Miscellany

Friday
4 March 20

That's our cabin at Jenny Lake Lodge.  It was built in the mid-1800's and moved to its current spot around 1952, or so.  This has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this post, but it makes me happy to think we'll be there in a few months.

GLOBAL WARMING AND LOBSTERS

Maine's lobster season is going to be too early and too small because all along Maine's coast temperatures have risen 2 to 3 degrees higher than usual.  This is the straw that broke the camel's back.  Rising sea levels is one thing, but lobster prices?  Please.

UNCHARACTERISTIC POLITICAL SANITY IN SOUTH DAKOTA

South Dakota governor Dennis Daugaard (R) vetoed a bill that would restrict transgender students' access to public school bathrooms and locker rooms.  There are a lot of these so called "bathroom bills" going around the country and it is a little surprising that in South Dakota, at least, sanity would prevail.  The cool thing is that Daugaard cited what should ordinarily be the conservative position on such bills as his reason for the veto.  Local schools, he explained, are doing and should be able to continue doing a fine job dealing with any problems caused by transgender students.  I'm sure there are just thousands of them in the Dakotas.  Isn't that the whole point of conservatism, to keep federal government out of the way of state government and state government out of the way of local control etc.?  South Dakota conservatives, of which there are many, are ironically bummed.  The motivation for bathroom bills is to legislate morality from the top down.  Doesn't sound all that conservative to me.

I THINK IT IS SAFE TO SAY IT.  REPUBLICANS ARE CRAZY.

I don't need to elaborate here, but I find it interesting that establishment Republicans from Romney on down the line are attacking everything about Trump.  To listen to them talk, electing Trump would be an unmitigated disaster for the country (Read: Republican Party).  Then, as soon as they get the dirt out of their mouths, they quickly assure everyone that, should Trump get the nomination, they will support him.  So does that mean that EVERYTHING they say is bullshit?

SPOTLIGHT

I've seen SPOTLIGHT three times now.  I think about it all the time.  It is one of those rare films that never lets up.  The narrative builds without a lapse from beginning to end.  I also think it might be one of the best examples of ensemble acting I've ever seen on film.  I even like it better than ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN and that's saying a lot.

If you don't know about it, SPOTLIGHT is about a Boston Globe investigative team blowing the lid off the sex abuse scandal in the Boston Archdiocese.  I keep thinking about the victims and how their lives, unless they brought a preternatural amount of strength to their molestations, were ruined.

My mother, after all this started coming out years ago, asked me if Father Sanger ever molested me!  I gave her question the respect it deserved and laughed at the suggestion, but I wonder if I was extraordinarily lucky.

According to the research, priests involved in this scandal (6% of all priests supposedly) preyed on the children of poor families without a father.  That was me!  I spent more time with Father Sanger than my own family.  I helped him chase mice out of the church.  We built a little shrine together.  He took me on skiing trips where we spent the night.  He truly was a father to me.

When I went to Regis, I was surrounded by priests of all sorts.  I loved hanging out with them.  I'd sit in the campus coffee shop till all hours arguing with them about religion or politics or football.  I went with them to a local bar where we continued the conversations and they would help me score drinks that I was too young to have.  The way I think, talk, write, the values I have, they all come from those encounters.  And in all that time nothing untoward ever happened to me or anyone else I knew.

I'm just so thankful that was my experience.