Well! Check out this delectable opinion piece which took me completely by surprise. My American partner-in-blogging crime, Leslie, has typed an exquisite and catholic critique of the student leadership training camp. "Camp No More!" quoth he. Scarily eloquent, the op-ed was published in its entirety in today's Le Provocateur, the student newspaper. With this exception: as Leslie tells me, after "they have two choices with regard to deviant behavior by students," it should note "(many of whom, not insignificantly, identify as Irish)." Nope, the Gaels, don't get off either. The censors would have been right were offense meant, but astute readers will find the remark relevant to the argument presented. So for just this once--and this once shan't endure, for my birthday's coming up on October 4, whence the glory shall return to its rightful repositor--

Be awed at the sight of his prowess!

I have written a sonnet, which was received to some acclaim at the d'Alzon Library's inaugural poetry reading on Friday. Cunina, Vallonia, Collatina, Mellonia, and Fructesa are all minor Roman goddesses St. Augustine mentions in Book IV of The City of God. The accompanying painting is Piero di Cosimo's The Discovery of Honey; though perhaps given to a different mood, it is an admirable Renaissance piece which, since it is on display in the Worcester Art Museum, I have had the immaculate pleasure of spending a few minutes contemplating in solitude.

Sonnet CXLV

Cunina, soft, safe valley; I was born,
She held me, care devout, immutable.
Vallonia, I walked her ways that morn,
Lived, satisfied by rivers wide and full.
That afternoon, with Collatina, I
Found paths into the hills, saw as from far.
Only Mellonia lives there, and by
Late day, I gorged thick sustenance from her.
Raw honey, yellow pale, down wrists and squeezed,
Made troubling nourishment without a cup.
Mellonia was good for talk, but teased,
Amused her honey was such messy sup.
Last light I left; Fructesa found me, seized
Me off to orchards, fruits I could pick up.

What a glorious primary night! This is getting to sound like a Same Old Story, but Christine O'Donnell is different. I have had my eye on the fine woman for some time, and in more ways than one. Forget Sarah Palin: Miss O'Donnell, 41 and still available, is quite the looker. Anyway, unlike some of the other candidates who've coasted to victory with the support of the Tea Party, Miss O'Donnell, unlike her heterodox brother in faith Michael Castle, has long been a model socially conservative Catholic politician. Unsuccessful, yes, but I shall always have a place in my heart for perennial candidates. A rare triumphs, and a triumph over a liberal Republican who's been a fixture in Delaware politics for decades, sends a sweet rush of vital blood through my arteries. Can Miss O'Donnell actually win the general election? The odds are against her, but in 2010, this singular year, she's got a fighting chance against the little-known Democrat, Chris Coons. And even if win she cannot, last evening's victory is the latest sign that Americans have firmly resolved, with the assistance of their lackluster President to be sure, to have at least one good political party. (Chris Young, the Democratic long shot I was rooting for for mayor of the beautiful metropolis of Providence, Rhode Island, easily lost, but for candidates as good as Mr. Young I expected nothing more from our country's social liberal party).

There is even good news from my own heathen-choked congressional district. Tom Wesley, a veteran whom MassResistance and this amusingly unprofessional-looking conservative voter's resource assure us is pro-life and pro-family, has one over the more lukewarm Jay Fleitman (who still deserves some credit; he's a Northamptoner. My fair city has a paucity of men with even a degree of common sense, so I would prefer not to send this one away). Scott Brown won district 2, and I have good hopes that Mr. Wesley can do the same.

In general, my studies divert my attention from practical politics, and lead me vainly cursing our liberal democratic order in the presence of my close friends. But it was in fact one of my latest philosophical readings that drove me to check up on this election cycle's socially conservative candidates once more. Tradition-minded conservative philosophers primarily rememberJean-Jacques Rousseau (it's getting cold, so I'd better give him warm attire) for his staunch belief that men are naturally equal (though not in the same way Hobbes, Locke, and their ilk aver), his advocacy of direct democracy, and his disbelief in human nature that foreshadowed Marxism. Under the tutelage of Assumption's atypical department of Political Science, however, this Citizen of Northampton has increasingly come to appreciate that Citizen of Geneva's heavily unpopular rejection of the Enlightenment as harmful morals and conducive to every sort of pride and pettiness. Few are the philosophers who praise virtue and provincial simplicity with like elegance; we Christians certainly have much to learn from his wise writings, and may delight in his unparalleled candor.

When I read Rousseau's Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero, an obscure reading we didn't have time for in a course I took on the philosopher, a stunning passage on the necessity of heroism in politics reminded me of the usual, nagging objection modern heathens and their collaborators (acting as much from spiritual sloth as liberal conviction) advance against encouragement of moral behavior and discouragement of the opposite by a regime: They just want to tell other people what to do/think. This one sentence rejoinder serves to delegitimate the only reasonable goal any government can pursue- general happiness in accordance with virtue. (To the immediate objections of government's role in establishing law and order, pursuing even that goal only makes sense as a condition for allowing virtue to flourish securely; a human being who has effaced his dignity with vice and debauchery suffers, I dare say, no real loss if he is deprived of his misused goods, or even his life). After saying the wise man's primary concern is "the care of his own felicity" (I myself have higher hopes for the philosopher than Rousseau and his forbearer Socrates), he attests:

The views of the true Hero extend further. The happiness of men is his object, and it is to this sublime labor that he devotes the great soul he received from Heaven... The Philosopher can give the Universe some salutary instructions, but his lessons will never correct either the Great who scorn them or the Populace which does not hear them at all. Men are not governed in that way by abstract views; one makes them happy only by constraining them to be so, and one must make them experience happiness in order to make them love it. Those are the occupations and talents of the Hero. It is often with a strong hand that he puts himself in a position to receive the Benedictions of men, whom he first constrains to bear the yoke of laws in order to subject them to the authority of reason in the end.

Never have I heard such lusciously illiberal sentiments in words so beautiful, words so eternal. Aye, but for this sad Republic, mired in deplorable relativism, too inert to oppose evil, infatuated with lugubrious, monotonous progress, and to this day convinced of the righteousness of the founding ideals which have inspired our moral perdition, there are no Heroes, and we oughtn't hope for any. Honestly! Lately I've been reading through St. Augustine's The City of God, on which I have a class (and it is, at last, turning me into an Augustinian; I just couldn't appreciate the teenage whininess of his Confessions). I've only read to book 4 of 22, and he already devoted so many pages to demonstrating that Rome's decline and the depravity that caused it not only was not the fault of the Christians, but began long before the birth of Christ. Were I a Muslim today, penning a contemporary argument on Augustine's model, and perhaps entitled The Umma of God would not be difficult. Though, to be sure, I believe Islamic moral teachings far less just than those our Catholic doctrines, the principal conservative loudmouths of our day inconceivably treat Islamic extremism, even when nonviolent, as a graver moral threat to America than the lax Christians and (numerically smaller contingent of) nonbelievers who either pollute our society with filth and immoral behavior or, in the name of freedom, reason, and tolerance, refuse to act against those who do. Indeed: as much as I disapprove of the Muslim understanding of modesty, predestination, the relationship between religion and reason, etcetera, it is hard to believe America would be less virtuous as a theocratic Islamic state than under the present set of Christian liberals and their various friends.

(In this condemnatory context, so to divert some due amount of the blame from generic foes-in-argument to myself, I note that over the weekend I at last purchased and thoroughly enjoyed the first volume of Ei Itou's Tetragrammaton Labyrinth, a fine manga exemplifying both the yuri genre and nuns with gun subgenre of the girls with guns genre; while I appreciate the series for its artfulness, touching relationships, and quasi-Catholic eye candy, there are some who would insist my fanship a peccadillo. In any case, the theology isn't very accurate... see lovely illustrations of such here and here).

While Catholics not infected by Enlightenment liberalism must continue to speak boldly against our diversity of errors and evils granted immunity, we must also recognize our country has always had a broadly Christian populace, and a self-governing one at that, and, as of now, we blew it. To return to Rousseau, I would indeed go so far as to say, to render our state of affairs into the children's program duality, far from electing a Hero, but two short years ago we Americans elected over ourselves no less than a Villain: a villain much more terrifying, I nostalgically add, than Hanna-Barbera's The Hooded Claw!

Ah! The warmth of summer is fleeting! Summer vacation being caput, it is time for some of us to resume our academic pursuits. Whilst I, Atobe, am as much taken with athletics as that noble labor, and often find myself within the plight of occupational two-timing, our brawnless Crusader assures me that my plight is not his own. For once more leisured than his aristocratic peer, so engrossed was he within his studies, required or otherwise, that I, Atobe, am again to type a post on his behalf.

Assumption is one of those rare college where a student of philosophy and theology begins his semester with Robert Nisbet and St. Augustine, Pierre Manent and Virgil. However, my familiarity with this set is tantamount to boredom, so instead I shall delve in to Leslie's leisure reading.

First, we're going back. Way back. Over the Labor Day weekend, my compatriot devoured his first ever light novel, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The light and fluffy text, reading like a Japanese variation on your American Goosebumps, is the first of Nagaru Tanigawa's ten-volume saga on the irrepressible heroine. Bored, quixotic, and "Jenius with a J" as Leslie puts it, here is how Suzumiya-san introduces herself on the first day of high school:

I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, sliders, or espers here, come join me. That is all.

(Found that pic, incidentally, when I was searching under Goosebumps. Yeah, she's that pretty.) I, Atobe, know my otaku compadre already discussed the corresponding anime, but brilliance of this intensity merits a sustained propaganda. After a few irritable weeks of trying out dull, "normal" clubs, Suzumiya's classmate Kyon suggests she start her own club. And so begins the SOS Brigade, or Save the World by Overloading it with Fun Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade. Forced to explain what the club's about, she says, To find aliens, time travelers, and espers and to have fun with them! Unbeknownst to Suzumiya-san, the three members she ropes in after Kyon are... an alien, a time traveler, and an esper, with whom she has altogether too much fun. In the manner of Cervantes's Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha and Toole's Ignatius J. Reilly, Haruhi inadvertently brings about the impossible by virtue of her very eccentricity. As the members reveal to Kyon they (and possibly the entire world with them) were created three years ago by a subconscious act of Haruhi's consciousness. As the Koizumi the esper explains, Why do you think espers such as ourselves and characters such as Mikuru Asahina [time traveler] and Yuki Nagato [alien] exist in this world? Because Suzumiya wished for it. Given her ability, Haruhi's underlings carefully conceal their powers from her, lest she comes to believe aliens, time travelers, and espers are common and the world is overrun by them, while still keeping her from giving up on the ordinary world and creating a new one in its place.

Me? Ugh! I, Atobe, have had quite enough of this Melancholy. In Japan, see, the series has sold 4.5 million copies, so it's little better than Harry Potter or Twilight amongst our teenyboppers. Still one of my intellectual caliber cannot deny the light novel's subtle Genius (with a G). When I see the American paperback cover, I cannot but paraphrase Zarathustra:

Behold, Tanigawa-san is a herald of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud; but this lightning is called Haruhi.

Over(wo)man or not, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a wonderful read for the philosophically-minded or the despiser of big words. Pick up a copy at your local comic shop today!

It seems I, Atobe, am almost out of time. Certainly an injustice to Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Rousseau's Discourse on Heroic Virtue, but I shall leave those for Leslie to write on once he is finished reliving his teenage years. So, too, shall I leave to him Yotsuba&! 1, should he then insist on reliving his childhood as well.

Be awed at the sight of my prowess!