Two takes on clericalism

In our discussions of the scandals currently afflicting the Catholic church, Jack and others have pointed to clericalism as one of the chief culprits.  So when I recently ran across a couple of passages about clericalism, they piqued my interest.  I'm sharing them here.

The Resistance

WaPo's Alexandra Petri has the best satire on the op-ed in the NYT by the Anonymous Senior Official yesterday. She throws into high relief the concern that a crazyman is our president and that only gutless people-pleasers stand between him and the total breakdown of Life as We Know It.

One day [Trump] picked up a red phone and said, “I would like to Start World War III, please, I don’t care with whom,” and if it had not been for me on the other line pretending to be a dial tone, who can say what would have happened. It is these little things that make all the difference between the unimaginable chaos you see and an unimaginable worse chaos. 

UPDATE: The anonymous editorial is generating weird buzz around the watercooler. To wit: The NYT is trying to grab attention from WaPo's Bob Woodward, whose book documents a similar picture of the administration. 

Weirder: The editorial is an inside job meant to deflect attention from the Kavanaugh hearing.

Or weirdest: Trump wrote the editorial himself to incense the base by confirming that the presidency is under the thumb of some deep state, a narrative the Trumpites have believed all along. 

Just sayin'.

ALSO: Apologies for posting over Margaret's thread on the same topic. She posted hers while I.was.composing, so they crossed in the ether.

The Adults in the Room

I applaud the unknown(s) who wrote the Times op-ed piece, and I applaud what they say they are trying to do, but until someone invokes the 25th Amendment....which Cabinet officials and the VP can do (ask the president to step down to allow an investigation by ??the House?), we should fear for the future of constitutional order.

"It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t."

Brett Kavanaugh's Confirmation Hearing

It's day two of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
So far he has been grilled about gun rights, diversity, sexual harassment, and of course, Roe v Wade. He indicated that it is "...an important precedent which has been reaffirmed many times." (Once again I think one-issue voters are deluding themselves.)
I am actually more interested in what he says about about judicial independence.
Meanwhile of course some people are losing their minds over this.  Folks, repeat after me, the Babylon Bee is satire.

Rahm-shell: Emanuel will not run for re-election in Chicago

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel stunned the city of Chicago and the entire region today by announcing he will not run for re-election.

Critics & Censors, Then & Now

 An echat with Gene Palumbo reminded me that I still own a rare book, so I decided to re-read it. The book is titled Criticism and Censorship,  by Walter Kerr, the distinguished drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune and, later, The Times.
 It's only 86 pages, and the reason it is rare is that it was originally the 1954 Gabriel Richard Lecture at Trinity College in Washington, D.C. Bruce Publishing Co., a conservative Catholic house no longer in business, gave it the kind of press run you would normally give an academic paper.  Then Time magazine gave the book a money review. Orders came pouring in. But by then Bruce had melted the printing plates to re-use the lead. But I had my copy.
 Re-reading it reminded me of the art vs. censors climate of the 1950s, and I was struck by how much the very different climate 65 years later resembles it.

Late Summer Reading

My book club just finished Exit West by Mohsin Hamid.  I liked it.  I don't know that I would have chosen it on my own, but it was something different. There was a little bit of "magical realism", but it was mostly pretty realistic.  It takes place in a dystopian, not-too-distant future.  The two protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, live in an unnamed middle eastern city in which things are going from bad to worse.  In fact there is not a location in the whole story which is not going from bad to worse.  Nadia and Saeed are in love, and decide that they have to flee their city. Which is where the bit of magical realism comes in.  The "doors" are an open secret. They are like worm-holes, which lead to somewhere else. Hopefully where life is easier and less dangerous. But that is a gamble, sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. My favorite part was the last chapter, which is more or less an epilogue, and takes place 50 years later than the rest of the story.  It leaves a bit of hope; bad times don't last forever.
The next selection for the book club is This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm by Ted Genoways.  I am interested to see how the subject is treated; hopefully neither a nostalgic elegy nor an overly pessimistic view of the future of farming.  According to the reviews on Amazon some environmental concerns are addressed, particularly the shrinking of the Ogallala Aquifer. As we were discussing on a previous thread, water shortages are likely to fuel some of the conflicts of the future.
Another book in my reading queue is The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores.  This one isn't a book club selection; it showed up as a Facebook ad, and looked interesting.  Turned out it is available in the Amazon Prime lending library to read free.  So I bit; figured I didn't have anything to lose.  Looks to be in the tradition of Under the Tuscan Sun, or Eat, Pray, Love.
The thing all of these books had going for them is that they aren't about dysfunctional politics or church sex-abuse scandal train wrecks.