ABOUT DAME MAGGIE

The choices of English newspapers that I can read without a subscription are narrowing.The Independent is stingy, allowing only 3 free reads per month, and the Times of London simply will not allow non-subscribers to read at all.  The Spectator would not let me in, because I had exceeded my allowance, and I had not clicked on their site for ages.  What's that about?  Anyway, I can still read the Guardian (Thank heaven!), but for how long?  And The Daily Mail, in which there's a lovely article about Maggie Smith.

Dame Maggie and I are the same age, but she lost the love of her life, the playwright Beverley Cross. Her words about her loss are poignant.

'Is it lonely?’ She replied: ‘I don’t know. It seems a bit pointless. Going on one’s own and not having someone to share it with.’

Warming to the theme of aging she also said she didn’t like it and added: ‘I don’t know who does. Noel Coward-- and I don’t mean to name drop.

'But he said,”The awful thing about getting old is that you have breakfast every half-hour.” And that’s sort of what it is. I can’t understand why everything has to go so fast.‘

Nor do I understand why everything must go so fast.

Interviewer Steve Kroft asks her: ‘But you have no interest in finding someone else?’

Dame Maggie replies: ‘Absolutely not. I – no way’.

We're together there.  I don't think there's any way that I could learn to live in intimacy with another person at my age.  And by intimacy, I do not necessarily mean sex. Dame Maggie and I have in common that we are both survivors of breast cancer.

If Maggie continues to work, I'll be more than grateful.  In the late 1980s, from a second row seat at the Gielgud Theatre in London, I had the great pleasure of seeing her in Peter Shaffer's play, Lettice and Lovage, written especially for Maggie.  Her performance was beyond superb.  Although there are other performers in the drama, Lettice, Maggie's character, carries the play.  It's a night I'll never forget.  Tickets were scarce, but the concierge at the hotel managed to find a single seat for me.  To the right is a scan of the copy of the play which I bought that night.

MIKE WALLACE INTERVIEW WITH AYN RAND

Well!  So this is the "morality" that the Republican Party embraces.  This is the writer whose books Paul Ryan insists that his staff read when they come to work for him.  The video is a 7-minute excerpt from an interview of Rand by Mike Wallace in 1957 which runs to nearly 30 minutes.  I watched it all and found Rand's words and manner to be chilling.  First of all, Rand's darting eyes and body language are strange, indeed.  She is unable to look at Wallace for any length of time, and she seems to be shrinking back from him during the interview.

Rand's "morality" favors the rational self-interest of the thinkers who never allow emotion to influence their conclusions.  Selfishness rules, and altruism has no place in Rand's "morality".  If the policies of  laissez-faire are in force, then the common good will result.  Greed, which is as evident today as ever it was throughout history, the desire to accumulate more and more money and goods at the expense of those less fortunate, seems not to be noted at all.  By simply leaving rational achievers to their own devices, without constraints, Rand and her disciples believe that all deserving people will benefit...somehow.  By magic?  As for the undeserving, who knows what becomes of them in Rand's morality?

This one interview sheds much light on where the far right, who have now become middle-of-the roaders in the Republican Party, get their ideas.  What I don't understand is how a person who subscribes to Rand's "morality" can claim, at the same time, to be an observant Christian, Jew, or Mormon.  Objectivism is in direct opposition to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to the teachings in the Hebrew Testament on mercy and justice.

Paul Ryan is Roman Catholic, and I have to wonder if he reads the church's teachings on social justice as assiduously as he reads Ayn Rand.

In an unusually pointed correspondence, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops urged lawmakers to consider the moral implications of their actions as they prepared to vote on the Ryan budget.

"We join with other Christian leaders in calling for a 'circle of protection' around our brothers and sisters at home and abroad who are poor and vulnerable," the bishops wrote in the spring. They said the "moral measure" of the debate "is not which party wins or which powerful interests prevail, but rather how those who are jobless, hungry, homeless or poor are treated." 
.... 

And he [Ryan] pushed back at those who criticized him for abandoning the Catholic principle of "preferential option for the poor and vulnerable." 

"Simply put, I do not believe that the preferential option for the poor means a preferential option for big government," he said.

There you have it from Ryan, the Pericles of Janesville.  (H/T to Charles Pierce.)

The entire 30 minute interview is here at YouTube.

BISHOP ALAN WILSON ON THE PROTESTS AT ST PAUL'S CATHEDRAL

An excellent interview. Back to Jesus, where all of us who call ourselves Christians should surely be.

Alan Wilson is Bishop of Buckingham in England and blogs at (Surprise!) Bishop Alan's Blog.

THE MAN BEHIND THE STORIES AND DRAWINGS

Elizabeth Kaeton, who knows how much I like the stories, wrote to say that yesterday was the birthday of Brian Andreas, who writes and draws the illustratons for the 'Story of the Day', which I copy and post quite often. She sent the link to an interview with Brian which is a delight.

A late Happy Birthday, Brian!

And here's the Story of the Day from StoryPeople.

this is the center of the universe at this
moment unless you're looking in
another direction or are thinking about
something from a long time ago, in
which case it will wait quietly right here
until you return