Food for the Spirit and the Soul

The Scrooging of America

19 December 1843 – Charles Dickens publishes “A Christmas Carol”

While watching the most recent Presidential candidate debate, I suddenly realized how badly I have misjudged Ebenezer Scrooge. It is now clear to me that, far from being a greedy, heartless, exploitative miser, Scrooge is merely a pragmatic businessman competing in the marketplace with his peers, and since he is aggressively vocal in his support of housing for the unemployed (prisons) and jobs for the destitute (workhouses), he is best understood as a “compassionate conservative.” In short, Ebenezer Scrooge was a good Republican, and if you have listened to Bachmann, Paul, Gingrich, Romney, Perry, and Santorum, I’m sure that many of you share my wish that they could all be transported back to mid-nineteenth century London, a time and place more suited to their economic and political humbug.

Ask Dr. Santa: A Christmas Movie

The Founder of the Feast

Dear Dr. Santa: What is your favorite Christmas movie? Ebenzer S

Dear Ebenezer: To get myself into the proper seasonal mood, every Christmas Eve I watch “A Christmas Carol,” starring Alastair Sim. Of course I always run the movie backwards, because Dr. Santa loves a happy ending.

Ask Dr. Santa: The Joy of Giving

Dear Dr. Santa: Is it really true that it is better to give than to receive? – “Tiny” Tim Cratchit

Dear Tim: Yes, it is true – but only if kicks and punches are involved. 


Below – The Spirit of Christmas

Prophecies You Can Count On

17 December 1790 – The Aztec calendar stone is discovered in Mexico City. After two centuries of concerted effort, linguists deciphered it just this morning, and they discovered that it offers two dire warnings. First: “Never believe anything the Mayans say about an approaching apocalypse. They are the Chicken Littles of Mesoamerica – always forecasting a cosmic disaster and then, when it doesn’t occur, recalibrating the date. They might as well be doomsday Christians. The world will not be destroyed in 2012, because our Aztec astrologers have determined with unerring accuracy that in every meaningful way it will end on 3 February 1959, since that will be the day the music died.” Second: “Never invest political authority in anyone from Texas, since most of the elected officials in that sorry place have a shockingly weak allegiance to both reality and truth. In fact, we’re considering building a wall along our northern border to keep Texans from sneaking into our country and stealing Aztec jobs.”

Happy Holidays?

The photograph above, taken two days ago by someone calling himself “J.O. Elf,” shows a tank approaching the North Pole. This picture clearly proves that rabidly conservative pundits like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter are right – there actually is a “War On Christmas,” especially since this visual evidence is far more convincing than anything they have offered in support of their claim. And to think that until just now the only way that I would have placed the word “right” and those three names in the same sentence would have been in a line like “In matters relating to culture and politics, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter are far to the right of Benito Mussolini.”

Story and Metastory

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” – Muriel Rukeyser
Keep that lovely thought in mind today as you go about the business of embellishing your personal narrative, because in some small but important way it is part of a much larger story. And remember this, as well: We can all be better “writers.” In Rukeyser’s words, “All the poems of our lives are not yet made.”

Muriel Rukeyser

“Boy Meets Girl”: Love Story or Mental Illness?

15 December 1973 – The American Psychiatric Association declares that homosexuality is not a form of mental illness. I find it interesting that the Association has never made the same declaration about heterosexuality. Given the multiple calamities associated with heterosexual relationships in the United States, including unhappiness, boredom, adultery, divorce, Sandra Bullock movies, Dr. Phil, and the deranged fantasies that attend Valentine’s Day, I suppose that psychiatrists are reluctant to deny something that is so painfully obvious – namely, that heterosexuals are clearly insane. Perhaps the same crackpots who think it possible to “pray away gay” can be enlisted to help “cure” heterosexuals with a similarly vacuous slogan – something like “don’t date a straight.”

It’s All Been Foretold

Born 14 December 1503 – Nostradamus, alleged French seer and one of the principal darlings of tabloid journalism, along with a few other odd creatures, including the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and Lindsay Lohan.
The so-called “prophecies” of Nostradamus are, of course, utterly baseless, but after every catastrophe that occurs on the planet, someone will find a passage in “Le Propheties” that foretold it. This exercise requires that the person explicating the text and those who consider the interpretation valid must all neglect the inconvenient fact that the same passage had been used countless times on previous occasions for different events. It’s what stupid, lazy people do instead of reading and thinking – rather like being a member the Tea Party, for example, or joining a religious cult, or watching Fox News. However, while it is tempting to ignore the obviously nonsensical Nostradamus prophecies, surveys unfortunately indicate that roughly 20% of “adult” Americans believe that they are credible – and these people vote. I suppose this depressing fact partly explains the otherwise implausible popularity of Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum.

A Pensive Occasion for Those Who Love Both the English Language and Human Intelligence

Died 13 December 1784 – Samuel Johnson, English poet, essayist, literary critic, biographer, and lexicographer. Johnson was the author of the first definitive dictionary in the history of the English language, and his contributions to our literary heritage are immense. One does not read Johnson merely to learn his opinions on various subjects, but rather to appreciate the stylistic elegance with which he expresses them. At a time when twitter is helping to accelerate the pace at which Americans are becoming a nation of inarticulate twits, Johnson’s prose, with its abundance of wit, irony, and complexity, provides a model for us to emulate and an antidote to stupidity. Whether we like it or not, our writing is the shadow of our thinking, and anyone who spends time reading what passes for discourse on the Internet knows that some people’s shadows are very pale, indeed. Finally, Johnson is the subject of what is arguably the greatest literary biography in history – “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,” by James Boswell, a book which has been at my bedside for decades and one that I heartily recommend people read in addition to Johnson’s publications.
Here are a few quotations from Dr. Samuel Johnson:
“All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.”
“A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.”
“Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?”
“Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.”
“Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.”
“Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
“Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.”
“He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.”
“Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.”
“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”
“Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.”
“Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.”
“Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.”
“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
“What is easy is seldom excellent.”
“Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.”

A Timely Sports Note: The Big East Conference Should Go South

28 October 1538: The first university in the New World, the Universidad Santo Tomas de Aquino, is established in what is today Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and the anniversary of its founding has inspired me with a plan that could help NCAA football. I think that every fan of college football should contact the commissioner of the Big East Conference, which is now scrambling to replace member schools soon to depart, and suggest that he should immediately recruit the University of Saint Thomas Aquinas into the league. After all, Santo Domingo is nearly 1,000 miles closer to Big East universities than at least one of the schools the Big East covets – Boise State – and it doubtless has better academics.

I know that some people will object to my proposal on the grounds that USTA does not have a football team, but if you have watched any college football for the past two years, realistically speaking, the same can be said about all the current Big East Conference schools, as well.

The University of St. Thomas Aquinas