Martin Meenagh blog

As this blog of old will attest, I like Eugenia Finnegan Biden's Son, even in his Frank Drebenish moments. Here he is talking to the families of fallen veterans about the loss of his own family and the service of his boy. I tried with a friend the other night to think of a remotely worthwhile Vice-president since Truman, Ford excepted, and Marcus Aurelius here was the only one who sprang to mind. I'm glad he's still on the ticket.

For reasons best known to myself, I like bad books. You know the sort of thing-- Holy Blood and Holy Grail type parodies of independent thought, which jump from loony narcissism to mad half-proofs on the basis of fifteen different types of evidential rule in the middle of barely suppressed rants which the author doesn't know were done better before. The problem with slumming it, however, is that sometimes you hit rock bottom, and then the memory of the hangover and the lingering taste of the vomit is enough to pledge you to abstinence and drinking only by means of Holy water on the tongue, until the next cocktail comes along. I suppose the bedroom equivalent is working out how bad your story might seem to the police and the Mrs if the girl you've just put on the morning train ever talked. Anyway, I've just reached that moment with possibly the worst book I've ever read (and I know von Daniken and Donnelly). It's Lucien Gregoire's ' Murder in the Vatican ...

We live in a more or less Liberal West. Liberalism is an ideology. It proceeds from a view of human nature in which people are individuals who must maximise themselves. Some liberals believe that the way to do this is to let people compete from the beginning, and others believe that the state should make opportunities equal by advancing some or holding others back. Most liberals want to turn their views into laws and rules, and, tellingly, though they believe that race, sex, sexuality, disability, age, or creed could be the basis of discrimination, most reject class as a universal fact. Liberals find it difficult to conceive of attachments to faith, family, and motherland, and tend to view these things as impediments on the way to a cosmopolitan world of federated republics. Many of them turn out to be self-serving warmongers and crooks whose main interest is to run their immediate circle like a company and advance their children upon the world whilst preaching bourgeois morality...

It's May, So It's Big Frank Time You never knew whether he was going to sing like the choir celestial or lamp someone or both. Das is der mann....