Jitterbugging for Jesus

I suppose it’s a measure of what a John Lennon freak I am that this story made me really sad, and I was sad when I posted a few months ago about Lucy’s illness. It’s also a measure of John Lennon’s genius that his inventive music and poetic lyrics had, and continues to have, such power over us fans: And good for Julian and his mum for their compassion.

By Peter Wilkinson
CNN
LONDON, England (CNN) — The childhood friend of John Lennon’s son who inspired the Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” has died aged 46 from the chronic disease Lupus.
Lucy Vodden was a classmate of Julian Lennon, who came home from school one day carrying a drawing of his 4-year-old classmate. “That’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” he told his father.
Lennon seized on the image and embellished it in a song along with “newspaper taxis” and a “girl with kaleidoscope eyes.”
The BBC later banned the track, which appeared on the 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” for its supposed drug reference with the words of the song spelling out LSD.
Lennon always claimed though that the title was suggested by Julian, not from any wish to spell out LSD, the chemical name for the drug, acid, in code.
Julian Lennon lost touch with Vodden when he left Heath House nursery school, near his parents’ home in Surrey following their divorce in 1968. But they were reunited in recent years when he heard she was suffering from the immune system disease and he lent his support to her.
Vodden’s death was announced on Monday by St. Thomas Lupus Trust in London, where she had been treated for more than five years.
“Julian and (his mother) Cynthia are shocked and saddened by the loss of Lucy and their thoughts are with her husband and family today and always,” the trust said on its Web site.
Angie Davidson, Campaign Director of the St. Thomas’ Lupus Trust said “everyone at the Louise Coote Lupus Unit was dreadfully shocked by the death of Lucy, she was a great supporter of ours and a real fighter, it’s so sad that she has finally lost the battle she fought so bravely for so long.”

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From the Metro News, United Kingdom:
Burglar falls asleep on the job
By METRO NEWS REPORTER – Tuesday, September 29, 2009 A would-be burglar failed to finish his crime after he broke into a house, drank a bottle of wine and fell asleep on a sofa.
The man stuffed items into a pillow case before settling down with the full bottle in Milton, Cambridge. The homeowner tried – unsuccessfully – to wake him before calling police.
Cambridgeshire police confirmed a man had been arrested on suspicion of burglary and criminal damage following the incident on September 22.
A spokesman said: ‘We arrived to find the man on the sofa with a bottle of wine on the floor next to him and after trying to rouse him we charged him with attempted burglary.’

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Michael, Michael, Michael,
I never thought I’d see the day when Michael Moore would become a parody of Michael Moore.
I haven’t seen your movie in which you obviously sustain your argument that capitalism, in and of itself, is the most evil institution since Satan and that capitalists are all members in good standing of the Satanic Lodge, but I’m not one of those who buys that you have to see a movie in its entirety to judge it. The first time I saw the preview of you wrapping crime-scene tape around a bank and breathlessly showboating about it and reminding me of a showy little boy, my first thought was, “Jeez, the guy really is a geek, isn’t he?”
And such a repulsively showy one. Which is really nothing new–I’ve always had mixed feelings about your work. You do some great work in throwing light on the worms and snakes that would rather crawl around in the darker realms unseen. No question about it–you’re a thorn in the sides of people who need to be pricked, but your excesses tend to overshadow you at your best.
Michael, every time I’ve turned on the TV or read anything lately, there you are denouncing capitalism, whole hog, as evil, evil, evil. Which wouldn’t be quite so stoopid–while stoopid nonetheless–if you weren’t using the person of Jesus Christ to justify your arguments. I understand where you’re coming from with that, and have no reason to doubt that you are sincere in your Catholic faith and strive to adhere to the teachings of Christ and the Catholic social teachings. Good for you.
But in my theology, each and every one of us is a broken sinner–full of goodness but capable of evil–in need of God’s humbling grace.
Michael Moore included.
Capitalists, socialists, libruls, conservatives, you, me, Wall Street bankers and Wall Stree custodians. We all contribute each and every day to the collective consciousness in some way that falls short of the very high bar that Christ raised.
I don’t believe that capitalism in and of itself is evil, considering its record for giving people the incentive to work hard and be rewarded for producing goods such as, oh . . . this brilliant laptop I’m writing on–or those high-tech cameras you use to make your movies that keep you raking in piles of capitalistic greenbacks like so many autumn leaves.
I know, I know–I keep hearing your position on the charges of rank hypocricy that are, by the way, totally justified. You say that you’re embarrassed by the wealth and, shall we say, fat-and-happy lifestyle you enjoy. That it pricks at your conscience every day, as I heard you say.
Well then, put your faith where your mouth is–give all you have and all you take in to the poor and take up the radical Christian life. Many Christians do. They cannot in good conscience live off the fruits and rewards of capitalism because they, like you, believe that the system is evil in and of itself. But they have the courage of their convictions and choose to live in solidarity with the poor in the very midst of the poor.
I know many of these people in the Catholic Worker branch of your Catholic faith, for example–people who put their faith and convictions and theologies and economic and political philosophies where their mouths are. They detest and loathe capitalism, so they’ve chosen to live outside of it to the extent that they can. I admire them for their principled faith and for the enormous good they do. They inspire me to do and give more as a follower of Christ, not by their words or by stunts, but by their quiet integrity.
But even they have to employ tools like computers and phones and cars and planes and things that, once again, are products of the capitalistic system that gave inventive minds the incentive to create inventive wonders.
Michael, you and I obviously share a passion for Jesus Christ and The Way, but the difference is that I’m able to live in the tension of all that is good and all that is evil about capitalism. That way I can enjoy the fruits of it and live off the genius of it, make money off of it–and boy, do I love money and boy, who doesn’t?–and turn around and do good with my money as well as the gifts and graces and talents that God gave me. Capitalism doesn’t make me as a Christian a hypocrite. Capitalism empowers me to contribute to the greater good in a million ways, big and tiny, day in and day out. That I benefit from some evils that drive it is, well, bothersome, but you as a good Catholic have to live with some evil in that great institution that is the church.
Me too. I have to live with evil every day. It’s everywhere. In churches, in banks, in, uh, Hollywood.
Michael, when Jesus said to “be perfect,” he was talking about being a spiritually mature disciple and a full grown man (see Paul on childish things). Wrapping crime-scene tape around a bank is performance art even though you make it a point to say at every turn that yours stunts are not performance art.
They are performance art, and they sometimes make good points, but more often than not, you keep coming across as a loud clown with no credibility and some really lame–and yes, obnoxiously arrogant and hypocritcal arguments to justify your belief that Capitalism is Satanism by another name.
I worry about your health. Please take better care of yourself before you hurt or kill yourself and as long as you’re living such an unhealthy lifestyle, don’t lecture me about the evils of the health-care system, OK?
And Michael, while you’re losing weight, lose those hideous whiskers, will you? Nobody expects you to be Hollywood’s glam boy, but you could at least clean up your act enough to be more appealing on screens. You’re really getting unsightly and near repulsive at times, and the grubby persona you affect looks like exactly that–an affect that’s not genuine. You’re too rich to be passing yourself off as one who looks a little like the homeless beggar down the street.
You’re very rich, so live with.
Or don’t.
Grace & peace
Paul McKay

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Very interesting stuff on the religious holiday and including some contemporary economics and history in Israel:

The Body Politic Electric
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for Israel to unplug for Yom Kippur.
By Michael Weiss
Updated Friday
Yom Kippur is devoted to atonement and forgiveness—or “conscience consciousness-raising,” as I once heard a rabbi still recovering from the ’70s phrase it. In itself, the purpose of the holiday needn’t really affect day-to-day life, except that observance takes the form of a 25-hour fast and the total abstention from physical labor and the use of technology. Jews in the Diaspora spend most of Yom Kippur at home or in synagogue, where the absence of electricity hardly affects the greater gentile grids. But in Israel, which effectively shuts down for Yom Kippur, the contradiction between ancient religious tradition and modernity is brought into stark relief once a year, creating either a brief trance of neo-Luddite serenity or a sliver of Dark Age privation.
Decades ago, when Israel was still locked in an agrarian economy, this contradiction was inconspicuous. Today, the country’s largest, fastest-growing industries are tech-related. Although children on bicycles and video-store patronage have long been staple examples of Yom Kippur apostasy, the advent of global media has forever altered the possibilities for transgression.
During the Days of Awe, the 10-day period between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, stores in Israel close early and radios broadcast liturgical music—all in rehearsal for the big blackout that occurs when God is said to seal the fate of each individual Jew for the coming year in the Book of Life. On the Day of Atonement, all Israeli radio and national television broadcasts are taken off the air, factories are closed, roads and highways are cleared of traffic, public transportation is halted, and all aircraft are grounded. Anwar Sadat made historic use of this short-term stasis in an otherwise dynamic society by choosing Oct. 6, 1973, as the date for Egypt and Syria’s joint attack on Israel in what was soon branded the Yom Kippur War. (Some historians now argue that the timing was actually beneficial to Israel’s ultimately victorious counter-response, as all roads were empty when Israel Defense Forces reservists were mobilized.) On the whole, religious and nonreligious Israelis alike observe the holiday in some fashion. According to a survey conducted in 2008 by the Panals Institute, 63 percent of Israeli Jews said that they’d fast on Yom Kippur even though the bulk of the population skirts the Sabbath the rest of the year. “One day totally free of car horns, telephone calls, email and polluted air,” Joel Leyden of the Israel News Agency noted in 2006, capturing an ecumenical sentiment.
But in the age of CNN and Twitter, it’s getting harder for an entire nation to unplug. On Yom Kippur in 1995, synagogues were filled with whispers as news of the O.J. Simpson acquittal spread. Matt Silver, a professor of Jewish history, also reminded me of the swiftness with which riots broke out in the northeastern city of Akko last year after an Israeli Arab drove his car into a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. “How did the people hear of that incident if not through banned technological means?” Silver asked. My Tablet colleague Liel Liebovitz, who grew up just outside Tel Aviv in the ’80s, recently wrote about how technology actually alienated him from his favorite Jewish holiday: “Even if the Israeli channels darkened their screens for a day on Yom Kippur, MTV in Hong Kong, or the soccer channel out of Milan, or any of the other stations included in our subscription plan went about their business as usual.”
The key word here is business. In the last decade, the fusion of venture capitalism and Silicon Valley-style savvy has completely transformed Israel into a first-rate economic power, one that has so far proved formidable in weathering the global downturn. As noted in this City Journal essay by George Gilder, an editor at Forbes and the author of The Israel Test, the Jewish state now launches more high-tech companies per year than any European nation. In 2007, it surpassed Canada as being home to the most foreign companies listed on the dot-com-friendly NASDAQ index. It’s second only to the United States in the six key fields of technology development: telecom, microchips, software, biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, and clean energy. A major contribution to the boom has been the influx of more than 1 million Jews from the former Soviet Union, beginning in the late ’80s with the Gorbachev reforms. They not only increased Israel’s population by one-quarter but today constitute half of Israel’s high-tech workers. Many Soviet Jews are secular and growing increasingly hostile to the Israeli rabbinate due to its exclusive legal authority to determine the requirements for marriage. Indeed, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party performed as well as it did in last February’s parliamentary election because it promised the emollient of civil marriage to Russian émigrés.
The only area where Yom Kippur melds easily with Israel’s technological advancement is environmental science. Being the only day on the calendar without automobiles makes the holiday the perfect control for studies in air pollution. The Israeli Environmental Protection Ministry found that on Yom Kippur in 2007, the amount of nitrogen oxide in the air in Jerusalem dropped from 250 parts per billion to 12 parts per billion. The holiday is also something of an unintentional trendsetter: “A Day Without Cars,” a green event, has been implemented around the world since 2000 as a way of both reducing carbon emissions and getting urbanites to rediscover their cities on foot. As Orna Coussin observed in a lovely Haaretz tribute to the holiday, a minor coincidence of this phenomenon is that Ford’s Model T first rolled off the assembly line in Detroit on the week of Yom Kippur in 1908.
In a way, Israeli environmentalism has the most in common with the agrarian-socialist culture that used to be inextricable from 20th-century Zionism. A few years ago in Slate, Judith Shulevitz remarked on efforts to try to modernize the Israeli Sabbath so that the rift between secular and religious Jews might shrink. The sociological appeal of this project is that it aims to revive a “public”—as opposed to popular—culture in Israel. But Thoreauvian reminiscences about a day with no video games are bound to grow scarce as more Israelis exchange the factory and the kibbutz for the cubicle and the laboratory. Perhaps the guiltiest confession of all is that the Day of Atonement may become a postindustrial curio in another 60 years of Jewish statehood.
Michael Weiss is a senior editor at Tablet magazine and a culture blogger for the New Criterion.

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I’ve been out of pocket a good bit this week and did not know that William Safire died. He was a wonderful old ink-stained wretch, and longtime jitterbuggers know the place in my heart for old ink-stained newspaper dogs.
And he was a bulldog, a top-notch reporter as well as an incredible wordsmith, and a conservative of great integrity, wit and wisdom–an institution at the New York Times in the now long-gone era of The Great Grey Lady, as the Times used to be called before it finally caved into the U.S.A. Today pressures and converted to color and dazzling graphics. (U.S.A. Today revolutionized journalism in many ways, forcing papers to go to lots of splashy color and graphs and graphics and sidebars, and, much shorter–and, unfortunately–less in-depth writing. Then again, U.S.A Today sort of reversed and started doing more in-depth reporting. Go figure.)
I learned a lot about writing and reporting from going to school on William Safire’s forceful political and current affairs columns in my own ink-stained days, and multitudes of people who love language read his language columns religiously.
Take your peace, Mr. Safire, and God’s blessings on you.

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From the New York Times obituaries:

John T. Elson, Editor Who Asked ‘Is God Dead?’ at Time, Dies at 78
September 17, 2009
All journalists want to write a story that makes a big splash. John T. Elson, the religion editor at Time magazine, was no exception. But in 1966 he got more than he bargained for.
For more than a year, Mr. Elson had labored over an article examining radical new approaches to thinking about God that were gaining currency in seminaries and universities and spilling over to the public at large.
When finally completed, it became the cover story for the issue of April 8, as Easter and Passover approached. The cover itself was eye-catching, the first one in Time’s 43-year history to appear without a photograph or an illustration. Giant blood-red letters against a black background spelled out the question “Is God Dead?”
The issue caused an uproar, equaled only by John Lennon’s offhand remark, published in a magazine for teenagers a few months later, that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. The “Is God Dead?” issue gave Time its biggest newsstand sales in more than 20 years and elicited 3,500 letters to the editor, the most in its history to that point. It remains a signpost of the 1960s, testimony to the wrenching social changes transforming the United States.
The quiet, studious Mr. Elson, who died on Sept. 7 at the age of 78, was an unlikely bomb-thrower, and his article, for those who ventured past the cover, reflected his scholarly bent. Meekly titled on the inside as “Toward a Hidden God,” it began: “Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no.”
For the next six pages, readers were guided through thickets of theological controversy and a shifting religious landscape. Profound changes taking place in the relationship of believers to their faith were often expressed through the words of people, both eminent and ordinary, grappling with the same fundamental problems. Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Billy Graham and William Sloane Coffin were quoted. So were a Tel Aviv streetwalker, a Dutch charwoman and a Hollywood screenwriter.

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