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Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms. Highs around 80. Southwest winds 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40 percent. Sunday Night: A slight chance of thunderstorms in the evening. Mostly cloudy with a slight chance of showers. Lows in the mid 60s. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
Handel’s Messiah Performed by the Festival Chorus and the Chamber Players of Palm Coast, directed by Paige Long, 3 p.m. at the old Palm Coast United Methodist Church, 5200 Belle Terre Parkway, Palm Coast. Please note that the church sign at 5200 Belle Terre Parkway reads CLC (Christian Life Center). The Music Ministry of Palm Coast United Methodist Church is presenting the Christmas portion of Handel’s Messiah, concluding with the Hallelujah Chorus. Complete with professional soloists, large Festival Chorus, accompanied by orchestra, this concert is free and open to all. Please invite family and friends as well as pass this info onto anyone interested. With Soprano Pamela Hanson-Peterson, Alto Aisha Barnes, Tenor Jeremy Hunt, and Bass David Stork, accompanied by the Chamber Players of Palm Coast, directed by Paige Dashner Long. The concert is free. Donations are accepted. Note: This year, the alto soloist is a local, home grown Palm Coast professionally trained singer – Ashia Barnes. Ashia graduated from FPCHS and earned her Associate’s Degree in Voice from Daytona State College. Then continued her studies and earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Classical Voice from the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. She is now working on her Master’s Degree in Vocal Performance at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
Craig Flagler Palms Funeral Home, Memorial Gardens & Crematory hosts the 18th annual Candlelight Service of Remembrance Sunday, December 3, from 6 to 8 p.m. at 511 Old Kings Road, South in Flagler Beach. The event is held to help those that have lost loved ones cope with the loss during the holiday season. The event is free and open to the public. Family and friends are asked to bring a Christmas ornament in memory of a loved one. The ornament will be placed on a 15′ Christmas tree that stands in the Garden of Memory Mausoleum. The decorating of the Christmas tree starts at 5:00 p.m. and the candlelight service starts at 6 p.m. Live entertainment and light snacks will be provided. More information on the Candlelight Service can be found on Craig Flagler Palm’s Facebook event here.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 1 to 4 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
In Coming Days:
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Notably: “… the Jews, who exaggerate everything …” That line, by Voltaire (the the especially) is anti-Semitic, as so much of what Voltaire wrote on Jews could be. The Shylock speech in Shakespeare is anti-Semitic, a reflection of what Philip Roth called “the genuine abhorrence of the Jew that animated Shakespeare and his era.” Thomas Mann’s story, “The Blood of the Walsungs,” is a deeply anti-Semitic story. Dostoevsky is tiresomely anti-Semitic in the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald was, using physical features to make make revolting pronouncements about an entire race. The text of Johan Sebastian Bach’s St. Johns Passion, sublime in every other way, “has added to the waves of anti-Semitism for generations and centuries since its composition,” says Robert Shaw, the choral master. Chekhov had his anti-Semitic moments (“shaking like a Jew in a frying pan,” is how Constance Garnett translated one of his lines from “An Adventure,” a lesser story from 1887). Henry Adams, so revered in conservative America, was a vulgar anti-Semite whose Education wasn’t good enough to know better, who said, proudly, “I pass the day reading Drumont’s anti-Semitic ravings” (Édouard Drumont, who died in 1917, started the Antisemitic League of France), and once said of Zola–famous defender of Alfred Dreyfus against the French state’s organized anti-Semitic lynching) that he should have been sent “to join his friend Dreyfus on Devil’s Island with as much more French rot as the island would hold, including most of the press, the greater part of the theatre, all the stockbrockers and a Rothschild or two for example.” Let’s not forget Ezra Pound, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and so many others: Western civilization, inventor and purveyor of the “intoxicant of anti-Semistism,” as Roth describes it, has no end of examples of its greatest lights spewing the sort of hate that would get them all banned from social media platforms or censored in the mainstream press today. But is a cartoon criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu, the butcher of Gaza, anti-Semitic? Is it no longer possible to criticize an Israeli politician for his genocidal bloodlust the exact same way that LBJ was criticized for his, in Vietnam, using the same imagery, the same references, and making those references explicit? Apparently not. So the Guardian–which defended the cartoonists of the Islamophobic Muhammad cartoons, as I did–fired Steve Bell for drawing the cartoon you see atop this page. Something is off here, and it’s getting out of hand, because it has two indefensible consequences: it misrepresents and, dilutes and cheapens the meaning and affront of anti-Semitism, and it provides a smoke screen for Israel to continue its murderous sweep through Gaza. It is intellectual dishonesty in the service of war crimes. It continues unabated, especially in the United States.
—P.T.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
The dispute among writers and other intellectuals about the award for free speech which Pen America will on Tuesday give to Charlie Hebdo is an example of how muddled the debate has become. The more than 200 Pen members who have withdrawn from the ceremony on the grounds that the magazine unfairly picked on French Muslims, a disadvantaged minority in their view, have missed the point. The award is for maintaining the right of free speech in the face of threats to life and limb. It is not about the content of every skit, report and cartoon. Some, and not only among the relatively small number concerning Islam, were no doubt unfair. Satire draws attention to defects or stupidities by exaggerating them, transposing them into startling contexts or turning them upside down. It can itself be defective and stupid but does not prosper when it is consistently so. There are unavoidable areas of friction in western societies between different religions and between religions and the secular world view, which is now the default position of the majority, including many Christians. They are not easily negotiated. Civility should be the rule in most circumstances, but civility can all too easily be cast aside. The danger in such a difficult situation is that speech and expression become a power struggle, in which one side attempts to curtail freedom by intimidation or worse. That must be opposed, and that is why the award to Charlie Hebdo is justified. It is a statement of principle that needed to be made and it is right that it has been made.
