Friday, August 8, 2008
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Petting My Inner Monarchist
I just stumbled onto this blogpost on the funeral of Archduke Carl Ludwig Maria Franz Joseph Michael Gabriel Antonius Robert Stephan Pius Gregor Ignatius Markus d'Aviano, son of Blessed Charles, by the Grace of God, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, of this name the Fourth, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, and Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria; King of Jerusalem etc., Archduke of Austria; Grand Duke of Tuscany and Cracow, Duke of Lorraine and of Salzburg, of Styria, of Carinthia, of Carniola and of the Bukovina; Grand Prince of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, of Auschwtiz and Zator, of Teschen, Friuli, Ragusa and Zara; Princely Count of Habsburg and Tyrol, of Kyburg, Gorizia and Gradisca; Prince of Trent and Brixen; Margrave of Upper and Lower Lusatia and in Istria; Count of Hohenems, Feldkirch, Bregenz, Sonnenberg, etc.; Lord of Trieste, of Cattaro, and in the Windic March; Grand Voivode (Grand Duke) of the Voivodship (Duchy) of Serbia etc. etc.
The funeral was held on December 2007. I like the fact that they kept this fine tradition, last performed for the funeral of Carl Ludwig's mother, Empress Zita:
As I am not a rabid zealot for democracy, and considering the unjust circumstances surrounding the abolition of the House of Austria, let me conclude this post with hope for the restoration of the once-glorious Hapsburg monarchy.
Plus ultra!
The funeral was held on December 2007. I like the fact that they kept this fine tradition, last performed for the funeral of Carl Ludwig's mother, Empress Zita:
"In 1989 Zita, the last empress of Austria and the last queen of Hungary died. The day of her funeral, 8,000 mourners filed out of Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral and fell in line behind the hearse drawn by six black horses. Two hours later the procession concluded at the Capuchin Church. There, in keeping with tradition, a member of the funeral party knocked on the door and a priest asked, “Who goes there?”
Zita’s titles were read aloud: “Zita, Queen of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia. Queen of Jerusalem. Grand Duchess of Tuscany and Cracow . . .”
“I do not know her,” came the voice from within the crypt.
The funeral group knocked a second time. “Who goes there?”
“Empress Zita,” was the more simple reply. Still the door remained shut.
The mourners knocked yet a third time. “Who is there?”
“Zita, a poor sinner,” was the answer. That answer was the right answer and the procession was allowed to enter."As I am not a rabid zealot for democracy, and considering the unjust circumstances surrounding the abolition of the House of Austria, let me conclude this post with hope for the restoration of the once-glorious Hapsburg monarchy.
Plus ultra!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Reflection on a Giant of the Age
I remember Joem telling me that the instructors for UA&P's Modern Literature subject were supposed to have the 19th century Russian literary giants as the standard when selecting which pieces of literature to feed the young minds. That meant the literature had to be in the near vicinity of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. (Makes me wonder why I got frickin' Harry Potter for mod lit... I wuz robbed!) The funny thing about those two men was how little they were understood by those they wrote for.
In the 20th century, another similar fate befell another Russian giant. He was called a traitor in the USSR, and a cranky monarchist anti-Semite in the US. But Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had their number. He knew, just as Dostoevsky knew, what darkness lay in the hearts of men. And because of that, he knew precisely the greatest weaknesses harbored by the competing ideologies of his time. I'll let him speak for himself.
"More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
- A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983
A simple analysis from Russian elderly: men have forgotten God. In its simplicity, it cuts through the Gordian knot of rationalizations we have put up as a culture to justify our decadence. At the end of the day, we the enlightened have forgotten God, and that is why, for all our material prosperity, we are much less happier than the Russian peasant who celebrated ecstatically over a good harvest or a new life born. We have shed more blood in the 20th century than in all the religious wars we have decried in the past combined. Yeah, yeah, we had better weapons. Heck, we made them.
At the end of the day, the generations of the 20th century, including my own, will have much to answer for.
Solzhenitsyn knew that his analysis was not just true for Russia. It was true even for the West. It was universal. (Why can't our over-hyped local intelligentsia come up with anything like that?)
"The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West's own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.
This may well be written for the Philippines. Daily, we are beginning to make our little concessions. Soon, we may have a new reproductive rights bill that throws condoms at every johnson without a conscience, and soon we will wonder why there is no sexual conscience at all. We decry the corruption of our leaders, just before we give a little grease money for someone to make our sins go away. Our media lords sings their own self-righteous praises as they sensationally condemn everyone else, and wonder why so many people want to shoot them. Our "art" is already a showcase of the debased. Much of it is devoid of love. "Serbis", that disgusting abortion of a movie we used to represent ourselves to the rest of the world at Cannes, is not a bug in our local "art" scene; it's a feature. Like the rest of the West, we are conceding our souls, and to the delight of our mortal Enemy, we are getting naught but rot in the process.
But all is not lost...
" But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells--they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.
God tends to be very resilient. "How many divisions does the Pope have?" I wonder if, when Stalin asked that question, he had considered those divisions he would only meet once he's shuffled off his mortal coil. They can shout down the children of God (I think "theocracy" is the avant-garde accusation these days, by mis-educated people who only have cartoon notions of actual theocracy.), but they only beat their heads against an unshaken wall. Heh, if your spiritual ancestors were fed to lions for the entertainment of pagans, what can they really do to you? And these morons cannot even afford tanks.
However, it is not enough to rest in smug satisfaction about one's own sanctity. There is still the Great Commission.
"To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our hands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone."
- A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983
Amen.
We have lost a prophet of our age, and we won't begin to feel the sting until the night comes. Hopefully, it isn't too late.
Rest well, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. For you, the war is over. It's our turn now.
In the 20th century, another similar fate befell another Russian giant. He was called a traitor in the USSR, and a cranky monarchist anti-Semite in the US. But Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had their number. He knew, just as Dostoevsky knew, what darkness lay in the hearts of men. And because of that, he knew precisely the greatest weaknesses harbored by the competing ideologies of his time. I'll let him speak for himself.
"More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.
- A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983
A simple analysis from Russian elderly: men have forgotten God. In its simplicity, it cuts through the Gordian knot of rationalizations we have put up as a culture to justify our decadence. At the end of the day, we the enlightened have forgotten God, and that is why, for all our material prosperity, we are much less happier than the Russian peasant who celebrated ecstatically over a good harvest or a new life born. We have shed more blood in the 20th century than in all the religious wars we have decried in the past combined. Yeah, yeah, we had better weapons. Heck, we made them.
At the end of the day, the generations of the 20th century, including my own, will have much to answer for.
Solzhenitsyn knew that his analysis was not just true for Russia. It was true even for the West. It was universal. (Why can't our over-hyped local intelligentsia come up with anything like that?)
"The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West's own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.
Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the "pursuit of happiness, "a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make daily concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism. If a blasphemous film about Jesus is shown throughout the United States, reputedly one of the most religious countries in the world, or a major newspaper publishes a shameless caricature of the Virgin Mary, what further evidence of godlessness does one need? When external rights are completely unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts?
Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis--race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain "equality"--the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today's free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance--the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money.
This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.
Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God."
- A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983This may well be written for the Philippines. Daily, we are beginning to make our little concessions. Soon, we may have a new reproductive rights bill that throws condoms at every johnson without a conscience, and soon we will wonder why there is no sexual conscience at all. We decry the corruption of our leaders, just before we give a little grease money for someone to make our sins go away. Our media lords sings their own self-righteous praises as they sensationally condemn everyone else, and wonder why so many people want to shoot them. Our "art" is already a showcase of the debased. Much of it is devoid of love. "Serbis", that disgusting abortion of a movie we used to represent ourselves to the rest of the world at Cannes, is not a bug in our local "art" scene; it's a feature. Like the rest of the West, we are conceding our souls, and to the delight of our mortal Enemy, we are getting naught but rot in the process.
But all is not lost...
" But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells--they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.
It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity."
- A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983God tends to be very resilient. "How many divisions does the Pope have?" I wonder if, when Stalin asked that question, he had considered those divisions he would only meet once he's shuffled off his mortal coil. They can shout down the children of God (I think "theocracy" is the avant-garde accusation these days, by mis-educated people who only have cartoon notions of actual theocracy.), but they only beat their heads against an unshaken wall. Heh, if your spiritual ancestors were fed to lions for the entertainment of pagans, what can they really do to you? And these morons cannot even afford tanks.
However, it is not enough to rest in smug satisfaction about one's own sanctity. There is still the Great Commission.
"To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our hands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone."
- A. Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize acceptance address, 1983
Amen.
We have lost a prophet of our age, and we won't begin to feel the sting until the night comes. Hopefully, it isn't too late.
Rest well, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn. For you, the war is over. It's our turn now.
First Year College Survey
Hey, since everyone's taking it...
What do you remember most about 1st yr?
Getting laughed at when I tried to ask for this girl's number. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and all that. Though I think Nietzsche got dumped a lot too.
Hmm...interesting survey. My first year was kinda bland though. Second year was more interesting.
What section were you?
Block SI
Who were your seatmates?
God, I'm bad with names...umm...some guy named Johndy (not Mr. Borra), another guy named Jerome, and a guy named Walter...oh, and this guy named Chris.
Still remember your English teacher?
Mrs. Dadufalza
What was your first class?
Euclidean Geometry (hell yeah!)
Who were your best friends?
That Johndy guy...and Chris.
Who was your crush back then?
Umm...just one? Okay, I'll say...Pia Vergara...among others.
Made friends to the higher years?
This girl who was editor of the now-defunct school magazine. (Told you I was bad with names.)
Had a boyfriend/girlfriend?
Are you fucking kidding me?
How was your class schedule?
A shock after the rigidity of high school. Felt kinda light. Second year was the killer.
Made any enemies?
Occasionally bickered with Jerome...but nothing bad til second year.
Who was your favorite teacher(s)?
Mr. Ray Leuterio and Mr. Art Vito Cruz for Civ 102 and Fine Arts.
What sport did you play?
Basketball and Fencing, for PE.
Back then, do you always buy your lunch?
Yep. Didn't want to lug around baon after doing it for four years.
Were you a party animal?
Never.
Were you well known in your school?
A bit in High School, for mixed reasons. In college, I was so anonymous, the CIA could've recruited me.
Skip classes?
Yes. Some were boring.
Did you get suspended/expelled?
Clean.
Can you sing the alma mater?
Mumble it is more like it.
What was your favorite subject?
Christian Civilization
What is your school's full name?
University of Asia and the Pacific
Where did you go most often during breaks?
Megamall, or the library.
If you could go back in time and do it all over, would you?
Nope. I was kinda glad first year was over.
What do you remember most about 1st yr?
Getting laughed at when I tried to ask for this girl's number. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and all that. Though I think Nietzsche got dumped a lot too.
Hmm...interesting survey. My first year was kinda bland though. Second year was more interesting.
Life Imitates Art, but only if by "art" we mean "Grand Theft Auto"
Some dumbass in Thailand tried to recreate GTA in the real world.
This leads to a halt in sales.
All it takes is one idiot...
This leads to a halt in sales.
All it takes is one idiot...
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Losing a Piece of Historical Memory
The great Russian writer, Nobel Prize winner and author of "Gulag Archipelago", Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, has just died. He was 89.A man who wrote about conscience in the century that didn't have it has finally gone on to meet the author of conscience itself.
Here is his Harvard address.
And my favorite Solzhenitsyn speech, his Templeton Prize Address.
Finally, an interview in Der Spiegel.
Requiscat in Pace.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
China's Paris Hilton, Sans Hotel Millions
"Crouching Tiger" actress Zhang Ziyi is a bit puzzled. From a news article:
"I don't see why people are so negative. The games are about friendship," Zhang was quoted as saying in the current issue of Vogue. "I'm Chinese and I'm proud of my country."
Gee, I wonder why? It can't be that bad...
A moment of Zen, brought to you by another pretty airhead.
Cluelessness: its not just American celebrities anymore!
"I don't see why people are so negative. The games are about friendship," Zhang was quoted as saying in the current issue of Vogue. "I'm Chinese and I'm proud of my country."
Gee, I wonder why? It can't be that bad...
A moment of Zen, brought to you by another pretty airhead.
Cluelessness: its not just American celebrities anymore!
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