In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

On July 15, LA County imposed an indoor mask requirement, which took effect at midnight Saturday. Media reports like this one have been incoherent , describing on one hand the usual "sharp increase" in cases, while saying as well they're "a far cry from the winter peak that saw an average of more than 40,000 per day". Nevertheless, CNN reported that every patient now in the hospital for COVID is unvaccinated . An issue that so far nobody has raised is that, with compliance in LA County near 100% on masking and social distance in late 2020, it had no effect, even with partial new lockdowns, on controlling the pandemic, with case rates declining only after the introduction of vaccines. If the problem is actually the unvaccinated, any type of masking, or the reimposition of any other former controls, will have no better effect than they did last year. But reimposition of former controls is exactly what the county has in mind : [Health Officer Dr Muntu] Dav...

Yesterday I said that, although Anglicanorum coetibus so far doesn't seem to have been affected by Traditionis Custodes , maybe it should be. Although it was originally intended to appeal to disgruntled high-church Anglicans, very few of these came in (I think this reflected a profound misunderstanding of Anglicanism). Instead, such appeal as it's had has been largely among the same traditionalist faction of cradle Catholics that Pope Francis intends to bring to heel with Traditionis Custodes . I observed this movement for almost ten years in the old blog. Even before Anglicanorum coetibus , the most successful Anglican Use Pastoral Provision parish, Our Lady of the Atonement, wound up appealing largely to traditionialist Catholics as well, but its separatist posture resulted in financial as well as sexual abuses. Media commentators over the weekend across the board haven't mentioned the essentially separatist nature of both Latin mass and Divine Worship parish cul...

One thing I've come to like about Pope Francis is how easy it is to find photos of him with a wide range of facial expressions. Whatever else someone may say, he doesn't lack affect. I have a sense, in the absence of equivalent photos, that Leo XIII or Pius XI might have been like this, too. Francis is a good Italian. There was a general anticipation that something like Traditionis Custodes was in the works, and I've already said that I don't have a dog in the fight over the Latin mass. But scanning reactions yesterday, I was struck by their intellectual weakness -- even beyond that, their un-Catholic nature. The most bizarre was from Fr Hunwicke, who cited an Anglican authority against the pope : From a private letter to me from Prebendary Michael Moreton (7 November 2001); "I regard the Roman canon as part of the complex of traditions which characterised the life of the Church as it emerged from the centuries of persecution: a shared rule of faith in t...

I posted yesterday about how C Wright Mills was deeply involved in creating from the start a Castro "third way" narrative that belatedly tried to create a new revolutionary model that, while totalitarian by nature, wasn't directly tied to Stalinism. This lasted, if it was ever very effective, only until the fall of 1962, when Kennedy, always a hawk in any case, tied Castro directly to Moscow in the Cuban missile crisis. (Although the resolution of the crisis itself has subsequently been portrayed as only a partial win, if that, for Kennedy, it's generally acknowledged that the outcome resulted in Khrushchev's deposition in 1964, so winners and losers are hard to pick.) The outcome of the missile crisis in popular culture is best illustrated in Hitchcock's 1969 film Topaz . I rewatch both Vertigo and Topaz almost compulsively, in part because I now think, although it's a close case, that Topaz is Hitchcock's greatest. (Both have a peculiar devi...

The last time I thought much about Cuba was during the 2000 Elián González controversy, when I got the impression that there was a faction of committed leftists who in fact believed, as essentially an article of faith, that Cuba was a workers' paradise, and the boy would be far better off if the US government would return him there. It vaguely occurred to me at the time that Columbia sociologist C Wright Mills had enthusiastically embraced the Cuban revolution not long before his death in 1962. I did a web search and came up with a 2017 article in The Jacobin , C Wright Mills's Cuban Summer , which described Mills's two-week visit to Cuba in August 1960 that formed the basis for his book Listen, Yankee . He spent three days of the visit interviewing Castro, and the photo above is of one such encounter, I can't remember now when I read Mills's White Collar (1951), but it must have been at an earlier phase of my life, because I was much impressed by Mills's o...

It seems to me that over the past year or so, there have been two types of demonstration, the Black Lives Matter type, and the populist type. I think Black Lives Matter and the related Critical Race Theory are mislabeled as Marxist (I haven't seen the term Marxist-Leninist used at all, but that would be more accurate if it were correctly applied). BLM is an alliance between bourgeois elites and the Lumpenproletariat . Bourgeois are the traditionial Marxist enemy, while the lumpenproles, street rabble and petty criminals, are unreliable as allies of workers. Nothing could be less Marxist in principle. The Leninist component of Marxism-Leninism, something the bourgeois Edmund Wilson nevertheless recognized in To The Finland Station , added the extreme ruthlessness necessary to accomplish a revolutionary agenda, without which no such activity can move beyond idle theorizing and play-acting. The problem with both BLM and CRT is that neither recognizes the need for ruthlessness, incl...

While compiling the timeline in yesterday's post, I ran into the intriguing data item that Episcopalian Bishop of California James Pike had publicly opposed John F Kennedy's candidacy in the 1960 presidential election due to his Catholic faith. I was 12 years old at the time, and while I was vaguely following the election, I didn't notice this then, although I was aware of some concerns that if Kennedy were Catholic, he would somehow be under an obligation to do whatever the pope told him to do. A churchgoing Presbyterian at the time, I had only the sketchiest notion of Catholic teaching. I probably knew Catholics were even more opposed to divorce than Protestants as of 1960, but that was about it, and I was innocent of the other details. In any case, the media at the time covered the issue as a question of whether the pope, as part of a nefarious plan for world domination, could order Kennedy as president to attack, say, Paraguay. Returning to the issue over 60 ye...