The "Great Pumpkin"

 On October 26, 1959, Linus first mentions the "Great Pumpkin":

From a "tweet": Baseball by BSmile on Twitter: "Today In 1959: Linus mentions the "Great Pumpkin" for the first time!

Ross Thomas

I've posted about Ross Thomas before. Yesterday at CrimeReads appeared "Ross Thomas: A Crime Reader's Guide," a good introduction to an author who never disappointed me. The opening paragraphs:

Nobody wrote scoundrels the way Ross Thomas could. His heroes all had checkered pasts, though often with a Bogartian streak that led them to do the right thing against their own self-interest. His villains were a spectacular assortment of con men, spies, shady politicians, corrupt cops, wheelers, dealers, fixers, and schemers. His complex plots often revolved around political intrigue and backroom chicanery leading to sudden violence, and featured double-, triple-, or quadruple-crosses, so much so that it might not be until the very end that you knew exactly who had done what to whom.

All of this, in a too-brief span from 1966 to 1994, was written with keen intelligence, sharp humor, and a brilliant gift for character, description, dialogue, and intimate observation. So good was he at all of the latter that Stephen King called him “the Jane Austen of political espionage.” His worldview was jaded, but to charges that he was overly cynical, Thomas only responded, “If there is a trace of cynicism in my books, it’s only based on reality. People are always saying, ‘Things can’t be as bad as you make them,’ and I say, ‘No, they’re worse.’” .... (more, including a list of "The Essential Thomas")

Ross Thomas: A Crime Reader's Guide | CrimeReads

PC

Political correctness is unpopular (very unpopular) with everyone except the tiny minority that wields it as a weapon. From Tablet, "Campus Week: The Emperor’s Woke Clothes":

A recent survey of 8,000 Americans reveals that people of all ages, races, and educational levels oppose it by lopsided margins. None of the demographic categories presumed to be aligned with it, or to fall within its protective embrace, actually support it. Three out of 4 black people, 2 out of 3 people with postgraduate degrees, and 78 percent of people under the age of 24 all regard political correctness as a problem. While 79 percent of white people oppose political correctness, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to be resistant to it. ....

The study demonstrates that the opponents of political correctness are not primarily the followers of Donald Trump. Nor are they in any significant sense the alt-right, a ragbag of at most a few thousand malcontents in a country of 350 million, who have been falsely magnified into a ludicrous simulacrum of a real social force. They are not predominantly the remnants of a dying white America brainwashed by Fox News. They are not a pitiable collection of angry white males....

... The study shows that virtually no one who does not directly benefit from the exercise of this power (in the form of sinecures, professional advancement, or the destruction of rivals within liberal institutions) supports it.

The only group within which a majority of respondents do not regard political correctness as a problem are those that the study characterizes as “progressive activists,” a category that comprises 8 percent of the country. Only 30 percent of this group considers political correctness to be a problem.

“Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample,” Mounk writes,

progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African-American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.

The extent to which this finding might surprise you is a measure of how close you are to either elite. It is also a measure of how successfully the toxic rhetoric of warring elite cliques has gaslighted you into submitting to a narrative that is brazenly false. .... (more)

Campus Week: The Emperor’s Woke Clothes – Tablet Magazine

"O may Thy house be my abode, And all my work be praise..."

Barbara C. Saunders, March 10, 1940 - October 23, 2018

My shepherd will supply my need: Jehovah is His name; In pastures fresh He makes me feed, Beside the living stream. He brings my wandering spirit back When I forsake His ways, He leads me, for His mercy’s sake, In paths of truth and grace.	The sure provisions of my God Attend me all my days; O may Thy house be my abode, And all my work be praise. There would I find a settled rest, While others go and come; No more a stranger, nor a guest, But like a child at home.
When I walk through the shades of death     Thy presence is my stay; One word of Thy supporting breath Drives all my fears away. Thy hand, in sight of all my foes, Doth still my table spread; My cup with blessings overflows, Thine oil anoints my head.

On hypocrisy

Samuel Johnson:

Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practise; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others those attempts which he neglects himself. [The Rambler, 14]

"And help us this, and every day..."

"New every morning" at Cyberhymnal.

Russell Kirk

On the centenary of Kirk's birth Matthew Continetti gives us a fine essay about "Russell Kirk: The Father of American Conservatism" at The Atlantic. Kirk was my introduction to conservative ideas. From Continetti:

.... By the time his 500-page book was published in 1953, Kirk had changed its title to The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana. T.S. Eliot replaced George Santayana in the subtitle beginning with the third edition, in 1960. The Conservative Mind was a critical and commercial success, turning its author into an intellectual celebrity. It also gave both a name and a philosophical and literary genealogy to a reemergent political persuasion: conservatism. “This study is a prolonged essay in definition,” Kirk says on the first page. “What is the essence of British and American conservatism?”

It was a question Kirk never quite answered. As he reminded readers for decades, conservatism resists precise definition. There is no conservative platform applicable to all people, in all places, at all times. “Strictly speaking, conservatism is not a political system, and certainly not an ideology,” Kirk wrote in 1982. Rather, “it is a way of looking at the civil social order.” Kirk spent his life circling back to general principles of conservatism, apprehended through the study of notable conservative writers and statesmen. These include belief in a “transcendent moral order”; support for “social continuity”; and adherence to the principles of prescription, prudence, variety, and imperfectability.

The Conservative Mind has provided generations of conservatives a sense of history and point of view. Where before conservatives had felt isolated, on the margins of political and cultural debate, they now could take their place in a great chain of thinkers, beginning in the modern era with Edmund Burke and continuing to the present. .... Kirk was as critical of capitalism—he reminded audiences that it was a Marxist term—as he was of socialism. As he put it later: “The intellectual heirs of Burke, and the conservative interest generally, did battle on two fronts: against the successors of the Jacobins, with their ‘armed doctrine’; and against the economists of Manchester, with their reliance upon the nexus of cash payment.”

Kirk’s criticisms of economic utilitarianism, industrialism, and commercialism distinguished him from many other opponents of government planning. “I never call myself an individualist; and I wish that you people hadn’t clutched that dreary ideology to your bosom,” Kirk wrote to Victor Milione, the president of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (later renamed the Intercollegiate Studies Institute) in May 1954. “Politically, it ends in anarchy; spiritually, it is a hideous solitude. I do not even call myself an ‘individual’; I hope I am a person.” Libertarianism, Kirk said, was a dead end because it failed to excite the moral imagination. A public exchange in 1957 with Friedrich Hayek exposed the divide. “I recall remarking that Hayek referred to religion as ‘mysticism,’” Kirk told a young correspondent many years later. “I retorted that such a notion merely reveals ignorance of religion.”

This suspicion of classical liberalism is one reason Kirk was reluctant to join Buckley’s National Review. Conservatism and libertarianism might fuse perfectly within the confines of Buckley’s personality, but he was just one charismatic figure. Kirk agreed to write a monthly column for the periodical that appeared from its founding until 1980. But the tension persisted. He never appeared on the masthead, chided Buckley when National Review failed to review his books, and was vilified by its senior editor Frank Meyer. It is noteworthy that Kirk looked upon the flagship publication of the conservative movement with detachment. “James Burnham was a utilitarian, really,” he wrote of another senior editor in a 1990 letter, “and I suppose I may be classified as a romantic—that is, on the side of Coleridge, Scott, and Southey, in the disputes of the first half of the nineteenth century.” When Kirk assembled his anthology of conservative thought for Penguin, he omitted Buckley while including the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol.

Although he called Kristol “a force for good” in a 1975 letter, Kirk soured on the neoconservatives after the end of the Cold War. ....

If we rewrite the standard version of conservative history to account fully for Kirk’s role, a more complex picture of conservatism comes into view: one where the Pentagon and marginal tax rates recede into the background, and religious communities, schools, national and local traditions, literature, and culture come to the fore. Kirk’s writing has much to offer this generation of conservatives—and liberals—as they consider what attitudes to adopt toward artificial intelligence, Silicon Valley, social media, free speech, drone wars, globalization, and entitlement spending. As I remember Russell Kirk on his centennial, I recall with gratitude and appreciation some of his favorite lines from Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: And what the dead had no speech for, when living, / They can tell you, being dead: the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. (more)

Russell Kirk: The Father of American Conservatism - The Atlantic

Possibly of interest

I taught elective political science classes for many years in two Madison, Wisconsin, public high schools. Obviously time was spent on the structure of the US government, the three branches, the bicameral nature of Congress, checks-and-balances, etc. In the context of the Cavanaugh approval by the Senate there have been complaints about the equal representation of states in that body, regardless of the population of the state. Vermont has as many Senators as Texas! It is unlikely that any amendment modifying equal representation could pass the normal requirement of three-quarters of  state legislatures. Changing the equal representation of states in the Senate would be even more difficult: see the final clause below of Article V of the US Constitution.

Article V (Article 5 - Mode of Amendment)

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

For a similar reason there is unlikely to be any significant change in the Electoral College. Quite a few state legislatures or conventions would have to be willing to have less influence on Presidential elections for such an amendment to be ratified.

"One step enough for me"

From 1905:

Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,                Lead thou me on; The night is dark, and I am far from home;           Lead thou me on. Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene: one step enough for me.

So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still           Will lead me on O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till           The night is gone, And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

                                                                                                                                   John Henry Newman

Reading

Joseph Epstein is a "bookish" person. I enjoyed reading his "The Bookish Life."

• So many books are there in the world that no one can get round to even all the best among them, and hence no one can claim to be truly well-read. Some ­people are merely better-read than others.
• The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned.
• The act of reading—office memos, newspaper articles on trade and monetary policy, and bureaucratic bumpf apart—should if possible never be separable from pleasure.
• Some of the best of all books are those one loved when young and finds even better in later life. .... The frisson afforded by rereading is the discovery not only of things one missed the first time round but of the changes in oneself.
• Unlike with friends, we spend time with books only because we truly wish to be in their company. We never have to ask what they thought of us. Clashes of egotism have nothing to do with the bookish relationship. Perhaps best of all, when we tire of books, unlike tiring of friends, we close them and replace them on the shelf.
• Reading may not be the same as conversation, but reading the right books, the best books, puts us in the company of men and women more intelligent than ourselves. Only by keeping company with those smarter than ourselves, in books or in persons, do we have a chance of becoming a bit smarter.

The Bookish Life by Joseph Epstein | Articles | First Things

The blind pulled up and the shutters thrown open

This is a selection from a sermon titled "Transposition" that C.S. Lewis delivered at Mansfield College, Oxford, in 1944, collected in (among other places) They Asked for a Paper (1962):

Let us construct a fable. Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of the sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. ‘But,’ she gasps, ‘you didn’t think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?’ ‘What?’ says the boy. ‘No pencil marks there?’ And instantly, his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition—the waving treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the colored three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.

So with us. ‘We know not what we shall be;’ but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like penciled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape; not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun.

C.S. Lewis, They Asked for a Paper, Geoffrey Bles, 1962, pp. 177-78.

Freedom and order

From Russell Kirk's "Conditions of Freedom" (Commonweal, 1956) collected in Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (Regnery, 1956):

.... When most people use the word "freedom" nowadays, they use it in the sense of the French Revolutionaries; freedom from tradition, from established social institutions, from religious doctrines, from prescriptive duties. I think that this employment of the word does much mischief. For we do not live in an age—and there are such ages—which is oppressed by the dead weight of archaic establishments and obsolete custom. The danger in our era, rather, is that the fountains of the great deep will be broken up and that the pace of alteration will be so rapid that generation cannot link with generation. Our era, necessarily, is what Matthew Arnold called an epoch of concentration. Or, at least, the thinking American needs to turn his talents to concentration, the buttressing and reconstruction of our moral and social heritage. This is a time not for anarchic freedom, but for ordered freedom.

There are much older and stronger concepts of freedom, than that espoused by the French Revolutionaries. In the Christian tradition, freedom is submission to the will of God. This is no paradox. As he that would save his life must lose it, so the man who desires true freedom must recognize a Providential order which gives all freedoms their sanction. The theory of "natural rights" depends upon the premise of an unalterable human nature bestowed upon man by God. Only acceptance of a divine order can give enduring freedom to a society; for this lacking, there is no reason why the strong and the clever, the dominant majority or the successful oligarch, should respect the liberties of anyone else. Freedom without the theory of natural rights becomes simply the freedom of those who hold power to do as they like with the lives of those whose interests conflict with theirs.

And in the Christian tradition, as in the Judaic tradition and the Stoic philosophy and the religions of India, there subsists also the belief that freedom is the absence of worldly desire. .... The man who has made his peace with the universe is free, however poor he may be; the man who seeks always to gratify his appetites is servile, however rich he may be. ....

More quotations from the essay can be found online here.

Incarnation

...for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos, 1949

“The night Vincent was shot he saw it coming.”

On the anniversary of his birth CrimeReads gives us "Elmore Leonard's Greatest Opening Lines."

Elmore Leonard was “the Dickens of Detroit,” “the poet laureate of wild assholes with revolvers,” and above all a master craftsman. Ever a writer’s writer, Leonard honed his craft meticulously over a career that spanned sixty years and nearly as many books, from westerns to era-defining crime novels like Get Shorty and Out of Sight to short story collections that still infuse the pop and mystery culture to this day. Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing,” published in the New York Times in 2001, has become gospel for many a writer, including such timeless gems as “[t]ry to leave out the part that readers tend to skip” and, most famously, “[i]f it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” Leonard was also renowned for his opening lines. (In his “Rules,” he warns writers to skip prologues and never to start by describing the weather.) Rightly, he’s now remembered as one of the greatest lead writers in the history of crime fiction, able to engage a reader, capture a mood, and establish a world in a few brief words.

In honor of Leonard’s birthday—he was born on October 11th, 1925—we’ve assembled 25 of his greatest opening lines. They’re ranked here (in descending order) but that’s a matter of taste, mood, and whimsy. Let these words be an inspiration, an entertainment, or just a good kick in the ass. Warning: the temptation to keep on reading Leonard’s books will be strong, and you should follow that temptation where it leads. (the twenty-five)

Elmore Leonard's Greatest Opening Lines | CrimeReads

From beginning to end

A post at the Center For Baptist Renewal asks "What Does Your Liturgy Celebrate?"

.... You see, our pastors, like your pastors believe in the gospel. Our pastors believe that the gospel is what saves and it is what trains us for godliness (Titus 2). We believe that apart from the gospel we have nothing to offer those who join us for worship on Sundays. ....

At our church, it is our desire that our liturgy would celebrate Jesus and his gospel from beginning to end. I hope you’ll look at your own liturgy and ask the question; “What is our liturgy celebrating?”

And an example of worship at Emmaus Church in Kansas City from September 23:

• Call to Worship – Psalms 19: 1-6
• Grace Alone
• Scripture of Response – 1 John 4:13-17
• My Worth Is Not In What I Own
• Come Ye Souls By Sin Afflicted
• Corporate Confession – Psalm 19:12-14
• Prayer of Confession (a written prayer of confession that the worship leader prays on behalf of our church and our nation)
• Assurance of Pardon – Ephesians 2:13-18
• Christ the Sure and Steady Anchor
• Scripture Reading – John 14:1-14
• Sermon – John 14:1-14
• Communion
• I Hear the Words of Love
• Benediction – May the grace of Christ our Savior, And the Father’s boundless love, With the Holy Spirit’s favor, Rest upon you from above. Thus may we abide In union, With each other and the Lord, And possess, in sweet communion, joys which earth cannot afford.” Amen. (John Newton)

I'm not a fan of all of the music (the words are fine) but I very much like the form of worship.

What Does Your Liturgy Celebrate? — Center For Baptist Renewal

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?"

From the beginning of T.S. Eliot's "Choruses from 'The Rock'":

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God .
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

(more)

Narnia

This could be good news (or not):

Netflix will develop new series and film projects based on C.S. Lewis’ beloved The Chronicles of Narnia series. Under the terms of a multi-year deal between Netflix and The C.S. Lewis Company, Netflix will develop classic stories from across the Narnia universe into series and films for its members worldwide. All series and films produced through the deal will be Netflix productions, with Mark Gordon of Entertainment One (eOne) alongside Douglas Gresham and Vincent Sieber serving as executive producers for series and as producers for features. In total the Narnia books have sold more than 100 million copies and been translated in more than 47 languages worldwide. The deal marks the first time that rights to the entire seven books of the Narnia universe have been held by the same company.

Netflix to Develop Series and Films Based On C.S. Lewis’ Beloved The Chronicles Of Narnia - Official Site | Narnia.com

"OUR heavenly Father, hear..."

When last in Madison a good friend gave me a 19^th century hymnbook. Its dimensions are 3" X 5.25" X 1.5" and it contains the words of 1254 hymns plus several doxologies and an appendix of "Temperance" songs. Like most such books it only contains words — there are no tunes although a tune is often suggested. It's very interesting to browse.  The example below is from the "Prayer and Praise" section:

631

The Lord's Prayer.
OUR heavenly Father, hear The prayer we offer now: Thy name be hallowed, far and near, To thee all nations bow.
Thy kingdom come; thy will On earth be done in love, As saints and seraphim fulfill Thy perfect law above.
Our daily bread supply, While by thy word we live; The guilt of our iniquity Forgive, as we forgive.
From dark temptation's power, From Satan's wiles defend; Deliver in the evil hour, And guide us to the end.
Thine, then, forevr be Glory, and power divine; The scepter, throne, and majesty Of heaven and earth, are thine.
Thus humbly taught to pray, By thy beloved Son, Through him we come to thee, and say— All for his sake be done.          Montgomery.

Planted by the river

Bob Dylan:
You know, these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness.
It's not happiness or unhappiness, it's either blessed or unblessed.
As the Bible says,
"Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly."
The Psalm he references: Psalm 1 (KJV)

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,
nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.
But his delight is in the law of the LORD;
and in his law doth he meditate day and night.
And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water,
that bringeth forth his fruit in his season;
his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.
The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.
Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous:
but the way of the ungodly shall perish.

On "Girl, Wash Your Face"

From the conclusion of Tim Challies' review of Girl, Wash Your Face:

.... It has long been my observation that there are two kinds of books being marketed to Christians. There are some whose foundational message is what you need to do and others whose foundational message is what Christ has already done. The first make a model out of the author, the second make a model out of Jesus. The first place the burden for change on personal power while the second place the burden for change on Christ’s power. It is clear that Girl, Wash Your Face falls squarely in the first category. ....

Girl, Wash Your Face - Tim Challies