Saturday, April 18, 2015

VILE HARD READING


Is the year only lost to me?/Have I no bays to crown it? Herbert

Like gang graffiti in a big, dirty, American city's most forsaken ghetto, the ominous writing's all over the vermin-infested walls of decaying Saint Gertrude the Great:
The cult's days are numbered. The divisive cult masters will soon be wanting.
With febrile apprehension, "One Hand" has read this dire message delivered by way of the Gerties' low attendance throughout Lent 2015. In the Easter Sunday "Bishop's (?) Corner," Dannie allowed all his pent-up angst to burst forth in a flood of dread and recrimination (emphasis ours):
It was a hard one, this Lent, as God sent the penance of the weather, making our Lenten church duties all the more difficult. Attendance was dismal. Many did not or could not come. Some simply stayed away week after week. Thank God most of those on whom we depend for all we do, mostly managed to make it.
Deacon Dan wears the panicky air of a man who knows he's about to be fired, doesn't he?  Gone is the insincere excuse-making to coax the reluctant back; the weather now shares only part of the blame. Dannie knows the truth: he's decoded the hostile body language of avoidance -- the averted gaze, the physical distancing:
It's a hot mess. He's afraid. 
The fact is, the awakening Gerties willfully chose not to attend; they pertinaciously shunned the cult center no matter what the weather was like. Apparently, even some of the hard-core, bug-eyed fanatics who keep the dying enterprise on life support didn't show up all the time. 

Gripped by his rising alarm, His Anxiousness, perhaps worrying he might trigger the early arrival of his (and the Cheeseball's) pink slip, must have had second thoughts about the harsh tone of his angry rebuke: Immediately he walked back his reflexive Nurse Ratched posturing, trying instead the indirect route in the morose persona of a wounded, stubbornly heroic soul soldiering on in the face of sullen indifference (albeit he couldn't resist scolding the Gerties just a little):
But still I could not give up the nights, although most of you have. Sometimes somebody comes to a 5 PM Mass. The Lenten Friday evenings are almost abandoned. The Stations never once drew even a modest crowd. Sad. The dead are gone, the devout grow older and can’t come, and no one takes their place anymore, although the memory of their example reproaches us(Emphasis ours.)
Li'l Dan doesn't know much Latin or Scripture (see our footnote below about his gross misspelling of Samson), but there's one thing His Covetousness does know: absence makes the heart grow harder and draws the purse-strings tighter. The fewer events you attend, the more remote your sense of affiliation. The more remote the affiliation, the less willing you are to part with your family's money for what you know to be frivolous, sinfully wasteful expenditures.

We also suspect that Diminutive Daniel, the Mount Denali of prudentia carnis, divines in the vanishing attendance a threat more foreboding than lukewarm devotion or missed opportunities to eat for free at tepid potluck suppers. He contemplates the very heart of darkness. Since Lenten devotions like Stations or weekday Mass are not of precept, the participation of the faithful is a sound indicator of how well-disposed people feel toward their chapel and its clergy.

A happy faith community will turn out in all but the worst of weather conditions, notwithstanding the inconvenience of rushing home on a wintry Friday to bundle the family into the van for an evening trek in the blustery dark to a distant chapel. The spiritual and social rewards are well worth the hassle, as long as that chapel remains a place where you want to be.

But, as His Self-Centeredness realizes with mounting horror, low or zero attendance means the folks don't want to be there; they're tired of enduring the cult crew's relentless fund-raising and profligate big spending. (Everybody knows that Checkie didn't really need a new organ and that the scandal-scarred SGG School should be self-supporting.) Attending devotions has become a burden, not a joy:
Any excuse, like the weather, will do.
When you don't see yourself as belonging, every time you miss an event, the easier it becomes to skip the next one.  Soon you get comfortable saying the family rosary on cozy Friday evenings after a comforting, hot, home-cooked meal. You become accustomed to the freedom from harassment for more cash from badly educated, arrogant clergy whom you quietly despise. At length, after missing so many Stations, so many evening Masses, it's easy to take a pass on the Maundy Thursday night-watch at a now foreign place where you no longer feel you belong. And where you don't belong, you don't give.

The Gerties' cooling fervor must have terrified "One Hand," for again he overshared in evident anxiety (emphasis ours) :
God bless the men of the Guard of Honor, who watched at the Altar of Repose on Holy Thursday night. We would be happy to have their ladies join them in adoration, as well as to recruit new men for this apostolate .... Like Sampson’s [sic!]* hair, it is a secret of our strength. Our enemies have never managed it. Few friends have matched it. Even though we’re not big on nights anymore, let us never abandon it, lest we lose our chief defense, the source too of so many other blessings, unseen, silent, like the night. 
The cult masters are having trouble filling the roster even for the holy privilege of watching one still hour with our Lord! The situation's so perilous that "One Hand" must brandish the ultimate weapon all desperate cults resort to in times of collapse -- OUR ENEMIES. When the faithful avoid the vigil at the Altar of Repose, His Nervousness is in big, big trouble:

He's lost the people! Fleet Dispossession, on whirring moth-wing, speeds her hurried way to Raggedy Dan's cult center. 
His appeasing words of surrender, "we’re not big on nights anymore," won't help him this year or in 2016, when Easter falls on March 27, ten days earlier than 2015's "early" Easter. If weather patterns hold, the winter of 2016 will be as severe as that he just experienced, arming the disaffected Gerties with all the justification they need to sit it out again, provided they haven't already vacated Dannie's loathsome cult by then.

All the writing on the wall spells an end to the cult masters' high living at the expense of the faithful. They can no longer  make it up as they go.  It'll be tough paying the huge Duke Energy heating bill this year; it'll be far tougher next year. Unless Dannie decides to throw caution to the wind, there won't be a giddy, carefree, decadently luxurious interlude in 2015 at the aggressively upscale Bishop's Lodge in impossibly chic Santa Fe. The prospect of a well-feathered retirement in the artsy, desert Southwest will become yet dimmer. Come to think about it, next year there might not even be enough cash to rent a jackass for the garish Palm-Sunday sideshow: His Asininity will have to stand in for the beast. (Not a soul will notice the substitution, we wager.)

No wonder His Uneasiness bitterly lashed out at the Gerties' apathy: as they steadily grow more weary of the cynical theatrical distractions aimed at separating them from their money, his day of reckoning creeps nearer and nearer.


Spare Dirtbag Dan the painful uncertainty of anticipating the end of the cult gravy train.

LEAVE TODAY!

* As every schoolboy knows, the traditional English spelling of the Nazirite judge of Israel is Samson, not Sampson. The latter form is that of Biblical Greek (Σαμψών). Now, since it's a sure bet that Deficient Dan has even less Greek than his very, very small Latin, we have here another example of his severe malformation.

After all, shouldn't a cleric at least be able to spell the names of popular Biblical figures? We mean, it's not as though he were referencing, say, (for Confraternity-Version readers) Maher-shalal-hash-baz -- although, Dannie should learn that name, for the etymology characterizes the ideal greedy cult cleric of Tradistan: "quick to the plunder, swift to the spoil."

Maybe there's an explanation for the orthographic lapse, one that may be beyond Dannie's customary ignorance and stupidity: Inasmuch as we've enjoined him from celebrating bloody bunny massacres in the Sunday bulletin, maybe his raging, rebelling subconscious conjured up that gruesome scene in Catch-22, where Kid Sampson, a young pilot, is sliced in two by the propeller of a prankster's plane, as in this clip from the Mike Nichols film adaptation.

Sometimes people can't help themselves, can they?


22 comments:

  1. Finished reading the "Bishop's Corner". Two things:

    1. What's up with all the mistakes in spelling & other things? There were so many I thought it was deliberate so someone would comment on it & thus prove that someone was reading his musings.

    2. I'm no expert on organs, but even to my untrained ear, that new organ sure sounded a bit tinny & unimpressive. If that's an improvement over the old organ, what must the old one have sounded like? I also noticed the lack of any reference to the organ. I expected some gushing over it. Maybe he noticed it as well.

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  2. We noticed the multiple typos, too, but the BC printed in the bulletin has cleaned up the boo-boos (at least the ones we sampled, e.g., "feat" and "Cerical."). Who knows what happened: maybe the web site has Dannie's original error- filled copy, which a better-educated lay person cleaned up when he or she produced the bulletin. Weird that no one has the common sense to compare the versions. That must be the "Gertrudian Way" of doing things -- by half measures.

    We thought the same thing about the sound of the organ! At first, we felt it may have been just the recording device, so we asked a friend, who holds a degree in organ performance from a prestigious Lutheran school of music, to evaluate the sound. In his opinion, the problem isn't solely in the recording method: he thinks much of the poor sound quality may originate the instrument itself, especially after he listened to one of the recorded performances we'd saved of the old instrument Dannie got rid of.

    It looks as if Dannie and Cheesy bought another pig in a poke again, and the dumb laity ended up paying. What a waste.

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  3. I also heard the sound of the "new" organ and I would agree with the tinny sound. My guess is that the registration (combination of voices--or in this case, lack of) was poorly chosen. I'm familiar with the piece which was played and while reed (trumpet) sounds are appropriate for the piece, there was no "bottom" to the sound. If the organist were my student, I'd have suggested adding other stops (a 16'+ 8's + Mixture ) to round out the sound. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with the instrument itself--just an unwise choice of registration for the piece.

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  4. Thanks for the analysis.

    We wonder if Checkie was the organist. Dannie's been saying that it's the Cheeseball's organ, and being such a new acquisition, he's probably been monopolizing it.

    If he was the organist, we now have another reason to hold him in contempt. That was the one thing in the world we thought he was proficient at. So should it turn out that he was at the keyboard on the recording, we have another instance of incompetence.

    Maybe someone out in cyberspace who knows the performer could enlighten us?

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  5. Does it matter who the performer was? If the performer was a student, wouldn't Cekada still have been responsible for setting the organ up or telling the student or whoever was playing what to do? If it was Cekada, didn't he practice first to see that all was set up properly? No matter what, this is Tony's toy or baby so the bottom line is that he's responsible. So it proves that he not only doesn't cut it with Latin but also with an organ. Poor thing.

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  6. Point well taken! Phony Tony is a complete loser in every respect. Thanks for putting it all in perspective.

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  7. Ephesians 4

    [26] Be angry, and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your anger. [27] Give not place to the devil. ... [29] Let no evil speech proceed from your mouth; but that which is good, to the edification of faith, that it may administer grace to the hearers.

    Pray more and put an end to diatribes?

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    1. Titus 1

      [10] For there are many disobedient, vain talkers, and seducers...[11] Who must be reproved, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake...13...Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in faith.

      Indeed, we all should pray more, but there are no diatribes here to end, since a diatribe, as now popularly understood, consists of bitter invective. Our just rebukes of the vain, ignorant, clerical loudmouths, on the other hand, are always light and seriocomic. We jest in earnest in hopes that the faithful see these mammonites for what they really are. Maybe when everybody leaves Tradistan, these "clergy" will convert.

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    2. Anynonymous 4/21 6:47 pm, please read the posting from last month, "The (Cash) Cow's Going Dry", and read an exchange between the writer of the blog and an anonymous going from March 18th to the 21st. That discussion makes it pretty clear that the writer of this blog is nothing more than an angry, resentful old man who wants to do nothing but sit around and attack other people who never did him any harm. Sad, really. He seems intelligent, and he could have used his talents to help some traditional Catholic priests somewhere spread the word of God, but instead we get this ...

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    3. And when Anon. 4/21 6:47 pm does read that interchange, young man, he'll find it all sweetness and light. You've hitched your wagon to the wrong star over there, and you know it. You're learning nothing in those 2 hours a day that fool has scheduled. You've got just a little time to break away from the mess you're in before it's too late. Use your online time to get a one-way ticket out of that circus.

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    4. To anonymous 4-23, 12:05 A.M.: According to you, anyone who criticizes someone else for ANY reason whatsoever is an “angry old man,” and that it’s “wrong” to do so. (If that’s the case, then most of the world’s editorialists would be “angry old men”!) Now if you had any data to disprove what was said in the article, you might have a point – but you DON’T. All you can muster is EMPTY CRITICISM, with NO PROOF of your own to offer. It’s just another CLASSIC case of “ignore the message, shoot the messenger” – and it’s also evident that it is the YOU, not the article’s author, who are the “angry old man.”

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    5. Great points, Watcher.

      Anon. 4/23 12:05 AM is a poor soul who wants to lash out because he's made a terrible choice. That's why he projects his anger onto others.

      It's true that Dannie and Tony's antics are enough to make anybody angry, but we refrain from upsetting ourselves and just concentrate on exposing the facts about the duo. Bitter, clueless Anon. 4/23 12:05 AM can't comprehend such equipoise: he doesn't have the right model where he's living. So he can only flail about like a caught mahimahi on the sand, flipping in every direction without rhyme or reason. We say to him, "A hui hou!"

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    6. Dearest Watcher, can you please try to learn to meaning of the phrase "shoot the messenger" and use it correctly? Every time someone disagrees with one of your opinions, you start shouting about "shooting the messenger" without having any idea of what that expression actually means. To "shoot the messenger" means to cause harm to someone who brings bad news, or relays a message from a third party. To criticize you or the genius who runs this site is not "shooting the messenger" because:

      1) Neither you nor the author of this blog are messengers. You are expressing your own opinions. A messenger by definition relays the message of someone else, which neither you nor the author of this blog do.

      2) What is presented on this blog is not news. It's opinion. Someone who disagrees with it is not "shooting the messenger" in the correct meaning of that expression because that expression is only correctly used when someone is relaying news. For example, if someone says, "The stock market fell 10 points today," that's news if it's true. It's an objective fact. But to say, "The people who go to SGG are horrible people" is an opinion. It's not an objective fact. It would be "shooting the messenger" to get angry at the first person because he's only relaying a fact about the stock market. But it would perfectly acceptable to get angry at the second person, because he is expressing a thought that is evil. That is not "shooting the messenger".

      Please do not respond until you thoroughly understand the distinctions and explanations I have given here.

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  8. Dearest Anon 3:03 AM: Is English your first language? The reason I ask is because your 'explanation' is all jumbled up & it's clear that it is you who does not really understand the expression "to shoot the messenger". I'll leave it to the Watcher to go through your points if he wants to waste his time on it, but for now let me 'splain it in a nutshell:

    For starters, you do not have to be just RELAYING a message in order to be a messenger as you assert. I can be the bearer or messenger of my own original news or opinions.

    Also, you're mixed up as to what shoot the messenger means, although your assertion might be partially correct. To shoot the messenger MOSTLY or mainly means that instead of focusing on the message, you focus on the messenger and attack him and completely ignore the message!!! Get it now?

    My advice is to ascertain if the message is correct & disregard the messenger. Have you researched to find if what he says is true? I'd do that before shooting the messenger. Just sayin'.

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  9. Anon. 3:03 AM also is using a popular but fundamentally inaccurate definition of "opinion." He should have heeded his own advice and been more careful in his choice of words.

    The *geniuses* "who run this blog" would like to remind Anon. 3:03 AM that in Scholastic philosophy, one definition of the word opinion is "a conclusion resting on a probable or dialectical truth."

    Hence, the proposition that "the people who go to SGG are horrible people" is not a baseless, subjective affirmation hatched in our fervidly brilliant heads, as the commenter seems to imply. It is a reasoned conclusion flowing from the moral principles based on how good people do act. Furthermore, week after week, we marshal objective facts to buttress our opinion that Tradistan merits no support from right-thinking people. Hence, our message is much more substantive than Anon. 3:03's imperfect understanding allows.

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  10. To anon. 4-25, 3:03 A.M.: “Ignore the message, shoot the messenger” may not be TECHNICALLY the right term to apply (perhaps “ad hominem” is better). Although the term may have originally meant something similar to what you say it does, nowadays it is generally understood to mean the same thing as “ad hominem,” i.e., responding to an argument by attacking a person’s character, rather than to the content of his arguments.” (By the way, thanks to anon. 4-25, 6:02 A.M. for responding that to you, and I also concur with him in wondering whether English is your first language or not.)

    At any rate, your comment is, again, EMPTY CRITICISM as well as being TOTALLY IRRELEVANT. If you have nothing better to say other than calling the author of the blog “an angry, resentful old man,” or lecturing both the author and me about what “messenger” means, etc., then I suggest that you crawl back to the sludge pot of mutated protoplasm from which you came – and don’t come back until you have something INTELLIGENT and RELEVANT to say.

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  11. Watcher, after I'd posted to Anon 3:03 I thought that I should have brought up 'ad hominem', then thought better of it so didn't repost because if he couldn't get the basic meaning of shooting the messenger, then how would he understand ad hominem? Glad you brought it up as that's a much better picture of what's happening here.

    Anon 3:03, if you're still lurking around, if you have proof that what was reported by The Reader about what went on at SGG is totally false, then I'm all ears - or in this case- all eyes. I'd be most grateful if you can set the record straight as I am an outsider & at this point believe all the reports I've read. Come forward with your proof, otherwise you are the one gravely sinning by attacking anyone who is trying to get these clergy to come clean & fly right to truly give glory to God and stop with the flagrant, perverse, silly, ostentatious caricature of Catholicism. Let's hear your proof.

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  12. Not to change the subject, but I always wondered what happened to the religious who used to do their weekly bulletins about ten or so years ago? Each bulletin was always so edifying. I used to download and print many of them out. Next thing I knew, she was gone.

    Same thing with the secretaries at SGG. There was one named Kathy that I especially liked but she didn't last long.

    Viola

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    1. We imagine they left in exasperation at all the disorganization. One man who prepared the bulletin for one of the satellite chapels wrote us once to complain about all the last-minute changes, some coming in on Sunday mornings. We imagine it's the same down there, only worse.

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    2. The woman named Kathy (and her two twin sons) left SGG some tome ago. One of her boys, by the way, was the one who got beaten with a wooden paddle simply for missing his homework assignment (the principal actually BROKE the paddle while beating him). When the boy was beaten, Cekada and the principal had other teachers called in to “ witness the punishment.” Both the mother and her sons, by the way, are no longer practicing traddies (Surprise, surprise!!!).

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    3. It's a wonder that any normal people still stay in sick-oTradistan.

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