Becket and More

 Here's my thing with the turmoil going on with the Mountbatten-Windsors over in the UK: This is a family in which members have literally murdered each other. It's a proven matter through the historical record. From the Godwinsons, to King John, to Richard III, to William and Mary. The founding member of the state religion did so JUST so that he could get a divorce. And if he couldn't find an excuse to divorce a wife and she proved problematic (see: Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard), he had her executed by the state.  "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest," was a substantial  rewrite of what Henry II actually said about Thomas Becket, which was, "Will none of you losers nut up and kill this disrespectful pain in my ass, already?!" (I paraphrase, but not by much.)[1] Victoria openly and vocally blamed her son, the eventual Edward VII, for her husband's death and badmouthed him to anyone who would listen. Comparatively, some in-family plotting

 Beloveds, oh, my beloveds. I have tried to watch and live-tweet the vice presidential debate going on as we speak. I couldn't. I was annoyed when Kamala Harris wasted her opportunity to tell America what a Biden/Harris administration  would do about COVID-19 on Day 1 by rehashing the current administration's complete lack of competence thus far. On the other hand, I couldn't look away. It reminds me too much of my days as a rookie teacher in a special ed classroom for emotionally disturbed kids. The first year always sucks, I don't care who you are or how prepared you thought you'd be. It's awful. And I lost control of my classroom on more than one occasion. That's what's happened to Susan Page tonight, and it's what happened to Chris Wallace last week. That's right, I'm gonna stand up for the moderators. Because the Commission on Presidential Debates  (CPD) gives them less power than a substitute teacher gets. The problem is that the CPD gi

Hey, guess what?! A few weeks ago, the GDP dropped to a new low. Like, a low  low. Like worse than the Great Depression low. What's that? You did't hear about it? Well, I'm not surprised. See, the same day that report came out, Donald Trump first tweeted his suggestion that the election be postponed. A suggestion that, rightfully, took over the news cycle like Godzilla took over Tokyo. This event lead us once again to the eternal question: do these media slights-of-hand reveal 45 to be a political genius, a puppet of diabolical handlers, or a very lucky idiot? Personally I argue some combination of all three, the exact composition changing on a day-to-day basis. Although, I'd never accuse Trump of genius , per se. All political acumen requires a high degree of low animal cunning. That day, the day of the GDP drop and the election mishigas, he was mostly a lucky idiot. Given the economy's  COVID-19-induced free fall, bad economic news is more or less a daily occurren

  Beloveds, I miss Molly Ivins like hell. There just hasn't been anyone like her writing on politics since she passed in 2005.  No one else has that fierce joy, or that sense of the ridiculous. No one else has that way of bringing us all together, making us think, and making us laugh out loud all at the same time.  *shakes fist at cancer yet again* Gail Collins is a little too silly (and lets Brooks and Stephenson get away with too much), and Dog knows Maureen Dowd can't laugh at herself. E. J. Dionne , while awesomely talented and intelligent (and my current favorite non-fiction Catholic writer), is so very earnest, and Eugene Robinson , at least right now, is too important. Besides, Molly's voice was a woman's, which is still in short supply. As I sat recently contemplating my navel and these unfortunate circumstances, a stray thought occurred to me: Could I be the Molly Ivins I wish to see in the world? Let's find out.

Welcome to the first of what will inevitably be a very long series of my white self yelling at other white people about racism!        This meme is a problem:        Worse, the problem is the point.      The way I read it, there are two possible/simultaneous messages here. First, that George Floyd’s death was a tragedy completely independent of race. Okay, interesting. Wrong, but interesting, and I’ll get into those details later. The other message is that if “people” (generally understood to be people of color, specifically Black people, and their allies) would stop bring race into everything, racism would disappear.      The first problem with that, and it’s so glaring that it can be seen from space, is that it blames African Americans for their own poor treatment.      Oh, not explicitly. Never explicitly. The people who create these memes would never be so gauche [1] . But do the math: if the problem, as the meme creator sees it, is that race is being injected into

Okay, there have been a few things being batted about the media about how weird and/or shocking it is that Protestant Christians and Roman Catholic Christians are diverging. Call the fire department! Clutch your pearls! See, here's the thing, though. It's only in the past thirty-five to forty years that Evangelical Protestants (who are the Protestants who are understood to be the other party here) and Roman Catholics have found common ground. On  anything. Why? I'm glad you asked. Stand back. *ahem* EVANGELICALS DON'T LIKE CATHOLICS. THEY STILL CALL US THE WHORE OF BABYLON. You see, Catholics  happened  to become useful to Evangelical denominations in the 1970s and 1980s, when we provided warm bodies to their right-to-life rallies, and again in the 2000s during the fight against marriage equality. (We were on the wrong side. Big shock.) Other than that, Evangelical and Catholic dogma and theology have about as little in common as possible wh