Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (71566)	8/5/2003 8:15:04 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

My goodness! I'm sure glad I don't have a horse in that race. We definitely live in interesting times.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (71566)	8/5/2003 8:17:05 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Political incivility eats away at social fabric By George F. Will In this season of vast public carelessness, political Toms and Daisys - like the careless Buchanans in "The Great Gatsby" - are trashing civic life, making messes and moving on. And there are no large ideas commensurate with, and capable of at least explaining, the institutional damage being done. In Texas last week, Democratic legislators left the state for a second time in 11 weeks. They fled, to New Mexico, to prevent a legislative quorum. Republican legislators want to draw new legislative district lines for the second time since the 2000 census, a mischievous idea already acted on by Colorado Republicans. This aggression shreds a settled practice that limits to once after each census the bruising effort of seeking political clout through redistricting. Defenders of the Republicans say they are breaking no law - that the once-a-decade practice is only a custom. But many of the practices that reduce the friction of life are "only" customs. And when the cake of custom crumbles, it is replaced either by yet more laws codifying behavior that should be regulated by good manners or by a permanent increase in society's level of ongoing aggression. Texas Republicans sought the help of the federal Department of Homeland Security in finding the Demo-cratic emigres in Oklahoma. New Mexico State Police guarded their hotel because the Democrats said they thought "bounty hunters" might try to drag them back to Texas. Two weeks ago, some congressional Republicans called the police - who called the sergeant at arms - to expel Democratic members of the Ways and Means Committee from a House library, where they went to protest the Republicans' demand for action on a 90-page bill the Democrats had not had a chance to read. Illinois' Supreme Court recently ordered the state to give all judges, including Supreme Court justices, a raise. Budget difficulties caused the governor to veto a cost-of-living increase for judges. The Supreme Court said this violates the Constitution's requirement that judges' salaries shall "not be diminished." There was no suit filed or hearing held. Just a judicial fiat. But is it seemly to argue it during painful budget cuts needed to close a $5 billion deficit? Last Thursday, considerations of taste, or perhaps just prudence, caused the court to retreat, vacating its order and allowing a trial court to decide the question. Political incivility feeds on itself. The attempt to recall California Gov. Gray Davis will encourage the idea that elections settle nothing - campaigning is permanent and ubiquitous. Life has been called a series of habits disturbed by a few thoughts. Civil society is kept civil by certain habits of restraint. Inflammatory political ideas can overturn habits, sometimes for the better, usually not. But no discernible ideas, at least none that are more than appetites tarted up as ideas, account for the vandalism by political overreachers of both parties. Each vandal seems to think that his or her passions are their own excuse for existing. As Santayana said, such thinking is the defining trait of barbarians. * George F. Will is a columnist for The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071; www.washingtonpost.com.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (71566)	8/5/2003 11:21:33 AM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 82486

Anti-Catholicism is still one of the permitted bigotries of the liberal cause.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (71566)	8/5/2003 1:14:54 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

Today, from Howard Kurtz. Persuaders or Partisans By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 5, 2003; 9:10 AM It should be utterly predictable, right? The New York Times and Washington Post editorial pages beat up on George W., while the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times editorial pages doggedly defend the president. Well, not quite. A new Harvard study says the conservative editorial pages are more intensely partisan, and far less willing to criticize a Republican administration than the liberal pages are to take on a Democratic administration. New York magazine columnist Michael Tomasky, who did the study for the Joan Shorenstein press center, is a certified liberal, so some may be inclined to discount his findings. But the nature of his research makes it harder to dismiss. Tomasky examined the editorial commentary on 10 Bush and Clinton episodes that were roughly comparable. He did not include extraordinary events, such as the Lewinsky scandal or 9/11. Everyone knows that virtually all papers, of every political stripe, whacked Clinton over his Monica dissembling. No surprise there, and there's no similar Bush scandal. More interesting is how the papers handled run-of-the-mill political controversies. The liberal papers criticized the Clinton administration 30 percent of the time, while the conservative papers slapped around the Bush administration just 7 percent of the time. The liberal papers praised the Clintonites 36 percent of the time, while the conservative papers praised the Bushies 77 percent of the time. One more set of numbers: The liberal papers criticized Bush 67 percent of the time; the conservative papers criticized Clinton 89 percent of the time. As for intensity, Tomasky cites a Journal editorial soon after the Clintonites arrived in Washington, describing administration figures as "pod people from a 'Star Trek' episode . . . genetically bred to inhabit the public sector." Let's go to the numbers: When Hillary's health care task force was sued in 1993 to open its records, the NYT wrote four editorials, all negative toward the Clintons. The WP had one mixed. The WSJ wrote eight, all negative. The WT had seven, all negative. The New York Times, for example, called the Clinton secrecy "unseemly, possibly illegal and wrong." The Washington Times said that "if ever there was a situation that demanded that all ethics regulations be followed down to the last dot on the last 'i' and the last cross on the last 't' it is the doings of the health care task force." Cut to Dick Cheney's energy task force keeping its records secret. The NYT, as it had with Hillary, wrote five editorials, all negative. The WP wrote one, mixed. The WSJ wrote one positive, and the WT wrote one positive, one mixed and one negative. Said the Journal: "This purely political lawsuit was [John Dingell and Henry Waxman's] attempted end-run around the Constitution's tedious separation of powers." The Washington Times compared the Hillary and Cheney situations, saying: "Perhaps the most important difference between the two task forces is that no one on the Bush team is channeling policy from Eleanor Roosevelt." During Janet Reno's first year as attorney general, the NYT wrote five positive editorials, 11 mixed and 17 negative. The WP wrote seven positive, three mixed and four negative. By contrast, the WSJ wrote one positive, four mixed and 11 negative. The WT carried two mixed and 16 negative. As for John Ashcroft's first year, the NYT had four positive, seven mixed and 13 negative. The WP had four positive, six mixed and 13 negative. The WSJ: nine positive and one mixed. The WT: 10 positive, two mixed and three negative.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (71566)	8/16/2003 12:11:09 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I had no idea Anne Catherine was so popular. She should at least get sainted for this... emmerich1.com Mel Gibson: The passion of the film star who directed the Holy Ghost By Andrew Gumbel 16 August 2003 It's almost always a bad idea for Hollywood stars to indulge their dreams and invest their own money in pet projects others wouldn't touch with a barge pole. Especially if they involve religion. Just look at John Travolta, who sabotaged what had been a miraculous career revival a couple of years back with Battlefield Earth, the L Ron Hubbard adaptation that was supposed to convert the masses to Scientology but succeeded only in reducing them to helpless snorts of derisive laughter. And now comes Mel Gibson, who has exposed himself to even greater risk with The Passion, his super-gruesome rendering of the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus Christ, which he is bankrolling entirely out of his own pocket. The dialogue is in Latin and Aramaic and the theology comes courtesy of his bizarre offshoot of the Catholic Church, which thinks the Pope is a heretic and that the Jews bear the brunt of historical responsibility for the crucifixion. The outcry, as might have been anticipated, has been swift and furious. Gibson has been widely accused of stirring up anti-Semitism - mostly, it must be said, by people who have seen only a version of the screenplay, not the film itself. One religious scholar, Sister Mary Boys of the Union Theological Seminary, has offered the dire prediction that we are about to see "one of the great crises in Christian-Jewish relations". Another, Paula Fredriksen of Boston University, has warned Gibson he can expect blood on his hands. This is not an easy controversy to judge, since the film has no distributor and is not expected to arrive in cinemas until next year's Lenten season at the earliest. Of the chosen few who have been accorded advance screenings, however, conservatives and Gibson's fellow super-traditionalists have - perhaps predictably - tended to love it, while the Anti-Defamation League, a conservative Jewish group which kicked up a huge fuss until it too was allowed a look, felt - also predictably - that the film confirmed all its worst anti-Semitic fears. Certainly, Gibson hasn't helped himself by trumpeting his film as an enduring work of art that corrects all the mistakes of previous versions of the Gospels. "This film will show the passion of Jesus Christ just the way it happened," he told a television interviewer earlier this year, before the controversy erupted. "It's like travelling back in time and watching the events unfold exactly as they occurred." And how, pray tell, can Gibson be so sure that he is right, especially when the Gospels themselves are contradictory and vague on many of the details? "The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film," he said. "I was just directing traffic." The scholars have had a field day with such assertions. For a start, they say, the soldiers of imperial Rome would not have spoken Latin, as they do in Gibson's film, but Greek. Then there is the question of sourcing. Gibson himself has admitted that his screenplay was based not so much on the Gospels as on the reinterpretation of a 19th-century nun called Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich, whose hypnotic visions of the Passion included many frankly anti-Semitic details missing from the Gospels. According to his critics, Gibson has the Jews clamouring for the death of Jesus in ways that neither the Bible nor the historical record suggest. Rather, they say, his vision fits right into the long, contentious, frequently violent and now largely repudiated Christian tradition of castigating Jews for the sin of deicide. Several of the scholars who examined the screenplay said they saw no way of correcting the problem without rewriting and substantially reshooting it. What, you might wonder, was Gibson thinking? He himself has said, only half-jokingly, that this could be "the career-killer film". Naturally, he denies it is anti-Semitic, but he also says he "can't hide" the role the Jews played in Christ's death. Not, perhaps, the most reassuring of answers. The Passion also promises to be a singularly uncomfortable viewing experience, with scenes of Jesus beaten until the skin is hanging off in strips. Gibson hopes the film will be inspiring - in the same way, one supposes, that Steven Spielberg thought Saving Private Ryan would be inspiring. At least Spielberg's film wasn't in Aramaic. The other strange thing is how far this project seems to be from the Mel Gibson audiences have come to know and love - the happy-go-lucky blue-eyed golden boy, with a malicious grin on his handsome face and mischief for ever on his mind. There was always vague talk of Gibson's deep religious commitment and conservative political views, but they never seemed half as important as his delight in showing up to parties in a bra and wig like an overgrown Aussie schoolboy out to have a good time. Gibson, in short, has always come across as a good guy. People who have worked with him say he is refreshingly down to earth, unspoilt and devoid of pretension. In Malibu, where he lives in a gated community about a mile inland from the beach, he is known as a committed husband and father and a stellar community activist who has given lavishly to the local public school system, where all seven of his children have been educated. Malibu is full of Jews, and none has ever had a bad word to say about him, even after he started building a church on behalf of his anti-papal Catholic sect recently in the hills above the town. Sure, people know he belongs to some strange religious order, but their attitude has always been that he is an OK guy who is welcome to his beliefs, whatever they may be. All that may now be subject to re-evaluation. The first thing to know is that Gibson's ultra-traditionalist sect does not just reject the Pope and insist on holdings its masses in Latin, like Catholics of old. It also rejects the entire body of Vatican teaching since Pope John XXIII, including its apology for the church's persecution of the Jews and its renunciation of anti-Semitic positions going all the way back to the Council of Nicaea in AD325, when Jews were declared to be "abhorrent to the will of God". The rite the Gibsons follow was codified at the Council of Trent in the 16th century - the high watermark of the Counter-Reformation that soon led to heretics being burned at the stake all over Europe. The second thing to know about Gibson is his 85-year-old father, the original traditionalist in the family and author of numerous religious tracts displaying some hair-raising religious and political beliefs. At various times, Hutton Gibson has said he believes burning heretics is "an act of charity", that Pope John XXIII usurped the Holy See after threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on the Vatican, that the Second Vatican Council was a "Masonic plot backed by Jews", that the Holocaust never happened, that al-Qa'ida had nothing to do with the 11 September attacks, and that income tax was and remains a communist plot inspired by Karl Marx himself. It is important, of course, to distinguish the views of the father from the views of the son, and Mel Gibson would have been thrown out of Hollywood long ago if he had gone round repeating such incendiary nonsense. Nevertheless, these are the views Mel grew up listening to, forming at least one strand of the religious tradition he has chosen to follow. Although many people think of Mel Gibson as Australian, he was in fact born in Peekskill, New York, where his father had a job on the railways. Then, when Mel was 12, a bizarre twist of fate caused the family to emigrate. Hutton won a disability settlement from his job following an injury, and went on to win big on the television game show Jeopardy. The parents and their 11 children took the money and left for New South Wales. The teenage Mel toyed with becoming a priest, but applied to drama school at the insistence of one of his sisters. The National Institute of Dramatic Arts opened up an entirely new world for him: he played Romeo to Judy Davis's Juliet, and shared digs with Geoffrey Rush. His film career took off relatively quickly, first with Tim, a succès d'estime in which he played the mentally disabled title role, and then with the Mad Max films, which earned him a mass audience from around the world. From the start, Gibson was pegged as a heart-throb and a rather nuggety sexpot. That reputation rather obscured his acting talent, displayed to fine effect in the Peter Weir films Gallipoli (1981) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1983) but later buried under a welter of commercial crowd-pleasers, especially after he moved from Australia to Hollywood in the mid-1980s. Even Braveheart, his 1995 Oscar-winning portrayal of the William Wallace uprising which also marked his directorial debut, was perhaps not all it was cracked up to be; it has since appeared with alarming regularity on lists of the worst Academy Award-winning films ever made. If one wanted to look for reasons why he would yearn to make a such a film as The Passion, they aren't too hard to find. By the late 1990s, Gibson was too old to make the Sexiest Men in Hollywood lists any more and seemed stuck in lucrative but less than meaningful films such as Payback, an unnecessary remake of the John Boorman classic Point Blank, and the umpteen instalments in the Lethal Weapon series, opposite Danny Glover. Who can blame him for taking his money - he's been worth $25m a picture for the past few years - and putting it into something a little more substantial? The problem, of course, is the nature of that something. Religion is never an easy topic for the movies - just think of the trouble Pasolini had with his Gospel According to St Matthew, or Martin Scorsese with The Last Temptation of Christ. Gibson can take comfort that the furore over such films tends to precede their release and fade considerably once they have actually been seen by real live audiences. (The Vatican now loves the Pasolini film, and the cries of sacrilege hurled at Scorsese are but a distant memory.) That assumes, though, that the anti-Semitic charge has either been overblown or can be fixed in the editing room. If it can't, and he really does incite a full-blown crisis in Christian-Jewish relations, he might just wish he had made Lethal Weapon 5 instead. LIFE STORY Born: Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson on 3 January 1956, in Peekskill, New York Family: Sixth of 11 children. His father, Hutton Gibson, worked as a railway brakeman until a work-related injury and a winning streak on a popular game show persuaded him to move the family to Australia when Mel was 12. His mother, Ann, was the daughter of an Australian opera singer. Career: Studied at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney. Shot to stardom with Mad Max (1979), then acquired critical kudos with his turns in Gallipoli (1981) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), both directed by Peter Weir. Made his US film debut in The Bounty (1984) and soon fell comfortably into the Lethal Weapon series, starting in 1987. Won Oscars for directing and starring in Braveheart (1995). More recent films include The Patriot (2001) and Signs (2002). The Passion is due out next year. Personal life: Married Robyn Moore, whom he met through a dating service, in 1980. They have seven children. Does not touch alcohol. Now building a traditionalist church in the hills above Malibu. They say: "That's the way you should do it. Take a garbage role for the money, like Lethal Weapon 4, and then do what you want to do." - Actor Peter Stormare "When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to." - Paula Frederiksen, Professor of Scripture, Boston University He says: "I want to be as truthful as possible." news.independent.co.uk

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (71566)	8/16/2003 12:18:00 PM
From: average joe	Respond to of 82486

I wonder if Mel feels the same way about the Sound of Music? Bishop Williamson's Letters November 7, 1997 Dear Friends and Benefactors, As the Christmas season comes round again, no doubt many Catholic households, especially but not only in the U.S.A., will be preparing to watch, on public television or on video-tape, The Sound of Music. This Hollywood film has repeatedly been the object of critical remarks in this letter. If readers have wondered why, let it now for the season be explained at length. The problem with The Sound of Music is that it is not just the innocent entertainment that it seems to be, as will be shown. Nor is Hollywood alone to blame. For the 1965 film was the cinema version of the 1959 Broadway (New York) stage musical. Now Hollywood and Broadway, like all entertainers, are responsible for what they do to elevate or debase their public, but they cannot be primarily to praise or blame for the state in which that public comes to them. Interestingly, in the years of grace immediately following World War II (it did teach some people some sense), the valiant Catholic magazine Integrity called in question the whole modern expectation of "entertainment", just as between the wars Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P., preacher in London, England, had called in question the whole of modern city-life because of the pressure it exerts on married couples to use artificial means of birth control. Obviously few souls paid much attention to Integrity or to Fr. McNabb, which is why we are now in the situation where few Catholics can see any problem with The Sound of Music. Let us then be aware that the problem runs deep, but let us here concentrate on its immediate manifestation in this one film. Its story is based on a real-life incident which happened in Catholic Austria just before World War II. The wife of an Austrian naval captain dies, leaving him with a number of children to look after. The captain appoints as governess for them a young unmarried woman who has just left the convent where she was trying her vocation. Fortune smiles as the captain and governess fall in love, but fortune frowns as the Nazis take over Austria in the Anschluss of 1938. To avoid serving the Third Reich, the captain manages to flee Austria with his new wife and children. It would be interesting to read the original book by the real-life governess, Maria von Trapp, to see just how far Hollywood departed from reality in the film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. However, we need not know the original to see what Hollywood has done! Firstly, Julie Andrews is nice (of course), but she is too high-spirited to be a nun (of course), for instance she dances over the Austrian mountain meadows, in springtime (of course), waving her arms around and singing (presumably to the grass) that "The hills are alive with the sound of music". The hills seem unmoved but they do look beautiful, as does Julie Andrews (of course. We know she would wear perfume and make-up to go jogging). Fortunately the Mother Superior is also nice (of course, at least in 1965. Today she would be a child abuser), so she and the other nuns are very understanding and let Julie Andrews go, to try out being governess of a tyrannical widower's unruly children who have (of course) chased away several governesses before her. What shall she do? Have no fear! The Power of Positive Thinking (of course) - she sings a gutsy little number along the lines, "...I have confidence in sunshine, I have confidence in rain... besides which you see, I have confidence in me". Bravo. Sure enough, once inside the door she gives a dazzling demonstration of the superiority of liberty and equality over stuffy old Austrian ways! Immediately undermining - in front of the children - the Captain's tyrannical discipline over them, she proceeds to win their hearts (of course) by a combination of being their friend, taking their side, making them sing and have fun, all this without a trace of motherliness and all the time looking as cute as a kitten. She even looks cute when she prays, in fact who would not pray when it makes you look so specially cute? Of course the stern Captain is soon won over by his domain being turned into a gigantic play-pen, so he breaks out in that favourite Austrian number Edelweiss, whereupon they all burst into song because the family has been re-built on the liberty-equality model. By now Julie Andrews is looking goofy around the Captain (of course), so there is a ball, and they dance (of course), and dancing reveals more of her charms (of course), whereupon the Captain also looks goofy around her (of course). But enter now the villains! Firstly a glamorous Baroness previously engaged to be married to the Captain, who schemes to get Julie Andrews out of the way, back to the Convent (but didn't you know, "The path of true love never did run smooth"?). Secondly, villain of villains, a - a - a NAZI! (Original sin? - never heard of it! Isn't all sin Nazi sin?) Pan back to the Convent for a heart-warming feminine dialogue: Mother: "You're unhappy". J.A.: "I'm confused". Mother: "Are you in love?" J.A.: "Oh, I don't know." Mother: "Go back to him". Him is of course delighted when she returns, so there is a duet of swooning, spooning and crooning by - guess what! - moonlight! "But will the children approve of our marrying?" Of course! Shiny white wedding dress (of course), wedding bells all over the place and a lovely ceremony (of course), to be spoiled only by the brutal re-appearance of the nasty Nazi - the Captain must report for duty to the Third Reich! The family tries to sneak away. The nasty Nazi spots them, so now they all break out into singing Edelweiss. The nasty Nazi is foiled when the family escape to the convent (where else?), but drama rolls as the nasty Nazis close in on the convent. (But didn't you know, "Life is not just a bed of roses"?) The Captain is heroic (of course), but the dastardly villains are only foiled for good when their car is incapacitated by the nuns turned into mechanics (of course), and the last shots show the "family" climbing a mountain path to get out of the Third Reich, amidst hills which are once more - go on, don't tell me you couldn't guess! -- "alive with the sound of music". How truly heart - warming. Dear friends, please excuse this long excursion into the audio-visual scenery of an average modern Christmas, but no less maybe necessary to rub noses in the falsity of this soul-rotting slush. Clean family edification? Nothing of the kind! As for cleanness, many films may be worse than the Sound of Music, but stop and think - are youth, physical attractiveness and being in love the essence of marriage? Can you imagine this Julie Andrews staying with the Captain if "the romance went out of their marriage"? Would she not divorce him and grab his children from him to be her toys? Such romance is not actually pornographic but it is virtually so, in other words all the elements of pornography are there, just waiting to break out. One remembers the media sensation when a few years later Julie Andrews appeared topless in another film. That was no sensation, just a natural development for one rolling canine female. As for being a family film, by glorifying that romance which is essentially self-centred, The Sound of Music puts selfishness in the place of selflessness between husband and wife, and by putting friendliness and fun in the place of authority and rules, it invites disorder between parents and children. This is a new model family which in short order will be no family at all, its liberated members flying off in all different directions. Finally as for edification, in The Sound of Music the Lord God is mere decoration. True, His Austrian mountains are beautiful (beautiful decoration), but His nuns are valued only for their sweetness towards the world and their understanding of its ways, while His ex-nun is wholly oriented towards the world. Dear friends, any supposed Catholicism in The Sound of Music is a Hollywood fraud corresponding to the real-life fraud of that "Catholicism" of the 1950's and 1960's, all appearance and no substance, which was just waiting to break out into Vatican II and the Newchurch. Right here is the mentality of sweet compassion for homosexuals and of bitter grief for Princess Di, of sympathy for priests quitting the SSPX for the Novus Ordo. Everything is man-centered and meant to feel good, the apostasy of our times. But, somebody may object, The Sound of Music is only entertainment. Reply, is the world in a mess, or not? Now, has the world got to where it is by people listening to sermons in church? They do less and less of that. Then what do they drink into their hearts and souls and minds? Is it not their "entertainment", The Sound of Music in season and countless films more or less like it out of season? Then if the world around us is corrupt, it sure fits these films being corrupt, whereas if someone can see no problem with The Sound of Music (1965), how can he see a problem with Vatican II (1962-1965)? The simultaneity in time is no coincidence. Dear friends, "entertainment" requires serious attention. Then what is to be proposed in place of The Sound of Music? For family time, amongst live human beings, better in general live games, talk or reading than mechanical TV or VCR, even good video-tapes, let alone video-tapes as false as The Sound of Music. Make your children (and your wife!) a Christmas present of your personal time, attention and guidance. That is more valuable to them than anything that comes in glitzy store-bought wrappings! The Seminary is nevertheless providing, as per the enclosed flyer, a wide variety of VCR tapes. Contradiction? Not quite. These tapes are instructional rather than entertaining, and well used they should make accessible a wealth of Catholic truth and beauty. However, note the new address at which to order either audio - or video-tapes. This is because, to get the material out, we have brought in professional help, only not resident in Winona. Note in particular the offer of a free 30-minute video-tape. Anything (honest) to get real Catholicism back into circulation! Sincerely yours in Christ, + Richard Williamson sspx.ca Let me take one case of this chaos, featured in many a Confirmation sermon this year, to try to help Catholics to grasp what a gigantic drama is playing out around them, because even most Catholics seem to think (or wish) themselves to be still living in the world of "The Sound of Music"! That world is gone, gone forever, as it deserved! The case was apparently all over the media here in the U.S.A. several months ago. My knowledge of it is essentially confined to one long newspaper article sent to me by a friend, but the main outlines are clear. A 34-year-old schoolmistress from Washington State, married with four children between the ages of 4 and 13, entered into a relationship with a boy in her sixth grade class (age 11 or 12?), by whom she then had a baby girl. Tried and convicted for the offence against a minor, she was sentenced to jail for eight years, but the sentence was suspended because her "sweet and bubbly" personality must have seemed to everybody to be out of place in the "slammer". However, no sooner was she out than she made herself pregnant by the same boy for the second time, whereupon her judge threw her back into jail to serve the rest of her sentence! The article prints an attractive colour picture of her in court at the moment of her original sentencing: her pretty little chin perched on her folded hands, looking no older than a teenager herself, she looks wistfully across the courtroom, as though to say, "Why cannot these people understand true love?" For indeed, one of the quotations attributed to her by the article runs, "I have found true love at last." Can anyone doubt she has watched "The Sound of Music" 20 or 50 times? Not I. "Oh, come on your Excellency! Get off movies, and leave that movie alone!" Dear friends, gladly, if only movies would get off Catholics and Catholics would leave that movie alone! But I have here under my hand a glossy "1998 Catholic Family and School Videos" catalogue, from a reputable conservative Catholic organization out of Colorado, which advertises one smiling, glamorous, sentimental, "uplifting" movie after another, page after page. Where is the blood? Where is the Cross? Where is the sacrifice? Movies are unreal. Catholicism is for real. Catholic movies, unless they are strict documentaries, are virtually a contradiction in terms. Yet movies occupy the front, center, and back of most Catholics' hearts and minds, at least here in the U.S.A.! This is the drama of our poor schoolmistress who - you guessed - is one of seven children from a strongly conservative Catholic home! She was born in 1962. What did her home lack in those supposedly wonderful days, that she is now completely detached from reality? Catholics must ask themselves! Listen to two more quotes of hers: "Some day we (she and the school boy!) will marry. We will all live happily together and my two families will be one, and everything will be just perfect!" (She means, she and her middle-aged husband and their four children and the schoolboy and their two children, will all live happily ever after, together? She is mad!) Again: "I couldn't be happier. I have a new life inside me. It's a sign, a sign that God wants us to be together, to be one!" She is using what remains of her Catholic Faith to justify her adultery and betrayal of a minor entrusted to her professional care! And she is watched and listened to with avid sympathy by media all over the country!! sspx.ca