Surfeited with Dainties is going to temporarily shut-down until the new year - no new posts and no new comments.  Sometimes, in order to have something worthwhile to say, you need to be shut-up for a bit.  I hope that a little time of quiet will go along way to making this a better site in year to come. As a parting note, I'd like to thank everyone who helped me through my transition from New York to D.C. and into my career, which began in earnest last month. Have  a Merry Christmas (or a Happy Holiday if you prefer) and I'll see you in the New Year.

Go Team!Worship teams. "Worship team" is one of the worst phrases ever invented. Much less Biblical than "prayer warrior," yet more aggressively insane-sounding when dropped into casual conversation. "Yeah, after we rehearse for the Hearts on Fire Crusade 2007 in the public middle school gym this Saturday, I'm taking the worship team to Applebees."

In my brief Evangelical interlude as a teenager (yes, as all these stories do, it started with some wonderful young woman), I saw plenty of worship teams: skits, matching t-shirts, and surprisingly competent musicianship.

The desperate search for "relevance" in the life of young people has lead to some bizarre (if sympathetic) movements.  I'm sure that as the television show "One Punk, Under God" premieres this week there will be alot of lifestyle sections talking about "Revolution Church" a  brainchild of Jay Bakker (of those Bakkers). I have to say that though I'm glad Evangelical services are generally so bad that they make the local silly liturgy at the catholic parish in anywhere U.S.A. look like a Palestrina high mass - I'm drawing the line at Evangelicals ministering to people in bars. They start taking away these hard-luck souls and feeding them coffee at the local "coffehouse" church service. This is unacceptable and I think the U.S. Conference of catholic bishops needs to more aggressively recruit men into the priesthood who will spend the weekday hours in bars as their glorious predecessors in the faith have done. Bars need more priests, less evangelism. I will stand guard against the influence of these worship teams.

Wallace StevensNow having circulated among writers in D.C. I have found several things confirmed. One of these is that several young writers (myself included) enjoyed and even wrote poetry in their formative years - even into college. Then they gave it up. Why? 

I've tried hard to figure this out and have come up with some preliminary observations.

My first observation is that poetry, at least as I remember writing it, took quite a lot of time to compose. As a teenager I had no car and was a bit of a night owl. Spending four or five hours over several nights on twenty lines of poetry was much easier to do. Also if one writes for a living or writes for money at all, poetry is not economical. No one is going to pay for poetry, are they? And now that I've had some time to learn about the world I can spend those same 20 hours or so researching and writing an article that fetches a few hundred dollars.

Another reason I suspect young men give up poetry is because poetry comes easier out of disturbed or heightened emotional states - which, I don't have to remind you, occur frequently in suburban adolescence. One hopes that these are quite a bit less frequent when you grow up. What is left then? Technique, craft and dedication. Sounds like work to me. Even granting that I may have had some of these things - still I found myself trying to induce those states.It is difficult to lead an adult life if you essentially lock yourself up for three days with little food, light or sleep - coming out with only seven verses. It was my greatest work - and yet only a half dozen people ever read it.

Also, being a poet seems to attract a certain subset of female peers in high school. Not so much in college or later - which is a shame. Maybe there are a few women who would like to date or marry a working poet - but I imagine these women wear thick black velvet dresses and too much eye-liner.

Finally it seems that poetry in English is dying or dead. It has become so precious that it has no life. Poetry and jazz in America are like two slumped over octogenarians in wheelchairs and on respirators. Even their loved ones recoil at the sight of them in their current states.  Who wants to hang out here?

I'm glad however that good teachers and my adolescence conspired to inscribe a few poems onto my consciousness. Last week after eating the best Chinese food I've had in a long time I was confronted with a friend's bookshelf. Unlike many I've seen in D.C. - this one had literature and poetry. I took down a volume of Wallace Stevens' work. I read my favorite verse of his, from "Six Significant Landscapes"

II

The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance. 

Another friend, who also now lives in D.C. asked me almost seven years ago what this meant. "Why does this verse 'just blow you away'?" I think commentary is unnecessary here as I thought it was then. But every few years I find a night where I mouth those words to myself - "Like a bracelet/Shaken in a dance" as I walk into the darkness away from something or someone that has just confounded and delighted me.

Poetry doesn't need a blogathon here on SwD - but I've lately become convinced that by losing poetry in our culture we are losing something vital. The first step towards recovering is not hectoring the schools, but recovering it in myself. To that end, I'll be putting my volume of Frank O'Hara's collected works by my bedside. And yes there are plenty of funny jokes to be had here.

Mandarins who dominate the World, drop your backpacks, please.You would think in a sophisticated metropolitan city like Washington D.C. - you know the capital of a world empire - that men would know not to wear a backpack with their suit after the age of (I dunno) 20.

 Buy something leather with a shoulder strap or handles.

 

Kirk: "Come home chirping sectaries"Brink Lindsey's essay "Liberaltarians" has been the talk of the right wing blogs lately. See, for instance John Tabin's discussion of it in the American Spectator. I agree with Daniel Larison when he says the following:

Instead of setting himself up for the usual knocks on libertarians for deficient understandings of community or excessive approval of individual desires, Mr. Lindsey offers up an abundance of reasons for traditional conservatives to be only too willing to help him out the door.  For example, he does this when he describes as “libertarian breakthroughs” things that seem to traditional conservatives to be unmitigated disasters.  He reminds us why traditional conservatives have long been skeptical of the virtues of capitalism when he correctly points out how capitalism has led to many of the social changes that strike the traditional conservative either as deeply worrisome (greater sexual openness) or downright horrifying (secularisation, decline in reverence for authority).  - Daniel Larison

One is tempted to say to Libertarians: please leave. But not so fast. There are several types of libertarians. There are the type of libertarians who believe liberty is not about individualism and the market - but about self-reliance and property.  perhaps we would call these people, paleo-libertarians. Then there are the memorably named, Dupont Circle Libertarians. They no longer see what conservatives consider moral decline as the result of liberal social policies but rather as the natural progression of things - the loosening of religion's power over society. I'd like to discuss Dupont circle libertarians at length soon. But one notices from the 2005 AFF debate that Nick Gillespie considers the decrease in social stigma against gays to be an increase in freedom.  One also sees in Dupont Circle libertarians an aversion to guns. Whereas our paleo-libertarians were staunch defenders of the second amendment, Dupont Circle libertarians don't care much for weapons - those are the concerns of idiot backwards-Christians in the hinterlands. Dupont Circle Libertarians exult in the defeat of Rick Santorum - not because of his reckless and statist foreign policy but because he is identifiably a Christian, a fetishist of the family and maybe because he wants to raise the minimum wage. So yes, libertarians enjoy Senator Casey, a pro-life democratic socialist. In short, Dupont Circle libertarians are (of late) blinded by their irrational prejudices against conservative Christians, because conservative Christians are skeptical of modernity and occasionally critical of the latest in reproductive technology, two things that Dupont Circle Libertarians prize more than, say fidelity to the Constitution.

So, about this article. Lindsey's list of issues on which libertarians and liberals can work together is problematic. He mentions ending farm subsidies and corporate welfare; creating a zero-subsidy energy policy, and shifting the tax burden from labor to consumption. No conservative I know opposes these things. Farm subsidies often go to agribusiness which is killing the family farm. Corporate welfare isn't a part of conservatism and we don't have it because Republicans get elected - we have it because corporations swing a heavy bat in this game. You can't say that corporate types support Republicans as an accusation, then brag when Wall Street starts putting money behind you.

He then argues that some kind of entitlement reform compromise is inevitable as if this were a reason for changing alliances or has any implications for a new liberal-libertarian fusionism.  The rest is just a mish mosh.

The glaring error in all of this is that there are large conservative constituencies demanding fiscal policies with which libertarians disagree. But it doesn't add up. Even if you say conservatives wanted faith-based pork, there are dozens of federal regulatory bureaucracies that liberals want to see expanded. Each proposal that Lindsey makes for uniting libertarians to the left seem to work fine in the current coalition of libertarians and traditionalists.

 Can libertarians swallow the pill of nationalizing the health care industry? I don't think so. Can libertarians resign themselves to left-wing managed capitalism? Is this easier than putting up with people who want to overturn Roe v. Wade? I don't think so.

 The only reason we are really talking about this is that there is an elite core of libertarians, located in urban areas who find more in common culturally with liberals than they do with conservatives. Politics are often driven by the irrational and in fact we may see more of a certain type of libertarians trying to align with certain pro-market liberals. But intellectually, the fusionism of Frank Meyer has coheres more than the new fusionism of Brink Lindsey. There are problems with the old fusionism for sure but it isn't over yet. Frankly I think its unseemly how much attentions libertarians are getting these days.

The Word of the Lord?Never pass up a story idea if you have one. I had been wanting to write about the incredible and perplexing Bible publishing industry. Alas the WSJ beat me to it. At the end of the Wall Street Journal article (which I can't find online), "Heavens, Bibles are really Booming" a Mr. O'Brien says ( a rep from Tyndale), "The question is always how to we create Bibles that people will pick up and use but that will not be too gimmicky."

Admitting that I cannot sort one publisher's wares from another's, the article does talk about the recent innovations in packaging the Holy Scriptures. Tyndale, has plans to release a Bible that looks like a flattened Nalgene bottle. But perhaps you just want your Bible to match your outfit or outlook.

The pink and brown model has been particularly popular. Bibles are also available. in the colors of your college, with a fur cover, a flower patterned cover, and to appeal to young adherents, with a camouflage cover, a metal cover and a duct-tape cover. ...

But Bibles are becoming as much personal statements as fashion statements. "What people are saying is 'I want to find a Bible that is really me," noted Rodney Hatfield, a vice president of marketing at Thomas Nelson. "It's no different than with anything else in our culture." - Joanne Kauffman

Exactly. Now I'm willing to go a long way in allowing good salt of the earth folks to do what they can to make themselves interested in their religion. There have always been complaints from certain upstanding religious folks about "kitsch" in religion. I imagine this complaint is based less on concern for souls than concern for appearances. "I don't want to be associated with one of those bog-Catholics."

But duct-tape? This assertion that this is "no different than anything else in our culture" sounds more like an indictment, no?