George F. Will mercilessly dissects Fink-Nottle:

Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.

Granted, his grandiose rhetoric celebrating his “transformative” self is entertaining: Recently he compared his revival of his campaign to Sam Walton’s and Ray Kroc’s creations of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, two of America’s largest private-sector employers. There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, “If you want to put people in jail,” look at “the politicians who profited from” Washington’s environment.

From this column, it sounds like Will’s a Huntsman supporter now.

Well, that was pretty great. We took the kids to New York City yesterday to see the Big Apple Circus. Ever been? It’s a wonderful, wonderful circus. I don’t like circuses, but boy, is this one terrific. It’s intimate and creative, versus the overwhelming spectacle of a Ringling Bros. show. Julie and I took Matthew to it 10 years ago, when we lived in NYC, and we were both so surprised by how charming and enjoyable the show was. So once we realized we were moving to Louisiana, we wanted to make sure all three of our kids got to see the show. What made yesterday’s performance special for our kids was that we had ringside seats. What made it even more special was that the show’s famous clown, Grandma (played by Barry Lubin), pulled me into the ring for a water-spitting skit:

“Did you arrange for that?!” Julie asked me after it was over. Uh, no. Not a chance. But I’m glad it made the kids happy. The circus was a joy all the way around. The kids loved the Chinese acrobats, the magic tricks, the porcupine (!), the trapeze artists, the whole dang thing. Walking back out into the plaza at Lincoln Center, Lucas said, “I think that is the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole life!” We walked across the street and got a table for lunch at Rosa Mexicano, which was a favorite of ours when Julie and I first moved to Manhattan (we frequented the location on First Ave., near our apartment). Because this was our first time there in at least a decade, and the last time we’d have a chance to eat there for a long time, we had pomegranate margaritas to go with the guacamole made at tableside. Hans, the guacamole maker, invited the children to help him mix the stuff, and gave them all souvenir aprons to wear. It could not possibly have been better, all this. After our lunch, which was, of course, delicious, I stood out on the sidewalk swooning, wishing that we lived in New York.

I e-mailed that sentiment from my phone to a New York friend, who e-mailed right back, “You’re on vacation.” I knew he was right, of course, but still, we were floating on a cloud of Big Apple love. All of us walked across town to see Christmas windows in Midtown department stores. Julie took Nora, an Eloise fan, into the lobby of the Plaza hotel to see the Eloise Christmas tree, which lit her up. Then we stepped over toward Bergdorf’s to see what they’d done with their windows, pointing out to the kids where an Indian restaurant called Pondicherry used to be, and told them how the late Ismail Merchant had given Mom and Dad a personal cooking lesson there once. (None of them can appreciate yet why this is one of their parents’ favorite New York memories.) Anyway, the Bergdorf windows were spectacular, as they always are. Look at this one:

If you’re in the city over the Christmas season, this is a must-see. Careful to avoid FAO Schwarz — a wonderland for kids, but for parents, the Mines of Moria — we ambled over to the wonderful Sherry-Lehmann to pick up some wine to take to our friends’ house later.

We bought a bottle of their house Champagne, which is reasonably priced and which I would drink every day if I could, and a bottle of nonvintage 2008 Chablis recommended by Pierre, a salesman there. It was less than $30, which I thought reasonable. Unfortunately, it’s not listed on the Sherry-Lehmann website, because let me tell you, this was a delicious wine — flinty, minerally, crisp, just what you want Chablis to be. For me, heaven is to sit at a cafe in Paris with a platter of cold, briny oysters and a bottle of cold Chablis. So, wine in hand, we walked over to nearby Barney’s to check the windows out there. What a disappointment! Uncharacteristically so. Lady Gaga designed the windows, and they were pretty much a dud. The kids had been stunned by the Bergdorf’s windows, but barely noticed these. Can’t say that I blame them. Who in the world would think it a good idea to have Lady Gaga do their Christmas windows? Wait, don’t answer that.

On to Saks, and Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas tree. Alas, on the way, the crowds and the cold and the walking wore the kids down. And when the children ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. They tried to be troupers, but they were overcome by it all. They were underwhelmed by the Rockefeller Center tree, which told me how tired they must have been. Julie and I realized that it was true: New York City is a great place to visit, but when you have three kids, it takes a lot out of you to live there.

We stopped at Magnolia Bakery to buy some cupcakes to take to our friends, caught a cab to Lincoln Center, picked up our car, and drove to Westchester for a dinner of clams and pasta, and tuna steak. S., our host and a French Culinary Institute-trained chef, really outdid himself. I ended the evening on a fold-out couch bed next to Lucas. I saw him in the dim light from the kitchen staring off into the distance, just before falling asleep. “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“The Big Apple Circus,” he said, grinning. “I can’t stop thinking about how great it was. It made me so happy, Dad.”

Just the reaction I had hoped for. Happy.

So, goodbye to candidate Herman Cain.  When he admitted that he never told his wife about his 13-year friendship with Ginger White, which included cash payments to, um, help her out, it was all over for him. You don’t dig your way out of that, not with all the sexual harassment stuff on top of it. The only political question now is: which Republican will get his endorsement? I’d think Gingrich Fink-Nottle would have to be the heavy favorite. The more enduring political question is: In this day and age, why do men who behave that way with women think that it’s not going to come out if they run for public office? Are they really that arrogant? I guess Cain — who still denies all the allegations — has gotten away with this sort of thing for so long that he really believed he was invulnerable.

I’m going to be away from the keys for most of today. We’re taking a day trip with the kids. Probably won’t be able to check in much today, but I’ll approve comments as I can. Please be patient. Meanwhile, enjoy this long, meaty interview Leroy Huizenga conducted with the media theorist Read Mercer Schuchardt. It’s about technology and religion. Excerpts:

Was the print revolution of the 15th-16th centuries an advance over prior oral and written culture? What was gained? What was lost?

Wow — that’s a huge question, and dissertations have been written on it and it’s still not fully answered. What was gained, thanks to Martin Luther and the power of the printing press, was the right to challenge the abuses of the church without necessarily burning at the stake for doing so (if only Jan Hus had this technology!) But without the printing press, Martin Luther would most likely have died an unknown heretic who violated all three of his monastic vows (chastity, obedience, poverty). As I understand it, modern Catholicism sees this portion of its history as a failure on their part to not internally reform soon enough. The other thing that was gained was representative money, an impossibility without the printing press to make receipts for the gold on store. But if the printing press created “Sola Scriptura” at the expense of orality (i.e., “tradition”), it also created more than just a “single” Protestant Reformation. According to the World Encyclopedia of Christianity, the “one true church” now has over 33,000 officially recognized denominations. And if military victories go to the technologically superior entity, then it’s certainly the case that the church has become impotent through a “divide and conquer” scheme — by their fruits shall you know them! So what was gained was greater intellectual freedom for the individual, vernacular translations of scripture, capitalism, democracy, the nation-state, nationalism, patriotism, and a massive increase in both the words of a language and the literacy of the population. What was lost was, ultimately, a coherent and meaningful narrative by which people led their lives. The psychological security of the average medieval peasant was, I think, far more profound than that of today’s well-paid, well-insured, well-adjusted citizen who is doing fine but taking Prozac to keep his ennui or depression at bay. If I’m a member of the one true church, but then have to choose between 33,000 denominations, well suddenly the whole thing gets called into question and people like Richard Dawkins start to make a lot more sense because they at least have one consistent story that solves the paralysis of choice quite easily: choose either (a) believe nothing, or (b) believe one of these 33,000 tales. If freedom requires a choice, then technology requires an efficiency to those choices, and most people simply don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to go through all their options on the believe side of the ledger. So I think, ultimately, atheism is a natural outgrowth of all this, the way nudity is the end result of too many fashion choices (this was the point of Robert Altman’s film Pret-A-Porter). It becomes the last resort of the rational mind, even as it defeats its own purpose.

More:

We simply swim in tech nowadays. Most of us couldn’t do our jobs without our computers, at least: word processing, the web as a major source of information, email for communications, et cetera. How does one swim against this tide?

There are two valid options, as I see it. The first is actually the easiest: become Amish. The second is even harder: swim upstream. McLuhan compared it to an Edgar Allen Poe short story called The Maelstrom. By noticing the pattern or effect of the whirlpool, one man in the story saves himself by jumping out of the ship and clinging to a piece of flotsam that is strangely swirling up instead of being sucked down by the whirlpool. So too can we devise a strategy of individual survival by being good at pattern recognition and by paying constant attention to the ways in which new media and technology can pull us down into their unintended side effects. It’s no surprise that the DSM V will have the most entries at the same point in human history as we have the highest number of new technologies to create psychic imbalances in our built environment.

How should Christian leaders – clergy, lay leaders, music ministers, etc. – think about using tech in their ministries?

Very very carefully. My first recommendation is to read Jacques Ellul’s “Effect on Churches” section of Propaganda. My second is to recognize that the church is not competing with Starbucks, the mall, or the movie theater for audiences. I think Henri Nouwen gets it right [in his In the Name of Jesus – ed.] when he says that the leaders of the future will be those who have the courage of being culturally irrelevant, because they will recognize that what the soul in technological society truly craves is the worship of the true and living God, not the temporary two-hour appeasement of the burden of self-consciousness that can be had anywhere else and with higher production values. So recognizing that worship and entertainment are not synonyms, understanding how icons (cultural and religious) work both semiotically and spiritually, knowing that “ecclesia” is the people and not the building, and knowing that value is a function of scarcity (and not repeatability), that is where I would start with teaching clergy how to think about tech use in their ministries. By and large, most people hate church for the same reason they hate meetings run by PowerPoint: if I can get this electronically on my laptop at my own convenience, why am I even here?

Read the whole thing.  Please comment on all this after you’ve read the interview — and remember, I’m going to be away for much of the day, so if you don’t see your comment for a while, just be patient. Because there will be a comment explosion at some point.

I’m glad David Brooks sticks up for the Germans today. So many people have been yelling about how awful they are to see the Eurozone crisis as a moral drama in which responsible northern Europeans are being goosed to spend the money they responsibly managed to cover the debts of irresponsible southern Europeans. Krugman et alia spite the Germans for cutting off their noses to spite their faces by insisting on seeing the economic crisis in moral terms. Yet as Brooks points out, successful capitalism has to be undergirded by reasons for people to believe there is a solid and defensible moral structure undergirding it. Here’s what it should look like, says Brooks:

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.

This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and degraded.

And not only in Europe, but here as well. Brooks says, sensibly, that in the heat of the crisis moment, the US government did what it needed to do so save the system (flooded it with money, basically). But that was not followed by rebalancing the moral books, including holding the people who blew up the system to some kind of meaningful account, and reforming the system to discourage morally reckless behavior, and to reward honesty, responsibility, and hard work (versus get-rich-quick gambling, crony capitalism, and so forth). Result?:

Right now, this ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists diverting money on the basis of connections; they see traders making millions off of short-term manipulations; they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.

The result is a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. Social trust shrivels. Effort is no longer worth it. The prosperity machine winds down.

Brooks says that the deep crisis of trust in the US is in large part the result of the government failing to bring a moral accounting to the system in the wake of the 2008 crash. A real Pecora commission likely would have gone a long way toward restoring confidence in our system. Yes, life would still be hard, and we’d still have a heck of a cesspit of debt to climb out of, but at least the public would be able to have the confidence that the system was morally sound and worth believing in.

I think he’s right, and I can completely understand the terrible choice Germans are faced with, and why they recoil from making it. It destroys the moral structure of capitalism. Let the Greeks and the Italians live by tax evasion, bribes, and destructive cynicism toward their institutions and the responsibilities of citizenship, and it doesn’t matter: the Germans can be counted on to bail them out. If I were a German and my government decided to do this, I would be filled with so much contempt and despair it would be disorienting. And yet, if my government failed to do that, I would be staring into the face of a Great Depression.

I wonder what would be worse: a Depression that serves as nemesis for the hubris of the Eurozone tower of Babel, or saving the Eurozone by throwing overboard the “precious social construct” of moral hazard and an economic system that rewards virtue and punishes vice.

I know some of you readers know a lot more about economics than I do — Pyrrho! — and no doubt disagree with me on this. Please help me understand why it’s wrong to apply a moral framework to this situation, why I’m worried about the wrong thing.

Lovely Five Books interview with Michael Farr, a “Tintinologist,” who discusses his favorite five books related to Herge’ and Tintin. Not all of them are Tintin books, but I found this history of “The Blue Lotus” fascinating:

I think one can safely say that The Blue Lotus is the most important Tintin adventure. Tintin first moves East with The Cigarsof the Pharaoh. The Blue Lotus, written in 1934, continues the adventure in China. When he started it, Hergé got a letter from a priest at Leuven University [near Brussels] saying: “I gather you’re sending Tintin to China. Be sure that you mug up on things Chinese and don’t just stereotype. We have a number of Chinese students here who you could talk to.” Hergé took up this offer and met several of the students. One of them in particular, called Chang Chong Chen, had tea with him on Sunday May 1st 1934 and they immediately struck it off. They were born in the same year, they had the same sign of the zodiac, the same interests, and Hergé was delighted to learn about China through this young Chinaman. A great friendship developed instantly. Chang would come every Sunday for tea, Hergé would give him his latest plate drawings for The Blue Lotus, Chang would write in the Chinese ideograms and they would have long discussions about art and philosophy and everything Chinese.

The result is a masterpiece. Tintin is immersed in extreme realism – Shanghai exactly as it was in 1934. It takes Tintin to a level we hadn’t seen before, because the previous adventures were approximations of a country or whatever Hergé could discover about them. They didn’t have the rich, accurate detail of The Blue Lotus. It is beautifully drawn by both of them, because the Chinese detail was done by Chang. Hergé suggested that Chang’s name should be on the title page, but he declined. Chang then went home and they lost contact for a very long time, but their friendship was reflected in the book in the character also called Chang Chong Chen – the orphan boy who is saved from the flooded waters of the Yangtze by Tintin, and who becomes Tintin’s closest friend in this adventure. That was mirroring in the book what was happening in real life. After The Blue Lotus everything was totally different.

Let me urge you strongly to buy all of the Tintin graphic novels for your kids. They are wonderful. My kids — even Nora — have read them over and over and over. Try to buy the single-issue paperbacks, not the three-in-one smaller editions.

Great quote from First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, speaking to Dave Weigel:

“I think there’s now an evangelical tri-lemma,” says Jeffress, who still backs Perry but doesn’t have illusions about his current electoral oomph. “Do you vote for a Mormon who’s had one wife, a Catholic who’s had three wives, or an Evangelical who may have had an entire harem?”

Funny. But Catsmeat, you’ll need to stand me a drink at the Drones, old boy, because I am sorely vexed over how any Evangelicals, or other Christians, are willing to trust the thrice-married Fink-Nottle, who, let us remember, started the acquisition process of wives No. 2 and No. 3 while he was still married. Yes, yes, forgive seventy times seven, and all that. But to forgive someone doesn’t mean you trust them to have the character required to be president. Me, I’m far more concerned about Fink-Nottle’s slippery character regarding policy and, well, basic integrity. Why do pro-Gingrich Christian “values voters” find Fink-Nottle so much more appealing than Romney, especially given that they aren’t far apart at all on policy, and they’re both epic flip-floppers?

I think two reasons. The minor reason is anti-Mormon bigotry. They’d rather have a sleazy multiple adulterer with a messiah complex rather than a buttoned-down Mormon who as far as anybody knows has been a faithful husband and good family man. The major reason is that Newt knows how to preach a tent revival, while Romney comes off like a respectable Mainline dullard who footnotes his sermons. The people want entertainment, and fire in the belly. Simple as that. If Fink-Nottle says he’s sorry, cheap grace will rain down on him like confetti on closing night at the convention. They want to toss Obama that bad. All that stuff about Bill Clinton and bad character? Forget about it. That was then, and he was a Democrat. Newt sounds good. These credulous souls will apparently sell their good sense for a pot of message.

Are you a pro-Newt Christian? Tell me why I’m wrong. Serious, open question.

PeterK passes along this new Cajun invention to feed your holiday crowd: the Fowl de Cochon, a boneless pig stuffed with turkey, duck, chicken, sausage, and cornbread dressing. Want. Me. Some. $275. Feeds 50-60. When the LSU Tigers play for the national championship, I want to be at the game party where they’re serving a Fowl de Cochon. Just so you know.

In India, a snake charmer unleashed his cobras at the local tax office, claiming they treated him unjustly and demanded bribes, and he was sick and tired of it. The obvious question: Between tax collectors and cobras, how can you tell them apart?