Matching Tracksuits

Month: October 2004

Inexplicable stupidity

Sunday 31 October 2004

Sorry, but I had to bump this up to the top. Come on people — this is utterly ridiculous. I’m making a big deal out of a mole hill and nothing?

I live outside the US — Poland, to be exact. Surfing the net, I found a claim that people outside the US couldn’t access Bush’s official web site.

So I tried it.

I get the “Permission to view this website is forbidden for this server” message.

Just what is Bush doing? There is no justification for this, and no logical reason for it either.

Here are some articles about it:

According to the Expatia article,

Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, was reported by the BBC on Thursday as saying: “The measure was taken for secruity [sic] reasons.” He declined to elaborate.

Security reasons?! Does al Q have the capacity to strike through IE? First Homeland Security is raiding toy stores (thanks to Thud for this info), and now Bush is shutting down his website for non-Americans? What kind of “security” is this?

There is just no logical reason for this blockage. If Bush’s team can’t “defend” his web site, what makes people think Bush and his gang can defend the country? Setting up a firewall is a lot easier than keeping out terrorists, I would imagine.

There was, in the Expatia article, some speculation as to why this was done:

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated to the BBC that the decision to block usage was made to cut traffic to the site in the run-up to the 2 November poll and make sure the site remains active.

Google doesn’t seem to have this problem, and I would wager they see _a lot more traffic_ than Bush’s site. If this is really a concern, I would suggest to Bush’s technologically savvy web team that they look for a better host.

From the BBC article, further speculation, which puts the previous quote in context:

On 21 October, the George W Bush website began using the services of a company called Akamai to ensure that the pages, videos and other content on its site reaches visitors.

Mike Prettejohn, president of Netcraft, speculated that the blocking decision might have been taken to cut costs, and traffic, in the run-up to the election on 2 November.

This just doesn’t wash either. How much could this possibly cost? Besides, in addition to campaign funds, Bush has a sizable bank account himself — he could pay for this out of his own petty cash, I’m sure.

Is it a conspiracy to keep non-Americans from viewing the site? I doubt it. Expatica claims that there are ways to get to the site:

However, keen net users have shown that the site can be found at other addresses, including: https://georgewbush.com; http://65.172.163.222 and http://origin.georgewbush.com.

However, none of them worked for me.

They all produced 404 errors.

A Poll of Poles

Sunday 31 October 2004

Polish news agencies reported yesterday that according to a poll (no pun intended), 41% of Poles would vote for Bush and 31% for Kerry.

In the rest of the EU, the numbers were decidedly more, well, decided: 61% of respondents said they would vote for Kerry; 9.8% for Bush.

“Damn liberal Europeans! Kerry probably bought them with money from the oil for food program!”

Tolstoy and Tahiti

Thursday 28 October 2004

I’ve been reading Anna Karenina intermittently for a couple of weeks now, and I find it somewhat difficult to sympathize with such characters who are so clearly in an entirely different social world than I. They talk of Society (with the ever-important “S”) and take off abroad on a whim. Hard work for the men is listening to petitioners in their civil service job or riding around their estate to make sure all the serfs are working as directed (maybe occasionally working with them!); had work for the women is dealing with servants’ incompetence. It’s not difficult to see why Marxist ideology took root there as it did, and it’s strikingly evident already in Tolstoy’s mid—19th century Russia. One character even semi-accurately predicts that Marxism will be the new theology, sweeping Christianity off to one side.

And just when you think none of the characters is going to address any of this, Oblonsky, Levin, and Veslovsky head off into the marshes for a couple of days of shooting. Sitting in a peasant’s hut, enjoying his hospitality, they begin talking about the justness of social system when their host must step outside for a while.

“Why do we eat and drink, go shooting and do no work, while he is always, always working?” said Vasenka Veslovsky, evidently for the first time in his life thinking of this, and therefore speaking quite genuinely (582).

Why indeed? Because you can afford it.

The conversation ends with an exchange between Oblonsky and Levin, in which the former admits the inherent injustice in the system, but encourages Levin to accept them nonetheless.

“One of two things: either you confess that the existing order of Society is just, and then uphold your rights; or else own that you are enjoying unfair privileges, as I do, and take them with pleasure.”

“No! If it were unjust, you could not use such advantages with pleasure; at any rate I could not. The chief thing for me is, not to feel guilty” (583).

It reminds me of a similar emotion I experienced a few years ago in Berlin viewing an exhibition of Gauguin’s work:

While at the new National Gallery I was struck with a terrible sense of the stupid futility of all that I was seeing around me. Here we were, the privileged ten or fifteen percent of the world’s population, paying fifteen marks to look at some paintings (created by someone who was, by his own admission, trying to escape reality) while the remaining eighty-five percent of the world’s population is fighting for survival. We spend so much of our time trying to inject some kind of meaning in our lives while they simply try to live. The significance of the Expressionist movement or the impact of Bach’s music on his contemporaries seems pitifully  insignificant when others go to bed hungry every night. Their suffering robbed me of any pleasure I might otherwise have experienced at the gallery. And then I turned this critical light on my own aspirations and once again felt that I would be wasting my life by devoting my time and energy to studying and teaching religion and philosophy. What does it matter whether Berkley is right or wrong about the relationship between perception and existence when people are starving and disease ridden? It’s a simply matter of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — most people don’t get the most basic needs fulfilled while we in the western world scurry about trying to find meaning in paintings and music.

Perhaps Gauguin just doesn’t appeal to me . . .

Reading Ann Coulter

Tuesday 26 October 2004

Why? Because I like to read what “the other side” has to say. I don’t know many conservatives who will sit down and read a liberal column, but that’s just my limited experience. In her latest piece, Ms. Coulter writes,

Among his other pointless carping about the war in Iraq, Kerry keeps claiming the military is overextended. His supporters claim Bush has a secret plan to bring back the draft. Whatever happened to all those gays who wanted to join the military? We haven’t heard a peep out of them lately. How about rounding up a “Coalition of the Fabulous,” Sen. Kerry? And what does his good pal Mary Cheney tell him about that?

Is it just me, or does there seem to be some rather rabid homophobia in that? The implied benefits are:

  1. “Those gays” will finally shut up about being able to join the military.
  2. A lot of them will get killed in the war — dead gays are always a good thing.
  3. All gays speak with a lisp and say everything is “fabulous.”

Perhaps I’m missing an insinuation.

Gombrowicz the Artist

Tuesday 26 October 2004

I’m reading intermittently ’s Diary, which was part of a wedding gift that consisted of several Polish classics. I’ve been wading through it for about two months now. I read a day here, a day there, an entry or two in a single day, then nothing for a couple of weeks.

It’s hard going because there’s only so much self-congratulatory discussion on Art (and that capital “A” is critical) that I can handle in one sitting. Gombrowicz was a self-exiled Polish writer who seemed constantly to be growling and grumbling against “timid Polish Art” and such. He’s an Artist with the Capital A because he regards Art (again, that “A” must be there) as something as critical as Air (an equally important “A”), and thinks Disastrous Art will lead to the Downfall of Civilization as surely as bad monetary policy. He does admit once that Art (or even lowly art) is a luxury, but only in a fever of humility that quickly passes.

It reminds me of what Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes in #15 from A Coney Island of the Mind of the adventures, difficulties, and responsibilities of a poet. It’s the ever-popular poem about poetry, in other words. It seems to be a bit of self-flattery, the knight looking at himself in a mirror, admiring his own armor and coming heroism. And taking himself entirely too seriously, the

super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut
truth
before the taking of each stance or step

As if the right words will save the world, and the wrong ones, destroy. The whole poem, for those interested (without F’s beat-poet line indentions):

the
poet like acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a

of his audience
sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and slight-of-foot

above the heads
tricks
and other high theatrics
all without mistaking
any thing
for what might not be.
For he’s

whenever he performs
the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth

Constantly risking absurdity
start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charliechaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair

with gravity to in
eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

before the taking of each stance or step
and death
his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits

I don’t know why it annoys me so much for an Artist to think of himself so seriously. He spends quite a bit talking about how no one understands him, how no one can comprehend what he’s been doing in his various novels that might appear to be unreadable, but in fact are only difficult because we’re not accustomed to such radically different Art.

“What I’m trying to do . . .”

Tom Wolfe commented on this thirty years ago:

Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! Phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed for me for the first time. All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many-thousand Pollacks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer — waiting, waiting, forever waiting for … it … for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there — waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well — how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other words exist only to illustrate the text (quoted in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate).

We have to have it explained to us. And what exactly are they explaining? Back to Pinker:

The political messages of most postmodernist pieces are utterly banal, like “racism is bad.” But they are stated so obliquely that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure them out.

This is true not only by the artists, but by the critics as well. Try reading a college textbook on film criticism. You’ll find yourself wondering how someone could write something so contorted, so warped — how someone could use so many words to say so comparatively little.

And so where does it leave us in this blog-invested world, where now everyone is an artist and everyone is trying to say something?

He writes with a grin.

Photo by 50 Watts

Get Yourself Registered

Monday 25 October 2004

How long do you think it would take to register a new car? How much time off of work do you think you’d have to take? A couple of hours after work? If only.

A friend recently registered his new car here in Poland. He took two days off of work to do it. Two days.

Two days

He went to the office to get in line at 4:00 a.m. No, I’m not making this up — he went to stand in the line at four in the morning, and finally got into someone’s office at twelve! And here’s the kicker — when he arrived, there were already people waiting!!! Once he got into an office to see someone, it took my friend forty minutes to fill in all the paper work.

The absurdity of this is astounding.

Chester, Oscar, and the Problem of Evil

Friday 22 October 2004

Last night I began reading Oskar i Pani Róza, which is originally Oscar et la dame rose (Amazon.com) and in English would be Oscar and Ms. Rose. It’s about a ten-year-old dying of cancer and a volunteer he makes friends with, named Ms. Rose. When Ms. Rose suggests that Oskar write to God, he replies that he doesn’t believe in God. She suggests that perhaps he should write anyway:

“Maybe you would feel less lonely?”
“Less lonely with someone who doesn’t exist?”
“Why not check if he exists?”
She bent down close to me and said, “Every time you believe in him, he’ll exist a little more” (15, my translation).

Believing in something makes it more real? Is that what she’s saying? Of course, it is, and of course, it’s true. Does that mean that God exists only in our heads, that we create him by believing in him? Not quite, I think, but strangely enough, taking a leap of faith and just believing seems to make it more believable.

Czeslaw Milosz wrote in The Captive Mind (Amazon.com),

The Catholic Church wisely recognized that faith is more a matter of collective suggestion than of individual conviction. Collective religious ceremonies induce a state of belief. Folding one’s hands in prayer, kneeling, singing hymns precede faith, for faith is a psycho-physical and not simply a psychological phenomenon.

Doing leads to believing. Believing is, in a sense, encapsulated in this “doing,” and so paradoxically, as Ms. Rose seems to be saying, believing leads to believing.

This is also the question in Life of Pi, though much more directly than in Oskar. I remember the quote, something like “If you stumble at believability, what is there left to live for?” Or something like that.

I was making a sandwich or something last night – perhaps pouring a brandy, I can’t remember – and I thought, “It would indeed be nice to believe in something out there, something bigger than us that we can count on to help us when we need it.”

The trouble with that is simply that I don’t see help where help is most needed – in the suffering of a child: the painful and incomprehensible suffering that child might have to endure before dying, and that’s the “problem of evil” as I frame it. Not just any evil – incomprehensible evil.

All evil can be understood on some level by adults.

Incomprehensible evil is that which attacks children, like children in Rwanda who were hacked to death with a machete because of their ethnicity when the notion of “ethnicity” is so foreign to them that it would be difficult to explain it to them.

Sunrise

Thursday 21 October 2004

I woke up the other morning and saw the most amazing sunrise.

Sunrise

Such beautiful beginnings here are often omens for a horrid afternoon: it starts out lovely, then clouds over completely. On the other hand, waking up to a foggy morning means a cloudless afternoon.

“Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes.” So goes the saying.

In Triplicate + 1

Wednesday 20 October 2004

I’ve recently begun the process of applying for a permanent residence status for Kinga. The amount of paperwork is about what you’d imagine. One form has to be filled out not in triplicate, but in quadruplicate — by Kinga and then again by me!

What’s amazing is that in the twenty-first century, these forms are still not available in an electronic format. Sure, you can get them in the PDF version from the INS (or whatever it’s called now) website, but you still have to print them out and fill them in by hand. A few of the forms use Adobe’s “Fill-in-able” (for lack of a better term) feature on its newest version of Acrobat Reader, but that saves very little time when you have to do four examples of the same form and you can’t cut and paste. It leaves you thinking, “What’s the point?”

The ideal, it seems, would be to write a small application that gets all that data (place of residence for the last five years, employment history, etc.) and then spits out the various forms in a printable format. Or make the INS website database driven, with accounts and such, so you can at least do it online. Such a web application in CFM, PHP, JSP, ASP, PPP, NOP, QRS, or whatever scripting language would not be that difficult to write.

Until the government catches up with the rest of the world, though, we’ll just have to get writers cramps filling in all that paperwork.

(Ultimate irony: it’s easier for Kinga to get permanent residence status in the States than it is for me to get the same in Poland.)

Twentieth Anniversary: Jerzy Popieluszko

Tuesday 19 October 2004

“If you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything at all.” So my Mom always told me, and I do try to put it in practice, hence today’s entry.

(pronounced more or less “Je-she Po-peal-oosh-ko”) was a priest killed by the Polish communist internal security forces exactly twenty years ago for his outspoken support of freedom.

Popieluszko was an associate pastor in a parish of a working-class suburb of Warsaw. He began giving a “Mass for the fatherland” at the end of every month in which he encouraged his listeners to defend their rights through rejection of violence. As word of his dynamic sermons spread, attendance for his monthly “Mass for the fatherland” swelled, and included people from not just Warsaw but all of Poland.

One can imagine the affect this had on the Communist leadership. In January of 1982, Popieluszko was asleep when, at one thirty in the morning, the buzzer for his door rang. Rather than getting out and checking the window to see who it was, Popieluszko lingered in bed a moment. It probably saved his life, for shortly after that, a brick crashed throw the window with a small explosive device attached. Part of his apartment was damaged, but Popieluszko remained unharmed.

Shortly after that, Popieluszko began receiving death threats by mail. In 1984, as Popieluszko was returning to Warsaw from Gdansk (the city Hitler attacked, thus starting the Second World War), his car was attacked and bombarded with stones. Popieluszko again survived a potentially fatal accident thanks to a professional driver from the Solidarity movement.

Exactly twenty years today, on 19 October 1984, Popieluszko went to Bydgoszcz to preach. Through a student friend, he asked another priest to substitute for him in a student Bible meeting “if [he didn’t] make it back.”

Four security officials were convicted of Popieluszko’s murder in February 1985, with the lightest sentence being fourteen years.

And he never did make it back.

On 30 October, Popieluszko’s body was dragged from an icy reservoir. He had died from choking from his own blood and vomit while being gagged and a rope had been thrown around his neck to weight his body down with a bag of stones.

At his funeral, Lech Walesa said, “Solidarity lives because you gave your life for it, Father Jerzy.”

Photo by BostonCatholic

Yelled at for a Week

Monday 18 October 2004

A tent revival is something that is particularly American, and conjures up images of snake-handling believers and wheezing, beet-faced preachers who can stretch the name of Jesus into four syllables, who preach hell fire and damnation, the dangers of card playing, and the outright evil of dancing.

It doesn’t seem to go with the ordered liturgy of a Catholic Mass. And yet, for the week of 9—18 October [2004], that’s exactly what the parishioners of Lipnica Wielka[, Poland] were getting.

The techniques used in the construction of the church are among the best and most expensive. – Three Times Superlative.

Entitled “Misja Swietych” (“Mission of the Saints”), it featured multiple, daily Masses with a particular focus: the family, the mystery of the Stations of the Cross, the sick. It was a fairly big thing, as it happens only once every five years or so.

This year it was led by Wojciech Chochól, a rector of a parish some hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of here, near Tarnów.

Chochól is a short, somewhat paunchy man who appears to be in his mid-forties and who, it seems, stepped directly from the 1950s into the twenty-first century. He believes in what some American Southerners might call “old time preaching.” Translation: he yells at people about their sins.

The Polish- and Italian-granite entry stairs to the new church cost so much that, says Father Wojciech, “for that kind of money, you could frame an entire, new church.” – Three Times Superlative

I suppose there’s nothing really wrong with that. Such “soul-pastoring” (a direct translation of the Polish term for the verb “pastor”) treats the parishioners as children and has a particularly humiliating feeling, but perhaps some feel at home being humiliated in church. They might refer to it as “being humbled.”

I heard him preach when I went to church Sunday afternoon (10 October) for the special “Men’s Mass.” [My wife] didn’t want to go alone, and I was curious what the priest would say to a room full of men.

“Everything here that glistens is gold plated,” adds rector [Chochól] , taking the time to show all the internal marble [ . . . , ] the same marble that is in the walls and the entrance to the bathrooms. Marble also rules in the cemetery’s chapel. – Three Times Superlative

I wasn’t disappointed, though somewhat provoked. Some of the highlights:

  • suggested people throw out television and unplug the “Satanic Internet;”
  • castigated people who have only one or two children, saying that children are only “normal” when there are three of them (One child is a little god in the house; two kids are two hysterics; only when you have three can you expect to have normal kids in the house);
  • said people should be worried about money with their kids (“They don’t have to have a gold watch right way. They don’t have to have a car or a mountain bike right away.”);
  • advised fathers to look in their fifteen-year-old children’s pants pockets to look for narcotics or “swinska gumeczka” – “filthy condoms”;
  • told of a little two-year kid who at Mass was lying in the floor, crying, waving his arms and such – being a fairly regular two-year-old. “And I thought, ‘You’ve got a little bin Laden!’” he told everyone. And they laughed – that’s the most disturbing part about it
  • said a child’s salvation lay in the fathers taking a fence board and “lay on as much as fits” (A child’s salvation = beating the daylights out of him);
  • recommended that fathers no let their daughter’s boyfriends sleep in the house;
  • pondered what sons who came home late at night or early in the morning were doing (“And later, three of them come to the altar for a wedding,” he concluded.);
  • told the story of a boy who came into the parish house to use the phone, calling the police and life-saving crew because his father had come home drunk again and began beating his mother. “I don’t know how much longer we can stand this hell,” he exclaimed, then left money on the priest’s desk for a Mass to be said the following day in their intention. And Chochól left the money hanging – didn’t say, “I gave the money back to him and said, ‘You all need this more than I do.’”

All in all, it was the usual, backward, uneducated tirade that, were it to take place in a clapboard building in Appalachia or in a mosque in Cairo, would be labeled fundamentalism: railing against the evils of modern society and the need to return to a Godly life, as defined by the priest, of course. Chochól showed that he knew nothing about children and even less about contemporary society. He showed his disrespect for parishioners by refusing to treat them as adults but screaming at them as if they were children

“The church is being built slowly, but also as expensively and as beautifully as possible.” – Wojciech Chochól quoted in Three Times Superlative.

Covering the usual litany of religious anti-modernism, yelling at people about their sinful indulgence in modernism and their material mindset, is one thing.

It’s an entirely different story when the priest is guilty of the very things himself.

It turns out, there might have been a reason he referred to the Internet as “Satanic,” for a few keyboard clicks at Google, and I found “Trzy Razy ‘Naj,’” an interesting article from 2002 about a then—new church being built in Chochól’s parish, with some choice quotes (which appear in the side inserts).

The picture we end up with by combining the sermon and the article is that of a hypocrite. In his sermon, Chochól anecdotally mentioned several times the churches “he’s built,” and so it is obviously a matter of pride to him, which he probably crows about whenever he can. Others derive their pride and self-esteem from what they own; still others from what they’ve built, I guess.

When village priests come caroling and collecting money, they don’t schedule a particular time, but tell their parishioners simply they day they might come – and expect them to wait around all day. Kids miss school for this; parents miss work. If a priest suggested this in a city, such as Krakow or Warsaw, he would be laughed out of the church.

Contrast that with a friend who lost her father when she was still a young girl. “Not once,” she said, “Did any priest come by to ask if everything were okay, to see if they needed anything.” They came about as is the Polish custom during the Christmas season for caroling, which is accompanied by (guess!) a collection. So they came to get money, and nothing else.

As a non-Christian, I find this particularly offensive, and I can think of a few things I might like to say:

  • Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world – James 1.27, New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
  • Jesus said to [the young rich man], “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” – Matthew 19.21 (NRSV)
  • All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. – Acts 2.44, 45 (NRSV)
  • [Jesus said,] “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” – Matthew 19.24 (NRSV)

The second sermon I heard from this jerk was the next Sunday. Highlights from that one:

  • Without priests, you will not go to heaven.
  • Priests are a second Jesus.
  • A wife of a communist official who’d refused permission to build a church came to Chochól when her husband died to ask him to anoint his body. Chochól’s response: “Well, now you can go anoint him with lard.” And this by his own admission.
  • He criticized the church in Lipnica, saying it was old and dirty. He wondered how priests could work in such an environment “without granite, without marble.”
  • He told a couple of stories of people who’d died shortly after criticizing priests.
  • Priests are hated just as Jesus is hated – for their holy example.
  • He whispered to the children in a sickeningly sweet voice, “Don’t say anything bad about priests.”
  • He said that when people go on pilgrimages without a priest, “it’s just an outing.” (“Wycieczka” was the Polish he used.)
  • He said that if you criticize a priest, then you’ll die without a priest (i.e., You’ll go to hell.).
  • He told people don’t send money to other parishes but keep it here. But just earlier, he’d thanked everyone for the donations given to his parish.

The irony: it was labled a “children’s Mass!”

The general reaction of parishoners after this joker wen home: “What beautiful preaching!”

Well, I’m criticizing him, so let’s see how long I last before God kills me for my blatantly Satanic attitude.

(An interesting thread at Catholic.com’s form about this, started by yours truly.)

Update from 18 October 2020

I was looking at this through the Timeline plugin (see footer) when I decided to Google his name. Apparently, he died 17 October 2020 (source, in Polish). I wonder if anyone anointed him with lard…