LAST MONTH, I wrote very briefly about Kevin Neary, a 29-year-old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania whose life changed irrevocably in November. His story, as familiar as it seems, is haunting. Neary was walking home in the Northern Liberties neighborhood on Nov. 15 when he was approached by a black thug. The man asked Neary for money. He then fired a bullet into Neary’s neck, shattering his spine, and ran away.  (more…)

AT VFR, a reader argues that it was wrong for a New Zealand Catholic to destroy a billboard that portrayed Mary disrespectfully. After giving some thought to it, I am inclined to agree with him. The reader, Pentheus, writes:

This billboard is like a mousetrap into which these protesters hastened thoughtlessly. They are of their own volition completing the set-up for this propaganda exercise. This brute response is in no way helpful, and is rather in every way detrimental, to all of us who in any way share or sympathize with their views. It is also something of a confession of intellectual impotence, like Billy Budd. (more…)

   AS reported by the Associated Press: Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta, left, kisses her girlfriend of two years, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek in Virginia Beach, Va., Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2011 after Gaeta's ship returned from 80 days at sea. It ís a time-honored tradition at Navy homecomings - one lucky sailor is chosen to be first off the ship for the long-awaited kiss with a loved one. On Wednesday, for the first time, the happily reunited couple was gay. Notice the way this couple is imitating a man and woman, with the one on the left playing the dominant male and the other the submissive female. They are playing roles. This is theater. So why not be real women instead? Wouldn't it make life simpler? The answer to this question is that it is no longer fully acceptable to be a real man or a real woman. But it is acceptable to play a real man or a real woman.

DIANA writes:

I rarely watch the evening news due to the rampant bias, but tonight I tuned in. One of the channels (I forget which, they are so interchangeable, and I switch between the three), had a report on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and its effects on the troops in Afghanistan.

It was a puff piece. Everything peachy keen. No problems – none. Everyone gets along, mutual respect, yessir. As if soldiers in the field would ever confide dissenting opinions on camera. (more…)

A READER writes:

I thought you might be interested in the “My Abortion, My Life” campaign, which is trying to end the “silence” and “shame” of abortion by normalizing it. Their mission statement is quite disturbing:

“[W]e will: Help women who have had abortions to not feel so alone. Begin to end the shame and secrecy that surrounds abortion in this country. Help people see abortion for what it is: a normal and necessary part of women’s reproductive lives and health. My Abortion, My Life will end the silence surrounding abortion one story at a time. Read more about it. Think about it. And join us in this effort to create a new and positive conversation about abortion.” (more…)

BRUCE writes:

The thread on Hitchens made me reflect on several things – one of them is the matter of what we pray for in public prayers. 

In my Church, there is an unfortunate tendency to use the phrase ‘pray for’ in a non-specific fashion in the guided prayers – and indeed most of these prayers may be directed at anti-Christian groups, including enemy nations. (This is almost certain to happen when the subject matter is drawn from whatever is being covered prominently by the BBC that day – the BBC being one of the most powerful forces for political correctness and all its evils.) (more…)

FITZGERALD writes:

This quote from Lawrence Auster on Christopher Hitchens is worth rereading:

The way these Christians talk about Hitchens is the way conservatives justify our trade relations with China: we have trade relations with China, they say, because such relations will convert the Chinese to be like us. (more…)

JILL FARRIS writes:

As the mother of eight children who writes and speaks on mothering I wanted to add my observation [as to] why Michelle Obama would allow her daughter to hang all over her. It is true (as Kidist Paulos Asrat wrote) that she is a distant mother. Thus, when she is with her children she thinks that physical closeness is proof that she is “close” to her children and that they have a “deep” relationship. Actually, my observation is that mothers who feel guilty and who err on the side of permissiveness because of that guilt, let their children hang all over them. I’ve observed children who play with their mother’s hair and comb it and are allowed to do that even when the mother is visiting with adults.

Of course, these actions are not the sign of a close relationship (as the mother falsely convinces herself) but of disrespect. The pose in the photograph is actually very disrespectful to a mother but Michelle wouldn’t know that because she doesn’t know very much about mothering…not because she only has two children but because she is a feminist and contemplation of such things as mothering and mother/daughter discipline and teaching is “beneath” her. (more…)

AT Corporette, a website for feminist go-getters, an unmarried career woman describes the soulless process of freezing her eggs and fertilized embryos for future use. She admits that the procedure makes her momentarily “sad, lonely, depressed, desperate,” but does not consider the possibility that it might someday make her children “sad, lonely, depressed, desperate.” Instead of realizing that she has been lied to about everything, most of all about this, she enthusiastically recommends the same choice to others. She writes:

[I]n our first appointment, the doctor told me that frozen embryos are more viable children than frozen eggs alone. I hadn’t actually thought of freezing embryos, and my reaction to his suggestion surprised me. Although I have never believed that life starts at conception/fertilization (and still don’t), the thought of creating embryos, freezing them, and then possibly not using them, gave me pause. It just felt more personal, somehow, and like somehow it created the obligation for me to use all of them. (more…)

  AT Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat compares the Obama family Christmas portraits to presidential family portraits of the past. This 2011 portrait is noticeably lacking in formality. It reminds me of the strange tendency families have today to express exaggerated affection for each other in public. Kidist addresses this point.

AT The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes of Franz Liszt’s “passionate fusion of musical art and religious conviction:” 

Wagner, before Nietzsche, was a revaluator of values. Liszt, while never as verbally astute as Wagner, was a re-revaluator of values, a natural agent of the type of counter-revolution recommended by Joseph de Maistre, whom Liszt read and admired. Liszt naturally – in his life and work – understood that while Wagner had recorded history accurately, he had interpreted history inaccurately. In Wagner’s aesthetic-ethical history, the crumbling away of religious illusion opened the space for the belated self-divination of the genius or hero, who as artist-politician would redeem society from its corruption through the éclat of his example. Wagner could adore the music of Palestrina and Bach, or “Christian Harmony,” as magnificent instances of musical self-expression, but not as signs pointing to a transcendental referent – he enjoyed them shorn, that is, of the deity to whom the polyphony was worshipfully directed. For Liszt, a loss, for example the loss of faith, was real, and could only be made good through reinstitution. (more…)

SEVERAL READERS expressed interest in Ingres’s famous 1845 painting of the Comtesse d’Haussonville, which I posted recently without comment. Though the image here does not do justice to the arresting colors and lifelike gaze, it’s still worth a second look. (Click on the image for a larger version.) The Comtesse’s marble white skin is so lovely in this ravishing blue gown against the blue mantel. Her unusual pose was perhaps inspired by classical statues of the muses. Her blue eyes, with unusually large pupils, suggest a penetrating inquisitiveness and detachment. She wears the most restrained of smiles and is not intent on proving  bouyant happiness. On the mantle, in between the classical vases, there are a small pile of visiting cards and pots of pink and salmon-colored chrysanthemums, suggesting feminine busyness. Everything is exquisitely refined and yet she lends it an inviting warmth and unpretentiousness. (more…)

[NOTE: See a reader’s correction below. Hitchens did not have a “British” accent. There is no such thing.]

IN AN entry at VFR, a reader quotes this anonymous online comment about Christopher Hitchens and the tendency of Americans to fall head over heels for glib British intellectuals:

He and Arianna H[uffington] were/are masters of that Oxbridge debating team thing that Americans lap up, remarkably fluid and fluent in their ability to think on their feet or seat. One need only think of the average presidential candidate’s stumbling utterances expressing ugly ideological claptrap to understand why these British-trained contrarians and freethinkers have been embraced as civilized truth tellers. But the downside of such verbal pyrotechnics is glibness and inchoate thinking. Pontificating that fast one doesn’t really know where one’s going and is then obliged to defend one’s half-baked conclusions with ferocious wit as if they were actually well-considered. Hitchens always reminded me of a rich, Public School bully, like the young Steerforth of David Copperfield (before his comeuppance), or, especially, Flashman, the ghastly cad you-love-to hate of Tom Brown’s Schooldays and GM Fraser’s further adventures of the boastful, beastly braggart. I’ll miss him making sport but the world has not lost a great intellectual and humanitarian. 

(more…)

SARAH writes:

After reading Sarah Nelson’s contribution to your site, I would like to make a contribution of my own. We are a family of three (becoming four next year!) and live on a single wage. We have also had foster children in the past.

We rent a small, 60-year-old home and have found our expenses to be incredibly minimal. In fact, we had $5,000 in cash left over this December, just from cinching the belt just a little more. We have never been bankrupt, do not have any loans or debts. We have never missed a payment on a bill. Most families we know struggle on two high paying wages and are always in incredible debt.

Here are a few suggestions. (more…)

WHAT KIND of society applauds women who want to be away from their young children? A sick society. You may have seen the many, many articles this week reporting on a small study that supposedly shows that women who take care of their children full-time are unhappier than women who are away from them. Instead of questioning what conditions and pressures might bring about such an unnatural state of affairs or offering any substantive analysis at all of the findings, the articles uniformly suggest that because a small number of women according to the lead women psychologists are unhappier with their children then it must be good that women in large numbers leave their young children for full- or “part-time” jobs, which are defined as jobs that occupy between one and 30 hours a week.

Once again the structure of home, work and society – indeed the whole social order – is reduced to the question of whether women surveyed by women psychologists are “happy.” (more…)

SARAH NELSON, a reader of this site, is a genius of domestic economy. I have added a lengthy comment of hers to this previous entry in which she describes all she has done to cut costs and make it possible for her to live on her husband’s salary. Readers who are struggling to do the same thing will find it encouraging and informative. Mrs. Nelson makes her own diapers, toothpaste and cleaning products. She elevates frugality to an art form. Below is her description of how to make homemade perfume. Even a man could follow her ideas and produce an inexpensive gift for his wife.   (more…)

IN A previous entry, a reader discussed the athletic, manly appearance of ballerinas performing The Nutcracker. Another reader, Rita Jane, here explains how American ballet has embraced technical mastery, a development evident in musical training as well. Her comment includes video clips in which you can see the difference between the athleticism of American ballerinas and dancers who follow an older European style.

Rita Jane writes:

Ballet has changed radically in the last 50 or so years. It has become much more athletic, and the sheer physical strength required to perform a ballerina’s steps is much, much greater. Larger muscles and less body fat (much easier to jump high if you have less weight to make airborne) are an inevitable result of this choreography. (more…)