Um, what’s the deal with the Denver Airport?  I’m not saying that I buy the conspiracy theory on offer here, but man, that’s some weird damn art to put in an airport. I trust Charles Cosimano will tell us what’s going on.

I love the way Chris Christie rolls:

Longtime Republican operative Douglas MacKinnon grew up dirt-poor in Boston, and wrote a book about poverty based on his own experiences. He complains that even though politicians used to call him for advice when he wrote books about other things, politicians aren’t calling him now. Notice that he’s not objecting to a lack of publicity (which he doesn’t seem to be suffering from), but from a lack of interest by the political class. Excerpt:

I find this odd and more than a little troubling. This is not about me. I don’t care if it’s other people who write a column or a book based on their own experience of unrelenting poverty. I don’t care if they are liberal or conservative. But when poverty remains one of the unsolved tragedies of our time, shouldn’t the observations of someone who truly suffered through it matter to at least one elected official?

In many ways, the mind-numbing ignorance of our “leaders” with regard to true poverty is the largest obstacle to finding actual solutions.

From MacKinnon’s new memoir:

I was born in a hospital in Dorchester, Massachusetts. At the time, Dorchester was an ultratough, blue-collar section of Boston, filled with mostly wonderful, hardworking people; it’s a place I will always be proud to call home.

Dorchester was never the problem. Poverty, homelessness, and hopelessness were the problems; and they were manufactured by two people—and two people only—our “parents,” John Mac Kinnon and Marie Carmel Mac Kinnon. These two individuals were not only full-blown alcoholics, but complete hedonists who saw their three emaciated and damaged children as obstacles to be crushed on their egocentric path to self-destruction.

By the time I was seventeen, our family had moved a total of thirty-four times. For those of you who, like me, are not fond of math, that’s an average of once every six months.None of the moves were voluntary—some, in fact, were quite disturbing and violent.

I dunno, I think I’d rather hear what he has to say about poverty than what someone from a liberal or conservative think tank in Washington has to say.

I interviewed this week a thirty-year-old young woman from my town who had been taught by my sister in sixth grade.  We spent an hour on the phone, and without question it was one of the most rewarding and inspiring hours I’ve ever spent with anybody. She talked about how she came from a very poor and messed up family — dad a chronic drunk, mom working three jobs to hold everyone together, etc. — and how my sister Ruthie, her teacher, was the only adult in her life who showed her love. S. talked in detail about how Ruthie helped her, and how she continued to help her throughout her school career by believing in her, and not letting her use her poverty and horrible home life as an excuse to fail. S. said, “A lot of teachers knew how hard I had it, and they felt sorry for me. Ruthie felt sorry for me, but she also knew what I was capable of, and wouldn’t let me feel sorry for myself.”

Today, S. has a husband, kids, and a great job at UCLA. By contrast, three of her brothers are in prison. She, though, has made it, and she credits Ruthie for making the big difference in her life. I bet S. has a lot she could tell Congress about poverty.

A group bought an ad in The New York Times urging liberal Catholics to quit the Church. Excerpt from the full text:

Why are you propping up the pillars of a tyrannical and autocratic, woman-hating, sex-perverting, antediluvian Old Boys Club? Why are you aiding and abetting a church that has repeatedly and publicly announced a crusade to ban contraception, abortion and sterilization, and to deny the right of all women everywhere, Catholic or not, to decide whether and when to become mothers? When it comes to reproductive freedom, the Roman Catholic Church is Public Enemy Number One. Think of the acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, social evils and deaths that can be laid directly at the door of the Church’s antiquated doctrine that birth control is a sin and must be outlawed.

More:

You’re better than your church. So why? Why continue to attend Mass? Tithe? Why dutifully sacrifice to send your children to parochial schools so they can be brainwashed into the next generation of myrmidons (and, potentially, become the next Church victims)? For that matter, why have you put up with an institution that won’t put up with women priests, that excludes half of humanity?

No self-respecting feminist, civil libertarian or progressive should cling to the Catholic faith. As a Cafeteria Catholic, you chuck out the stale doctrine and moldy decrees of your religion, but keep patronizing the establishment that menaces public health by serving rotten offerings.

I don’t really object to the message here — I mean, the organization has a point; if you believe these things, then you really ought to think hard about whether you should remain in the Church — but the language of the ad is hysterically spiteful. I find it impossible to believe that the Times would have allowed an organization that denounced Judaism or Islam in those terms to purchase an advertisement. For The New York Times, some religions are more equal than others.

Click here for a TV interview with the Sheriff Marge of the Grand Forks food beat. I love this sweet old lady. She has an output that would put most newspaper columnists to shame: five columns per week, including her “Dear Shirley” letter to her sister. Here’s the latest Dear Shirley. Excerpt:

The restaurants are crowded. The beaches are peppered with sunbathers. The palm trees sway in the gentle breezes on the southwest coast of Florida.

One week of these idyllic surroundings was all I could manage. All I could handle! So I pulled the collar of my jacket tightly around my neck as I got off the airplane in Minneapolis and made my way to the A section of the airport to catch the final lap in the journey home to Grand Forks.

… I’ve got to say I like Grand Forks, Shirley. Winter is fun watching sports, plays and hearing concerts as well as playing bridge. And when spring comes to the Red River Valley you have a feeling that you are born again. You congratulate yourself on being tough and making it through yet another winter.

When I was living in Dallas, I learned that the late Archbishop Dmitri of the OCA believed that parish churches should not get too big. Once they crossed a certain threshold in numbers of parishioners, it was time to create another church. A church that has too many people in it, he believed, couldn’t really be what a church ought to be.

Back in the 1950s, Will Herberg wrote an essay titled “What Keeps Modern Man From Religion?” (PDF here). I don’t know how valuable the following insight is, because clearly lots of people today go to megachurches. Still, take a look at this, and the comment I’ll add at the end:

In a mass society, people live in close propinquity, but there are no neighbors in the proper sense, no people bound by genuine community bonds. Therefore, while there are all kinds of sociability in a mass society, often factitious and contrived, it is a sociability false and spurious, a “non-involved sociability.” That is what mass society is like. Everything is big — Big Business, Big Labor, Big Government, Big Communications, Big Education, Big Entertainment, and … Big Religion. But in all this bigness, there is no room for the individual, the person, who is often reduced to nothing, and to less than nothing.

By atomizing, depersonalizing, and homogenizing the very substance of human life, mass society withers the roots of humanness, and thus, as Martin Buber has so well shown, it withers the roots of community and religion. It in fact leaves no room for religion and the church except as another Big Enterprise in mass society.

Earlier this week I interviewed N., a close friend of our family’s, about what he saw in Starhill, our rural community, during Ruthie’s struggle with cancer, and the aftermath. N. and his family moved to Starhill in 1990 from Baton Rouge. He told me that even though there’s a lot more physical space between neighbors there, he is a lot closer in the neighborly sense to the people there than he was to anybody living in a subdivision in BR. We talked for an hour and a half about the things he had seen and done in the over two decades living there, especially during my family’s time of trial. He said at the end that this community “is what church is supposed to be.” N. explained that in terms of people looking out for each other, and loving each other actively, and being present for each other in good times and in bad, this is what the church ought to be (N. is a Christian, by the way). He said that he has come to understand the Starhill community in an organic way, as something that grew from seeds of neighborliness planted long ago, and nurtured by others. You have to have good soil to plant in, he said, if you’re going to get anything like this to grow. You can have the impulse to neighborliness, but if your physical and social environment works against its nurture, the seed will bear little fruit.

In light of Herberg’s observations, as well as N.’s, to what extent do you think bigness is the enemy of parish churches? And if it is, what ought to be done about it?

This is how the comments thread for every article written about PETA plays out, says Nicole Cliffe.

1. This advertising campaign is offensive to women.

2. Clearly you have not read “The Sexual Politics of Meat.” Here are four paragraphs from it.

3. Women are not animals and dairy farming is not rape.

4. Um, obviously women are animals. We’re all animals.

5. METACOGNITION! Intellect. Patterns. The pyramids.

6. Cameron Diaz’s niece is dumber than a pig, says Cameron Diaz!

7. Bacon is yum. I eat bacon whenever I see a vegetarian post on a message board. Sometimes I make myself throw up so I can eat the bacon twice.

8. Bacon is the Holocaust. Isaac Bashevis Singer quotation.

9. Israel perpetrates its own Holocaust daily against the Palestinians.

It goes on. Read the whole list. It’s hilarious.

Members of an anti-Putin feminist punk band are facing charges after staging a protest inside a Russian Orthodox Church. Radio Liberty has the story, which I only link to so I can reproduce the best sentence I’ve read in a news story all year:

Not all Orthodox, however, back the legal assault against Pussy Riot.

No comment.

Behold, a masterpiece of a certain kind of food journalism: Marilyn Hagerty’s Grand Forks Herald (ND) review of a new Olive Garden. Excerpt:

It had been a few years since I ate at the older Olive Garden in Fargo, so I studied the two manageable menus offering appetizers, soups and salads, grilled sandwiches, pizza, classic dishes, chicken and seafood and filled pastas.

At length, I asked my server what she would recommend. She suggested chicken Alfredo, and I went with that. Instead of the raspberry lemonade she suggested, I drank water.

She first brought me the familiar Olive Garden salad bowl with crisp greens, peppers, onion rings and yes — several black olives. Along with it came a plate with two long, warm breadsticks.

The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day. The portion was generous. My server was ready with Parmesan cheese.

By contrast, see this review from “Dive Bar Girl,” an anonymous critic who writes for Cherry, a Baton Rouge newsletter:

Twin Peaks 6990 Siegen Lane http://www.twinpeaksrestaurant.com

Admit it, you like it when DBG is mean. You only send her fan mail when she’s mean. She never gets mail for being informative. That’s why she was saddened when she actually had a few nice things to say about Baton Rouge’s newest “breastaurant.” So she is going to write about the positive things first and then write the review you want to read. The smokehouse burger was above average. The patio was a nice space. The staff, while scantily clad, was professional. The salads even looked good. The place was miles above Hooters.

Here is the review you want: Twin Peaks has to be the brainchild of two 14-year-old boys who recently cracked the parental controls on the home computer. Waitresses are known as “Lumber Jills”. In case you are missing the imagery—each Lumber Jill has been endowed with an epic pair of Twin Peaks. If David Lynch were dead, he would be spinning in his grave on a rotisserie. (So no, there is no Log Lady and the owls are exactly what they seem.)

DBG arrived to find the parking lot filled with big trucks. Lonely men sat at the bar and slugged down large mugs of 29 degree beer. DBG’s Abita molded itself into a large snowball. They featured a dessert called the Twin Peaks Sundae—“two scoops of vanilla ice cream on top of a hot Blondie.” Of course, each scoop of ice cream has a cherry on top.

Does that make you horny?

Many dead animals and televisions lined the walls. They even have a Twin Peaks channel that introduces patrons to their girls. Sheila from Austin says, “My friends tell me I have a pretty mouth.” Of course, it is located on Siegen Lane, the showplace for all the worst Baton Rouge has to offer—insane traffic, big box stores and bland chain restaurants.

To sum it up, the entire place just says, “Sure, you work for the state in a dead-end job and make 28K a year, half of which you pay to your ex-wife and weekend child, but when you slink out of your efficiency apartment on Gardere and go for some beers at Twin Peaks, you become a God among men. Those Lumber Jills really understand all of your inner pain. As you sign your Discover card receipt, you are gonna leave Bambi an extra large tip that will add to your mountain of credit card debt.”

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