It's the shock. The intensity of the moment.

The whole world has sunk into melancholy resignation. But as long as time remains, you know that, in purely rational terms, the possibility remains - so you wilfully choose complete disbelief. You want it so badly that you overcome reason and deny the possibility of satisfaction for the sake of your own mental health.

Then the empirically impossible happens, and the only possible response is laughter and shouting and hugging - it's a reflex response. You've been stretched like a rubber band through sheer unconscious effort. You've been in the inferno. You've been wound up like a coil on some machine that I can't think of that wraps coils up tightly.

And then the release. The explosion. The irresistable exultation.

That's the heart of comedy. The longer and greater the tension, the more intense the laughter at the release.

And that's why the whole world laughed so hard when Nathan Poole caught Josh McCown's pass and put the Green Bay Packers into the playoffs. It was right and just, so everybody wanted it in the depths of their souls (because even Viking souls year for justice). But it seemed so helpless and so utterly impossible. So improbable, indeed, that my sons David and Matthew embraced me and each other for the first time in nearly ten years. Heck, they almost kissed me we were so happy.

If I imitated the plot of the Packer's season in a novel, nobody would buy it because it would be too (forgive me) cheesy. Too improbable.

But, as many commentators have pointed out, God is a Packers fan. Why? Because God loves reality. He loves real things. And the Packers are the only real football team. They are the form of a football team. All the rest are Platonic imitations.

When you get to heaven and look for the heavenly football stadium, there you will see the true Lambeau Field in the true Wisconsin snow, with Vince Lombardi, Curly Lambeau, and Mike Sherman (Mike Holmgren will be there when he gets out of purgatory) standing on the sideline in the form of the ideal coach. There you will see Jim Taylor, Paul Hornung, and Ahman Green lined up behind Arnie Herber, Brett Favre, and Bart Starr. Out wide you will see Don Hutson, Boyd Dowler, Sterling Sharpe, and James Lofton. Willie Davis, Ray Nitschke, Reggie White, Kabeer Baja-Biamilla, LeRoy Butler, and Gilbert Brown/Grady Jackson form persons of the glorified defense.

God loves the Packers. May He bless them over the next month and bring them to the predestined glory of the Super Bowl.

Wisdom of the Ages:

In every marriage at least one partner is laughing at him. He decides which.

Some predictions for 2004:

The world will be dangerous at the end of the year.

The presidential debates will be nasty and Bush will win on niceness but say nothing much substantial

The economy will continue muddled and commodoties will outgain stocks

Public schools will market themselves on dreams and make no substantial changes, but sentimentality will rule the day

Winter will be colder than summer

Green Bay will beat Philadelphia in the NFL playoffs. New England will probably win the Super Bowl, but I'm not comfortable with that prediction.
More tomorrow?

Literature is the art of wishful thinking. The great writers take our hopes and fears and give them a verbal and formal expression. Sometimes the wishes are explicit and sometimes they are implicit, but every story and poem is the more or less metaphorical expression of a dream or a nightmare.

That's why contemporary music - in general - leaves us so unmoved. You would think it would make great background music because it doesn't stir us. But the music that stirs us deeply, Handel's Messiah, Bach's Christmas Oratorio, Simon and Garfunkle's Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Beatles Helter Skelter, is better background music. But the point I'm radiating toward in this winding paragraph is that the dreams and fears of contemporary music tend to be more twaddle than hope, more band-aid than nightmare.

It is gutless music. It lacks authenticity. Except for some of the rappers and hip hop artists. What we call rock music hasn't been authentic since disco. Say what you will of the immaturity of the 60's - and they were immature - their music was an authentic expression of their childish dreams.

But their dreams were childish. "All you need is love," they wailed, never having seriously considered the claims of Francesca in Inferno 5.

Dante could dream. He had the courage to explore the nightmare of his own human soul more deeply than any poet has ever been tempted to do. This gave him the right to explore the fantasies of his own human soul more highly than any poet has ever been able to do. He reached Paradise because he was more honest, more authentic, not only about his dreams as dreams, but about what he was dreaming about.

Dante understood Christmas. He knew that the desire of nations had come and that the hopes and fears of all human history (i.e. of the human soul) had merged in the incarnation and that that incarnation was the only hope he would ever find of escaping the dark wood in which he - we -find ourselves wandering.

Dante knew that the incarnation was the actualization of the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy. So he could confront the ultimate nightmare - sin unveiled, and that in his own soul.

May this Christmas find you walking the path of blessedness!

A distant epilogue:

Psychologists and philosophers sometimes argue against Christianity that it is precisely this wish fulfillment fantasy. Their argument is strange in that it not only overthrows the desires of the human heart in the name of healing it, but it also argues from the conclusion. If there is a God, would it not follow out of necessity that He would be the fulfillment of our wishes? What kind of sadism would lead a healer of hearts to any other conclusion?

Here is a great article on fatherandsonhood from ESPN:

http://espn.go.com/page2/s/bloc/031222.html

I don't know if you can just click on it or if you'll have to copy and paste, but it's worth the extra step if you need to take it.

Sports are so important because they don't matter.

Like every true American, I am a fan of the Green Bay Packers. My family crest, developed in the 70' s and 80's, is embossed with the motto, "The Pack Will Be Back." I make no apologies for rooting at a primal level for the only genuine football team in the world.

I lose sleep over my football team. I read about them on the internet during lunch breaks, sometimes forgetting to eat (though that is very rare, as anyone who knows me can tell you - food is second only to sports in my life). And, though baseball is the game they play in heaven (they have made a hell of it on earth), there is no team in any sport anywhere in the world like the Green Bay Packers.

Your alma mater can almost affect you as deeply. But the word devotion was developed for the relationship between the Green Bay Packers and their fans. The Packers and their fans could teach Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan how to do a romantic story. They could teach Frodo and Sam about persevering faithfully through hopelessness. They could teach Richard I about courage under fire. They could teach the Chicago Bears how to win.

Say what you will about how there is nothing else to do in Green Bay. Mock all you like the Polish and Belgian heritage that dominates the community (I went to Pulaski High School where my friends had names like Rozmiarek and everybody knew how to pronounce Krzyzewski - some people even knew how to spell it!) Decry the gallons of alcohol consumed in the cold winters. Scoff at the poor lost souls who take out the garbage in their shorts and bare feet and drop it in the four foot pile of snow that hardened to ice during the 40 below temperatures reached the night before. Call it the very center of Dante's Inferno if you like.

But we have the Green Bay Packers and you don't. We have Brett Favre and you don't. We have the Lambeau Leap, Lombardi Avenue, and the Don Huston center. And you don't.

So we are better than you. Even when we move to the south.

Maybe it's already been done, but it seems we need a new literary form that I have dubbed "the suburban novel." It would be a form designed to carry the story of suburban America with all its stresses and anxieties.

The reason for this idea might make it more understandable. I arrived at the Y this morning while listening to a singer on NPR who croons Rap in Middle English. This redefines cool in a way that noone is sure to dig. She also sings in prisons, where, she said, 84% of the female inmates are women.

Just kidding, but I bet I snuck that past you. Actually, 84% of the women, or some equally depressing number, are mothers. I was stunned by this. So I got out of my car and entered the Y, where I did my workout thinking about life in suburbia. It ain't the stuff of novels. You can't find a romantic setting, unlike rural or urban areas. Plot lines would have to be as trivial as the people's problems. I'll come back to that in a moment for those whom I have offended.

You certainly aren't going to find a heroic character. Everybody is statistically controlled and if they slide out of the middle range of the bell curve they go in for counseling or correction. Thus you can't even find an evil villain for the hero to conquer. Suburban life is a great life, but it's not the stuff of novels.

Granted, a movie like ET took place in suburban California. But it wasn't about suburban life. It was about something invading suburban life, and what I'm describing has to be about suburban life. I suppose you see an attempt to approach it in The Truman Show too, but that is all about detachment and viewing it from the outside. What I'm calling for has to arise within suburbia and be about suburbia - it has to express suburban life.

Maybe the Simpsons and King of the Hill - but I would need to watch them again and I find it hard to sit through a comedy that doesn't evoke a smile for more than 10 minutes.

So I'm proposing a form of literature that expresses life in a domain that is anti-personality and thus won't produce characters, is a-moral and thus won't support meaningful moral crusades, is anti-verbal and thus won't promote attention to language, is anti-intellectual and thus won't inculcate thought, and is anti-courage and thus won't resist any attacks on its [lack of a] culture or way of life.

So what is the heart of such a collection of acquaintances? Self. The self is the locus, source, and goal of all their problems. They aren't attacked from without; they crumble from within. They aren't confronted with ideals; they melt when they slip outside the standard mean.

The suburban novel would have to be ironic and sometimes satirical. It would have to wear the souls of these soul-less folk on their sleeves. They wouldn't respond to, and they don't deserve, a rebuke or a spanking. That would be like going to church and listening to a hellfire and brimstone sermon. You'd leave purged of your fears, convinced that you, surely, won't have to go because you just sat through it.

But laught at them. That will bring them to their knees.

Only the beginnings of a reflection that, since I am a suburbanite, won't go anywhere. Maybe someone who knows real life can pick it up and turn it into a novel.

These are the words of Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Vatican's Justice and Peace department, on seeing footage of Saddam Hussein being examined by a US doctor:

"I felt pity to see this man destroyed, [the military] looking at his teeth as if he were a cow. They could have spared us these pictures."

The great thing about Christianity is without question the endless offer of mercy that springs like a fountain from the blood of our Lord. It staggers the human sense of justice, but if Saddam Hussein were to repent and throw himself for mercy on the holy throne of the cross, God would grant it.

One wonders, though, if pity hasn't become disconnected from reality and become mere sentimentality when it weeps for one of the cruelest living humans while he is receiving - and welcoming - medical attention from those he drew into war.

Dante shows, in the inferno, how people become sub-human when they follow their desires and set aside reason, virtue, and a will aligned to our true good. From the permanently adolescent Francesca in the second circle of hell to the savagely mature Ugolino in the ninth, the story of hell is the story of sin un-manning - de-humanizing - bestializing - those who enter her gate.

Saddam Hussein, by treating humans like animals, became an animal himself. He set aside his own humanity by denying it to others.

But walking firmly in the Christian tradition on which the United States bases its concept of human dignity and worth, we as a nation preserved our humanity by treating this animal as one of us.

Who knows, perhaps by contact with human dignity he can rediscover his own human soul before it is too late.

He certainly won't discover it when he is treated as an object of sentimentality. For even that is to deny him his humanity. Saddam Hussein is a man who deserves and whose soul craves just retribution. He should receive it, if for no other reason than to have his humanity restored.

We could use some more humans in this world into which my nephew was born yesterday in Sydney, Australia. I'll record his name when I find it out. Congratulations Philip and Amy!

Word of the week:

Expectoratory: A Place to expectorate.

Didn't Dickens write a book about that? Great Expectorations or something along that line.

What follows is a very moving poem that I received from two wonderful science teachers at an anonymous school called Bear Creek in Redmond, Washington, where I had the great privilige of doing teacher training. They wanted to make sure I understood the poetic value of science. Now I do.

This frog has lost its frogness,
The fact can't be denied
And yet you will find more essence
If you look at what's inside.

Incredible organs and tissues
And of course the magnificent cell
Sometimes as you go smaller
The beauty continues to swell.

There's molecule-ness and atom-ness
And relations between these things
Don't start us on quantum physics
And the beauty of superstrings

Is beauty the parts or is it the whole
These thoughts we find hard to perfect,
But please refuse to accuse us
Of murdering to dissect.

Once upon a time a foolish king and his equally foolish wife bore a baby girl. Since it was a fairy tale, the fairy godmother came and granted each of the royal parents a christening gift. The foolish king thought only briefly and said he wished for her child to be the most beautiful girl in the kingdom. The foolish queen thought even less and declared that she wished her little girl to be the wealthiest girl in the realm.

At that, the obligatory wicked enchantress appeared in a stinky cloud of black coal smoke. She said she also wanted to be granted a gift for her little niece. The fairy godmother was forced by the code to allow the wicked enchantress to name her gift as well. The wicked enchantress looked at the king and queen with deep sympathy and said, "I only want what is best for my niece. Since you have given her the burdens of beauty and wealth, I wish for her to be granted great intelligence."

The king and queen smiled with relief and tried to hug the wicked enchantress, but she disappeared and they were left smelling and looking like ashes.

The story hardly needs telling. The brilliant little girl with the good looks and lots of money was utterly unable to resist any temptation, and she had so many she couldn't come close to sorting them out.

In the end she became the slave of the wicked enchantress, who used the genius of her niece to take over the kingdom.

Beauty, brains, and bucks. God help us.

The less I matter the happier I am and the more useful I am to others. Weird. But then the Greek word for I is ego, after all. What a plague to be constantly told to seek to make a difference. What a misdirection of a child's thoughts. I matter so little the only thing I should do is cultivate virtue. Especially the virtue of death to this unmattering self.

Re: December 3, I know Virgil was an effeminate provincial. That has nothing to do with my point.

The Gnostic Economy (part 2)

Everybody knows that Weber presented us with the protestant work ethic and ascribed the prosperity of the countries under Calvin's influence to that ethic. That is probably true, though I question the extent of the psychological motivation he suggests. In the popular dialogue, he is reported to have said that Calvinists work hard because they are trying to prove that they have God's blessing and that, thus, they are elect. Every idea takes strange passageways from our eyes and ears to our soul, but, as I said, I question the extent of this motivation.

But to the point: The New England and, to a large extent, the New York economies were built on principles of thriftiness, saving, and lending at interest. They were so built because, being dominated by the Puritan mindset, they believed and embraced the realities of the world they lived in (admittedly that embrace was sometimes a wrestling hold, but to hug or strangle both require acknowledgement). They believed in deferred pleasure because greed and impatience lead to poverty. They believed in paying your debts because to do otherwise is to become a slave to lust and, eventually, to the lender.

Then came the triumph of unitarianism, especially in its "transcendental" form. At first, we were only distracted by the metaphysical flights of fancy of the Boston Brahmins. When the civil war and its aftermath drove the ministry from its role in politics, when Darwinism spread like kudzu, when the unlimited resources of the American continent began givng up its wealth to the great manufacturers, the piety and restraint of the puritans ceased to make sense.

Andrew Carnegie hired Napolean Hill, Napolean Hill taught us how to visualize ourselves to great wealth, and marketing took over the American mind left vacant by the withdrawn ministry.

In short, the gradual destruction of the real world had begun. Being real, it always outlasts fantasies, but when the fanatasies have billions and then trillions of dollars behind them, it can take a relatively long time for the laws of nature to re-establish themselves.

The point is, that when the culture of New England cast aside the religious side of the puritan mindset (they have held onto the meddling and utopian elements with a vengeance), the American economy began a century long process of losing touch with reality.

We take on debt believing it is the surest means to prosperity. We buy stocks (still!) believing that they go up forever. We produce computer blips and call it wealth. We have detached money from material production or movement. We have made wealth simply a figment of our imaginations.

He who pays the piper still calls the tune. And the piper can be paid to be pied. Where is he leading us? To what captivity are we gleefully dancing?

My conclusions:

Buy some gold when she dips. She's mother natures coin. Put trailing stop losses on your other investments. Pay off your debts. To help the economy, pull something out of the ground and make it beautiful or useful. Or move money around in such a way that you can take your share and help others pull something out of the ground and make it useful or beautiful.

Run with the fools, but have a parachute for when you reach the cliff.

Classical educators need to take care in their language and literature studies. English is a language for dancing. Latin is a language for marching. That's why English delighted in the alliteration of Beowulf and Gawain before the London conquest led by Chaucer. That's why Latin produced Virgil. Even soldiers can sing; sometimes right lustily. But the easy step of the country dance - that seems to me to be the natural grace of the English poet.


The Gnostic Economy

In 1971, President Nixon followed the rest of the world and disconnected the dollar from the gold standard. Since then, we have seen an unparalleled prosperity in our country and around the world. I remember in 1984 discussing this casually with an associate at work and holding to the theory that ours was an artificial economy and that as such it couldn't be sustained forever. He dismissed my comment with a smirk. "So what" he asked, "if the economy is artificial? We're still getting wealthier."

Because I wasn't sure what I meant by an artificial economy, I had no response. I think I understand now. It was explained to me in two different ways: first, reflections on religion in New England and second, reading excerpts from a (somewhat exagerrated - I hope) white paper written by a Chinese economist in which he analyzes the American and European economies and predicts war between the two. Here's the statement that explains everything:

"Money transactions related to material goods production, counted 80% of the total [global] transactions until 1970. However, only 5 years after the collapse of the Bretton Woods the ratio turned upside down - only 20% of money transactions were related material goods production and circulation. The ratio dropped to .7% in 1997."

This amazes me. It is a truism that if you want to get rich you don't go into producing goods, you go into moving money around (banking, brokering, buying and selling, etc.). However, as everybody and his taxi-driver is now able to move money around, we've forgotten a rather unsettling economic fact. Somebody still has to produce something. Wealth is still the result of taking something raw and making a finished product of it. It is still, in short, value added to something that formerly had little value.

Things that are necessary but don't last long derive value from their scarcity (thus food and oil, etc.). Things that are not necessary but last a long time and make life more attractive, derive value from their preciousness (thus gold, silver, precious stones, etc.). Things that don't exist derive value only (please note that "only") from the imagination of the people buying and selling them (thus paper dollars, electronic money, derivatives, etc.).

When the dollar and every other world currency was linked to gold, it was shackled to the reality check of material production. When currencies were disconnected from real material production, the whole world looked to the dollar as the foundation of stability.

It went to the dollar's head.

In 1997 we were so disconnected from reality that less than 1% of the buying and selling that took place in the world had anything to do with the production or movement of material goods. Granted, much of that was the imagination run totally amock in such practical jokes as Global Crossing and Enron. I'd like to know the number now.

The Chinese bureaucrat who penned this article used the intriguing title of "fictitious economy" to describe our present situation. Debt is the unending problem, of course. It always has been. But why do we take on debt so much now. It has always been an act of confidence in the future. But now our confidence of the future has been disconnected from any reason for hope. We simply believe the future will be better than today. So we spend money we don't have to buy reams of toys we don't need and will one day find we have to pay for. Many people are seduced into debt today precisely because they no longer believe there is any need for material production. There is no necessary connection to the reality of the world outside our minds. Our government can always keep the economy going.

We'll see.

What has that to do with New England religion? On that, more tomorrow.