Difficulties show men what they are. In the case of any difficulty, God has pitted you against a rough antagonist so that you might be a conqueror, and this cannot be without toil.
— Epictetus
Author: Eric Johnson
Catholic Light breaks records!
…its own traffic record, that is. And I’m not talking about anything connected to the DMV. No, we’re talking Web traffic. Here are the stats:
Total page views: 32,639
Total visits: 18,019
Average page views per day: 1,087
Average visits per day: 600
Top countries: Italy (!), U.K., Australia, Canada, Netherlands
Even discounting 30% of the traffic as bots or Catholic Light contributors — probably a high estimate — that means about 400 people visit the site every day. Not too bad for a little blog like ours. Break out the holy water! Let’s get CRAZY!
They’ll come after you anyway, Arnold (part II)
How can you spend a year and a half in the late ’90s saying that it’s okay if a governor and president…
1. Uses public employees to procure sex;
2. Cheats on his wife countless times;
3. Gropes and fondles a job-seeker;
4. Carries out a sexual affair with a very junior subordinate;
5. Lies under oath about the affair;
6. Encourages others to perjure themselves (“We were never alone, right?”)
…and then pretend it’s a big deal when a movie star, who holds no position of public trust, is accused of being an obnoxious boor?
I hold no brief for Arnold, and I would vote for McClintock if I were in the land of my California ancestors. That being said, nobody’s accused him of rape, perjury, or abuse of government power. He didn’t do anything extraordinary, by Hollywood’s alleycat moral standards — and I thought if “everyone does it,” as Clinton-lovers were so fond of telling us, then it’s tolerable?
I’m not trying to square Catholic morality with Arnold’s alleged behavior, just pointing out the blatant hypocrisy on the part of Democrats and the media. I can’t resist referring you to something I wrote six weeks ago:
“The media love ‘moderate’ Republicans. All you have to do is favor abortion under just about any circumstance, and you get to be a moderate….Then when election time comes, the ‘moderate’ Republican finds that his buddies in the press, along with previously friendly Democrats, have turned against him. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the latest to find out that just because you favor abortion, gun control, and scads of money for ‘the children,’ you’re not immune from being lumped in with the snake handlers.”
Gutenberg in reverse
Before the 15th century, books were for important information: Holy Scripture; recording baptisms, marriages, and deaths; noting important events in a kingdom; great works of literature. As the demand for literature grew, a German printer named Johannes Gutenberg invented a way to print large numbers of pages, leading to cheap books, and ever more widespread literacy.
The printed word reached its apogee in the 19th century, as there were no competing media for entertainment or news. Since the inventions of radio, television, and film, print has lost its exclusive hold on the public. Indeed, there are indications that it is in decline, hastened by the appearance of the Internet.
Personally, I hope it declines faster. I can’t stand paper anymore. Oh, I love books and magazines just fine, and I even love attractive catalogs with beautiful objects in them, though they are overstuffing our mailbox these days. What I don’t like are the transient papers: bills, receipts, reports, pickup stubs…all the printed effluvia of modern-day life.
The day when print returns to its pre-Gutenberg status as a privileged medium will not come soon enough, as far as I’m concerned. It’s tough to search through paper as easily as the Web, thanks to Google, or your hard drive. We must act now to ensure the revolution does not stall at its present level.
There is much work to be done, fellow paper-deprecators. We must stop our co-workers from printing 500-page manuals, of which they will only read 13 pages. Encourage your financial institutions to send electronic reports instead of paper ones. Stop writing checks and pay bills online. Eliminate paper, and the future is ours!
This rant was precipitated by a small yet daunting mound of papers here on my desk, which I have not gathered the courage to sort through. I am now going to bed, with the mound fully intact.
Imagine there’s no Clintons
(It’s really hard to do)
Bret Stephens, editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, outlines his reasons for being a Clinton hater. The occasion was a birthday party for Shimon Peres, where Clinton bemoaned the lack of peace in the Mideast, and sang John Lennon’s atheist anthem “Imagine.” The lyrics are below:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…
Does he really believe this dreck? Would the good folks in Arkansas who elected him 392 times to state office agree that “no religion” is an ideal world? Would the plurality of U.S. voters who put him in office supported the elimination of the nation-state?
Of course not. He’s one of the Hollow Men, the Men without Chests, the Last Men, the New Class. He will pick up an instrument of traditional religion — the Bible — and without a hint of shame carry it into church while surrounded by the press. Then a few years later he’ll turn up at a party and start singing about how traditional religion is an enemy of peace and mankind. If you point out the inconsistency, you are a fool, a rube. You don’t get the postmodern joke: Clinton dwells in Nietzsche’s land beyond good and evil, where there is no standard with which to evaluate him except how good his performance is. Consistency is for absolutists, and absolutists are the kind of people John Lennon hates, people who believe in religion, possessions, countries, and all the rest. They’re the only real enemies.
Bill Clinton keeps on going, never in a state of being, always in a state of becoming. He’s still got some game left — his wife must be elected president, and he’s flailing around trying to codify his “legacy.” Let Stephens have the last word:
…there never was a “President Clinton.” There were, instead, two incarnations of Candidate Clinton: first the challenger, then the incumbent. In both cases, no such thing as “policy” could be said to exist; Mr. Clinton moved where political convenience dictated.