Jack Bauer. A Man of Constant Sorrows.

"Odysseus slept. And lightly the ship sped on, bearing that man who had suffered so much sorrow of heart in passing through wars of men and through troublous seas--the ship sped on." The Odyssey by Homer.

Once again, Jack Bauer has been rejected by everyone around him in the final hours of his 24 hour assignment. Even the President of the United States has tried to arrest him. And Chloe. Although we knew that couldn't last. Now she has been replaced as CTU Director by an evil henchman of President Logan and, I feel certain, will find a way back to Jack's team.

And another love interest is dead. Renee. Not my favorite character in many ways, but I have to admit I was sorry to see her go. Jack seems to like the muscular but well endowed types. All a little too androgynous for me. But I have never been attracted to girls who can beat me in an arm wrestle. Be that as it may, Renee is dead. As are all the girls with whom Jack has been romantically involved. Jack is a male black widow. First bed, then dead. It's a tragic formula.

Jack being the self-conscious man that he is, blames himself for the pain he has brought to his friends, and rightly so. SWM seeks SWF. Former love-interests: Teri Bauer, Nina Myers, Audrey Raines, Renee Walker. All dead or whereabouts unknown.

But I love Jack, he follows in the great tradition of sad and reluctant heroes, from the ancient Odysseus to our modern day Spiderman. Something in us likes our heroes to suffer.

All Jack Bauer wants is to return to his daughter, to find a woman to love and who can stay alive more than one year, and for justice to rule the earth. Not too much to ask. But I doubt he will get any of the above. He will not walk off into the sunset at the end of the series. He will have succeeded in saving the world but he will be alone at the end. There are unforeseeable twists to come; maybe his first wife is still alive, maybe Dalia Hassan was motivated by revenge and plotted her husband's death, maybe Tony's still alive. Who knows, but the surprises are not over.

Which reminds me that there is another Jack in TV Land whose plot has twisted one too many times for me, and that Jack, albeit a man of sorrows as well, whines too much to be a really cool hero -- and I have abandoned any hope of understanding "alto" world. I am referring, of course, to LOST.

But I get 24's Jack Bauer. And it's been fun.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post Scripts

1. Heroes in TV and Movie frequently have names that begin with a "J". Jack being the most frequent. See an old post: Jack Bauer's Man-Purse
2. My thanks to Schuyler Whately, from whom I first heard the phrase "a man of constant sorrows" in reference to Jack Bauer. The phrase comes from song lyrics of Dick Burnett, circa 1913, and was made popular in the movie, Oh Brother Where art Thou. I believe the earliest origin of the phrase is from the Book of Isaiah: He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

Oxford, England Summer Studies 2010

Seminars on lyric poetry and lectures on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, 

English history and architecture

Each year the College of St. Thomas More in Fort Worth, Texas invites students, associates, friends of the College, and entering freshman to travel to England to participate in seminars, lectures, and tours given by Tutors of the College in the unique environment of the university city of Oxford. The program gives participants an opportunity to immerse themselves in this historic place and introduces them to the enduring tradition of English-speaking arts and letters begun in Oxford in the twelfth century.

The group will stay at St. Benet’s Hall, a Permanent Private Hall of the University of Oxford located in the center of Oxford on the beautiful, tree-lined street of St. Giles.

Participants take an intensive three-credit course in Lyric Poetry, meeting in the mornings, and attend occasional lectures on important places, dates, and people from English history. Some afternoons are reserved for tours and excursions, with day-trips to London and Canterbury. The cost of the program for students and prospective students is $1350, for non-students, $2350, and includes course tuition, room accommodations, and daily breakfast. Participants are responsible for airfare, bus and train fares, lunch and dinner, and museum fees.

The deadline for registration is June 1. Space is limited. Register now.

For more information or to register for the program, please call Stephen Shivone in the College office at 817-923-8459 or write to him at sshivone@cstm.edu.

Audit or earn three-hours of college credit. Some scholarships available.

Oxford Summer Studies / July 12-25, 2010
817-923-8459
sshivone@cstm.edu
www.cstm.edu

Impunity. With or Without?

 "That capering buffoon shall not escape with impunity

though he were favoured by the whole human race . . . " 

Don Quixote

-----------------------------------------------------------------

I have lived most of my adult life wondering if I'll ever get to use the word notwithstanding in daily conversation. Just once I would like to say, "that notwithstanding, I think . . ."

There is another word I admire from a distance and that is the word impunity.

It's best understood breaking up the syllables and their Latin origins. Im is a Latin prefix denoting the absence of and the syllable punity from the Latin punire meaning to punish. So, impunity means the absence of consequences or punishment.

Even in the appropriate setting, when someone or something is wrongly going unpunished, I always want to say "without impunity," instead of  the correct "with impunity." Probably, because it would be correct to say "without punishment."  

There may be a proper use of the phrase without impunity but I am certain I will never understand the proper use of this double negative.  There are things I just can't wrap my mind around. Like the space/time continuum in the movie Back to the Future when they go back in time and then come forward to the present and the person that went back into the past is watching the person in the present.

Young Tomato Plants with Patron

 

This is a poor excuse for a horticultural picture, especially compared to a couple other blogs I visit, but I like my tomato plants, so here you go. The good Saint Francis asked if I would crop him out of the photo but I didn't.

Refrigerator Magnets.

On the side of my refrigerator are no less than twenty promotional magnets, only one or two of which serves any present purpose. They may have served some purpose in the past, even if a minor one, but no one seems to think that a purposeless refrigerator magnet should be discarded, including me. Actually, I think I'm the one that makes sure they don't get thrown out. Well, at least that's true for six of them, anyway.

They are the six large Texas Rangers baseball-schedule magnets, starting with year 1997, each received on opening day of a baseball season. Those magnets represent about 20 years of going to Rangers games with my wife and children, and as they say, "them were good times."

Also, not to be discarded is a magnet with a family picture of an old and close friend. He's a missionary and it's a way for him to ask for prayer and other support when we can.

But I have magnets for several people no longer in business, an insurance agent and a plumber. I have a magnet for important Verizon telephone numbers. I don't have any Verizon accounts, though.  I have a magnet to remind me to buy my printer toner from a place called Inksell. I don't know if I have ever done it. I have a magnet from the Dallas Morning News, a newspaper to which I no longer subscribe -- as of at least ten years ago. A "Trains Galore" magnet. I have no idea what that is. And one for the Trinity Railway Express. You get the idea.

They're not really hurting anything but I wonder if a stranger walking into the house thinks, "why do they have so many magnets on the side of the refrigerator?"

To which I have no answer. Maybe you do.