Sic dolet

(This was posted to my MySpace Weblog on July 1, 2006). This comes a bit late, this commentary of Joan Acocella's review of  The Playmate Book  which appeared in the March Twentieth issue of  The New Yorker . At first I was surprised that the sophisticates at  The New Yorker  would dignify such blatant exploitation by giving it so many pages of analysis. Then again,  Playboy  is very much a cultural phenomenon, and  The Playmate Book  is a very stylish coffeetable monument to that phenomenon or at least tries to be. So, the  The New Yorker  as America's judge of true style has a duty to review this book and determine whether it is truly stylish. The answer is no. The nude playmates are so vapid that they are not even erotic. The whole Playboy culture that Hefner espouses has not extricated itself from Hefner's own fantasy of a brandy-snifting bachelor world filled with highbrow discussions about Nietzsche and good, wholesome devianc...

The anthropology that underpins transgenderism, namely the complete disassociation of the mind from the body, is precisely the anthropology necessary to understand prostitution as a "job like any other". If one locates human identity entirely in the mind, then there can be no parts of the body considered so integral to personhood that they should be off limits to the profanations of commerce. The entire body is merely an instrument, which means that one's "privates" have as much significance as one's arms and legs, and just as we do not think it is any violation of our dignity as humans to put our limbs to work, it should not be deemed below our dignity to put our "privates" to work either because neither our limbs nor our "privates" have anything to do with our identities as men and women. They are all equally instrumental. It is little wonder then that George Soros is funding both the Transgender Movement and the Pimp Lobby.

 For a little while in a roof's shade, Brightly painted horses turn in a band. They have all been taken from a land That hesitates before it fades. A pinching harness keeps them bound, But all have courage in their eyes, A crimson lion terrifies, And now the china elephant comes 'round. Just as in the woods there's a buck, Except that it's saddled and carries A little blue girl all buckled up. And on the lion rides in white a young Boy and holds on with a small warm hand As the animal shows his teeth and tongue. And now the china elephant comes 'round. Bright young ladies are also there, Almost too old for these wooden mounds, In the middle of the leaps and bounds, They look up, around, at us, anywhere. And now the china elephant comes 'round. And so it goes--faster, hastening its end, It circles and it turns and has no aim, A red, a green, a grey sent around, A small inchoate outline of a face, And sometimes we see a smile triumphant And bless'd that sparkl...

Man: Hey, I would like to buy you a drink. Woman: (flashes her wedding ring at him) Man: So? Woman: I’m married, dumbass. Man: So? Woman: Are you really THAT stupid? I’m married. That means that I am off the menu. Get it? Man: Oh, I get it. You think that marriage means the forsaking of all other lovers, right? Woman: Hey, Einstein, that’s not what I think marriage means. That is what marriage means, you creep. Man: No, it doesn’t. That may be what your particular religious tradition says it means, but that’s NOT what marriage means according to Rawlsian Public Reason. Woman: What the hell? Man: Before you throw your mojito in my face—and you don’t want to do that, anyway, because the mojitos here are just scrumptious— Woman: Well, yes, okay, you have to go down to Miami to find any better.   Man: True that. They use their own mint, did you know that? Woman: Yeah, fine, don’t change the subject. Why shouldn’t I throw something else in your face, you creeper? Man: For the simpl...

 Written in April 2021.           A few months ago I was brave enough to venture out to do some much needed grocery shopping.  I was even braver to take mass transit. In this pandemic most people who can avoid riding mass transit for reasons too obvious to mention here have done so, leaving the trains and buses to those who, like me, have no other choice, or crazy people. This tends to make the riding of mass transit a bit hairier than it used to be. My ride back from the store offered a particularly harrowing illustration of this. On the train I sat across from a noticeably unkempt and disheveled man, who was, well, crazy and belligerent. He started a White Supremacist rant with lavish use of the N-word, which he exclaimed as loudly as he could. There were, of course, several black men on this train, and they, of course, heard him.  No one could not hear him. Everyone, knowing he was obviously bonkers, tried to ignore him, but his hateful ra...

 I am often asked with great bewilderment why in God's name Jeanne la Pucelle, a warrior who led a very bloody war, is my favorite saint? Why would God have a person lead an activity that maims, mutilates, and kills people? And, by the way, am I not supposed to be vehemently anti-war? Yeah, precisely. The Catholic Church won't let me be dogmatically anti-war. I must allow at least for the possibility of a Just War. And the story of Ste. Jeanne tells me exactly what a Just War should look like. It should be one led by a nineteen year old Virgin whose visions have been exhaustively documented by an ecclesiastical consistory and found to be consistent with Holy Doctrine and Writ, and if it's not, then it's evil and I have a sacred duty to protest it. Thanks, Jeanne!

 [This is a scene from a play that I never wrote. Actually, I just wrote this scene, and it's not very good. I include it here because it does have the merit of explaining why I would never be a Protestant. The play was supposed to about Marlene Nowotniak. She is a very bright 16 year old girl and a very beautiful one as well.  She likes to frequent a used bookstore, owned by Friedrich Nietzsche (I just decided to put Nietzsche in for the hell of it), who has as his indentured servant a very bizarre but orthodox Catholic, Ken Silenus.  Ken tries to convince Marlene of the need to believe in Catholicism to understand  Shakespeare properly.  Marlene will have none of it, though, saying that she likes Shakespeare just fine as an atheist.  Much to Ken's horror, the charming and elegant and witty Marlene falls head over heels for a quaterback from her High School.  His name is Scott Coiler, and he is a grunt, the type that thinks poetry ...