Sunday, May 11, 2014

Bring back the horses?

There are more important things to blog about. The Boston Archdiocese has taken exception to the "Black Sabbath Mass" performance at Harvard. Quickly: no, Father Landry, Harvard doesn't actually maintain a handy Index Librorum Prohibitorium, to which the folks who rent out the rooms can refer before letting a student group sign up for space; anyway, wouldn't it have been smarter to react the way the LDS church did to the Book of Mormon? My advice to everyone: if it offends you, don't go and you won't have to be offended, and if you can convince enough others to stay away, the show will fold. Right now you have the marketplace of ideas working against you; if the Church thinks it's that bad, it really must be worth seeing!

Then there is the resurgence, with Joe Biden's full throated support, of the campus sexual assault issue, which Ross Douthat ties rather too simplistically to a general breakdown in morals at college. Hint on my views on the key action item: I think accusations of grave crimes require a high standard of proof, since the consequences of false positives are so severe. I always thought that was the American way.

But I don't have enough time to do a proper job on those sensitive issues and am likely to be unhelpfully annoying if I do them quickly. (Probably was already, in fact.)

So instead I will just give two cheers for new Boston Mayor Marty Walsh for planning to bring back the mounted police to the City of Boston.

The only occasion where I encountered police on horseback was after the Harvard-Yale game when it was held at Harvard. Some years ago, after a Harvard student was severely injured when the crowd in New Haven pulled down the goal posts, Harvard decided to do what it could to be sure the same thing did not happen at the Stadium. The Stadium is in Boston! So with 10 minutes left in the game, half a dozen officers on mounts approached each goal post. It was something to see. And in spite of the propensity for drunken students to do incredibly stupid things, they never were stupid enough to mess with those horses.That ended when the MPs were disbanded. We've been lucky the past few years, but it might be a good idea to restore the practice if we have the chance.

6 comments:

  1. The book of Mormon: The Mormon church has placed advertisements in playbills for The Book of Mormon with phrases like
    ``the book is better'' and
    ``you've seen the show, now read the book''

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  2. Yes, and they had a guy standing outside the theater proselytizing. Just the right spirit. Arguably, the Satanic Mass is meaner to RC than BofM is to LDS, but did the RC church try to shut down Tom Lehrer for "The Vatical Rag"?

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    1. Vatican.....

      On an aside: where are you on the new pope's call to re-distribute all the new wealth? To what extent are we our brother's keeper?

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    2. Vatican. Sorry.

      I am not going to tell the Pope what he or his flock should do, unless (as in the case at hand) he involves himself in preventing me from doing or hearing something.

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  3. When the whole issue about sexual assault reemerged, I went back to reread your section on the topic in "Excellence Without a Soul", and still think it is an excellent discussion of the whole issue; it's also a discussion that seems to require some length a good deal longer than a newspaper column.

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    1. I appreciate that very much. It was very hard to write. Thank you.

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