Church Fathers and Hunter Thompson (Yes, Unrelated Posts)
I need to get back and read the first generation of church fathers again. I used to dip in and out of their writings (guided primarily by Quasten--see below), but got out of the habit. Sites like this remind me that they deserve a lot more space in my mental landscape. The Early Christians Believed in the Real Presence.
Chesterton, de Tocqueville, and U.S. national elections. The author, Elizabeth Scalia, has far more confidence in the legitimacy of national politics than I. She apparently doesn't see the federal government as a gang intent primarily on misappropriating resources for a group of brigand insiders. But hey, give her time . . . and some Albert Nock and Matt Taibbi to read in the meantime. (But heck, last I knew, Taibbi, hadn't even connected the larger dots; he still thinks we just need bigger government to stop the Wall Street plunder, not realizing that Wall Street has the ability to plunder only because government has the requisite power.)
A friend gave me a copy of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. I'm not much interested in politics, but Thompson has long interested me, so I started reading it during odd moments. It's interesting, and, in addition to getting exposed to Thompson, I'm learning things that feed into my theory that national politics is merely an insider's game. In the first five pages, for instance, he mentions that reporters know not to report certain things, or else they'll lose access to the politicians. So if that's the case, what are the reporters giving us? Answer: crap. And if we're getting crap, how do we know what information to trust? And if we don't have good information, what allows us to make an informed decision at the polls? Quite frankly, you can't. The newspapers feed us half-truths, and you can't rely on what the politicians say they'll do, because no politician follows through (it's an American tradition; Nock in the 1930s was scoffing about Americans' gullibility).
