-- Hubris: the condition of the high and mighty on Olympus believing they are immune to the consequences of bad behavior. And too often we are hubris' enablers -- too sophisticated to be appalled, too inured to be outraged. About the excesses of entertainers from Hollywood to Washington, from the gridiron to our museums of modern art, from the pulpit to the links. They would not take themselves seriously if we did not. Tiger discloses himself to be not his handlers' ballyhooed paradigm of perseverance and uprightness -- but a man enslaved by sexual appetite, emphatically unliberated and compulsively unfaithful. In this culture, has fascination replaced revulsion? Where is there, in him and so many other swells, any of the humility and honor displayed in The Manger 2,000 years ago?
-- Is the economy in the tank? Many of the stats making the case for that proposition are undermined by all the cars in the holiday parking lots, even those bearing Obama/Biden bumper stickers. Between shoppers and the 20-foot mounds of plowed snow, it's hard to find an open parking space -- or when rushing to see a marvelous movie like "The Blind Side." Yet such an uplifting flick, about the goodness in the human heart, conveys none of the vanity that our ignorantly bestowed honors so customarily revere. Think Oscars and Pulitzers to the ideologized, think Nobel peace prizes to the unwashed and the unschooled.
-- IS IT possible to be for both the environment and over-regulation? Does the one require the other? Maybe the conservationist, an earlier hour's environmentalist, departed the landscape because of an insufficient regulatory impulse -- wherein he sought a governmental hand light in contrast to absolute. A moment of silence, please, for the departed conservationist. RIP.
-- President Obama is giving interviews grandly expatiating on his momentous achievements in his monumental first year. Health care, nuclear treaties, Copenhagen -- and like that. But what about the chavezing (the castroization) of Latin America, often with the blessing of Obama and his administration? What about Obama's collapse before a rampant China, his apologia to Islam, and his bowing seemingly to any and all? What about his hammering of Israel, his dithering on Afghanistan, his rank incompetence regarding Iran? In too many instances, does his foreign policy reduce to being easy on America's enemies and tough on its friends?
-- As in so much, the late novelist Saul Bellow had it right in his determination -- through his writing -- to rediscover "the magic of the world under the debris of modern ideas." Actions and ideas have consequences, as in -- let's see: the election of Barack Obama and the incumbent leftist Congress -- in the socialization of American medicine (with its inevitable rationing and bureaucratism and diminished quality and higher cost), in the inflation and steeper taxes to come, in the unfettered ascendance of China and Iran, in the developing ambivalence toward jihad, in super-regulation entering everywhere (from the economy to the environment to energy to education).
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Amid such wreckage, the mind reflects in wonder on the message brought by a baby in a manger 2,000 years ago. And, in a field nearby, the cattle are lowing still.