Sarah Palin must be the biggest threat to the corporate Progressive Machine, as the news cycle and the later-Goebbels on MSNBC, CNN and on the Big ( ABC, CBS, NBC) networks have worked this woman and her family over like they were characters out of Aeschylus*.
You are only as big as the enemies you have and Sarah Palin must be enormous.
Palin's Old Man, the kids, and even the grand kids are targeted by sad people like Letterman, Olbermann, Maddow, Schultz, Matthews, Schuster, Brown, and Maher -insignificant and self-absorbed people one and all.
These sad human beings, who make a great deal of money and have the attention of many not very bright people, detest Sarah Palin, not because she is Pro Life/Pro Gun/Pro Family/ Pro Free Enterprise, Republican, or pretty, or wildly popular. They detest Sarah Palin, because the woman is happy.
Not DL Hughley/Joy Behar/Kanye West/Alec Baldwin/Bill Maher or Katie Couric happy, but fulfilled, meaningful, centered and significant - happy.
When the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was on his death-bed he told his mother that he was never happier.
The Irish are generally a pretty happy people - I remember going to the wake of Man from County Clare; I asked 'what did he die of?' His young widow replied, 'Nothing serious.'
Happy people make other people happy, by giving us direction. Only suckers beef.
That dictum came from a wise bartender who refused to hear the drunken bile coming from louts who 'vented' about what bitches their wives were, or how disappointing their kids turned out.
Governor Palin, stay happy.
Mortimer Adler's lesson on Happiness Eudaimonia,a contented state of being happy and healthy and prosperous, as opposed to giddy, silly, aimless and vacuous, tells us that:
These matters, of relevance to the theory of happiness, are discussed in the chapters on ETERNITY and IMMORTALITY; and in the chapter on SIN we find another religious dogma, that of original sin, which has an obvious bearing on earthly happiness as well as on eternal salvation. Fallen human nature, according to Christian teaching, is incompetent to achieve even the natural end of imperfect temporal happiness without God's help. Milton expounds this doctrine of indispensable grace in Paradise Lost, in words which God the Father addresses to His Son:
Man shall not quite be lost, but sav'd who will,
Yet not of will in him, but grace in me
Freely voutsaft; once more I will renew
His lapsed powers, though forfeit and enthralled
By sin to foul exorbitant desires;
Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand
On even ground against his mortal foe,
By me upheld, that he may know how frail
His fall'n condition is, and to me owe
All his deliv'rance, and to none but me.
God's grace is needed for men to lead a good life on earth as well as for eternal blessedness. On earth, man's efforts to be virtuous require the reinforcement of supernatural gifts - faith, hope, and charity, and the infused moral virtues. The beatific vision in Heaven totally exceeds the natural powers of the soul and comes with the gift of added supernatural light. It seems, in short, that there is no purely natural happiness according to the strict tenets of Christian doctrine.
Aquinas employs the conception of eternal beatitude not only to measure the imperfection of earthly life, but also to insist that temporal happiness is happiness at all only to the extent that it is a remote participation of true and perfect happiness. It cannot be said of temporal happiness that it "excludes every evil and fulfills every desire. In this life every evil cannot be excluded - For this present life is subject to many unavoidable evils: to ignorance on the part of the intellect; to inordinate affection on the part of the appetite-; and to many penalties on the part of the body ... . Likewise," Aquinas continues, "neither can the desire for good be satiated in this life. For man naturally desires the good which he has to be abiding . Now the goods of the present life pass away since life itself passes away ... . Wherefore it is impossible to have true happiness in this life."
If perfect happiness consists in "the vision of the Divine Essence, which men cannot obtain in this life," then, according to Aquinas, only the earthly life which somehow partakes of God has a measure of happiness in it. Earthly happiness, imperfect because of its temporal and bodily conditions, consists in a life devoted to God - a kind of inchoate participation here and now of the beatific vision hereafter. On earth there can be only a beginning "in respect of that operation whereby man is united to God. ... In the present life, in as far as we fall short of the unity and continuity of that operation, so do we fall short of perfect happiness. Nevertheless it is a participation of happiness; and so much the greater, as the operation can be more continuous and more one. Consequently the active life which is busy with many things, has less of happiness than the contemplative life, which is busied with one thing, i.e., the contemplation of truth."
When the theologians consider the modes of life on earth in terms of the fundamental distinction between the secular and the religious, or the active and the contemplative, they seem to admit the possibility of imperfect happiness in either mode. In either, a devout Christian dedicates every act to the glory of God, and through such dedication embraces the divine in the passing moments of his earthly pilgrimage.
Sarah Palin, like most happy people, suffers outrageous set-backs, endures insults, personal tragedies, stumbles and falls, but remains happy because she is centered and other directed.
That drives sad, but very successful people, crazy.
The crazy is on 24/7 on cable television.
Click my post title for one of my favorite sites belonging to a very smart Obama supporter.
