Lenten Shenanigans
So far, I'm having just an awful, terrible Lent. My sense of timing was distorted by my sojourn in southern California; as a result, on Friday I ate a delicious ham and cheese sandwich. Only hours later did I realize I'd eaten meat on a Lenten Friday! Curses! My Lenten sacrifice (no eating outside of meals) failed abyssmally as I spent all of yesterday on my arse either reading for pleasure (The New Teen Titans: The Terror of Trigon) or watching TV (MythBusters and Law & Order, both SVU and CI). Last but certainly not least, I'm bloggy blogging instead of attending noon Mass; both Mom and I felt like skipping today.

The Christ spent forty days in the desert before Pilate nailed Him to the cross, but I can't keep my greasy mitts out of the Goldfish box? My favorite part of the song "Amazing Grace" has always been the words, "a wretch like me."

The Iron Curtain's 60th Anniversary
Churchill! I am a great admirer of the late Sir Winston Churchill and his ability to see the inevitability of Hitler's aggression and Stalin's repression when most of his contemporaries were convinced those two monsters could be easily intimidated.

That said, Churchill was a man and like all men prone to making mistakes; for those of you who know your history of the Great War (or have seen the movie starring a young Mel Gibson), Churchill was the chief proponent of the disastous Gallipoli campaign. The debacle cost him his post as First Lord of the Admiralty. The Goldbricker has tried to sway me to his bigoted view of Islam by quoting some remarks of Churchill's that betray a less than flattering view of "Mohammedanism." As a counterpoint, I have mentioned that though I admire Churchill, he was in favor of keeping hundreds of millions of Indians under Bitain's imperium without giving them a single vote in Whitehall. I am something of an Anglophile, and I appreciate the grandeur of Rudyard Kipling's poetry, but the British Raj was morally indefensible.

History proved Churchill right about both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Likewise, it has proved him wrong about the Raj specifically and the British Empire in general. Perhaps he was wrong about the "nature" of Islam and Muslims. On this sixtieth anniversary of the "Iron Curtain" speech, let us remember that Winston Churchill was a great man, one of the greatest men of all time, but not a perfect man.