Death by 10,000 Cuts

One of the speeches my son and I most wanted to see was Tom Martin on Chesterton & Nietzche, but we overlsept! We missed Holy Mass, Breakfast, and the first speech. How dreadful is our human weakness.

Much complaining in the air about the 10,000 indignations the attendees are enduring. For example, we are staying in the dorms and the college has failed to provide towels, soap, or blankets in most rooms. Sean Dailey spoke on this in his talk at 10:30 this morning. One of the profesors at the Southwell Writers' Conference that I just came from last week spoke about how Solzenitzen wrote of the Soviets use of this tactic, asking over and over again for minor concessions, none of which appears worthy enough to do battle over, until finally the victim is dead of 10,000 cuts. And so in this atmosphere of totalitarian oppression Sean Dailey speaks ...

"Of course the university is afraid to let us drink without security present. You know how those Chestertonians are. There may be a riot. Though it would be a riot of laughter."

Many more quotable lines from an excellent talk by Sean, who has lost 80 pounds and is looking very good, but the notes I took indicate the best lines were "God made dinosaurs because they're cool," and "Those devoted to pity without truth are ultimately pitiless and those devoted to truth without pity are ultimately untrue," but the gist of his speech, which covered "Juno", "Harry Potter" and the mindset of a certain midwestern nominally-Catholic college was, as is the chapter in Orthodoxy to which he was referrring, a strong yet restrained condemnation of the Suicide of Thought.