Waiting for Godot to Leave

This is a repeat.  I linked to this in my latest post.  It's from last year, but it's worth republishing. Some readers were confused about this - as they are about a lot of things I write.  It's just the perfect portrait of more than one person I've known, that's all.  I suspect my readers have known one or two of these themselves. *** We've heard from the  Poet  and the  Sinner . Today I received an email from the Tease. Gosh!  I had no idea you would be reading this.  And look at what I'm wearing! Kevin, we really want you to perform at our parish picnic fish fry fundraiser.  We really really do.  Can you send me a contract? Oh, well, we can't pay you.  So it will have to be a free show.  And you'll have to pay your own way here, and we're at Fr. Corapi's Montana Ranch, so it's not cheap to get here. Did I say cheap?  That's what the boys used to call me!  My!  Has my strap been down like ...

I've turned comments back on for this blog.  It's the internet, you know, so feel free to say something incredibly stupid or hateful.

Another re-post.  This one is from this time last year.  Regular readers will note that there are themes I've been sounding and threads I've been following for a while now. _______________________________________________________________________________ If you read nothing else on this blog, read my piece Boredom and the Barbarian , especially the part where I quote Erich Fromm. Fromm's vision is of two sorts of modern man. The Bored - homo consumens - those who are eternally infantile, always wanting to be passively fed, to suck forever on the Great Teat; they are never satisfied; they are depressed and self-indulgent.  They neither understand nor appreciate culture or beauty, or even other people beyond the use they can put other people to.   The Interested - those who are inter-esse , whose being is within  and among people and things outside of themselves and their own egos. You might say that the first, the Slackers, are simply selfish,...

So I'm in Phoenix this week and I was forced to go to a luncheon performance of a play that I had no interest in seeing.  It was a One-Act for Black History Month. That's right, a luncheon one-act for Black History Month.   Yes, it was as awful as it sounds. And it's downtown.  And the theater is surrounded by hideously ugly statues of naked people frolicking - totally naked men and women, doing a kind of queer "liturgical dance" with their breasts and butts and genitals flying in every direction and captured forever in stop action by the sculptor. And the audience is a bunch of old folks.  And they all get box lunches.  And they sit around you and eat their sandwiches and chew their food, packed into a tiny studio theater, and you want to scream. And some old gal comes out and warms up the audience.  And finishes with a stupid tap dance.  And it's embarrassing.  And the old folks, with their moldy tuna fish, sit there laughing.  We...

Deacon Jim Russell is trolling the internet claiming that G. K. Chesterton supported lying for a good cause. He bases this on a Chesterton quotation taken entirely out of context which I addressed three years ago, and the points I made then Deacon Russell continues to ignore now. In brief ... The entire point of Chesterton’s quote and of the English tradition since the execution of the Jesuit martyrs is that equivocation is wrong because it is lying about lying; it is a double lie. Equivocation is not wrong because lying is right; equivocation is wrong because lying is wrong, and to play games with words is to lie twice. Read what Chesterton actually said about lying here. And please pray for people who get sucked in to the irrationality that rules most of the internet. Personally, I need a break. *** And, by the way, something else that Deacon Russell and the "We Like Lying" crowd have ignored for years is the mass of evidence that the Ordinary Magisterium ...

"Professional Catholic" Mark Shea rightly condemns Professional Demagogue Michael Voris for promoting the work of antisemites and geocentrists . Let me explain what this is all about.  I'll use shorter words. Michael Voris.  The bad hair doesn't bother me; what bothers me is what's underneath. Michael Voris is not content (as Shea points out) with denouncing the errors and gutless cowardice of such menaces as Fr. Father Robert Barron and such dangerous men as Karl Keating, Jimmy Akin, Al Kresta and similar wolves in sheep’s clothing ... he now gives exposure to folks who believe that modern science is all wrong and who believe that the Jews are a menace to society. *** Let us learn a few things here. As I point out in Mark's comment box ... The fact is that Voris has been fueling the fires of schism, fanning the flames of the irrational, and feeding the furnace of wrath for years now. His engine keeps chugging along, but the track leads ...