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Civility is a pipe dream. I understand that. This is the blogosphere, the modern-day Wild West. Six shooters going off all over Dodge City and stuff.
Fine.
Personal insults are the coin of the realm among some, and that's just the way it is. It's a free country.
The anonymous are free here to personally insult me:
"Your're ugly and your mother dresses you funny" is fine. Hey, it's an arguable point.
"Your theology is not my idea of sound Christian doctrine." OK, that's the basis for debate.
But there's a kind of personal attack that goes beyond nasty and gets, for want of a better word, creepy.
The stalkerish kind of creepy. Where I live or don't live, who I make eye contact with in the hallways -- that's just nutsy cuckoo kind of stuff and believe me, blog administrators will be deleting those.
By the way, my trip to Maine was swell and Thanksgiving in South Jersey was a treat. How's by you?

Odds and ends and on the road

I'm going on a road trip to visit my son Christopher in Maine. He's going to show me around the used book stores in Portland, I'll meet his girlfriend's parents, and then on Monday we're going to Boston to see Bruce Springsteen perform at what used to be called the Boston Garden. Lord only knows what corporation has bragging rights to it these days.
I'll be driving home Wednesday and Thanksgiving Day we'll be spendng with my mother-in-law.
All this by way of saying that I won't be posting for a couple of days. But Chris assures me that the Internet has made it to Maine so I'll be able to check in to see if you folks are playing nicely.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Praying for rain?

Just a couple of random thoughts on the news that Georgia Gov. Sonny Purdue is going to stand on the steps of the state Capitol today, joined by lawmakers and ministers, and they are all going to pray for rain:
1. I think we can all agree that Purdue isn't the first guy to think of asking God for a lttle help during the drought. Does he believe that if a few more people get together in front of the TV cameras, the Almighty will say, "Oh, man. That's right, I was supposed to send some precipitation down there to Georgia?"
2. I believe it was C.S. Lewis who said, "God is not some cosmic bell-boy." The theology of petitionary prayer is not a simple matter.
3. While it is always troublesome for an American Baptist to see clergy cheek-by-jowl with politicians -- we're big on the separation of church and state -- prayer can't hurt, unless all you're doing during the crisis is praying, in which case you're just wasting everybody's time -- including the Almighty's.

Veterans Day

"Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day."
---from the St. Crispin's Day speech in Shakespeare's "Henry V''

"If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields."
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields"

And there, in lines written centuries apart, is the glory and sadness of Veterans Day. The old soldiers remember, in their minds and in the aches in their bones, how they fought for the blanket of protection and the free skies under which we live. But it should not be only the old soldiers who remember, or even the old and young soldiers together.
We need to keep the faith with our soldiers, to thank those who serve now and remember those who sleep now in the bloodied ground.

The trouble with atheists....

It's boom time for the unbelievers. Folks like Dawkins and Hitchens are zooming to the top of the best-seller lists championing the cause that God is just a really bad idea.
Well, good on 'em, I say. This is America, after all, and we're all free to ply our books, whatever they say. (Speaking of books, I've just started reading Garry Wills' new tome -- "Head and Heart: American Christianities." Like everything Wills writes, it's very good. Wills is one of those writers I'm in awe of. "How can anybody be this smart?'' is what I always think when I'm reading his work. With this book, he seems to be saying that American Protestantism has always had a tension between reason and emotion, between Enlightenment and Revivalism. But he also makes the point that it is precisely the wall of separation between church and state that has allowed such a vigorous religiosity in this country.)
But back to atheists. The more strident among them can sound as foolish as fundamentalist Bible-thumpers.
I have more respect for agnostics, those who can say, "I don't know," which Frederick Buechner has noted, is "all of us some of the time, and some of us all the time."
P.S. Most of the time, blogger Ray sounds like a guy I could have a beer with.

Love is blind...thank God

I'm always amazed by the bravery of the modern blogger, who somehow finds the courage to say nasty stuff while conveniently cloaked in technological anonymity.
My wife wrote a response to an earlier blog of mine and it was followed by this comment:
"Anonymous said...
why do you even waste your time with this loser?
3:20 PM, November 07, 2007"
Anonymous' parents must be stinky with pride over his literary contributions to the world.
Well, anonymous, you ain't the first to ask that question. When Sue and I got engaged, friends of hers came to her and said, "You are the nicest, sweetest person on the planet. Why would you even think of marrying...him?''
Sue would look them straight in the eye and say, "It's a nasty job, but somebody has to do it."

A helpful party tip

I'm sure my sister-in-law meant well. One of the celebrations for my wife Sue's 50th birthday was a small family gathering at my mother-in-law's place. And Sue's sister had gone all out - a basket full of brightly wrapped gifts. Sue opened one at random: there was a dollar bill in it.
Right there, the other shoe dropped - there were 50 baskets.
Well, after the initial laughter, what are you left with? Forty-nine boxes to open and no more surprise. The joke wears off pretty quickly, even if the gratitude remains.

Musharraf: with friends like these...

So, our staunch ally in the war on terror, the leader of Pakistan, has suspended the constitution, fired a supreme court justice, started rounding up the usual suspects that usually get rounded up when dictators get their knickers in a twist, and pretty much declared martial law.
Well, that was 10 billion of our tax dollars well spent.
Somebody should have told President Pervez Musharraf that in the good ol' US of A. we don't suspend the constitution: we just make it stay after school and stand in the corner.

A near-perfect paragraph

Pulitizer Prize-winning author Richard Russo knows how to write a novel. I hope by now most people have read his books "Nobody's Fool'' and "Empire Falls'' or, failing that, at least seen the movies made from them. The former is one of my favorite movies of all time.
Russo has another wonderful novel out now, "Bridge of Sighs," and near the end of the story I came across a paragraph that is as near a perfect piece of writing as I've seen. You don't need to know that plot or the characters to appreciate the power of it, the way the sentences fit, the way the juxtaposition of certain words just keeps the paragraph going deeper and deeper into something like truth:
"The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up."
You read something like that and it can pretty much take your breath away.