Monthly Archives: December 2019

New Year

Happy New Year from Dean, Frank and the Ding-a-Lings. Which begs the question…were the Ding-a-Lings a different group from the Golddiggers? Did they precede them/morph into them? I remember Dean and the Golddiggers from my childhood, but I have no recollection of these Ding-a-Lings. Ah well – glad to have discovered this, for ’tis delightful:

Merry Christmas

Christmas Card

When the white stars talk together like sisters
And when the winter hills
Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night,
Somewhere one window
Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force.

Hills, stars.
White stars that stand above the eastern stable.

Look down and offer Him
The dim adoring light of your belief
Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire.

Shall not this Child
(When we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice)
Conquer the winter of our hateful century? 

And when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib,
Lo, with what rapiers
Those two loves fence and flame their brilliancy! 

Here in this straw lie planned the fires
That will melt all our sufferings:
He is our Lamb, our holocaust! 

And one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet,
Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt,
And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life. 

  • Thomas Merton

Inconvenient Murders

This is from Bari Weiss at the New York Times, so those of you who (understandably) despair of the paper might glean some hope from this column.

The theme is that Jew-hatred is surging and yet Jewish victimhood does not command attention or inspire popular outrage. That unless Jews are murdered by neo-Nazis, the one group everyone of conscience recognizes as evil, Jews’ inconvenient murders, their beatings, their discrimination, the singling out of their state for demonization will be explained away.

It is, as I’ve often said, amusing (in a dark, sad way) to listen to leftists pretend they care about Jews. Of course, as Weiss points out, this happens only when Jews are attacked by those on the right. It is somewhat akin to the pretend concern for the Kurds of so many on the left. They never cared about them in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, but now that Trump has abandoned them, they matter (at least for a few minutes).