Denial is a bitch

Climate change deniers.

Papal Conclave deniers. 

Pope as "source and guarantor" deniers.

White supremacy/systemic racism deniers.

Covid deniers.

Covid vaccine deniers.

US Election result deniers.

And now: Insurrection deniers.

Welcome to the Dictatorship of Relativism.

Another reminder

Anyone using the term "public mass" (such as saying the "public mass is being suppressed") is someone playing word games and is engaging in manipulation. They are dealing in lies. There is no such thing as a private Mass. All Masses are public, regardless of attendance. Hence, people like Mark Mallett, knowing full well that the Mass is not being suppressed, but desperately wanting to fit a square peg into a round hole, tries to get around factual reality by saying the "public mass" is being suppressed. Word games and manipulation.

COVID deniers do the same thing with the word "lockdown". People like Mallett will say "lockdown" to refer to various restrictions. Knowing that referring to restrictions in themselves won't carry the same bludgeoning, scare-mongering coercion as "lockdown", they will, in full relativistic mode, opt for the word "lockdown" as the smothering blanket term for basic safety measures.

So Mallett will quote someone from the WHO talking about how lockdowns are not, or should not be, the best means of battling the spread of COVID. Which is totally correct. But you see, in saying that, the WHO expert is actually talking about how we should be doing safety measures, like social distancing, mask-wearing, etc. And those are all things Mallett slumps willy-nilly into the overarching category of "totalitarianism" and "suppression" and this and that. This is called quoting someone in bad faith. It is manipulation.

Lockdown is something very specific. Safety measures like social distancing, limited occupancy, mask-wearing etc. are not lockdown. He does the same thing with words like "quarantine" and so on.

It reminds me of just the other weekend, after I spent a good few hours working on Saturday, I was waiting at a red light on my way back home, looking forward to the fun of playing with granite stones, and this convoy of vehicles goes through the intersection beeping their horns, and in the windows of their vehicles are sheets of paper taped up with words such as "Un-mask your voice" and "Community hugs" and (the stupidest of all) "Stop the lockdown".

As they drove past one by one, beeping their horns, I was like, "OKAY, BOOMERS". But later I reflected: how much more of a self-evidently self-disproving protest could one make than by driving around with the slogan "Stop the lockdown"? 

Like, uh, you're driving around freely, just as the thousands of other motorists around. You will likely stop by the Tim Horton's later on and get yourself a double double with the piece of paper still taped up in your window saying "Stop the lockdown". LOL. Like, okay then. Okeeydokeey there, Boomer.

I'm also reminded of some months ago when I was on my usual evening walk. I noticed, many yards ahead of me, a man had crossed the street and was standing on the sidewalk. Well before I was within proximity to him, I did my due diligence of giving the old wide berth, and since he was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, this entailed me going onto the grassy shoulder. As I passed him by (he looked a bit like Joe Rogan, with what in passing appeared to be a similar build - he could have K.O.'ed me no problem), he turns his face to me and says, very directly and very hatefully, "What the fuck do you think you're doing, you piece of shit."

And I was like, "OOOKAAAYYY Paul, just keep on walking". LOL.

I'm also reminded of that film Bird Box. I hated that film, and place it in my "hated films" category which also contains films such as Birdman, Noah, and Joker. Anyways, you may recall in that film there are these "herd immune" satanic figures who drive around trying to remove people's blindfolds to expose them to the force/entity that makes people kill themselves. I mean talk about a prophetic film.

I think about the bullying people have received for wearing masks. I think about people like Taylor Marshall who creepily on the anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre tweeted how he was going to have over thirty people gathered at his place for Thanksgiving to flip the bird to the Marxists and Communists. I think about the manipulative sectarian false prophets who in denying COVID are practically proto-eugenicists. I think about the random psycho Joe Rogans and wolves painting their caring neighbours as sheep.

Here's a short prayer you can pray when putting on your mask: "Lord, make me ready for persecution!"

 

"They are victims only in their own imagination." --Pope Francis

Is the mask issue contentious?

No, not really. Though there are some fearful sectarian nuts who desperately want it to be.

I believe Japan only did partial lockdown measures, if any, and they've done well because they all wear masks, no problem. That's just what people in Japan, and many other Asian countries, voluntarily do when one may have a cold and one goes out in public. It's to prevent others from getting your cold. So they have no problems doing it when it's a highly contagious and deadly virus.

They don't have selfish speculators who talk about masks from the standpoint of the effectiveness of it preventing you from getting the virus from someone else. They start from the standpoint of wearing a mask as a means of preventing others from getting it from yourself - when you don't know if you have it.

The beauty of it is when everyone is looking out for their neighbours, then everyone is wearing a mask out in public, and transmission of the virus goes way, way down.

A 100,000 times more ideological brainwashing goes into the refusal to wear a mask than into choosing to wear a mask.

COVID science denial, including speculating about the number of deaths from COVID and whether it was COVID that killed them, as well as biased speculation about the effectiveness of wearing masks dressed up as journalism, is all at bottom predatory opportunism, lying in wait, and nourishing itself into something extraordinarily malignant.

It is not seeking truth; it is not concerned with freedom. It is an entrenched, nasty, predatory opportunism; the refusal of the exercise of mercy in a bid for power. They approach a crisis this way: as vultures, like those in a pyramid scheme. The fact that they don't even realize this about themselves because their motives are not nefarious only speaks to how brainwashed they are, and how much they are content to stew in the relativism of ambiguity, the dictatorship of relativism.

They project this despairing power grab from the contented darkness of ambiguity (where any and all conspiracy theories are valid) onto others. Their capitulation to right-wing nuttery and sectarian fantasies - their defeat in surrendering to the politicization of the pandemic for the sake of their own comfort (including the comfortable illusion that they are prophets of the wilderness) - they project onto those complying with safety measures: they lie through their teeth about "defeated and fearful" eyes peering out above their masks.

This image is a total fabrication they weave out of their own desperate, private, wishful thinking.

Wearing a mask in public places, one only encounters this: kind eyes, humour, lots of solid eye contact, and a sense of fraternity. All the bullshit about "fearful and defeated" eyes peering out from above their masks is one of the flat-earthers' little preciouses they will never give up, no matter how much reality says otherwise.

The thought of people simply shouldering a rather mild burden and changing things up to accommodate the lives of others, and not have hospitals overwhelmed, thinking about all the nurses and doctors and hospital staff who would get heavy viral loads if the hospitals are overwhelmed (as clearly happened in Italy among other places) - and that people would do this and simply remain normal - no, this is too much for the sectarian nutbars. We all have to be fearful sheeple staring with round eyes of despair above our strangling masks as we are herded like steer into the vaccination barns.

It's amazing how much they love and cling to this fantasy over and above all observable reality to the contrary.

It's really quite something. But maybe observable reality is just a hologram? It's part of the COVID-21 Hologram? Now that would be something. Holy shit.

"There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.

"She [the Church] of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality." --Pope Benedict XVI, in the book-length interview Holy Father We Ask For Clarity

Remember the days when certain Christian conservatives harboured panicky fears about Gays going around and poking people with AIDS infected needles? Remember the fears of them spreading "their" disease through toilets and such?

It was proven to be a disease spread through sexual transmission, yet that didn't prevent many a conservative from treating them as lepers, given a wide berth of social distancing, lest one, or one's children, contracted AIDS.

The conservative cultural consensus was something like, "You need to keep your distance lest you infect us with the disease of your licentiousness!"

Anyways, welcome to 2020! In which a highly infectious, deadly, and incapacitating (to many of those who recover) disease spread through air droplets and surface contamination, and which can be prevented through simple effective ways, is met by those same conservatives with, "Look, buddy, we all die, alright? My pride and freedom licentiousness says I won't take preventative measures for your sake!"

FYI

Every expression, whether oral or written, about Covid being a hoax; any speculation ("I'm just asking questions!"), or downplaying, or conspiracy theory, made in this regard, is done on the backs of doctors, nurses, and all health care workers and hospital staff.

Anyone saying, in so many words, "Where is this so-called virus?" is saying it as a privileged ignoramus standing on the welfare provided by hundreds and thousands of medical experts who have been taking action to break the waves and insure that ignoramuses are able to stand on their feet and breathe and talk (the feet and lungs of the US "president" included).

There is a concrete reality with real human beings at the receiving end of your indulgent abstractions. It just so happens that the image of overwhelmed hospitals with morgue trucks parked outside of them, and health workers who serve the sick getting heavy viral loads and dying, is the one image these people conveniently leave out of their paranoid and adolescent conjectures. (They'll use the image of course when they want to condemn the world they hate and are afraid of as an abstract "the darkness that exists outside the Church" sort of crap.)

From their high-minded religiose bullshit about masks covering the Imago Dei, and how the church has "failed the test of the coronavirus" [so be a man then and publicly say you support Vigano and think Francis a failure you fake prophets], to their juvenile crap about contact tracing being the sinister state imposing on the church - just remember, in all of these things that they say and write, the nurses and doctors (perhaps you know a few) who are in hospitals overrun with Covid because safety measures weren't taken in a particular region because that region's negligent political leader decided to prioritize mammon.

These are the same people who are oh so absolutely sure to remark in their criticisms of their culture war enemies that, "Your ideas and speculations have real consequences, and it's the death of millions of people!"

But turn that back on them? Watch those same absolutists turn into the world's biggest relativists. And watch them do it in the name of absolutes.

Whenever you read or hear their conspiricist bullshit, simply recall to yourself the concrete reality of overrun hospitals and the staff serving the sick getting viral loads.

Though, by fall and winter, that may not be so necessary. For it may be in our faces everywhere. Their speculations and conspiricism will have done their work, having used the grounds gained against the virus to spread the virus (because enjoying the safety and benefit of the preventative actions of medical experts is the perfect time to blabber about it all being a hoax), and people will be getting diarrhea just from reading the headlines. And then it will be time for the full surfacing of the Scapegoat.

May it not be so, God help us.

Breaking the Waves

Safety measures break the wave, so you can prepare and coordinate, and deal with the next smaller one, until you have it down to traceable pockets, or to status of entirely virus free. Because it's a natural virus with a lifespan (not the half-life of nuclear radiation) requiring your respiratory system to propagate itself while being unable to live on any given surface past 72 hours.

Otherwise what you have is not diminishing waves, but one single super-tsunami that "just washes over the country" with no end in sight.

The interesting thing about everything the medical experts have been telling us with regards to safety measures, is that what to some ears sounds "draconian" is in fact quite optimistic - in the best sense of the word. That is, the safety measures actually have an effective end that is totally within the realm of possibility. After which, the measures are no longer necessary. But the fundamentalist who absolutizes everything in a bid to fight what he perceives as draconian, is actually helping to perpetuate a super-draconian virus and a truly dreadful scenario.

Extremists like their extremes, and they'll bend every particular of concrete reality to fit their extremes (because of which they are also the biggest ambiguous fence-sitters who are forever vamping off of every situation according as it pleases them).

It's a hoax goes merrily skipping hand in hand with let's welcome this pandemic as a super-tsunami pandemic, and in no other form, because absolutes!

Super-tsunami pandemic is in fact the direct offspring of "It's a hoax!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "This is all an overreaction!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "You're all just the sheeple lapdogs of modernist science!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "The cure is worse than the disease!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "God will protect us if we are just presumptuous enough yelling freedom!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "These safety measures are the equivalence of the Jews being packed into train cars and taken to the gas chambers! Oh I walked into the store and there was plexiglass - oh the persecution!"

Super-tsunami pandemic is also the offspring of "The stock market is the best it has ever been!"

Question

What good is your orthodoxy, and your traditionalism, and your conservatism, and your apocalypticism, if its sum total end is to swallow a camel?

Ah, the many angles from which to view COVID-19 - what a prestigious luxury! It's all alarmism: see here, the antibody testing is finding thousands of more people who were infected but never became seriously ill.

You see? The disease actually infects so many freaking people that it changes the death rate! Time for Magic Think: 380,381 deaths after about three and a half months isn't as scary or tragic any more, because that's just a fraction of the total number infected! That means the virus is not as dangerous/deadly as they've been saying!

TA DA!

There's one person on twitter - can't remember the name - who when he encounters these sorts of statements of truth-bending gymnastic bullshit (otherwise known as relativism) responds simply with the words, *chef's kiss*.

Yes, uhm, Actually - they love to say, thinking themselves so red pill - we've been sheeple and if you look at the cwisis from weal fah away, fwum a diffwint angle - say, fwum the moon - the cowonaviwus is a dweam within a dweam.

I am so effing done with this sort of crap.

"Rogue One Is Still the Best Star Wars Movie of the Disney Era" --Caitlin Chappell

And that ain't saying much. LOL

It's funny, you know. I watched Rogue One, and right after it I watched Revenge of the Sith, which I had seen a couple times before, way back when. And oh my goodness, it was night and day.

I remember when I saw Revenge of the Sith in the theater, and in the first five minutes I was like, "Alright, here we go! Lucas finally has his shit together!" And that held throughout the entirety of the movie.

On the latest viewing I found myself especially appreciative of this exchange of dialogue:

Anakin Skywalker: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy."

Obi-wan Kenobi: "Only a Sith deals in absolutes."

I had forgotten Anakin's remark that prompts Obi-wan's: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy." This is the stance of the sectarian absolutist. He no longer submits to absolutes but has become a dealer in them. Which is the highest form of relativism.

Contrasted with Rogue One, some positive things were apparent to me about Revenge of the Sith that make it good:

-Not using music in every single fricking scene. Unlike Rogue One, which constantly employed swelling music to make up for its utterly grey porridge lack of rhythm in storytelling.

-Not using flashbacks, which nine times out of ten are leaden and labourious and add absolutely nothing to either story or character. Unlike Rogue One which is basically opened up with a flashback. Weighed down from the get go. All of this stuff is better left to be developed in the mind of the viewer as the film progresses and unfolds.

-Characters speaking in their own natural tone (relatively). Unlike Rogue One, with its characters speaking in the now ubiquitous severe gravel undertone while straining and sombering their emotions in every single fricking scene instead of actually acting.

The Mandalorian is enjoyable, but it's kind of basic.

The premise and bulk of the Star Wars universe, both in general and in specifics, owes its existence to Jack Kirby - a short, cigar-smoking, street-scrapping, Brooklyn Boy who produced his prodigious output in the basement of his middle-class house on a kid's drafting table while sitting in an uncomfortable wooden kitchen chair.

You know, that reminds me of something. Oh what is it now...something about how some other major studio owes the bulk of its existence to an unsung artist/writer while attributing it to someone else who was only responsible for a tiny fraction of it...oh come on, it's on the tip of my brain...oh yes, that's it -- Marvel Studios! Which owes its existence to...oh, who was it now? Oh yeah, that's right, Jack Kirby!

LOL

"Do me a favour will ya and stop watching Star Wars!" --Sir Obi-Wan Kenobi

FYI

Rejecting the development of doctrine means that you distort teachings of the church, not that you abide by them.

This is one reason why absolutists are the absolute worst relativists.

Time is freely proffered, and time resists our attempts at sequestering it; time is as present as our freedom. Pope Francis speaks not infrequently about beginning time processes rather than occupying spaces. The latter tends to falsity and regards time as flowing. But as T.S. Eliot wrote, "All time is eternally present". In The Family Reunion he wrote, "The past is about to happen." Time comes in seed form, always right now, and it accretes to itself what we choose to engender. Time does not flow; it aggregates.

Perhaps we live in times of the whetstone and the millstone, and they are one and the same stone: you can be sharpened if you choose, or cast into the sea. You may be a great sinner, and the millstone lying in wait for you can become instead a whetstone for your sharpening if you repent. You may be one of the just who knows it all; and always analyzing and classifying, inspecting and verifying, the whetstone of your formation can become a supreme weight, and overnight you can find yourself tethered to it by nothing other than your own absolutist insistence, and you can be cast into the sea by it, off the barque of Peter. Even cast off the seat of your own mind.

Cast into the sea by your own super formation! Huh, imagine that.

People moaning about confusion in the church are inventing a false problem to evade the challenges they are being called forward to. Those challenges are quite clear, and the problem that people have with it is that it is not what they expected, or have known, or it's something they dismissed out of hand in typical human fashion, and now faced with what, in their relativism, they dismissed, it appears as both threatening and short shrift in comparison to the hierarchy of their nicely stacked ideas. What they claim is short shrift they are threatened by because they see it as something that will rob their storehouse. It's a clarity that does not align with their subjective certainty, which proves their certainty facile and, well, subjective.

This is made worse in that their subjective certainty is bound up with their religious scrupulosity, not to mention their religious grandiosity. Insofar as they seek this evasion, they want confusion; they purposely seek to confuse the ringing, unmistakable messages, teachings, example, and guidance of Pope Francis. The evils and errors they attribute to him, either by arrogant accusation or by the pietistic hypocrisy of concerned fraternal correction, are directly linked not to reality, but to the hot house of their own ideas. When confusing him goes so far, they seek to banalize him; when that goes only so far, they seek to undermine him in myriad other ways.

For where are they being called forward to? Outside. And not just outside in opposition to remaining inside, as though going outside would mean leaving behind, which is not what it means most essentially, nor in that remaining inside would be to occupy an actual reality, which it wouldn't. But called outside in new ways that brings with it the renewal of the very Church. The reality of the Church is shown in that it can meet messy present matter in the newness of faith; going out in new ways does not foreshorten its riches; it is the proof of its rich depth. Here is an interesting simplicity: the renewal of the Church is constituted in doing what the Church is supposed to do. Those who know best find this extraordinarily difficult to accept. And what is it? You might call it the perennial orthopraxy of the Body of Christ. Why do they find it hard to accept? Because the huge implication in this is that the Church is not what you thought it was.

All the best of what you know is only what you know. The best of what you know, if left to remain like that, is nothing but a reduction, which is the flip side of watering down the faith. We hear about these figures watering down the teachings of the church. Personally I would like to know where these people are, but lets grant for the sake of argument that there are minions everywhere in the church under the sway of watering it down: the flip side error goes mentioned little to none at all, except by the Pope and a few others. Perhaps it goes so little mentioned because this error is far more prevalent and is, and has been, the mode of operation of those who are constantly harping about people "watering things down".

To reduce - as when a recipe calls for you to reduce a sauce or gravy. This is the lost road of the mastermind. Jesus has not asked you to take what He has given you and reduce it down into a super-concentrated concoction. Jesus has not given you the fresh fruit of the Gospel and told you to turn it into fruit leather "just in case" we run out of food near the end of winter. These people are like the Israelites in the desert who attempted to save the manna overnight "just in case" - after all, one needs to be on the right side of history. LOL. Yes, see how much on the right side of history you are when you wake in the morning to find your priceless storehouse being eaten by worms because, wayward child that you are, you took it and attempted to preserve it away from the Church and her Supreme Pontiff. Like a gaggle of ladies stowed away in some kitchen making jam preserves: taming the Holy Spirit. Domesticating God's doctrine. This is the mistake - indeed, no mere mistake, but serious objective error - of turning the Church into mere wisdom, and thereby ceasing to be receptive and docile to what the Church is teaching at this time, which is the present tense matter in which the eternal form is proven. We are not one-time receivers.

In a word, what is received must be given. There is never going to be a perfect time to do it, and every time is an acceptable time. Again, this is a simplicity that we find difficult. Jesus says I Am, and says to us, give as you have received. He is that simple with us - it's beautiful. Interesting that when Jesus speaks of being salt of the earth and light of the world, in both images the essence of the preservation, or saving, that he speaks of, consists in going outward: salt is to season the earth, light is for the lamp stand. Insofar as they fail to season the earth and fail to go on the lampstand, they lose their saltiness and lose their light; nowhere does Jesus put this loss to a failure to self-preserve your uber-identity as salt and light. And the reflexive "Yeah but one needs to first be salt and light, and therefore..." is itself the first paroxysm of reductionism.

Bruised and dirtied from fighting in the streets. You would think that the manly man subculture, which for the most part takes to Chesterton who wrote the great street-fighting novel The Napolean of Notting Hill, would be all over this sort of image. But I guess not. When it comes to the life of the Church, the crucified foundation of which has turned the world upside down for all time, it would appear they prefer the image of the stay-at-home dad, overtaken with granny-like fretting about disturbances in the force, inducing an endless schizophrenia about Infiltration and the Fruits of the Enlightenment, disenfranchising anyone who lends them their itching ears from the here-and-now present as something always insufficiently banal, even though they themselves are the ones eviscerating it, by the incestuous networks of traditionalist social media, which has an interesting pathological need to trot out pre-scripted stage dramas, and deliver it through the extremely selective drip line as "news" like timed pellets fed to mice or chickens. The material of the pellets is not what matters; what matters is that they get the mice and chickens coming to the feeder with the same volition that rightly should be given to the Keeper of the Keys. In other words, they want you on their timeline. Let me repeat that: the pellets aren't what matter; all the information, or "news" hitherto come out, or to come out, as it relates to the original material from which it is derived, means nothing. They want you on their timeline.

There is a word for this. It's called manipulation. Where the corpse is, there the vultures gather.

“So if anyone tells you, ‘There he is, out in the wilderness,’ do not go out; or, ‘Here he is, in the inner rooms,’ do not believe it. For as lightning that comes from the east is visible even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will gather." --Matthew 24, 26-28

Fake Site News and the Neo Pharisaical Inquisition

Great post here by Scott Eric Alt:

So what we have here—do I understand this right?—is a case where no clarification could possibly be enough because Schneider has already decided before any of it that the document is heretical. If Pope Francis says, “No, I meant this,” Schneider just says, “Oh, then it’s a contradiction.”

H/T: Austen Ivereigh

Down with Feb and the Dark Ages!

Hooray March and the realization that your winter coat is getting a little too warm!

In the middle of January I stopped at the bottle depot with returns and there I saw a forsythia in bloom.

There it was, in the middle of January in yellow blooms, and I thought to myself, "Well now, that sure as hell doesn't look like Global Cooling to me!"

*

I am so happy Pope Francis is visiting Japan this year. The bulk of my youtube viewing over the past several months has been Japanology stuff, bonsai, carving up of various fishes, all the amazing art and craftwork, stuff they do so well it's just completely out of left field. Like one film I watched on how they make charcoal. The sound the charcoal made when they clinked it - it was like the sound of metal it was so pure.

It is unfortunate that the western experience of Japan was initiated by effeminate prints exported in the 19 century, which sort of dictated what the aesthetic of Japan was, which it isn't. And it is not perfectionism that defines them, but attention. With attention is life and virility.

Japan is also very Laudato Si. There's something about the fact that they are the one country to have been attacked with nuclear arms, and also the problem of Fukushima.

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Oh look, the Fascists are here to claim Western Civilization and teach you about the Edenic Paradise that existed before the Fall that is the Enlightenment. Huh, imagine that.

*

Been listening to a series of lectures while driving and at one point the prof repeats that stale chestnut about how "Jesus wasn't nice." And I'm thinking to myself, "What in the hell are you actually saying? That Jesus was a jerk?"

I am so tired of these blasé half-baked Fascistic pyrite turds that get passed around in Catholic circles like the common cold.

Remember when Fr. Corapi would say that O.L. "wears army boots"?

Right.

And St. Lawrence said turn me over, I'm done on this side.

Yeah. Not likely.

And St. Paul was "knocked off his horse."

Wasn't on a horse. Nor was he metaphorically "knocked off his horse" - as in his "high horse". This gives very short shrift to Christ's powerful revelation, powerful in mercy, and to the full weight of Paul's conversion, Paul who said, "Who are you, Lord?"

That and the fact that he was standing on his feet and fell down has in it the true drama of that instantaneous conversion. He fell down. He fell down prostrate, or on his knees. He wasn't "slain in the spirit".

But good luck with all that I guess.

*

Speaking of February, the television networks were doing their due diligence to show Groundhog Day end to end as a repeating marathon the same day of that superstitious observation, so I watched it when visiting my sister and brother-in-law while dinner was being prepared.

The last time seeing the film was long ago, and I remember sort of disliking it, but not totally disliking it, when it first came out. But I was an adolescent then, and Groundhog Day is, for all its screwball lightheartedness, a film only adults can really appreciate. There are quite a number of nuances and nods I recognized in the most recent viewing that had me enjoying the film.

I'm sure thousands of sophomoric essays have been written about the film, and I have no interest in reading them. Murray's character Phil, certainly goes through the gamut of the seven deadly sins before trying to escape - that is, seek redemption. I was taken not so much with the enormous number of good deeds that Phil builds up to, but the keen level of attention and timing, down to the second, that this demands. I think the words of Ned the insurance salesman are key in this regard: "We-eh-eh-ellll! Watch that first step - it's a dooooo-zy!"

Ned is actually the key to Phil's redemption. He is the one character Phil dislikes the most and wants to get away from the most. So obviously Ned is there telling Phil the way out: "We-eh-eh-ellll! Watch that first step - it's a dooooo-zy!"

Exactly. Watch that first step - it's a doozy. It's the first step that Phil must realize. The first step is adventure.

But thinking about the film afterwards I realized that the premise cannot stand without all the characters in the film becoming in some way unreal. They become only objects for the aim of Phil to finally get it right. He can hit them, insult them, seduce them, steal from them, whatever, without any temporal consequences (beyond the one day), so even his seeking redemption is self-centered. Of course, the premise is just that - a premise, a screwball comedy: let's set it up and see where it goes. Still, it's certainly not a reflection of Christian redemption, or the Christian understanding of the eternal and temporal consequences of sin. For the film doesn't even have the temporal consequences.

Still, this very reduction of others, and oneself, to unreality, is the very picture of sin and what it does. Interesting that one of the selfless things that Phil comes to doing that makes for his redemption is the making of art.

What is perhaps an unintended hang-up of the premise of Groundhog Day is a deliberate and conscious point in Tarkovsky's Solaris. Our unrepentance makes us the center of the universe, which is a lie, and because of this, even our loved ones become merely our consciousness of them. We do not actually love. Our failures of attending to someone's reality becomes the "reality" we live, repetitiously - and this is hell. And we are doomed to the repetition in the very effort we make to expunge ourselves of it.

Groundhog Day makes that going back again and again an actual what-if reality scenario. It's a screwball comedy.

Solaris is much more truthful: you can't go back. Going back is precisely the doom of hellish repetition in which no one is real, including yourself, when you do not accept what you have done and what you have failed to do, and repent before your father. This is shown frankly, boldly, yet not preachingly, in the film's final shot, which is clearly reminiscent of Rembrandt's The Prodigal Son.

Yet to repent is to turn back, or turn around, or simply to turn. What is this paradox? Unless you turn back and be converted, you will be doomed to eternally revisit your sins and folly. Unless you turn back, you cannot go forward.

Another memorable film that belongs in the same arena as Groundhog Day and Solaris is Scorsese's After Hours. This is a dark comedy not as lighthearted in touch the way Groundhog Day is, but it is light in touch for a Scorcese film. Almost two decades now since viewing it, and I still remember the nightmarish slant Scorcese is able to give to certain mundane details, such as a set of keys dropping down from an apartment window like the approach of a train, and the equally unstoppable horror of an overrunning toilet.

Like Phil, Paul cannot escape from his own nightmare predicament, which is downtown New York late into the night, without any fare to get back, being pursued by a mob, and met at every turn with some new obstacle to prevent his ever getting back to his home and work, until he gives himself to the point of forgetting himself.

In his case, this means putting his last bit of money into a jukebox and slow dancing with a lonely woman in a seedy bar at something like 4 o'clock in the morning. Only when he has done this, giving up all his efforts to get out, does June, the woman he has danced with, encase him in a full body plaster cast, which hardens. He gets taken by the mob that has been searching for him, and ends up rolling out of the back of their van, whereupon the body cast shatters, and he stands up on the stairs of his workplace with the rising of the sun. A new day. A new man.

Three films that would make for an interesting marathon viewing.

*

Today's Communist denies Communism of the past.

Says it wasn't real Communism, or it wasn't Communist enough.

Today's Fascist appropriates Fascism of the past.

Gives a slight dismissive smirk and says I'm not that caricature of the past.

*

Each according to their kind.

Misc.

Thumbs up for A Quiet Place.

It is such a Pro-Life film, and I love that so much.

More like this please.

*

I am so looking forward to the mid-term election popcorn fest.

I am going to watch it on Fox and get pizza and popcorn.

*

To hell with perogies that contain cottage cheese. So disgusting.

I love cottage cheese, but in perogies it just becomes this rubber rancid sort of thing.

That's fine because the cottage cheese ones are the most expensive.

I've been buying this local brand that uses simple ingredients.

My favourite perogy is just potato with onions. It can have dill as well - that's nice.

I don't care much for the cheddar cheese ones. Or the ones with bacon and potato.

The bacon just makes it taste like dog food.

*

Stop it with the bacon. Bacon is nice, but it doesn't make everything better.

It's good by itself with eggs, on BLT, moderately with baked brussell sprouts (be obedient and eat your brussell sprouts!) and moderately on certain pizzas, but that's pretty much it.

Bacon on burgers is just dumb.

*

Oh look, your own private apocalypse!

Huh, good for you!

Well did Christ speak when he said, "So if anyone tells you, 'There he is, out in the wilderness,' do not go out; or, 'Here he is, in the inner rooms,' do not believe it."

Just think about what "wilderness/desert" and "inner rooms" represent.

Just imagine.

*

Oh, Popes come and go. It's about the office, not the man occupying the office.

Yeah, and this from the champions of the Domestic Church.

You call your homes the domestic church - a kind of sub-church, which is modeled on the Church.

And for some reason these heroes think Christ wants the family of his body, the church, to be addressed with,  "Ah, you see, Popes come and go!"

Right.

Moms and Dads, they come and go.

I respect your office as Dad, but unfortunately you are in error. I duly expect a Peter and Paul moment anytime soon.

Eat your brussell sprouts.

LOL.

*

On one American apologist's twitter page I came across a meme that featured Roy Scheider from Jaws with the words, "We're going to need a bigger Dubia."

Right, "We're going to need a bigger doubts."

Okeeydoekeey then. Good luck with all that.

LOL.

*

It is amazing the amount of relativism and gradualism over the course of the Hero's Three Letters (and probably counting). I guess when you deal in absolutes you're allowed to leave a mega slime trail and not have to address any of your shiftings?

Huh, imagine that.

*

Amoris Laetitia contains no errors.

All the parts must be understood in the whole. Which is par for the course for anything. It's like trying to pick apart a Tarkovsky film. Your starting point of approach must be from the departure point of having taken it in its entirety.

But will the prophets of the inner rooms and the desert admit to their audiences that it was they themselves, and not the Pope, who was in error?

Don't count on it.

Escalation

After Jesus' body is scourged, the torture escalates in the crowning with thorns. Where before they ripped apart his flesh, they seek now to humiliate his dignity; their hatred is focused upon his head. The scourging of Christ's body escalates upwards to his head.

As those with proper liturgical formation, they provide Jesus' body with none but the finest cloth: a scarlet robe reserved for royalty. As those who preach about giving God our finest, they actually dress Jesus in the finest garment available. Nowhere else in scripture do you see Jesus dressed in royal garb. Only here.

These are the same people who have just scourged his body. They proceed to crown his head with thorns; they bind his head with a blindfold; they cover his head with spit; they beat his head with rods.

Of all the garments in their possession, they give to Jesus the one that is most fitting for who he is - the robe of royalty - and their worship of him is a mockery.

"Jesus Christ, therefore, appointed Peter to be that head of the Church; and He also determined that the authority instituted in perpetuity for the salvation of all should be inherited by His successors, in whom the same permanent authority of Peter himself should continue. And so He made that remarkable promise to Peter and to no one else: 'Thou are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church'" --Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum

 "How can you celebrate the Holy Eucharist and pronounce his name in the Canon of the Mass?" --Cardinal Marc Ouellet