Will was with us all day, and we were unprepared to continue this week’s return to Daily Office postings in the face of our conflicting cnmmittment to him. We’re professional up to the point where it turns out that grandchildren come first.

¶ At The Awl, Mat Honan explains yet another ugly truth about Califronia: why the coming gubernatorial race makes the current incumbent look like a genuine statesman. (But not, we must aver, in so many words.)

What I do know is that if Brown is removed from political office, he loses his physical form, and returns to his natural state: swamp gas. You’ll note that Brown’s last private sector job was hosting a radio show. That was because it was one of the few jobs Brown could find that required no corporeal presence. Brown is a purely political creature so embedded in the status quo of California governance that his election would guarantee that nothing will change in the nation’s most populous state….

And then there’s Meg Whitman, a power-mad, bullying, shoving, former CEO who, after purchasing the Republican primary, seems poised to buy the general election. Perhaps this is appropriate. After all, she is essentially running on the platform that she is a billionaire, and you are not. But as our nation’s first CEO president proved, experience running a business that runs itself doesn’t translate into effective executive governance. (Although, to be fair, I’m sure she will be just as competent a governor as W. was a president.)

¶ A big, juicy story in the Times barks like an enraged but leashed dog at Benedict XVI. No blood is drawn. Eventually, however, this is the sort of story that will shrink collections in the parishes.

But the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.

As pope, Benedict has met with victims of sexual abuse three times. He belatedly reopened an investigation into the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a powerful religious order — and a protégé of John Paul’s — and ultimately removed him from ministry. He gave American bishops greater leeway to take a tough line on abuse in the United States, and recently accepted the resignations of several bishops elsewhere. And on June 11, at an event in St. Peter’s Square meant to celebrate priests, he begged “forgiveness from God and from the persons involved” and promised to do “everything possible” to prevent future abuse.

But today the abuse crisis is still raging in the Catholic heartland of Europe: civil investigators in Belgium last week took the rare step of raiding church headquarters and the home of a former archbishop. The Vatican under Benedict is still responding to abuse by priests at its own pace, and it is being besieged by an outside world that wants it to move faster and more decisively.

¶ Why Alcoholics Anonymous works (maybe): Jonah Lehrer at Frontal Cortex. You so have to read the whole piece if you don’t know what “prediction errors” are, and how the mind deals with them — or fails to do, addled by addiction. But Mr Lehrer’s “blatant speculation” feels sound.

Now here’s some blatant speculation. I think one reason AA is successful, at least for many of those who commit to the program, is that it’s designed to force people to confront their prediction errors. Just look at the twelve steps, many of which are all about the admission of mistakes, from step number 1 (“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable”) to step number 8 (“Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all”) to step number 10 (“Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it”). I’d suggest that the presence of these steps helps people break through the neuromodulatory problem of addiction, as the prefrontal cortex is forced to grapple with its massive failings and flaws. Because unless we accept our mistakes we will keep on making them.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 10:35 pm.