Quote of the Day (John Buchan, on Atheism)

"I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support." –John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, statesman and novelist (The Thirty-Nine Steps) in a speech to the Law Society of Upper Canada, February 21,1936; published in his book Canadian Occasions (1940)

That quote was later used by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen in an article in Look Magazine in its December 14, 1955 issue. It remains as true now as it did then.

Quote of the Day (Rod Stewart, on Wedding Rachel Hunter)

“I’ve been tamed. I've put my last banana in the fruit bowl."—Rod Stewart, following his marriage to model Rachel Hunter on December 15, 1990, quoted in John Walsh, “The Saturday Profile: Rod Stewart, Rock Star: Do Ya Still Think I’m Sexy?” The Guardian, December 5, 1998

Do I even need to write that the couple separated in 1999? I guess you can say that for Rod Stewart, this relationship devolved from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” to (given his recent gravitation toward what a friend of mine once termed “Grandma’s Music”) “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

None of us should be surprised that the relationships of entertainers last about as long as summer fireflies. Compared with the eight-day marriage of Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips (see my post from the other day), the union of Stewart and New Zealand supermodel Rachel Hunter amounted to an entirety.

(Before we go any further, a question: what does a young woman have to do to graduate from being just a model to being a “supermodel”? A Sports Illustrated appearance? Million-dollar contracts? What, exactly?)

What continually gets me, though, is how silly entertainers sound when they profess eternal fealty in public. It’s like what someone told me when I asked him why so many CEOs spout optimism about their firms when financial results tell a far different story: “They’re caught up in the moment—they can’t help themselves.”

Among the people who haven’t been able to “help themselves,” for instance, is Brad Pitt, who praised his beaming honey in the audience at one awards show as “my angel.” Who was this seraphim? Angelina Jolie? Jennifer Aniston? No, try Gwyneth Paltrow, about 14 years ago, right after their Seven came out.

On another such occasion, Jim Carrey spotted his beloved (no, not Renee Zellwegger or Jenny McCarthy—perhaps it was Lauren Holly?) down the aisle, then pronounced, before millions worldwide watching on TV, “I would slay dragons for you.”

An easy promise to make—no dragons have been around since St. George, to my knowledge—but when it comes to something harder, like sticking with the person he loved after their 10th fight over mirror time, Carrey had no desire to go the distance. As all my married relatives and friends (nearly all of whom are married longer than Stewart, Pitt or Carrey) have told me, marriage requires inordinate patience, even hard work.

But you have to ask yourself, why was Stewart so confident that his relationship would last? His own prior history with Britt Ekland, Kelly Emberg, Alana Hamilton, and God knows who else didn’t exactly inspire optimism about his connubial endurance.

Neither did the age difference between him and his toothsome blond bride. Once, in a live version of the immortal song about his youthful love for what would now be termed a “cougar,” “Maggie May,” he joked that his wife was still in diapers at the time it was recorded. Put another way: she was 21 and he was 45 when they wed.

At some point, Ms. Hunter was bound to look at the man who still thought of himself as a bantam rooster and conclude that he was getting long in the tooth. Though marketers are fond of telling us that today’s youth are not as loyal to brands as earlier generations, I’m afraid the same holds true for how long they stay with older partners. That meant Ms. Hunter would, at some point or other, join Cheryl Tiegs, Christie Brinkley, Cindy Crawford, and others among the legion of MCSs (Maritally Challenged Supermodels).

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Holds Firm Against Extending Slavery)

December 13, 1860—For the second time in four days, Abraham Lincoln did what virtually no prior President-elect had done—influence the course of legislation before he took the oath of office—by urging a member of his own state’s delegation not to yield so much on compromise that he would break his party’s major plank: curbing the expansion of slavery.

Lincoln’s election the month before had spurred secessionist impulses in the South. One week after Lincoln’s second message, South Carolina would vote to secede from the Union. Five more Southern states would join her by the time Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861.

If Lincoln’s pre-inaugural intervention in legislation was extraordinary, it was because the times themselves were. Perhaps the best explanation of why comes from historian Elizabeth Varon of the University of Virginia. This past weekend, I saw her on a C-Span panel, “The Nation Before and After the Civil War,” in which she discussed how, after years in which disunion had been dismissed with a shudder because of the prospect of vast bloodshed that would follow in its wake, influential Southerners now imagined a scenario where disunion became thinkable, without the terrors so long ago )(and, it turned out, accurately) envisioned.

Upping the stakes in this situation: the sea change in American parties. The Republican Party, having come into existence only six years before after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had just won its first Presidential election.

But that race was the most sectionally divided in American history to that point. Lincoln won the Electoral College vote in a landslide, but not a single Southern state. In fact, his name did not even appear on the ballot in a number of these states. Whatever unionist sentiment was represented in these states divided between John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s longtime Illinois rival, both of whom were prepared to compromise, in some form, with the forces of slavery (including extending the old slave-free line of the Missouri Compromise west to the Pacific).

A new party, then, was taking over the national government--or what remained of one, since many Southerners on Capitol Hill had either departed already or were making no bones about doing so. But two years before Lincoln would tell Congress in his annual message, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew,” he was already acting on this belief in coping with this unprecedented crisis.

Four days after counseling Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” Lincoln wrote essentially the same thing from Springfield on December 13 to another friend on Capitol Hill from the same state, Congressman Elihu Washburne, in a short letter marked “Private and Confidential.”

Washburne had written Lincoln on December 10, warning that William Seward, a former rival for the Republican nomination who was about to become his Secretary of State, was “misrepresenting your position” with respect to slavery, in an attempt to conciliate the slaveholding South.

Lincoln would have none of it, writing in a nearly identical manner as the one he’d taken with Trumbull: “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends from demoralizing themselves and our cause by entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort on ‘slavery extension.’ There is no possible compromise upon it but which puts us under again, and leaves all our work to do over again…. On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”

In a way, Lincoln was surprised both that secessionist advocates could misconstrue his intentions concerning slavery and that he needed to say anything further on the subject. Ever since re-entering politics six years before, he had qualified his adamant, fiercely argued brief against permitting slavery into Western territories with an equal insistence that he would not interfere with it where it already existed. He had said this so long and so often, he told Northern congressional advocates of compromise, that he couldn’t believe that it needed to be said again.

For once, this most eminently rational of men was being naïve. Just as the Soviet Union would react with anger--and, often, refusal to negotiate seriously--when American Presidents criticized human-rights violations in their country, so the South lashed out over any criticism of “the peculiar institution.” Both cases might have been a century apart, but the principle remained the same for the U.S.S.R. and the slaveholding South: moral criticism undercut the very foundations of their legitimacy, even if opponents professed not to want to take military action against areas where these violations continued.

Quote of the Day (Dennis Hopper, on One of His Marriages)

“The first seven days were pretty good. The eighth day was the bad one.”—Actor Dennis Hopper (1936-2010), on his eight-day marriage in 1970 to singer Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, quoted in Paul Harris, “Hellraiser Dennis Hopper Dies From Cancer,” The Guardian, May 30, 2010

Quote of the Day (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, on Advent vs. “The Gods of Our Time”)

“People of today have not grown. Technology and commerce have become a law unto themselves, which threatens to destroy the human person. They raise themselves up and their demons populate the heavens as the gods of our time….And in the knowledge of such degradation of the human person, there comes a great hope for a new kind of person, for a rebirth, for the future. Whether one sees this person as a political, moral, intellectual, a warrior, or the man of peace, there is basically one concern– the new person of the future. The human person must not go under, but must triumph. The powers of this world must neither tread the person down nor enslave him. He must remain lord of the world, lord of the future.”—German theologian and anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), November 29, 1931, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, edited and translated by Edwin Robertson

Flashback, December 1965: “Charlie Brown Christmas” Airs

Forty-five years ago this past week, Charles Schulz’ adaptation of his Peanuts comic strip, A Charlie Brown Christmas, aired on CBS, earning Peabody and Emmy Awards and, by spawning more than a dozen follow-up specials, becoming a cornerstone of its franchise.

Jazz fans know the show for another reason: its soundtrack lifted to even greater prominence the pianist-composer Vince Guaraldi, whose “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” had landed him a Grammy a couple of years before.

For years, as one of Guaraldi’s fans, I would listen to the "Charlie Brown Christmas" CD or hear tunes from it on the radio or at a coffeeshop. Or I might hear one of the cover versions by admirers such as Shawn Colvin, Sarah MacLachlan or George Winston.

But until this week, I had never understood how the music was used in the special itself, because I had never seen the special in its entirety, believe it or not.

Then the other day, seeing the CD and DVD packaged together and on sale at my local Starbucks, I was seized by an irresistible impulse to buy it. Since then, I’ve watched the DVD twice. Before the season is out, I wouldn’t be surprised if I watched it twice more--I liked the show so much.

Consider the opening song, “Christmastime Is Here.” The lyrics, by executive producer Lee Mendelson, speak of “happiness and cheer,” but Guaraldi’s melancholy melody stands in lonely opposition to them—in much the same way that Charlie Brown, virtually alone among the children, wonders what the impending holiday, with all its blatant commercialism, is all about.

(In fact, Charlie Brown feels like a younger version of the depressive who questioned “To be or not to be”--except that, instead of receiving obeisance as the Prince of Denmark, this angst-ridden little boy from Middle America is universally derided as a blockhead by the other, happier, but less thoughtful children.)

Amazingly, CBS executives hated virtually everything about the special when it was previewed for them a few weeks before broadcast: the lack of a laugh track, the use of actual children’s voices (often untrained), humor deemed too sophisticated for children (in a portent of our current economic crisis, after Lucy complains that she gets stupid toys for the holiday and Charlie Brown asks what she really wants, she responds: “Real estate”), Linus’ climatic reading from the Gospel of Matthew, even Guaraldi’s music.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and the animated special went on to become one of the baby-boom generation's beloved holiday perennials. Two years ago, the Paley Center for Media announced that A Charlie Brown Christmas, along with two other specials from the 1960s--Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, finished in its top four of favorite holiday specials. (The winner: The Star Wars Holiday Special, never repeated after its initial 1978 run.)

Quote of the Day (Henry James, Cautioning About “The Human Heart”

“Never say you know the last word about any human heart.”—Henry James, quoted in Donna Rifkind, “Natives of the James Family,” The New Criterion, December 1991