In the National Post I ask how even bureaucrats could possibly write a doggerel health warning that, whatever one thinks of its content, is miserably inept as doggerel and not notice that it didn’t rhyme, scan, inspire or amuse except, in the last case, accidentally.
"real eating will restore his sense of the festivity of being. Food does not exist merely for the sake of its nutritional value. To see it so is only to knuckle under still further to the desubstantialization of man, to regard not what things are, but what they mean to us… A man’s daily meal ought to be an exultation over the smack of desirability which lies at the roots of creation.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
In my latest National Post column I say Britain needs a Tory victory because (a) Corbyn is a loathsome anti-Semite (b) democracy requires you to respect referendum results and (c) self-government requires a functioning parliament, which the UK hasn’t had since 2016.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the predictable vacuity of the premiers’ gathering in Toronto to ask for… wait for it… more money from the federal government’s magic money try to sustain health care so nobody has to think about fixing it.
“Man must be taught to see things as symbols – must be trained to use them for effect, and never for themselves. Above all, the door of delight must remain firmly closed.”
Some bright young devil's pitch to Satan at a board meeting in Hell in Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb p. 111 (hence Capon’s imagined “Harry” who on p. 112 refuses noodles with the Chicken Paprikash because he’s counting calories. “There are, to be sure, greater blasphemies than that against the goodness of creation; but none illustrates better the fundamental antimaterialism of the age. Harry sits in front of one of the finest and simplest goods in the world, and he begs off, not because he does not like it, but because he has ceased to see it. Noodles, for him, are not unique and delightful beings; they have become an abstract subject called highly caloric food. No matter to him that Martha made the noodles herself – that he has before him something he will not meet again for years: He turns them down precisely because they are, to him, no matter at all. It is calories, not noodles, that count…. How sad, then, to see real beings – Harry and all his fellow calorie counters – living their lives in abject terror of things that do not even go bump in the night.”
“‘Frankly,’ I reply, ‘I wouldn’t know how to describe the difference.’”
John O’Sullivan in National Review March 25, 1996 (the specific reference was people who diet down to ugly sticks then ask “Notice any change in me?” but it offers far broader “He’s an extraordinary man” possibilities)