Nailbiting Time

It’s Advent, perhaps the most spiritual and most nervewracking season of the year!

Anticipation of celebration, and anticipation of death and the end of the world, are linked together. You are commanded to declutter your worldview and straighten up your ways. At the exact same time, you’re doing that physically, both in your house and at work.

But beyond the busy labor and the panicked realization that you’ve forgotten to do some important stuff, there is peace and a new beginning.

Via the Anchoress, Msgr. Charles Pope gives a nice thorough scriptural reflection on Advent readiness.

North: A Little Anime about Where Not to Emigrate

Apparently, North Korea held a repatriation program for Japanese of Korean heritage back in the early 1960’s. Since it really stunk to live as a Korean in Japan and never be able to become a citizen without changing your name to something Japanese, and since there were a lot of gullible Communist-sympathizing Japanese, a lot of people took the North Korean offer and moved to Pyongyang.

North is an anime about just how bad a decision this was. (The trailer’s in English.) Being sneered at is annoying, but it beats a concentration camp.

Via AintItCool.

Annoying Westboro Tachmonites at Funeral in Fairborn

Yeppers, America’s least favorite non-Christian religious group, the Westboro “Baptist” Church, is coming to Fairborn, Ohio to spread the Tachmonite word of hatred and conspicuous immaturity. Since Fairborn includes one of the oldest and most important Air Force bases in the United States, this seems like a Bad Plan. But then, their previous appearance at the funeral of a murdered Vandalia Marine woman wasn’t a good plan, either. The Patriot Riders and other folks will probably just crowd them out, and that will be that.

Information on Jesse Snow Jr.’s funeral at Mary Help of Christians, and the previous day’s viewing at Fairborn High School, is included in the article linked.

Sorry I’ve Been in Such a Rotten Mood This Week

I’ll try to adjust my attitude over Thanksgiving weekend. Luckily, I don’t have to fly. 🙂

Of course, if the North Korea situation blows up, turkey may not be the only thing that’s cooked…. But the TSA says radiation’s good for us, so extra-crispy us is nothing to worry about.

Let Me Fix That for You

(Hide your eyes, kiddies. As with the TSA and condom controversy posts, there’s an adult word coming up.)

The New Liturgical Movement had some nice videos up today of the Dancing Procession of Echternach, Luxembourg — which is in honor of St. Willibrord. (A contemporary of St. Boniface, also from England.) So I looked up the saint’s Wikipedia article.

Somebody had been trying to write about St. Willibrord defiling a male pagan god’s sacred island, and had instead written, “He deflowered the god.”

“Anatomical impossibility” isn’t a justification for edits that you get to write very often. 🙂

I Don’t Get Why Some Don’t Get This

One of the more shameful aspects of the whole TSA goatgrope is the active opposition to any sense of modesty or privacy. I’m sure that there are some people who really aren’t bothered by being treated like a plastic Kewpie doll that doesn’t have anything to show. But even if one lacks a visceral need for control of one’s body and how it is shown to others (and is it healthy if you don’t?), it’s still a fairly basic value in terms of human dignity in society.

So it’s disturbing to see bureaucrats not understand this, or pundits that support the TSA. It’s even more disturbing to see people who oppose the TSA not understand this. The querulous demand comes up again and again: “What’s so different about this? Why does this upset people?” How on earth can you even begin to respond, if ‘naked pictures’ and ‘groping and squeezing genitalia’ doesn’t say it all?

Commenters end up having to relate the most personal feelings of vulnerability and fear, things which one should never have to call to mind again. They’re things that shouldn’t even have to be said, because one assumes fellow feeling across a whole culture and is startled to find it not there. But even after people have poured out their souls (and in some cases, their tales of sexual assault), there’s still this total incomprehension. You see men limply conclude that women just have some kind of modesty thing (ignoring their manly male commenters who object on terms of their own modesty). Women pundits of this kind don’t seem to want to think about it at all, or make some kind of lame comment about body shame. I wouldn’t worry if this were a standard distribution, but a lot of people claim not to understand. (Though as people started to realize the full extent of the “patdowns”, some folks suddenly stopped talking about how they’d be perfectly fine with it.)

The interesting thing is that nudists, and neopagans used to going ‘skyclad’, seem to object as strongly to the TSA’s assault on common decency as the average person does. I saw one nudist comment that he would have no problem walking naked through an airport if it were his idea, but that being naked at government command was different and shameful. There’s a crucial difference between being allowing other people certain things, and being forced to allow something.

If the government wants to transgress the normal laws of social behavior in our society, it’s not the people who object who have a duty to defend their position.

(And if that Pistole guy doesn’t wipe the smirk off his face sometime soon, somebody will have to do it for him. Who the heck gave this guy management of anything? He’s a jerk who obviously gets a charge out of all this, as you can tell from the way his excrement-eating grin has slowly grown from a tiny deniable sneer to outright glee. I’d say he disrespects women, except that he treats the male interviewers with even more outright contempt.)

Reading Comprehension Test II

The deliberate and continuous misreading of the Pope’s little pastoral talk about curing souls, as okaying condom use, when the man comes out and says they’re not — well, it’s not the first time.

Humanae Vitae was billed by wishful thinkers in the media and the Church as the encyclical that would allow birth control, and maybe even abortion.

(Pope Paul VI reiterated and explained basic Church teaching about various life issues, and got a firestorm of criticism from the wishful thinkers — for not writing what they’d promised themselves he’d write.)

Not eating meat on Fridays throughout the year was never dropped.

(The US bishops okayed doing “another penitential practice” instead, if you felt like it. American Catholics heard in the news that they didn’t have to do any penitential practices on Friday, and most still believe it.)

The “new Mass” was always supposed to be said ad orientem, toward the east, as a careful read of the rubrics reveals.

(American Catholics heard in the news that all the altars had to be turned around or destroyed or replaced with new altars, thanks to wishful thinking.)

And so on. Pretty much everything, that in actual Church documents was described as an option, has become an obligation somewhere. Pretty much everything that was described as the normal thing has been practically outlawed in the US. And why? All smoke and mirrors, with no theological or legal backing, and only kept in place by keeping both clergy and people ignorant of the primary sources.

And it still goes on, though it’s harder to make it work these days. Not impossible, though, as this story has shown. All sorts of things are supposed to be allowed any day now, and people repeatedly fall for it because it’s in print. Then people get mad at the pope for not making all their (creepy and un-Christian) magical unicorn wishes come true. (Or they oppose what’s supposedly being done, and make fools out of themselves by noisily blaming the popes for things they never actually said or did.) The media makes the message, and who cares whether it’s true.

Killers of the Innocent

North Korea shelled a civilian South Korean island today. I guess their last few acts of war weren’t a big enough hint that the dear leaders want a foreign war.

I guess nothing says “I’ll be better for you than South Korea” like setting your house on fire and killing your family with artillery shells. Yeah.

World History Class Skipped the Important Bits Again

I’ve read a lot about the reasons Japan and South Korea have just a tad bit of historical unhappiness with each other. I’ve read about WWII, and comfort women, and the Japanese empress who liked to collect ears, and the way Korean kings liked to catch and kill Japanese pirates. And yeah, Korea allied with the Mongols while Japan fought them. And so on.

But nobody mentioned that the last queen of Korea, Queen Min (or Myeongsong), was hacked to death in the palace gardens in 1895, in front of all the diplomats and everybody, by a pack of fifty or so Japanese samurai. (They killed a couple of other women too, in case they were her.) In an operation organized by the Japanese ambassador, who was (apparently) rewarded by becoming a privy councilor. But the king’s father may also have been involved, as he had apparently tried to assassinate Min several times before, albeit in a (relatively) nice little palace intrigue sort of way.

Oh, and why did they hack her to death? Because she had spent the last umpteen years pushing modernization and alliance with all the countries she could dig up, in a desperate attempt to keep Korea from being taken over by Japan (or China, but Japan’s the one that gobbled them up, because they won the Sino-Japanese War). The further Korea progressed in tech and the more allies it made, the harder it would be for Japan to take over. With her gone, they could exert more pressure on the king and foment more chaos between factions. (And of course, a lot of anti-Western Korean factions didn’t like the queen either, so not everybody shed tears.)

I’m thinking this was just a tad bit more relevant than Empress Jingu’s disgusting ear collection…. Bah.

Well, This Site Sure Is Different….

There’s a site called viikii.net that apparently does nothing but link to YouTube videos of Asian shows, and then use software to put fan-provided subtitles on them, in a ton of different languages. It’s an interesting approach. Not sure if it’s legal or not… but it uses up a lot less bandwidth than torrents of fansubs do, I imagine.

I found a fun South Korean historical police drama on this site. Chosun Police takes place during late Victorian or early Edwardian times, I think in the city later called Seoul. It seems to model itself deliberately on CSI and similar shows, but confines its detectives to traditional Asian forensics (there was plenty of that) and Victorian technology. The world is fascinating, the characters fun, the cinematography beautiful, and the mysteries challenging and full of twists. The show’s been running for three seasons; this site links to <a season 3. The cast apparently changes somewhat from season to season, which allows for characters to change and grow.

Given all the Asian TV costume dramas of various types, and all the Mexican costume drama telenovelas that you see from time to time, and the eternal US appetite for UK costume drama, why do we hardly ever have anything historical that’s longer than a miniseries? Except for the odd Western, like Lonesome Dove: The Series, or that one educational cartoon set in the American Revolution, you have to go to HBO to see even something sensationalist like The Tudors or Rome. It just seems sad.

Reading Comprehension Test

Amy Welborn has read the whole Seewald book, because she got an early copy for reviewing it. However, she and others who have the book in hand were/are under an embargo not to talk about it until the book comes out. So was L’Osservatore Romano, btw. (And thus LOR completes its transformation into a tabloid newspaper.)

Amy’s first post on the kerfuffle, which includes links. Her second post, which complains about the embargo breakage.

Janet Smith: It’s about conversion, not condoms!

Jimmy Akin: “….L’Osservatore Romano omits material in which Benedict clarified his statement on condoms in a follow-up question.”

I could find a lot more, but it’s probably more efficient for people to find a roundup post.

The moral of the story: Don’t believe the junk the mainstream media puts out about churches right before Christmas and Easter. Every year, a huge amount of misrepresentation goes on, and it almost always turns out to be nothing with whipped nothing and a Maraschino nothing on top.

Second, if they interview a cardinal or a “Vatican insider” for an article, and he starts talking excitedly about how this means the Catholic Church is finally changing after 2000 years, he’s a crank with a pet theory. The reporter is just using him to get a dramatic quote, or the cardinal is running around trolling reporters in order to push his pet theory.

Pioneer Woman’s Husband’s Side

Oklahoma takes its local history seriously!

Drummond Ranch article.

Article about one of the Drummonds.

A more recent article about the ranch.

Jeong Yak-yong: Korean Catholic Confucian mystery-action drama!

John Jeong Yak-yong was apparently one of those Renaissance men who typify the best of Asian scholarship. He was an influential Confucian, who became one of the earliest Koreans to convert to Catholicism by “reading his way in”. He then worked to show his countrymen how Western ideas could fit into Eastern systems of thought, in a new school of thought called Silhak. In his ever-so-copious spare time, he fought government corruption and crime as a secret inspector for the Korean crown. And that’s just his real life.

He may have renounced his faith during the later persecution of Catholics and otherwise Westernized or inconvenient Korean people, by Queen Jeongsun’s government. Then again, he might not have. It doesn’t seem to be clear, although his being allowed to live in exile is sort of evidence; but then again, a lot of Asian governments have been reluctant to kill really eminent scholars. He wrote over 500 books while in exile in Kangin.

He was the uncle of St. Paul Chong Hasang and his sister St. Jung Hye, the brother of Augustine Jeong Yak-jong, and the brother-in-law of St. Yu Cecilia, all martyred for the faith.

(I thing Chong, Jung, and Jeong are all variant transliteration spellings of the same surname, but don’t quote me on it.)

Augustine wrote the first Korean catechism written in the Korean characters of the people instead of the Chinese characters used by scholars, and was killed in the 1801. As a layman, St. Paul Chong Hasang helped reorganize the shattered remnants of the Church in Korea after this persecution. Joining the diplomatic service, he made contact with Beijing’s bishop and repeatedly wrote letters to the pope pleading that he send them a bishop. In 1831, his efforts bore fruit and their first bishop arrived. He began studying with the bishop to become a priest, but the 1839 persecution swept both him and the bishop away. He wrote an apologia for Catholicism and submitted it to his judge, who noted that while what he had written was right, it was his duty to do what the emperor said. The saint replied, “I have told you that I am a Christian, and will be one until my death.” He then underwent many tortures with a calm face (showing that he still possessed all the virtues of a Confucian gentleman as well as of a Christian) and died the same way.

In 2009, MBC released an 8 episode South Korean mystery show where he’s the sleuth. It’s called Jeong-Yak Yong, Jung Yak Yong, Korean Mystery Detective, or Korean Mystery Detective Jung Yak Yong. Obviously we need this on EWTN right away. 🙂

Seriously, though, the story of the Korean Catholic Church is full of drama and interest. I’m really surprised that there aren’t any vast epics being made to tell their story. There’s people like St. Kim A-gi Agatha, a convert who had a lot of trouble learning the prayers and doctrine, and thus when arrested told the police, “I don’t know anything but Jesus and Mary.” But when asked if she would renounce them, she bravely said, “I would rather die than reject them,” and went on to withstand torture. Her fellow prisoners baptized her when she was sent back to the cell, and her faith and bravery was multiplied even more by the graces of the Sacrament.

Kyrie: Korean-American Catholic Drama show

While the media is demonstrating their total inability to understand Catholic teachings on sexuality (and demonstrating that it’s not just male prostitutes who are having a hard time understanding where to point their rare moral urges without inadvertently committing evil), let’s look at something a bit more amusing.

Kyrie is apparently the product of some Korean-American Catholic kids who watch a lot of K-drama, the Korean equivalent of J-drama and telenovelas. This seems to be half a parody, half serious drama. There are several episodes on YouTube. The first one starts with some voiceover introducing the characters while they pray — and there’s some acute observation of the kind of kids who participate in youth groups. Not great sound or pacing, but it’s not professional, either. So take a look; I think you’ll find some interesting stuff.

This got put up back in 2008, but it’s new to me. 🙂

Now, back to my search engine quest for some weepy Korean Catholic saint miniseries, possibly with heroic horseback riding through majestic scenery….