Alan Jacobs

For alcohol and firearms alike, there’s room for sensible restrictions in a non-prohibitionist world. I don’t think the Assault Weapons Ban was remotely effective as public policy, but I don’t think it was a severe blow to liberty either, and maybe there’s a better version waiting to be crafted. The chance, however small, that an experiment in restricting high-capacity magazines might reduce the deadliness of massacres could make such a restriction worth trying. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging gun safety in the same way that we try to limit underage drinking (though those efforts are sometimes counterproductive) and discourage drunk driving.

It does, however, make a case against a worldview that ignores other possible policy responses to gun violence, treats guns themselves as a “ravaging infection” and gun ownership is a form of mass psychosis — and yet sees no contradiction in rhapsodizing elsewhere about “the mystique and the smoke and the complexity” of a substance whose widespread availability kills just as many people every year. I am not one of the many millions of Americans for whom gun ownership provides a sport, a pastime, and a feeling of security, and like Adam Gopnik I enjoy a glass of wine with my dinner. But I don’t confuse that cultural difference with a self-evident moral distinction. Recall that Tartuffe’s real sin wasn’t self-congratulatory piety; it was hypocrisy, and the refusal to apply to his own pleasures and appetites the judgments he passed so easily on others.

On his death-bed, the dwarf king, Thorin commends Bilbo’s blend of courage and wisdom, adding, “if more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” Food and cheer are transitory pleasures, which take their value from the moment and the company. The Hobbit is actually as much about food or lack of it - as well as the fear of being eaten - as it is about the shiny solidity of metal. The dwarves are continually tightening their belts or existing on cram.

Just as Bilbo teaches the dwarves the value of sharing their gold, so they teach him at their first encounter - the unexpected party - the value of sharing food and distributing it as widely as possible. What, one wonders, was one bachelor hobbit going to do with a larder as full as his obviously was with mince-pies and cheese, seed-cakes, pork pies, cold chicken and pickles?

Economics is not a party, and the Incarnation is not a political program but I believe The Hobbit has something profound to offer us at this festive season about the true use of the bounty and beauty of the earth, which is to distribute it in such a way as to enable and make visible as many relations between producers and consumers, and fellow-workers as possible in contrast to the barren golden abstractions and glamour of money-markets. Ruskin wrote, “there is no wealth but life” and the hobbits are so successful a race as enablers and burglars because deep down they know that too.

At a concert in New York, he instructed his bandmates to walk onstage and begin the set by destroying their instruments, since “everybody’s breaking their stuff at the end; who’s breaking it at the beginning?” Standing amid the wreckage, only then did it dawn on him that there would be an audience of people waiting. At other concerts, crowds were treated to twenty minutes of reggae or Miles Davis or jazz-punk iterations of “Loser.” He recalls looking up at the end of one show to see fewer than five people remaining. In a show in Los Angeles, he used a leaf blower to send leaves billowing into the crowd; he’d been preoccupied by Los Angeles’s obsession with manicuring lawns. This was after the riots, it was meant to say something important — “I can’t remember what exactly,” he says now. “Some civic speech” about “the streets running with blood.” It became a self-fulfilling narrative: the “Loser” acting out.

Wise Men are busy being computer literate.
There should be a law against confusing
Religion with mathematics.
There was a baby. Born where?
And when? The sources mention
Massacres, prophecies, stars;
They tell a good story, but they don’t agree.
So we celebrate at the wrong midnight.
Does it matter? Only (dull) science expects
An accurate audit. The economy of heaven
Looks for fiestas and fireworks every day,
Every day.
Be realistic, says heaven:
Expect a miracle.

The aire is not so full of Moats, of Atomes, as the Church is of Mercies; and as we can suck in no part of aire, but we take in those Moats, those Atomes; so here in the Congregation we cannot suck in a word from the preacher, we cannot speak, we cannot sigh a prayer to God, but that that whole breath and aire is made of mercy…. God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quotidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe to morrow, but to day if you will heare his voice, to day he will heare you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries: all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.

Malcolm receives an early Christmas present. Emphasis on receives.

c86:

Taken from Woman’s Day Best Ideas For Christmas, 1974

via CheshireCat666

This was the moment when Before Turned into After, and the future’s Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing Happened. Only dull peace Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans Could find nothing better to do Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment When a few farm workers and three Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight Into the kingdom of heaven.

People use guns. But in a sense guns use people, too. When we have the technology for violence easily to hand, our choices are skewed and we are more vulnerable to being manipulated into violent action.

Perhaps that’s why, in a passage often heard in church around this time of year, the Bible imagines a world where swords are beaten into ploughshares. In the new world which the newborn child of Christmas brings into being, weapons are not left to hang on the wall, suggesting all the time that the right thing to do might after all be to use them. They are decommissioned, knocked out of shape, put to work for something totally different.

Control of the arms trade, whether for individuals or for nations, won’t in itself stop the impulse to violence and slaughter. But it’s a start in changing what’s taken for granted. The good news of Christmas is that the atmosphere of fear and hostility isn’t the natural climate for human beings, and it can be changed.

If all you have is a gun, everything looks like a target. But if all you have is the child’s openness and willingness to be loved, everything looks like a promise. Control of the weapons trade is a start. But what will really make the difference is dealing with fear and the pressure to release our anxiety and tension at the expense of others. A new heart, a new spirit, as the Bible says; so that peace on earth won’t be an empty hope.

— Rowan Williams. I often have to tell people that I don’t agree with everything that I post — I sometimes post quotations because I think they’re interesting, worth thinking about, whether I agree or not. But in this case I want to be clear that I could not possibly agree more fervently with what the Archbishop says here.

No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable,
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host —
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love nor money.

Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.