MAILBAG PART I: So I’ve been a complete, total, colossal shank about keeping up with my inbox. Here is the first installment of mail; the rest will come over the next couple days; apologies, etc. etc. I’m in plain text, readers are in bold, as always. In this episode: celebrity spies; lousy churches; war; bodily pleasures; the Special Ops Foundation; and saints.

From Tepper, in re Spy Museum (see below, “Wilderness of Gift Shops”): You were pretty much dead on (but my parents and I liked it anyway, as a fun-once kind of thing). What shocked me was that Hedy Lamarr was missing from the celebrity-spies gallery; as you may know, she received a patent for a method of transmitting on constantly shifting frequencies. Added bonus? It made cell phones possible.

See now, I didn’t know that.

From Roy Sheetz, re bad Catholic architecture: The Blessed Sacrament Chapel in the link is very much like the one at — cue ironic tone here — the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Zandria, VA, my parish. We are preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of $$ to relocate Jesus to a place appropriate for Him and for His children to pray to Him. The current experience with a centrally located ultra reflective brass Tabernacle can be duplicated as follows: affix two full length mirrors back to back; have a person you don’t like kneel down opposite you and put the mirror/mirror construction in between. If you concentrate on Our Lord you find yourself staring right back at you. If you avert your gaze you stare at someone else. I have gotten used to that, you sort of let yourself glaze over, but it is always disconcerting when you realize that someone is staring at you with a vaguely glazed expression. Nice, eh? Nightmarish actually…

The Man from K.A.I.R.O.S. on war as rhetoric (more on this soon, by the way): I’m pretty hawkish on Iraq, but the “war as rhetoric” stuff is perflooey. The theory may be fine, (or it may not, but that’s a different issue) but the problem lies in the execution. To spread the gospel of “Don’t Mess with Texas” would require a “Rome at Carthage” approach of killing every living critter of every genus, and salting the earth (probably with radioactive salts), and that ain’t never gonna happen. Even a straightforward, conventional duel of tanks, aircraft and infantry, in which all the bad guys’ materiel was wiped out wouldn’t do it, because we as a nation aren’t really full of the sort of bloodlust that it takes to wage total war. Revisionist history (and Curtis LeMay) aside, we had neither the will nor the capability to lay waste to Japan in 1945, even after 4 years of truly appaling casualties. We were still preparing to invade Japan on August 9. The invasion wasn’t to be about destroying Japan, but ending its ability to wage aggressive warfare.

We have even less will today in that regard. We haven’t actually started the war, and already we have republicans who should know better trying to bog us down in the morass of the UN (motto: “Dollars, yes! Yankees, no!”). No, war as rhetoric only works when you not only are willing to annihilate (quite literally) your enemy, but can convince him of that fact. Anyone who reads even a modest amount of English will know we are not willing. Anything less than total conquest of the Arab World will eventually be construed as a defeat, unless we grapple military victory with political change, which is (and ought to be) the primary goal of the war. But we can’t win a “war as rhetoric” (though we can and should as you point out wage a rhetorical war.)

PS Whatever happened to the Stalin Malone thing? I thought my suggestions were pretty good, though I can’t say as I have tried them…

KairosPerson is referring to a contest, long lost in the cobwebbed attic of my head. All good things come to those who wait, though–I will deal with the old contest, and post a new one, sometime this week. No, I mean it this time.

D. Connaughton on my defense of rock music against Allan Bloom’s criticisms: I think Aquinas is in Bloom’s court though. You said, “I don’t view the emotions as opposed to reason such that stimulating one necessarily reduces the other.”

Aquinas said: “Bodily pleasures hinder the use of the mind by distracting it, occasionally conflicting with it, and sometimes (as in the pleasure of drinking intoxicants) by fettering it.

“Bodily pleasures are often more intense than intellectual pleasures, but they are not so great or so lasting. The objects of the bodily pleasure quickly pass away; spiritual good are incorruptible.”

– St. Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologica”

I think my post pretty freely mingles pleasures that Aquinas would consider bodily and pleasures he would consider intellectual (partly because they do some similar things, and partly because it’s just near-impossible to draw a good distinction between the two). That’s probably one source of conflict. I don’t know how much of my post Aquinas would get behind, but so far, I do stand by it all. Very much appreciate the cite from the Angelic Doctor nonetheless.

From K.R. Coolidge: Thanks for the plug for [the Special Ops] Foundation. My brother-in-law is a Lt.Col. special ops commander and have been aware of this foundation for some time now.

The men and women of special ops are a special breed — they spend months in faroff countries and then spend days and weeks away from home when they are stationed in the US. The cost to the families is high — a sacrifice they and their families freely make in service of their country. Because of the long hours, many spouses are more or less single parents most of the time — between that and frequent moves, these families are one to one-and-a-half income families.

What some may not know is that the squadrons raise funds themselves for the foundation, as well. Many of them have events to boost morale and get the families together — and put the profits into the foundation. Many squadrons also have a stash of sodas in a fridge, snacks, etc. available in the buildings with the proceeds going to the foundation — a nickel here, a dime there, it adds up after a while.

As to [the foundation’s] high expenses, I don’t have firsthand knowledge but do know that they are subject to accounting rules beyond the standard from the military side of the house — they must go out of their way to show that they receive no support (free supplies, office space, etc.) or funding, direct or indirect, from the military or federal government. That may account for higher than average costs.

Again, thanks for highlighting this worthy cause. These families are deserving.

And two emails about saints (more on this in a moment). From Sandra Miesel: The cult of the saints, says Peter Brown, first saw them as patrons in the Roman sense. I like to think of them as heavenly friends, unseen but present. And how’s this for a patron answering a client promptly? I murmured a prayer to St. Anthony to find a lost paper, looked down, and my hand was on it.

And from Father Shawn O’Neal: On this feast day of St. Monica, I want to clarify that Monica did not become a saint simply because she prayed for her son Augustine’s conversion. Our Church believes that Monica would have persevered in prayer no matter what — even if her son did not convert either before her death or after it. His conversion has much more to do with her faith in general than it has for her specific prayer of his conversion. I refer to the Gospel two Sundays ago when I state that Jesus healed the Canaanite woman’s daughter not only because the Canaanite woman prayed for it to happen, but because she was resolute in what she believed. Jesus said, “Great is your faith!”; he did not say, “What a pretty prayer!”

Pray that we as a Church ask for the saints’ intercession for much more important things than the intercession of St. Joseph for the sake of a house being sold. I know that this topic can start a discussion within itself, but our intercessory prayer should be the sake of spiritual growth much more than it should be for the sake of gaining something such as a “sold” sign in the front yard.