Russian choir mocks energy-dependent Europe

An amusing display of national pride and mockery of neighbors.

I know of nothing similar in the U.S. music industry, which is mired in embarrassed irony.

Horror: Electronic Arts makes video game 'inspired by' Dante's Inferno

The first person who said "there is no such thing as bad publicity" likely was an incompetent PR man trying to spin his way out of some mess he made.

One such ridiculous mess comes from Electronic Arts, which funded fake Christian protests of its Dante's Inferno game. The protesters "passed out amateurish material and held signs bearing slogans such as 'Trade in Your PlayStation for a PrayStation,' 'Hell is not a Game' and 'EA = Electronic Anti-Christ.'"

The game's development team even tweeted the dull protest as if unaware of its origins. Speculating on whether the team was in on the act adds the faintest spice to the plain mush of the marketers' failed sensationalism.

Delicate connoisseurs of Western culture are advised to avoid descriptions of the video game's "interpretation" of Dante.

Dante’s epic placed his beloved Beatrice in Paradise. The EA game, in a vile act of cultural vandalism, makes its Dante character rescue Beatrice’s soul from Lucifer.

To make reparation, a reading from La Vita Nuova is in order:

Beatrice has gone to the highest Heaven,

to the realm where the angels have peace,

and stays with them, and has left you ladies:

no quality of coldness took her,

or of heat, as it is with others,

but it was only her great gentleness:

since light from her humility

pierced the skies with so much virtue,

that it made the Eternal Lord marvel,

so that a sweet desire

moved him to claim such greeting:

and called her from the heights to come to him,

since he saw our harmful life

was not worthy of such a gentle one.

Speaking of this life's unworthiness: the Inferno video game character uses a cross as a weapon.

There is more vengeful fun to be had in comparing EA's gassy pop culture burp with its supposed inspiration. The playful CNA article continues:

"We've tried to faithfully recreate the geography of hell as he wrote about it," the game’s executive producer Jonathan Knight told USA Today.

Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” depicts various circles of hell in which sinners are punished according to their defining sins.

Dante placed the fraudulent and the sowers of discord in the penultimate Eighth Circle.

In the Divine Comedy the Inferno is followed by the “Purgatorio,” a poetic exploration of purgatory, and then by the “Paradiso,” Dante’s depiction of the blessed in heaven.

He closes the “Paradiso” by exalting God as “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

EA has not announced any sequels to its game.

St. Thomas Aquinas the comedian

Christopher Tollefsen in his spring lecture at CU-Boulder noted this bit of scholastic humor from St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae I.i.1 Art. 8:

If [sacred doctrine] is argued from authority, it seems unbefitting its dignity, for the proof from authority is the weakest form of proof... according to Boethius.

Curiously, New Advent's edition of the Summa omits this geeky self-parodying joke. The jest is in the Latin text, however:

Si [argumentatur] ex auctoritate, non videtur hoc congruere eius dignitati, nam locus ab auctoritate est infirmissimus, secundum Boetium.

What 'culture of choice'?

Last month Patrick Deneen discussed the contradictions of the rootless academic who is caught in the trap of inauthenticity: he propounds a life of “localism and community” on the internet and in the academy, two institutions which tend to dissolve what he professes to love.

Criticisms of would-be localists are easy to write: some haven’t been home in years. They murmur about loving “the idea of place,” rather than about the charming and dirty realities of one particular place. They only have time to theorize because of the productivity and efficiency of the economic system they often disdain.

Deneen himself writes that the arguments of his compatriots at Front Porch Republic

…are almost everywhere and always paradoxical, if not contradictory - arguing on behalf of communities and a culture in which choice and escape and individual self-assertion is subordinated, yet urging the embrace of these ways as a matter of choice and self-assertion. This paradox is forced upon anyone making these arguments by a culture that renders everything into a choice.

But how many of us really live in a “culture of choice”?

Many do not.

Circumstance, family concerns, health problems, lack of opportunities or simple lethargy encourage many to stay put without ever having to make an explicit rejection of “choice and escape.” While George Bailey almost left Bedford Falls several times, some of us never even became near-escapees.
We live within a thirty-minute drive of our birthplace and in the religion of our forefathers. We know the quirks of our area’s history and we can spot the landmarks even amid the suburban neighborhoods that have grown around them.

We try to place our fellow locals by what high school and what year they graduated in. And we wonder who all these people from out of state are and what they doing to change us.

For those of us settling into a career and starting a family, our regular choices may be no more substantive than what to watch on television, what or who to have for dinner, and what to do on the weekend.

We’re simply too busy or too non-wealthy to live in this “culture of choice” lauded by some and condemned by others.

Yet for all their abstractions and anti-abstractions, FPR writers and other localists help those of us who, because of forces beyond our control, have been extricated from the meritocratic amoeba but wonder why we are nevertheless content.
While many such authors may be mirror images of those they criticize, they speak for many of us who are not.

Eavesdropping on D.C.

The D.C. Interns blog sums up its target:

Over the next three months you have paper runs, coffee runs, and envelope licking to fill your days. As a consolation prize, you will be provided an intern badge, conveniently red, fashioned as your scarlet letter. This will identify your status to all of DC. A status that you interpret as “important” and we interpret as “tired” and “obnoxious.”

Aiming to correct the egregious behavior of aspiring lackeys, the blog recounts laughworthy but worrying examples such as this tour-leading intern:

High School Kid: "Are Ted Kennedy and Edward Kennedy related?"

Intern (authoritatively): "They're brothers."

And this:

Intern 1: I like, wanna try getting waterboarded.

His intern friends: What?!

Intern 1: Yeah, like I feel like it would be totally grounding.

Hear this blog tell of an intern who signed legislation meant for her boss. And observe more willful stupidity:

Intern 1: I'm not good with numbers.
Intern 2: Oh, I'm really good with numbers. Just not the times tables. I gave up on those.
Intern 1: That's okay, memorization is for baby boomers.
Intern 2: I know, right? I had to go to some research seminar last year. It was total bulls**t. I mean, maybe back before the internet...
Intern 1: But you can just look stuff up on Wikipedia now. I mean, I can learn more in twenty seconds than I could from reading books.
Intern 2: I totally agree.

It is unpleasantly amusing to think that those who answer phones and prioritize mail for the halls of power are supremely confident in their hodgepodge understanding of Wikipedia entries.

The horror continues with the sighting of "Two red-badge toting interns sharing a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations ... Cliffs Notes version."

This provokes an aphorism: Ideology is to reality as Cliff's Notes are to great literature.

Attention-grabbing tales of D.C. Interns are by nature outliers, so we may hope that these tales reflect the follies only of the dullest political and careerist youth.

The Capitolist, a blog which claims to accept anonymous postings only from Capitol Hill IP addresses, serves a related purpose. Acting as a direct line into the various ids of staffers and interns, it allows the reader to eavesdrop on the type of internet dependent who works in a Capitol Hill office.

Many of the comments are pleas from clueless workers who lack a social life. Those competent enough to acquire juicy gossip likely won't share it there. They are astute enough to use sensitive information to advance their careers and to bait reporters.

But their ineffectual expressions of opinion are of minor interest.

For instance, a March 30 entry praising Catholic dissent generated replies two (clever), three(anti-papal), four(anti-dissent) five (pro-dissent) and six (pro-dissent).

Those wishing to monitor legislative obsessions may find The Capitolist useful. But note that mockery of constituents quickly turns tiresome.

RIP Bishop Kaffer

Bishop Roger L. Kaffer, auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Joliet, died at the end of May.

Now is as good a time as any to note that I helped edit Bishop Kaffer's forthcoming book from Basilica Press, "Common Sense Catholicism." Though I only spoke with the bishop two or three times, I sensed that he and his book reflected a deep and simple piety.

In our time when churches and the popular culture seem to be run by technocrats and self-conscious professionals, the bishop was just the type of clergyman to appeal to the average high school-educated layman. May he rest in peace.

Andrew Bacevich to speak in Denver tonight

According to the 5280 blog, Andrew Bacevich will speak at the Tattered Cover in LoDo tonight at 7:30.

See also the Downtown Denver Examiner.

Brains beat machines

On the Internet, transhumanism may be belittled as much as it is praised. Its science fiction dreams predict artificial intelligence, immortality through computing, and the wholesale re-engineering of mankind. Rev. David B. Hart described it as “a sensibility formed more by comic books than by serious thought.”

But its proponents are generally technology lovers who believe that foul devil Progress is on their side.
Derision, alas, is not enough to silence their claims.

Over at the New York Times, Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang evaluate the prospective match-up of Computers vs. Brains.

Of the brain, they say:

One cubic centimeter of human brain tissue, which would fill a thimble, contains 50 million neurons; several hundred miles of axons, the wires over which neurons send signals; and close to a trillion (that’s a million million) synapses, the connections between neurons... unlike a computer, connections between neurons can form and break too, a process that continues throughout life and can store even more information because of the potential for creating new paths for activity.

Their back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests the human brain has a capacity for about one petabytes, one million gigs, of information. (They say all information stored on the internet only reaches three petabytes.)

The writers throw cold water on futurist Ray Kurzweil's optimism that Moore's Law (the so-far constant doubling of computer capacity) will overcome the difficulties. Even if it runs into no insurmountable design barriers, “By 2025, the memory of an artificial brain would use nearly a gigawatt of power, the amount currently consumed by all of Washington, D.C.”

The human brain runs on only 12 watts. If nigh-limitless power devices remain uninvented, substantive technological mock-ups of the human brain may never be possible.

Aamodt and Wang close on a humanist note.

...although it eventually may be possible to design sophisticated computing devices that imitate what we do, the capability to make such a device is already here. All you need is a fertile man and woman with the resources to nurture their child to adulthood. With luck, by 2030 you’ll have a full-grown, college-educated, walking petabyte. A drawback is that it may be difficult to get this computing device to do what you ask.

U.S. Catholic history, blogged

Recently New Advent has been linking to the blog of Dr. Patrick McNamara, Church historian and assistant archivist at the Diocese of Brooklyn.

His posts feature brief profiles of important figures, historical summaries and also original sources.

To start with, here is Dr. McNamara's description of colonial America's Maryland Tradition in American Catholicism, "a tradition that stressed interfaith harmony, public service, and an attachment to such American principles as religious liberty and separation of Church and State."

A brief foray across the Atlantic touches upon Joseph de Maistre and his ultramontanist views on the papacy.

McNamara reports on Brooklyn's anti-Catholic riots of 1844 using a period newspaper article. Priestless parishes are not a new phenomenon, he adds, explaining that they were common on the American frontier.

For the Civil War period, McNamara informs us of Father James Sheeran, chaplain of the failed Confederacy and author of the mournful poem "Conquered Banner." The Catholic Encyclopedia article on the priest begins with this precious description: "He inherited from his parents, in its most poetic and religious form, the strange witchery of the Irish temper."

We also learn that General James Longstreet was a Catholic convert.

Given its sad history, it is not surprising that the largest group lynching in U.S. history took place in the South. But the action's victims were not blacks, but Italians.

They had been officially acquitted of the murder of an Irish-surnamed New Orleans police chief in 1891.

Obviously the Catholics of the U.S. labor movement cannot go unmentioned. Let Mary Kenney represent them.

Then there are the "modest proposals" of Brooklyn's Monsignor William McGuirl. In his tongue-in-cheek 1917 St. Patrick's Day address at the Waldorf Astoria, he asked the Irish to petition Congress to enact a law prohibiting any immigration for three decades, "except for the Irish."

"For thirty years none but Irish need apply."

The monsignor called for a boy in every family to be named Patrick or a girl to be named Patricia, so that "the virtues of the great old Saint might be perpetuated by psychology." Further, he advocated that incoming immigrants from Eastern Europe or Italy to be made to take the name of Patrick.

McNamara reproduces the full text of President Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 address to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

The president, the first to speak at a Catholic college's commencement, used the opportunity to promote Celtic literature. He claimed he had grown "particularly interested" in it in the preceding three years, adding:

I feel it is not a creditable thing to the American Republic, which has in its citizenship so large a Celtic element, that we should leave it to the German scholars and students to be our instructors in Celtic literature. I want to see in Holy Cross, in Harvard, in all the other universities where we can get the chairs endowed, chairs for the study of Celtic literature.

Noting the revival of old Norse poetry, Roosevelt predicted an “awakening to the wealth of beauty contained in the Celtic sagas.”

Dr. McNamara also discusses black U.S. Catholics such as the twentieth century's Sister Thea Bowman

Further, there is an account of the inspiring heroism of Congressional Medal of Honor awardee Father Joseph T. O'Callahan, S.J.. When he was serving on the carrier U.S.S. Franklin, a March 1945 Japanese attack devastated the ship.

His award citation reads:

...calmly braving the perilous barriers of flame and twisted metal to aid his men and his ship, Lieutenant Commander O'Callahan groped his way through smoke-filled corridors to the open flight deck and into the midst of violently exploding bombs, shells, rockets and other armament. With the ship rocked by incessant explosions, with debris and fragments raining down and fires raging in ever increasing fury, he ministered to the wounded and dying, comforting and encouraging men of all faiths; he organized and led fire-fighting crews into the blazing inferno on the flight deck; he directed the jettisoning of live ammunition and the flooding of the magazine; he manned a hose to cool hot, armed bombs rolling dangerously on the listing deck, continuing his efforts despite searing, suffocating smoke which forced men to fall back gasping and imperiled others who replaced them.

The battleship U.S.S. O'Callahan was named in Father O'Callahan's honor.

Let's end with McNamara's appreciation of Myles Connolly's short novel Mr. Blue. Comparing Connolly's creation to F. Scott Fitzgerald's, he writes:

I have come to realize that the character of Blue must also have appealed to us all, and to countless other readers, because he was a uniquely American personality. As Myles Connolly wrote him, J. Blue was the man that the ambitious Jay Gatsby might have become had he steered by a higher truth than the sound of money in Daisy Buchanan's voice.

Dr. McNamara was a great help to me in writing my first freelance essay for Our Sunday Visitor, in which I discussed the place of bishops in the public square.

In Dr. McNamara's remarks, published in the April 19 edition, he explained how intense public engagement by bishops produced the New Deal-foreshadowing Catholic Miracle. However, he said the divergence between Catholic life and American culture has increased in recent decades, as evidenced in the rise of an anti-clericalism new to the U.S.

My thanks to both Dr. McNamara and OSV editor John Norton for their help with the piece.