We got our dog, Boomer, when he was one year old. It wasn’t a name we would have chosen, but it suits him pretty well; and we didn’t want to confuse him, so we kept the name, and we’ve been calling him Boomer since Christmas.
Today I dug up his vet records so I could get his license. Turns out . . .
I guess I’ll go git it engraved on his colla.
Look, I know Taylor Marshall is a good guy. He is a courageous and clear spoken advocate for the faith (a little bit of “NFP is for when you’re schizophrenic or in a concentration camp” kookiness notwithstanding); and he has that wonderful, alt-universe-Johnny-Cash face:
But this aggression will not stand, man: Marshall asks, Did the Beatles Promote Abortion?
Marshall zeroes in the covers for the albums Sgt. Pepper and Yesterday and Today as evidence of the Beatles’ sinister influence.
Let’s look at Sgt. Pepper first. Now, I will concede that the title song itself is neck deep in the hyper-self-aware, absurdist, non-specific smug condescension that dogged the second half of the Beatles’ career. It’s technically a good song, but if I never heard it again, I would shed no tears. Ditto for “She’s Leaving Home” (a “STFU, Paul” moment if ever there was one.) “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” — meh. But the rest of the songs are all good, some of them great.
But Marshall (oddly, for someone commenting on musicians) doesn’t mention the music. Instead, he dutifully lists the names of all the people who appeared on that wretched cover:
Ah, the cover. I’ve read a bit about what it’s supposed to represent, but I think what it really comes down to is a bunch of young guys who started playing in sleazy bars when they were teenagers, and abruptly got pushed around so much by their own talent that they needed to show the world that they’re done being cute. I remember doing edgy, baffling montages like this when I was about 17. You want to be taken seriously, and you’re hanging out with a bunch of arty types, and you feel like Making a Statement, even though you don’t exactly have anything specific to say, beyond, “I’m smart! Not like everybody says… like dumb… I’m smart and I want respect!”
Only the Beatles had more money to spend, so this is what they came up with. That’s the statement they’re making when they stick together Shirley Temple and Oliver Hardy and Aleister Crowley: hey, lookit us! It is not, as Marshall says (italics his),”a collage of intellectual poison” — although Marshall struggles manfully to describe everyone in the most sinister terms he can muster, including:
“Marlon Brando, homosexual, actor?” “Lewis Carroll, alleged pedophile?” I ‘m sorry, when you come up with descriptors like that, you gotta turn in your “I understand stuff” card. I’m relieved, at least, that he didn’t come up with anything bad to say about Johnny Weissmuller. I love Johnny Weissmuller.
The fact that Weismuller is included here, along with Shirley Temple, Tom Mix, Dylan Thomas and Fred Astaire, says one thing to me: “Things! And the other things! We’re awesome and edgy because look at all the things, oh man!” But in Marshall’s analysis, this is “an assembly of occultists, political socialists, eugenists, homosexuals, and sexual provocateurs.”
So here is your first clue that Marshall is not going to offer an especially perceptive analysis of the Beatles. His list reminds me of someone who wants to prove that the American flag has its roots in Freemasonry because, as all scholars know, that odious color blue is so closely associated with Masonic ritual, duh. Never mind the red and white because holy cow, how can we overlook the obvious significance of blue? Blue!!!
Moving along. Marshall describes the cover for The Beatles: Yesterday and Today:
Marshall says,
The four Beatles are wearing white doctor’s coats covered with flesh and decapitated babies. John looks mildly pleased. And Paul looks happy, even delighted. Ringo looks depressed (“Am I really doing this?”). George Harrison looks straight up evil. I feel like George is giving me the bird with a dead infant’s head.
This is just gross.
Okay, I’m with him there. It’s also naively executed. They were trying a little too hard to be ever so shocky-wocky, leaving us feeling like Ringo looks. Marshall continues:
Pause. What did this represent in 1966? John Lennon said it was a commentary on the Vietnam War. But I don’t see what physician smocks with dead babies has to do with the war. Yes people are dying in each, but still. Kinda weird.
For what it’s worth, the Parliament legalized abortion in the UK with the Abortion Act of 1967 on 27 October 1967. Abortion was being hotly debated in the United Kingdom when this photo was taken.
Or, they are wearing butcher’s coats, and it is a commentary on the Vietnam War — something along the lines of “killing is bad; and yet we are rock stars. Isn’t this edgy as crap?” Oh, and Harrison looks “straight up evil” because that’s his face, circa 1966. He had bad teeth and was not yet coked to the gills.
Marshall concludes:
My conclusion is that there is something really dark about the Beatles. It’s not just a happy “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da Life Goes On” quartet. There is something sinister here. This album cover just screams it. It’s not normal.
I used to think that the great “evil minds” infecting the 20th century were men like Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michael Foucault. However, I think the biggest wrecking ball of Western culture might have been resting in every American’s record collection (or iPod) – John, Paul, Ringo, and George!
Okay. I actually agree with him, if not his analytical technique: as with 99% of musicians, playwrights, painters, poets, novelists, sculptors, and bloggers worth reading, there is something really dark about the Beatles, and some caution is a good idea. I encourage my kids to listen mostly to the earlier stuff, where their technical brilliance can be enjoyed unimpeded with the navel gazing muzziness that came later. We have discussed how people in Hell are probably holding hands and singing “Imagine” right now; and I have taught them to identify the sitar, when played by a white man, as the sound of bullshit.
But . . . oh, I don’t even know what to say. I’ve said it so many times, and I don’t know if there’s any way to persuade people who don’t already see it so clearly. We’re Catholic. Our main job isn’t to apply “censor” bar across everything that doesn’t come straight from the Baltimore Catechism. We take what is good. We’re supposed to beexperts at identifying what is good. We’re not supposed to be screaming meemies who bite our lips and blush every time someone dips into a minor key. We’re supposed to use sifters, not dump trucks, when sorting through culture.
My daughter says that most of her friends only know two Beatles songs: “Yellow Submarine,” and “Eleanor Rigby.” Lord, what a shame. No musical education is complete without:
So much heartache, so much loveliness, so many moments of pure music, written by people who are in love with music. Did the Beatles confuse its fans and popularize bad ideas? Sure. But they used their God-given talents to produce music which elevated the world in a real, valuable, irreplaceable way. Everything that is good sings the praises of God, and the Beatles were good. Really good. As long as they were together, they worked in the service of the muse, and they produced something great.
I really do like Taylor Marshall, but I don’t like the world he seems to want to live in.
Happy 50th anniversary to Doctor Strangelove! I came pretty durn close to naming my book How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love NFP, with a special bonus chapter on p.o.e.
Yeah. Imagine that cover.
In the interest of environmental responsibility, Al Gore suggests that all African women should bear four children.
This is, at least, what Al Gore surely anticipates when he speaks of “making fertility management ubiquitously available” to African women. He says that “If you get the health improved, if you get the availability of contraceptives, then families will voluntarily choose to have less children.” Surely he and Tipper had good health and access to contraception when they bore their four children.
Following Gore’s example, African women should also, presumably, voluntarily choose to live in a 20-room, 10,000 square foot mansion that uses approximately four times more energy than the typical home in the neighborhood. In addition, each African mother should maintain a luxury apartment in San Francisco. In order to save the environment, Mr. Gore encourages all African women to take several plane trips every year, and only to charter a private jet “when necessary.”
PIC African woman carrying baby and firewood “And don’t forget to buy some carbon offsets to make up for that cooking fire you’re planning, missy.”
Oh, pish tush, you will say. Al Gore’s racist hypocrisy is old news, low-hanging fruit, as it were. It’s easy to pick on a bloated lout like him; but his point still stands, yes? Even if the first world did their fair share to reduce environmental costs, rather than palming it off on impoverished villages on the other side of the world, those third world women would be better off if they’d just put a cork in their outrageous, unthinking fertility. They’d be healthier, wealthier. They’d be happier. Why not flood them with contraception?
Here’s why, according to Obianuju Ekeocha, a Nigerian woman who actually lived in one of those impoverished African villages — and who actually knows what it’s like to see the kind of aid that Westerners want them to have. Her open letter to Melinda Gates is from 2012, but it deserves to be read over and over again. She says:
I see this $4.6 billion [in contraceptive aid] buying us misery. I see it buying us unfaithful husbands. I see it buying us streets devoid of the innocent chatter of children. I see it buying us disease and untimely death. I see it buying us a retirement without the tender loving care of our children.
Please Melinda, listen to the heart-felt cry of an African woman and mercifully channel your funds to pay for what we REALLY need.
She then goes on to describe the true needs of African families. And here is Ekoeocha’s follow-up from August of 2013. She explains:
[M]ore educated African women almost always choose to have fewer children (but mostly by natural methods rather than artificial contraceptives). So rather than fill our defenceless under-aged brides with Depo-Provera — which is more like a general anaesthesia that will numb them to the brutality of their reality — we can better empower them by giving them an education, which becomes the lifeline by which they can climb out of poverty one girl at a time.
Is that what the likes of Gore and Melinda Gates really want — truly educated girls? Do they respect African women and African culture enough to help them make their own choices? Or is that too much trouble to go to for a bunch of dark-skinned global parasites? Do Gates and Gore and their ilk show any interest in listening to the true concerns of actual African families? Or is all their wealth just funding another chapter in Western imperialism, where, rather than exterminating Africans directly, we brainwash them into exterminating themselves?
Take a squint at how you’re raising your kids. The general impression should be “up, up, up.”
I don’t think it describes everyone who accepts abortion, even those who accept it enthusiastically. People and their motives are more complicated than that. But I don’t know how else to describe people like this.
For their sake, I’m hoping they suffer from some kind of mental illness, because otherwise, damn.
Because all of a sudden, it’s in stock!!!!!!!!!!!!
Buy The Sinner’s Guide to Natural Family Planning straight from the publisher, Our Sunday Visitor
or from Amazon. I just happened to go the page and realized it was in stock! It says there are only 19 copies left!
If you were darling enough to pre-order my book a month ago, it should be winging its way to you very soon!
Good heavens!
WordPress is being extra special today and won’t let me upload any images, so you will just have to imagine that peppy yellow 7 Quick Takes logo here.
When I banned reading at the table, my kids used to do dramatic readings of condiment labels. The mustard was the best.
Sadly, the length of a mustard label is about as long as I am able to sustain my attention while I’m reading, lately. If you have but attention the size of a mustard label, then that is not very good. It means that you have all these tabs open all the time, and you are totally going to go back and read more carefully because you can see this is good stuff. If you leave the tab open long enough, you may actually finally get around to reading the thing, and then you’re like, “Wow, that was great. I should write about it.” And then you have to leave the tab open for another day . . .
Anyway, here are the things I read and liked but never did write about this week:
–1–
Via John Herreid, a huge, fascinating collection of short first-hand accounts of things that happened during the Civil War.
–2–
From Eve Tushnet (DID YOU KNOW SHE IS WRITING A BOOK?), some “Snow Day Thoughts” that I loved, especially this:
The Dutch portraits were a striking contrast to all the Spanish stuff we saw in other parts of our trip. I’m not sure I’ll ever love Rembrandt, but I did find his cloudy, lumpy-faced people very beautiful and relatable. There’s a gentleness to his work, at least in the paintings we saw in New York. The Dutch people also often looked worried or questioning. They lacked that “mask of command” intensity which the Spaniards typically had. The Spaniards were basically either in ecstasy, or staring right at you like, “AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM. *drops mic*”
–3–
Good stuff: Let your husband love you.
[G]uys are weird. Once they fall in love with you, there’s nothing you can wear, no amount of weight you can gain, and no lack of make up that will make them see you any differently. You are their love, their bride, and after he’s been at work all day, you are a sight for sore eyes.
So instead of rolling your eyes, huffing and puffing, throwing out gut kicking comments about how he has it easy, doesn’t understand, is lazy, a jerk, whatever comes to your beautiful stressed out brain… BREATHE. Look away from your day and see the man that won your heart.
Let your husband love you.
Because he needs to love you. As much as you need to receive the love he has for you, he needs to be received. He needs to be welcomed, embraced, and loved. Even if the last thing you want is to be touched or to hear how amazing you look when you feel insecure and disgusting. Let him love you. Don’t push him away. If you do, I can guarantee there will come a day when your cold shoulders and eye rolling will have trained him to stay away. There will be a day when you will need to be hugged and need to be reminded of how amazing you are and he won’t know how to tell you.
–4–
Not one but two new free resources for art online:
and
As part of an increasingly common trend (the British Library did a similar thing at the end of last year) Wellcome Images has released tens of thousands of images from its archive into the public domain.
–5–
This is driving me crazy, because I can’t find it anywhere. I heard a story on the radio about a young oceanographer who wanted to record sound in the Mariana Trench. So he came up with a glass sphere, half the size of a basketball, with recording equipment attached to it. You just drop it overboard, and down, down, down it goes. It sits there, recording, for six weeks. Then, when it’s all done, it’s preset to jettison some weight, and slowly rises to the surface, and a strobe light starts to blink, to let you know where it is.
Isn’t that lovely? The fellow let it go, and thought, “I may never see it again.” He had spent $50,000 developing it, and nobody really thought it would work. He sweated out the six weeks, and when it was time to fetch it, he went out on a bridge and looked out across the dark, dark ocean. Just a wall of black, with nothing but darkness to be seen. He looked and looked, and there was nothing but darkness, and then the guy next to him casually says, “Ah, there it is.”
And so he got his glass ball back, full of sounds from the darkest, coldest, heaviest bottom of the sea. He went home and plugged it in to download all the sound, and went to bed. And when he woke up in the morning, it was like Christmas: he knew that, waiting for him, was a sound that nobody on earth had ever heard before. And he had fetched it with his glass ball.
I didn’t make this up! I heard it! But I can’t find it anywhere.
–6–
Wow, this is turning into a long post. Here is something I never ever considered writing about, but it made me laugh, especially after all these Real Beauty campaigns and “OMG this model didn’t have her armpit fold airbrushed out, OMG OMG this will change the world.” Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good trend, but I still liked Nine Unretouched Photos of Disney Princesses That Disney Doesn’t Want You to See
–7–
And finally the real reason Pope Francis said that the internet is a gift from God.
Phew! Happy weekend. May all your tabs be closed.
A nice way to add some color to a house full of people who are pretty much tired of brown, white, brownish white, and black. This is one of those crafts that is easy, but you have to not give a crap about your furniture or clothes.
Step 1: sit on a bunch of coffee filters to flatten them. Irene, 4, notes that this step is important, “although it’s a little bit vulgar.”
Step 2: drip some water on them.
Step 3: drip food coloring on them. You may also do food coloring first, and then water.
Step 4: let it dry. The end.
These dry fast and make nice marbled, stained glass effect, very cheery hanging in windows. They look like planets. You can experiment with different amounts and combinations of water and food coloring. I know you can get this same effect with decent watercolors, but the kids really love squeezing the food coloring droppers.
Bonus: you get Hulk Hands for a good week or so!
As long as old lies keep circulating, we have to keep the truth circulating.
