Christmas Day Greetings

For those of you who are simply addicted to the Internet, rather than taking the day off as you should, a few seasonal thoughts and observations. First, as the pic nearby attests, I was on Santa’s Not-Naughty List this year. Obviously. And isn’t “Dividing Opinions Since 1815” the perfect motto for the perfect whiskey for a polemicist?

Next, it has been some time since I last dipped into my usual Christmas Day reading—something from G.K. Chesterton. This year it is The Everlasting Man that I pulled from the shelf.   (And I have a lot to choose from in the Chesterton department.  See below for my Chesterton shelf.) Now the marvelous thing about reading Chesterton is how he unfolds his arguments slowly, with much indirection and irony, but all along the way throwing off one usable aphorism after another. Like this one, which could head a memo to just about every academic:

No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world.

Or a bold proposition that you just know will lead to subsequent mischief of the highest order:

Turn the universe upside down in the mind and you turn all the political economists upside down with it.

Maybe this is the origin of the more contemporary joke that if you laid all the economists in the U.S. end-to-end, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Sometimes his sarcasm is a little more subtle—but just a little:

But genius can turn up anywhere, even in a governing class.

Zing!

Anyway, let’s close out with the kind Christmas greetings from the First Lady, along with a meme that escaped the Week in Pictures:

Seriously—that’s almost as good as having Sarah Palin as Vice President.

And—the Hayward Chesterton shelf:

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