Christmas Every Day

Since so many [Mao] badges were made illegally, accurate estimates are impossible to reach, but at the height of the revolution some 2 to 5 billion badges had been produced across the country. The amount of aluminium diverted away from other industrial activities was so excessive that in 1969 Mao intervened: Give me back my aeroplanes. – Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, 2016

The flowers bloomed, the schools of thought contended, and Mao’s executioners went to work. The slogan had the same function as the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Zinoviev tellingly defined as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it, so that they could be dealt with. – Clive James, Cultural Amnesia, 2007

One evening about six months later, there was a knock at my door. It was the Chairman, cheerful on rice wine. With his famous economy of expression, he embraced me and taught me the Ten Right Rules of Lovemaking: Reconnoitre, Recruit, Relax, Recline, Relate, Reciprocate, Rejoice, Recover, Reflect, and Retire. I was surprised by his ardor, for I knew the talk that he had been incapacitated by a back injury in the Great Leap Forward. In truth, his spine was supple as a peony stalk. The only difficulty was that it was sensitive to certain kinds of pressure. A few times he was moved to remind me, “Please, don’t squeeze the Chairman.” – Veronica Geng, “My Mao”, Fierce Pajamas, 2002

Loudspeakers blasted revolutionary songs, one of them with lyrics from the Chairman’s Little Red Book: “The world is yours, and also ours. But it is, in the final analysis, yours. You young people are full of vigour and vitality like the eight or nine o’clock sun in the morning. You are our hope”. Zhai Zhenhua had heard the excerpt a hundred times before. It had filled her with pride. But on the day of her departure to Yan’an the words rang hollow. “The world is ours?” she asked herself. “Bullshit!” – Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, 2016

But perhaps the veil that time draws between us and the distant past in some sense protects us from the burden of too much memory. It often proves debilitating to dwell too entirely in the shadows of vanished epochs, and our capacity to forget is (as Friedrich Nietzsche noted) very much a part of our capacity to live in the present. That said, every natural strength can become also an innate weakness; to live entirely in the present, without any of the wisdom that a broad perspective upon the past provides, is to live a life of idiocy and vapid distraction and ingratitude. – David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 2010

A bee can find a nectar-bearing patch of flowers from the polarization of skylight and information communicated to it in the hive. A bat can detect and capture a flying moth in complete darkness, using echo-locating high-frequency sound. A bird can navigate over thousands of miles of open water, using the position of the sun and stars and the earth’s magnetic field. It would surely be egotistic of us to deny the term intelligent to these creatures while retaining it for a creature that until quite recently built its wells in back of its outhouses. – Alan Cromer, Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science, 1995

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. – Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 1844

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged. – Czesław Miłosz, “The Discreet Charm of Nihilism”, 1998

God makes a portion of each generation intelligent well above the average, and despite the best efforts of our state school systems, His handiwork is hard to suppress. The task of the modern progressive university is therefore to corrupt and unbalance the intelligent; to pit their minds against their common sense. – David Warren, “Essays in Idleness”, 2016

From man’s sweat and God’s love, beer came into the world. – Saint Arnold (or Arnulf) of Metz, (582-645),  the patron saint of brewers

Let all who desire to be Christians know that it is incumbent upon them to manifest the virtue of temperance; that drunken sots have no place among Christians, and cannot be saved until they amend their ways, until they reform from their evil habits. – Martin Luther, (1483-1546)

“Son, a woman is like a beer. They smell good, they look good, you’d step over your own mother just to get one! But you can’t stop at one. You wanna drink another woman!” – Homer Simpson, “New Kid on the Block”, The Simpsons, 1993

Dancing is not an art but a pastime, and should, therefore, be freed from the too-burdensome regulations wherewith an art is encumbered. An art is a highly-specialised matter hedged in on every side by intellectual policemen, a pastime is not specialised, and never takes place in the presence of policemen, who are well known to be the sworn enemies of gaiety. For example, theology is an art but religion is a pastime: we learn the collects only under compulsion, but we sing anthems because it is pleasant to do so. Thus, eating oysters is an art by dint of the elaborate ceremonial including shell-openers, lemons, waiters and pepper, which must be grouped around your oyster before you can conveniently swallow him, but eating nuts, or blackberries, or a privily-acquired turnip—these are pastimes.

– James Stephens, “There Is A Tavern In Our Town”, Here Are Ladies, 1914