Bookworm Room

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

  • Easy Ways To Teach Kids
  • Bookworm’s Book
  • Books!
  • Contact Bookworm

History, Holidays & Observances -November 30

November 30, 2019 by Wolf Howling 1 Comment

A look at some of the history and holidays on November 30

Holidays & Observances on November 30

Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, who lived with Jesus Christ, then after a long life of evangelizing, died a martyr on a St. Andrew’s cross in 60 A.D., during the reign of Nero.  Andrew was a fisherman and a follower of John the Baptist when he first encountered Jesus Christ.  Andrew introduced Jesus to his brother, Peter, and the two became among the first four of Christ’s apostles.

In the gospels, Andrew is referred to as being present on some important occasions as one of the disciples more closely attached to Jesus. Andrew told Jesus about the boy with the loaves and fishes (John 6:8), and when Philip wanted to tell Jesus about certain Greeks seeking Him, he told Andrew first (John 12:20–22). Andrew was present at the Last Supper. Andrew was one of the four disciples who came to Jesus on the Mount of Olives to ask about the signs of Jesus’ return at the “end of the age”

Andrew was martyred in 62 A.D., crucified for his faith on a cross in the shape of an “X” — a shape which is now known as the “St. Andrew’s Cross.”  St. Andrew has been associated with many places and patronages, but perhaps most famously he is associated in legends with Scotland, where he is the patron saint, and where the St. Andrew’s Cross flies on the flag of Scotland.

Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran — As May, 1948 approached and, with it, the birth of Israel, many Arab Palestinians — the same one’s now demanding a “right of return” — voluntarily left the borders of the nation soon to be Israel.  Jews throughout the Middle East in the Arab countries and Iran were not given a choice to remain in their homelands.  These Mizrahi Jews were expelled from their homes, with many coming involuntarily to settle in Israel.  Since 2014, today is a day set aside in Israel in their honor.

Major Events on November 30

1782 – American Revolutionary War: Peace Negotiations

With the cessation of major operations in the colonies (skirmishes in SC were still ongoing), the war’s conflict turned in April, 1782, from the battlefields in America to the negotiating table in France.   Britain’s major goal in the negotiation was to drive a wedge in between France and America so that it would not be facing a long term threat from a Franco-American alliance.  That meant returning the American colonies to close trading partners almost as soon as the war concluded.  France, for its part, expected to be included in the negotiations with Britain and America so that they could, to the maximum extent possible, shape the peace to their benefit.  They wanted the payoff for their assistance to be a peace that punished Britain.

Fortunately for America, Ben Franklin was the man in charge on the American side of the aisle, and he was in his element, He was later joined by lawyer John Jay, the acerbic John Adams, and from SC, Henry Laurens, all extremely intelligent men who worked well together, though not harmoniously.  Their first act was to ignore the French and cut them out of the talks.  They opened direct negotiations with Britain, making demands that were highly favorable to America.  And surprisingly, the British were quite willing to accede to those demands — and more, so long as American loyalists were protected.

The French, who had gone broke supporting the Revolution with $100 million in aid, and who lent their own military and naval might to the effort, were, to put it mildly, outraged.  Franklin turned his attention to mollifying the French while the British negotiations were ongoing.  Franklin, probably the most skilled and canny diplomat alive at the time, returned to his unsophisticated man from the wilderness of America persona that he used repeatedly over the years in France.  His  excuse to the French government was, we are poor simple Americans who do not understand how to handle diplomacy properly, so please excuse our faux pas.  He then added, utterly shamelessly, the British clearly want to divide America from France.  Please do not be angered and give them that satisfaction.  Amazingly enough, that worked at least well enough to buy French patience and a measure of acquiescence for enough time to complete negotiations with Britain.

On this date, in 1782, Britain and America signed their own preliminary peace agreement and sent the treaty to their respective governments to be debated and ratified.  In terms of land, borders, fishing rights, and independence, America received all for which it asked.  And indeed, within three short years after peace was concluded, trade with Britain had returned to pre-war levels and only grew from there.  So Britain achieved what it wanted as well from the peace.

On a final note, the painter Benjamin West was commissioned to memorialize the signing of the peace agreement.  But one of the two British negotiators refused to sit for the painting.  It was left unfinished.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: History Tagged With: activist court, Adeste Fideles, All Ye Faithful, American Revolutionary War, Andrea Palladio, Andy Williams, Angels We Have Heard On High, Anti-Federalist, Anti-Federalist 78-79, Apostle, Article III, Ben Franklin, Benjamin West, Britain, Colin Mochrie, Constitution, crucifixion, Day to Mark the Departure and Expulsion of Jews from the Arab Countries and Iran, Ella Fitzgerald, Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, Federalist, Finland, France, Franco-American alliance, Friar Alessandro, Henry Laurens, House of Representatives, Impeachment, impeachment trial, Israel, Jesus Christ, John 12:20–22, John Adams, John Jay, John the Baptist, Judiciary Act of 1801, Justice Yates, Last Supper, loaves and fishes. John 6:8, Marbury v. Madison, martyr, Mizrahi Jews, Mount of Olives, Nero, Nero. Fisherman, Oh Come, Oscar Wilde, Palladian architecture, patron saint, Peace Negotiations, Peter, Samuel Chase, Scotland, Senate Trial, Soviet Union, St. Andrew, St. Andrew's Cross, Supreme Court Justice, Thomas Jefferson judicial review, Treaty of Paris, Winter War, “end of the age"

Calling Christ a drag queen pedophile shows what’s wrong with academia

April 1, 2018 by Bookworm 39 Comments

An academic article calling Christ a queer, pedophile drag queen reveals that modern academics know nothing about anything — and then teach it to our kids.

I finally got around to reading the article about Holy Cross College professor Tat-Siong Benny Liew, who has some interesting ideas about Jesus Christ (whose resurrection Christians around the world celebrate today). Before getting to Liew’s theories, you need to know that he’s not just any professor who’s randomly dabbling in religious analysis. Instead, he’s someone with rigorous training and expertise in Christian religious studies:

Professor Tat-siong Benny Liew received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Olivet Nazarene University and completed his doctorate at Vanderbilt University.  Prior to his appointment at Holy Cross, Professor Liew had been Professor of New Testament at the Pacific School of Theology, and before that taught at Chicago Theological Seminary. According to the Department of Religious Studies webpage, his fields of specialty include “synoptic gospels, gospel of John, cultural and racial interpretations and receptions of the Bible, apocalypticism, and Asian American history and literature.” [Footnotes omitted.]

Those are some serious academic chops. Clearly, if Liew opines about Christianity, we should give him deference, right? Welllllll . . . maybe not.

The above-linked, much-shared article, exposes the theories Liew has been promoting in academic publications. For Liew, identifying Christ as a Jew, a rabbi, a profound moralist, and (if you’re Christian) the Son of God and Man’s savior, is old hat. It’s time for some new thinking about Christ:

The 2004 article “Mistaken Identities but Model Faith: Rereading the Centurion, the Chap, and the Christ in Matthew 8:5-13,” provides a representative example. Professor Liew and his co-author, Theodore Jennings, argue that Matthew 8:5-13, the story of the centurion who goes to Jesus to ask for healing for his servant, ought to be interpreted in terms of a sexual relationship.  Matthew’s account, runs the argument, does not concern a centurion and his servant, but a centurion and his lover/slave. “The centurion’s rhetoric about not being ‘worthy’ of a house visit by Jesus (8:8) may be the centurion’s way of avoiding an anticipated ‘usurpation’ of his current boylove on the part of his new patron [Jesus],” they assert. Furthermore, “The way Matthew’s Jesus seems to affirm the centurion’s pederastic relationship with his παῖς, we contend, may also be consistent with Matthew’s affirmation of many sexual dissidents in her Gospel.” [Footnote omitted.]

Yes, says Liew, Christ is a gay pederast. But wait, folks, there’s more!

. . . . Professor Liew explains that he believes Christ could be considered a “drag king” or cross-dresser. “If one follows the trajectory of the Wisdom/Word or Sophia/Jesus (con)figuration, what we have in John’s Jesus is not only a “king of Israel” (1:49; 12:13– 15) or “king of the Ioudaioi” (18:33, 39; 19:3, 14– 15, 19– 22), but also a drag king (6:15; 18:37; 19:12),” he claims. He later argues that “[Christ] ends up appearing as a drag-kingly bride in his passion.” [Footnotes omitted.]

Gay pedophile cross-dressing Christ! Appearing soon at a sex show near you!!!

But why stop with that, if you’re Liew? In today’s LGBTQRSTUV etc. world, there are many more labels that can be attached to Christianity’s savior: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Christians, Education, Homosexuality, Identity politics, Religion Tagged With: Academia, Academic, Annunciation, Cal, Christ, Crossdressing, Deconstructionism, Gay, Gospels, Holy Cross, Jan Van Eyck, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Liew, New Testament, Oscar Wilde, Pedophilia, Picture of Dorian Gray, Symbolism, Tat-siong Benny Liew, University of California Berkeley

The unintentionally funny anguish of the distraught feminist Hillary voter *UPDATED*

December 1, 2016 by Bookworm 12 Comments

Weeping Woman 1937 by Pablo Picasso 1881-1973I want to share with you one of the funniest feminist posts I’ve ever read, although the humor this anguished feminist infuses in her post is entirely accidental. The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as the Oscar Wilde’s quotation about The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

Unlike Dickens, the post to which I refer is not literature but — Oh. My. God. — it did make me laugh. Self-described “comedy writer” Eirene Donohoe confesses through a veil of tears that she is still unable to recover from Hillary’s loss. If she’s a comedy writer, this post is the tears of a clown.

The post opens with Donohoe describing her valiant efforts to live her life as if nothing has changed since that fatal day in November. Then, overcome by emotion, Donohoe finally admits that she can no longer pretend that life is still normal or, indeed, that her life or the lives of any women in America still matter:

I’m a comedy writer, but suddenly I was thinking up stories about post-apocalyptic worlds where women revolt and take over the planet. I started thinking about writing a song. Something that captured everything I was feeling. A love song, a fight song. Something to show the world that I was still with Her.

I am her. The words flashed through my head. And suddenly, there on the 101 freeway, I was down the hole again. Tears streaming, sobs choking, heart breaking. The realization hitting me. I am Her.

Yes, this young comedy writer in Los Angeles, with her three-year-old child, is identical to a 69-year-old woman who has built an entire career based upon her willingness to stand by her husband, a man repeatedly and credibly accused of raping and otherwise sexually assaulting women. Moreover, Donohoe’s woes aside, if one looks back over Hillary’s career, one can see that, up until her tenure as Secretary of State, she accomplished nothing other than being her husband’s wife — and, moreover, a wife who strongly felt he and the rest of the Democrat party owed her for her unswerving fealty to covering up his (and her) financial and sexual peccadilloes.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Feminism, Hillary Clinton Tagged With: Benghazi, Bill Clinton, Christopher Stevens, Eirene Donohoe, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Oscar Wilde, Reset, Russia, Secretary of State, Sex Predator

The Picture of “Barak-ian” Gray

October 9, 2014 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Slide1
Slide2

Wait for it. . . .

Wait for it. . . .

Wait for it. . . .

Wait for it. . . .

Wait for it. . . .

Joe Biden

The genesis for this post was an email from a friend commenting on Joe Biden’s apology tour:

So actually, Joe Biden is really good at executing the only real task he has with this administration: being a bigger jackass than the President. To bad he’s the only one good at his job.

I got inspired.

Filed Under: Barack Obama Tagged With: Barack Obama Scandals, Joe Biden, Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray

England swings wildly between the extremes

May 4, 2010 by Bookworm 4 Comments

In 1931, Nancy Langhorne Astor’s son Robert Gould Shaw III was arrested for committing a homosexual act (in a park, I believe).  This was a continuation of a long-standing British public policy of prosecuting “sodomists.”  Arguably the most famous prosecution was that against Oscar Wilde, for public indecency.  The trial, scandal and imprisonment destroyed the noted Victorian wit entirely, and he died in self-imposed, poverty-stricken exile soon after his release from prison.

How times have changed.  In 2010, Dale McAlpine, a Baptist preacher in England, was arrested for stating in a public place that homosexuality is a sin.

Have the English no sense of balance or proportion?  Do they think that criminalizing people’s thoughts and opinions is the only way to balance the scales for the humiliations they visited on homosexuals in years past?

Anyway, rather than opining more on the subject, let me refer you to my previous post on thought crimes.  I think it pretty much covers anything I want to say.

Filed Under: Britain, England, Free speech, GBLT, Homosexuality Tagged With: Britain, Dale McAlpine, England, Free speech, Homosexuality, Nancy Astor, Oscar Wilde, Robert Gould Shaw, Sodomy Laws

The paradoxical effect of my “liberal” education

January 8, 2010 by Bookworm 12 Comments

I’m having a minor mid-life crisis.  I’ve been a practicing lawyer for almost 23 years now.  I’m quite good at what I do, but I hate it.  And lately, it’s been getting harder and harder to flog myself into getting the work done and meeting the deadlines.  (Although I should assure any current or potential clients reading this post that I do get my work done, and I’ve never missed a deadline in 22.5 years.  I may be bored, but I’m good at what I do and very reliable.)

What I like to do best, of course, is blogging, but that’s not a way to earn a living.  I was speaking with a very wise person about my little career crisis, and he suggested that I write a book.  His first suggestion was that I write a nonfiction book, perhaps an expansion of my “San Francisco in decline” post.  I vetoed the idea, explaining that I’m too much of an intellectual dilettante to put together an entire book on a single subject:  my knowledge base is wide and shallow, and a single subject book needs depth.  Rather than focusing on a single topic, I like to bounce off of things that catch my interest — explaining why blogging is a perfect, albeit financially unprofitable, outlet for me.

My friend pointed out that, while I’m reactive (as opposed to proactive) at a detail level, I do have a fully formed ideology that I apply consistently to every factual scenario that comes my way.  Running with that, he suggested that I write a “novel of ideas.”  I looked at him blankly.  I had absolutely no idea what a “novel of ideas” was.  He explained that Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is the quintessential “novel of ideas.”  Ayn has taken a world view (individualism), and created a fully realized novel centered around the virtue of that ideology.  Her book is not a polemic, filled with wooden characters mouthing political speeches.  Instead, her lead character lives out his political beliefs, for better or worse.  1984, of course, is another example, showing the horrors of the wrong world view.

For the first time since I started hated my work (about 21 years ago), I suddenly though, “Wow, I’ve just heard about something that I really would like to do.”  I have absolutely no idea how to go about writing a novel, since plot and dialog have never been my strong points, but those can be learned.  I can take writing classes or read books on the subject.

My friend suggested that the first thing I should do, even before I start writing, is to start reading.  He told me to ask people I respect what novels helped form their political beliefs.  So, I asked you all that question yesterday.  Your answers stunned me.  First off, they reminded me again of what I already knew:  you are an incredibly intellectual crowd, well-read and thoughtful.  I’m often in great awe of your knowledge and your ability to apply that knowledge to real world scenarios.

The second thing that struck me is how few of the recommended books I’ve read, including any of Ayn Rand’s books.  I can tell you exactly why I’ve read so few of those books:  I had a liberal arts education at very liberal institutions.  The result of this ostensibly liberal education is that I have a strong aversion to vast numbers of writers I’ve read, as well as unreasoning prejudices against writers I’ve only heard of.

The easiest example of the negative effect of my liberal education can be described as “my adventures with Charles Dickens.”  When I was in 9th grade, we read Great Expectations.  When I was in 11th grade, we read Great Expectations.  When I was in my Freshman year at Berkeley, we read Great Expectations. By the third read, I could quote large parts of the book practically by memory and hated it with a passion.  In every class, whether I was 14, 16 or 18, we engaged in two, and only two types of analyses:  we did what I now realize was a Marxist inspired analysis that examined the class system in mid-Victorian England; and we painstakingly went through the book looking for literary symbolism.  At no point did we ever examine the book as Charles Dickens wrote it.  Unlike his Victorian audience, we never got to see a rip-roaring novel about a boy’s life trajectory, the weird characters he meets, the wrong assumptions that guide him, and the decisions he makes and their effect on his life.  In other words, we never looked at why, long before Marxist analysis and symbolic investigations, legions of ordinary Brits anxiously awaited each installment in this exciting cliff hanger.

By the time I was 19, I vowed that I would never again read another word of Charles Dickens.  I hated Dickens.  Dickens was ponderous.  Dickens was preachy.  Dickens was depressing.  Blech.  And then one day, when I was living in England, I found myself quite bored.  Boredom didn’t happen to me often when I lived in England.  I was a student having fun.  I went to parties, and more parties, and still more parties.  But even I couldn’t keep the dancing going forever.  So I asked my roommates (pardon:  “flatmates”), “Do any of you have something good to read?”

Jenny was the only one with an answer (perhaps because she partied less than the rest of us).  “I can loan you David Copperfield.”  It is a measure of my desperation that I even let her put the despised Dickens in my hand.  It was even more shocking that I started to read it — and I fell in love!  Reading the novel as it was meant to be read, as the picaresque adventures of a young man, wending his way through the highly colored, eccentric England of Dickens’ imagination, was absolutely delightful.  It was such a relief not to have to analyze every phrase for its class or symbolic implications.  After David Copperfield, I gobbled Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, and A Christmas Carol.  I was finally able to see Dickens as a first class writer, rather than an intellectual burden.

That pattern, of my hating a writer because of the way he was taught, happened again and again.  Last night, after my husband and I finished watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, my husband turned to me and asked, “Had you read that story?”  I drew back in revulsion, announcing, “I hate Fitzgerald.”  And then I paused.  I realized that I’d actually read only one Fitzgerald book, and that was in an English class.  We read and analyzed The Great Gatsby to death.  As with Great Expectations, we focused obsessively on Marxist class issues and literary symbolism.  Ironically, the one thing we didn’t do was try to look at the novel as it was read in its own era:  as a good story that also described the tension between the controlled 19th Century and the wild Jazz Age.  The kind of close textual analysis we did sucks the life out of everything.  When we were done, I vowed never to read Fitzgerald again, and I’ve kept that youthful vow.  (A vow I’m thinking I might want to abandon now.)

Oscar Wilde got the same treatment.  The only way I can think with any fondness of The Picture of Dorian Grey is to remember the student in my class who, in a desperate bid to impress the teacher with his grasp of symbolism, announced that “Wilde repeatedly describes flowers in the book because he wants to remind the readers of the phallic symbolism of the female sexual organs.”  We can now cross Wilde off the list of writers I ever want to read again.

In addition to turning me defiantly against the classics, the liberal arts institutions in which I found myself kept up a constant drumbeat of negativity about many of the books that you all recommend.  Rand was a boring fanatic, Huxley’s book was a fantasy, Clancy was a right wing techno wacko.  Indeed, it’s amazing to me, looking back, that George Orwell’s books were (and are) still part of the educational canon.  Thinking about it, the only reason I may like Orwell’s books is because their defiant anti-Leftism meant that the teachers couldn’t subject them to a Marxist analysis, and their straightforward writing defied any in-depth symbolic exegesis.  In other words, the teacher’s couldn’t turn them into deconstructionist gobbledygook.

These snarky views about anti-Leftist books even infected popular culture that surrounded me when I was young.  As an example, I was a big fan of Dirty Dancing when it came out.  I was in my early 20s, and Patrick Swayze was so beautiful.  Who wouldn’t be impressed?  So I paid attention to the story — and I certainly didn’t miss the fact that Swayze’s arch nemesis, the swaggering, dishonest stud, Robbie Gould, justified his immorality by informing Baby, and the viewing audience, that he lived his life according to Ayn Rand:

Robbie Gould: I didn’t blow a summer hauling toasted bagels just to bail out some little chick who probably balled every guy in the place.
[Baby is pouring water into glasses for him]
Robbie Gould: A little precision please, Baby. Some people count and some people don’t.
[Brings out a copy of The Fountainhead from his pocket]
Robbie Gould: Read it. I think it’s a book you’ll enjoy, but make sure you return it; I have notes in the margin.
Baby: You make me sick. Stay away from me, stay away from my sister or I’ll have you fired.
[Baby pours the jug of water on his crotch]

Clearly, Ayn’s writing makes people evil and immoral.  You may as well read Mein Kampf, since it will have the same poisonous effect on your soul.

So here I am, the product of a fairly high level liberal arts education, and I hate the books I’ve read, and won’t read the books people recommend.  The process of reading and studying so many of those books was such agony, it was always impossible to imagine that there might be a simple pleasure associated with the actual story the author was telling.  I shied away from those books just as I shy away from certain foods I associate with food poisoning.  (Don’t ever bother trying to feed me scallops.)  And as for many of the writers I might have found interesting, the ones who directly or indirectly articulated anti-Marxist sentiments, I was ordered away from those books, assured by professors and pop culture alike that they had the potential to corrupt my brain and my soul beyond redemption.

I think I’m going to have a lot of reading to do in the next few months, not my ordinary diet of fascinating nonfiction and painfully innocuous fiction, but serious stuff — the heavy intellectual stuff that will help develop my thinking as I contemplate creating a literary world in which my own political ideas can flourish.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: Ayn Rand, Dirty Dancing, Education, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Literature, Marxism, Oscar Wilde

Top Posts & Pages

  • Bookworm Beat 12/4/19 -- Trump, Schiff's Schpy-gate, and more
  • The impeachment farce, not Trump's conduct, should shock the conscience
  • History, Holidays & Observances on December 6
  • History, Holidays & Observances on December 5

Recent Comments

  • Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove on History, Holidays & Observances -November 30
  • Project 1619 | Directions on A Response to Thanksgiving History as Told by the NYT
  • If All You See… » Pirate's Cove on Happy Thanksgiving — there is so much for which I am thankful

Bookworm’s Tweets

Tweets by Bookwormroom

How to Donate to Bookworm Room

Writing this blog is a labor of love. However, if you’d like to donate money for my efforts, please feel free to do so here. Thank you!

Archives

Categories

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2019 · Bookworm Pro News Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in