a note, catholics, and michelle obama.

My mom recently sent me a package with some boxer shorts in it that I had brought home over the holidays so she could repair them, and on Friday I finally got around to opening. She slipped in the latest issue of my favorite crossword magazine, and two sticky notes on the front cover held down a twenty dollar-bill, one note saying

HI!

and the other

BUY!

Every chance I get I've been talking with people about the round of scandals surrounding the Society of Saint Pius X and Benedict not caring that much about a Holocaust-denying bishop, and it turns out that a ton of people are paying attention to this, even if they're not practicing Catholics.

For example, when I was drinking at my one Dutch friend's house on Saturday early evening, his neighbors, who are these kind of drugged-out artist people, stopped by, and a couple of them who are musicians and went to catholic high schools have been paying attention, and the one dude who wears a leather jacket and was telling me about how M.I.A.'s one song "Paper Planes" works off of a riff from this song "Straight to Hell" by the Clash, said that to him this just shows how there are very few liberal priests and bishops left like when he was young, and that now the only people going into the ministry or in positions of power are hard-line conservatives, all across the church.

Later on, I went out to meet friends from school and ran into some other people from school. In the course of talking about this, one student, this Italian guy from Rome, was saying that everyone loved JPII because he cared about young people, but Benedict is evil. He also said as an aside that everyone knows that JPI was poisoned because he was too liberal, and when I asked him how he knew this, he was like, "Oh, that is ah-something, that everybody knows."

I also ran into one French student from school who's a Buddhist and studies Buddhism, and he was saying that he's been reading this wonderful Tibetan commentary on a Sanskrit text and every night he goes to bed with a warm feeling in his chest, knowing that he'll be able to wake up and read the text in the morning and learn something wonderful, and that he's learned so much just in a few days how Being relates to ethical behavior in the world.

He also said that appreciates the articles about the SSPX scandal that I've been sending him, but he feels that he reads them as an outsider now. In an e-mail exchange earlier in the week he had said this to me:

I actually lived very closed to their church in Paris and used to do my laundry next to it.

Then, in reply to my next e-mail, he said this:

No theer were young people (some I knew I suspect they were part of it - but a lot of Catholic in France, even conservatives, are attached to the Pope so are against the "Lefebvristes"). And no I am not surprised there are holocaust deniers among them: the vast majority of them vote far-right and you could see them on Sundays, with the old people for the "Algerie francaise" and so on. The same bunch of mediocre and despicable scum.

Also, I stopped into the African goods store where I buy Obama buttons and talked with Sister Rose today. She was telling me about the bus of people from her church that went to the inauguration, and how they stuck around in D.C. to see stuff, and like at 11am two days after the inauguration they were outside the White House when Michelle Obama happened to look out and see all these people out there, so she had security let everyone in with cameras for an impromptu tour, and let the kids sit in the President's chair in the Oval Office, and she took pictures with them and everyone.

"Let the people in!", Sister Rose told me that Michelle had said when she asked security to allow them in but security had refused, and Sister Rose repeated that line several times, and it seemed to me that this is already a legend circulating among people in her church and beyond.

She also said that Michelle had said, "This is their house too!"

When I said that Jimmy Carter had said that the White House was distant because of all of the anti-terrorism barriers but Michelle refused to let those precautions separate her from people and that you could tell she didn't want to lose touch, Sister Rose was like, "Hallelujah!"

I also noticed that behind the counter at her shop there's an old painting of a white Jesus standing with his hands extended, and at his right hand there's Abraham Lincoln's head, and at his left that of John F. Kennedy. In the other paintings, Jesus is always black.

Also, a couple weeks ago my one dean at school said that Michelle's a "hugger", and if you even slightly know her and run into her, she just goes off and hugs you, which some (white) people find off-putting (my dean didn't say white, but the people I visualized in my head who were grimacing were white).