as a civilized custom.”  Student respondents invariably fail to read the qualification, “as a civilized custom.”  The result is just as invariably a whiney anti-liquor screed with mountains of statistics downloaded from various Bluestocking websites cut and pasted without any attempt at interpreting them.  I hasten to add that few of freshman composition students are unfamiliar with spirit, especially beer, which they drink to excess regularly, using their fake IDs to obtain it.  They know the phenomenon of hangover quite well (many of them, anyway).

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The actor Hugh Grant is among those calling for assisted suicide

HAVING promoted the Sexual Revolution for decades, elite Westerners now turn their attention to the Death Revolution. That’s no surprise. The Sexual Revolution is a form of collective suicide.

See the long list of British actors and literary figures who signed a recent letter to The Telegraph calling for Parliament to make assisted suicide legal.

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We were not given life to be happy but to render glory to God. However, it is important to note that even from the viewpoint of earthly happiness, neopaganism is bad business. There is more joy in an austere and Christian society, even when life is modest, than in the fallacious splendor of a super-civilization – perhaps better said, a “pseudo-civilization”- that puts all its happiness in the delights of sensuality or the illusions of money.

—– Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

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DAVID BROOKS, the New York Times columnist laughably called “conservative,” picks the top magazine essays of 2014. His favorite is the “blockbuster” article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic calling for reparations for blacks. All American blacks, in Coates’s view, should receive money in reparation not just for slavery but for ongoing discrimination, particularly discrimination in lending.

Brooks writes, “The essay has incredible propulsive force.” That it does. You might call it a journalistic version of the Knock Out Game.

Coates has impeccable elite credentials. He is the son of a member of the Black Panthers. He has done remarkably well as a journalist even though he dropped out of college.

See Jared Taylor’s excellent analysis from last May of Coates’s essay.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

TWO  idealistic Italian college students, who went to Syria on a humanitarian mission and were kidnapped there this summer, have emerged in a video recording begging for their life. Details about any ransom requested by the Islamic group holding them are not available.

Now’s the time for a fresh statement from “Pope” Francis saying every religion has its fundamentalists.

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ADVERTISERS love to combine retro imagery that suggests stability and traditional sex roles with images of the Sexual Revolution, equating with no subtlety whatsoever the latter with the relative normality of former times. They really do beat you over the head with it. See Tylenol’s ludicrous comparison of one extremely Messed-Up “Family” with Norman Rockwell.

Here is another example analyzed by Kidist Paulos Asrat at Reclaiming Beauty. An American Airlines ad juxtaposes Gregory Peck with Neil Patrick Harris. While Peck gazes off into the distance with Randian confidence, the homosexual actor looks directly at the camera with a smirk, as if to say, “I am here. I am enough.” (Wow, he’s wearing a tie! How cool is that?)

What we see here is hero and anti-hero side by side.

Remember, it’s in the interest of the corporate world to promote the Sexual Revolution. Traditional family life is not so good for full-throttle consumerism.

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MOST of the famous American Christmas pop tunes have been ruined by retailers. Whether it’s “Winter Wonderland” or “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” it’s played constantly and very loudly in stores from Thanksgiving to Christmas. There are the jazz versions, the rock versions, the country versions, the creepy sexualized versions. It’s hard to think at all fondly of roasted chestnuts and sleigh bells anymore. Let these things disappear off the face of the earth. The Christmas season in the stores is a prolonged, industrialized, desensitizing, cacophonous aural assault that has nothing to do with Christmas. It’s so much raw manipulation polluting the soundtracks of the mind and creating a form of Post-Traumatic Christmas Shock Syndrome that paradoxically sends people fleeing to psychologists for anti-depressants because they have been dangerously over-exposed to good cheer and feel their own lives are deficient and gloomy by comparison. Are people really induced to spend by this noise?

It will take many years before some benevolent king looks out on the wreckage of Western civilization from some isolated refuge and says to his people, “Let there be silence.” In the meantime, we must suffer.

Experts complain about the effects of violent imagery. No one complains about the cumulative effects of having natural feelings for warmth and festivity hyper-stimulated by canned music. These tunes have become Christmas amphetamines.

Now that it’s almost over, now that we can perhaps venture out and buy toothpaste without encountering “Jingle Bell Rock” or the “Grinch” song, perhaps we can finally enjoy a few moments of Christmas pop music for the fun that some of it might be if it weren’t overplayed for mercenary reasons. Here is Cyrus Chestnut, the jazz pianist, playing a very good version of the Charlie Brown Christmas song by Vince Guaraldi, a version that I have never heard in my local Rite Aid or Bed, Bath and Beyond. You just might be able to listen to it without seeing a credit card flash before your mind.

Merry Christmas!

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SAGE McLAUGHLIN writes:

In his weekly column, Jonah Goldberg says “I don’t know who first said, ‘Behind every apparent double standard lies an unconfessed single standard’ …. , but whoever did was onto something.”

I’m nearly positive that Lawrence Auster was the first to say it, and he certainly said it more often than anybody else, usually in response to mainstream conservatives’ whining about liberals’ supposed double-standards. He pointed out numerous times that the supposed “double-standards” of liberalism were really just a single standard aimed at whites and white civilization.

I wonder how Jonah would feel if he were to learn of this? It makes me smile inwardly to imagine it.

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CHRISTMAS II
—    George Herbert

The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
My God, no hymn for Thee?
My soul’s a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is Thy word: the streams, Thy grace
Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
Outsing the daylight hours.
Then will we chide the sun for letting night
Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I find a sun
Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
As frost-nipped suns look sadly.
Then will we sing, and shine all our own day,
And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev’n His beams sing, and my music shine.

QUESTION: What is the ideal political role for a Modernist anti-pope?

Answer: Serving as go-between for a Marxist police state and an atheist democratic republic, both enemies of the Catholic Church.

JEANETTE V. writes:

Episcopal “Bishop” Heather Cook has been charged in a fatal hit-and-run that killed a 41-year-old cyclist.

According to The Daily Mail:

Maryland’s newly ordained first female Episcopal bishop fatally crashed into and killed a bicyclist before fleeing just two days after the Christmas holiday.

Police on Saturday said a 58-year-old female motorist drove away from a scene of mangled metal beside a fatally injured man taking his final breaths–41-year-old father and custom bike maker Tom Palermo.

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CHRIS S. writes:

Oh, isn’t this video ad by Tylenol just wonderful.

It’s amazing how legendary American companies have given into the perverts. And to capture a classic American icon as Tylenol has done and use it for propaganda breaks my heart.

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N.W. writes:

Thought you might appreciate this little tidbit. When you search “thinking housewife” on Google the first auto-suggestion is “thinking housewife” and the second is “thinking housewife racist.” Don’t know quite why, but I found that amusing.

Hope you and yours are well this Christmas season and may y’all have a Happy New Year!

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JEANETTE V. writes:

After failing all year to pass a bill in 15 states, activists scrambled together for a cheap PR move right before Christmas. Therapy for confused adolescents will no longer be legal in D.C. Merry Christmas to pedophiles in Washington, D.C.! There will be plenty of access to young boys from now on.

These homosexual activists and their fellow travelers are evil. They are willing to let children suffer and perhaps die in pain to promote their sinful and degenerate agenda.

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Nativity,
Master Francke; 1424

MAY THIS CHRISTMAS DAY FILL YOU WITH CONFIDENCE AND JOY.

ALL manner of silliness and irreverence have been embraced by the Novus Ordo Church since Vatican II. They say the law of praying is the law of believing. Disbelief in the supernatural reality of the Eucharist leads to barren prayer. So why not fill that time up with something at least entertaining or even useful?

Here’s more innovations that “Pope” Francis could probably get behind.

Okay, maybe that’s too extreme. The Elvis mess is more like it.

A 1954 recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Christmas cantata, Hodie, performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra can be found here.