Five Quick Takes

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I have an announcement: Mudblood Catholic is moving! I was recently picked up by a blogging platform, and I’ll be relocating accordingly. I’m not sure yet of the exact date, but I believe it should be some time next month. I’ll keep you informed about the details!

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Speaking of movement, I’ve been drifting away from anarchism lately. Less for practical reasons—I always knew anarchism was impractical (even if it isn’t nearly as impractical as people suppose)—than because it’s hard to maintain simultaneously that men should govern themselves, and also that the state, i.e. the structure which most men at most times and in most places have recognized as a legitimate governing power, is intrinsically illegitimate. How can their political choices be genuine, with the sole exception of that one? The system may be salvageable: I don’t rule out a possible return to my anarchist convictions. But even in anarchism, I accepted that there would have to be some sort of compromise with the state, since it clearly isn’t going anywhere right this second.

So yeah, after my first time voting for a President eleven years ago, I’m probably gonna vote for the second time in 2020. Feels a little odd.

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I’ve been feeling the bite of singleness a lot more in 2019 than in previous years. Singleness, not loneliness; I’ve often felt that, and if anything it’s troubled me somewhat less this year than before. But that’s only one of the trials of being single. The workload of just being alive is hard to handle by yourself. A couple, or a commune, can divide among themselves the responsibilities of earning a living, cleaning, cooking, budgeting, making social arrangements, and the like. When you’re single, either you do those things for yourself or they do not get done.

This is one of the principal things that many straight Christians who take a traditional view of sexual ethics forget, or neglect. I rather suspect it’s also one of the things that tends to move many Christians to progressivist views on sexuality; a subconscious conviction that God wouldn’t impose a burden like that on people (and indeed, it is not he but our society’s determination to identify intimacy with sexuality that imposed this burden).

I am open to dating: I don’t consider a relationship as such in the least contrary to my beliefs, because finding an intimate relationship through dating doesn’t have to be sexual (though I certainly make no claim to be a good boy whether dating or not). But, I’m not dating anyone now. And I’m a little stumped; as so often.

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My antifa posts are really taking the energy out of me, so don’t expect them to get any more regular. There’s only so much white supremacism I can stand to wade through in a given month.

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I’ve been reflecting a little of late on social media. It’s commonly accepted that it’s an echo chamber, that it gives anger and hatred a place to flourish, that it aids the spread of misinformation, that people are crueller online than they’d ever be in real life, and so forth. All of that’s true, and I don’t know that I have a good solution to any of it.

All the same, and while I do have to be thoughtful and restrain my desire to reply a lot of the time, when I think about Facebook or Twitter, I have to say: they’re delightful! Not 100% of the time, but by and large. I know so many sweet, smart, funny, caring, devout people that I’d never have heard of except thanks to Twitter. The number of brilliant jokes and adorable animals in my Facebook feed far outweighs the impact of most of the online nastiness I come across, and it’s nearly all stuff I’d never have come across except thanks to social media. We spend a lot of time lamenting the divisiveness and ragesturbation of American media, and well we should; but one of the ways we can counteract that darkness is by seeing the good that’s there and enjoying it.

And if that makes me basic, consider: perhaps basic will save the world. It’d fit right in with meek and poor in spirit.

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The Fall of Uncle Ted

ITHAMORE. Look, look, master; here come two religious caterpillars.

BARABAS. I smelt ‘em ere they came.

ITHAMORE. God-a-mercy, nose! Come, let’s begone. …

FRIAR BARNARDINE. Thou hast committed—

BARABAS. Fornication: but that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.

—Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

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I just heard the news that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been removed from public ministry on the instructions of the Holy See. Two allegations of abuse of a minor, and three allegations of sexual misconduct with adults, have been advanced.

The original child abuse scandal that the Boston Globe broke turns sixteen this year. The Catholic Church seems to have learnt something, though perhaps not much, in that time. Cardinal DiNardo, the current president of the USCCB, stated that ‘As clergy in God’s Church, we have made a solemn promise to protect children and young people from all harm. This sacred charge applies to all who minister in the Church, no matter the person’s high standing or long service. This morning was a painful reminder of how only through continued vigilance can we keep that promise.’ Too little, too late? Possibly. The issue of the canonical trial of Cardinal McCarrick remains to be seen, as does any reformatory work—including, among other things, whatever reparations to victims are possible—that the Catholic Church in this country undertakes.

But why, why, why the lies and evasion and backroom squalor, the hypocritical concealment of hypocritical perversion? Rod Dreher (about whom I have mixed feelings [1]) expresses it very well at The American Conservative:

McCarrick was a major bone in my throat. Take a look at this story from the Boston Globe: 

‘Prominent church opinion-makers, including two cardinals, have suggested that the clergy sexual abuse crisis is a relatively minor phenomenon that is being turned into a major scandal by the media and others with an ax to grind. Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington, for example, told The Washington Post this week that some newspapers are having a “heyday” with the issue. “Elements in our society who are very opposed to the Church’s stand on life, the Church’s stand on family, the Church’s stand on education … see in this an opportunity to destroy the credibility of the Church.’” 

Imagine seeing and hearing things like that from the likes of McCarrick, knowing that he was a serial abuser of priests and seminarians—and knowing, obviously, that he knows it. He was playing a role. The stories about Uncle Ted were rampant on the East Coast, among priests. I know this because they told me. These weren’t just rumors … 

Some bishops were part of a gay cabal who looked out for each other, and made sure their secrets stayed safe. Many other bishops were neither gay nor sexually active, but had a strong sense that the Church’s image must be protected at all costs. This is how a dysfunctional family works. Nobody notice that Uncle Ted has his hands down Cousin Bobby’s pants. If we don’t talk about it, maybe it’s not happening … 

Which brings us to the laity. [A] reader wrote, with admirable self-recognition, that ‘we’d fooled ourselves into thinking’ that the crisis was over. This is why actual sex abuse victims remained silent about their abuse: because they knew that people wouldn’t believe them, because they didn’t want to believe them. … When I blew the whistle on a priest in my own parish in 2005, a friend of mine who was on the parish council reproached me bitterly. Of course we all knew what Father had been accused of, and that he wasn’t supposed to be in ministry, he said. But we kept it from the parishioners for their own good.

‘We kept it from them for their own good’: the plausible, Satanic mantra of the gaslighting abuser. Is the Catholic Church as obsessed with image as Hollywood and the White House? I wouldn’t have thought so, but maybe I was naïve; not that I ever thought the Church was perfect—my acquaintance with Christian history and my Calvinist upbringing prevented me from falling for that idea—but I had supposed that she was better than this.

This is what happens when the ikon is allowed to calcify into the idol. In ordinary language, an ikon [2] is a depiction of God, Christ, or a saint, and ritual veneration of the ikon is an act of reverence to the person it depicts, rather like kissing a loved one’s photo while separated from them. More broadly, the function of an ikon is to establish contact between ourselves and the persons, mysteries, and archetypes of the heavenly realms, and in this way practically every thing is an ikon: each woman and man is an ikon of God, Christ is the ikon of the Father, every word is an ikon of an idea, every love-affair is the veneration of an ikon. That which transcends the senses must nevertheless be presented to us in terms of the senses, because that’s how human beings learn. I think it is in this light that we must understand the profession of the Second Council of Nicæa, that reverence for ikons is not only licit but necessary in Christian worship; even if we were to ban wood and paint, sculpture and tapestry, from the liturgy (which is a good deal more austere than the instructions for the Tabernacle), it would still be true that the incomprehensible God can only be approached through images—poetic if not pictorial, and perhaps no less crude for being conceptual.

But there are two skewed ways of looking at ikons, and Iconoclasm is only one of them. The other error is the mental blending of the type with its archetype, the confusion of the ikon with the thing it communicates. This is when the ikon becomes the idol, usurping the reverence and loyalty due only to God, and issuing inevitably in monstrosity and corruption, and often in bloodshed. The lover who pretends that all his beloved’s real flaws are mere harmless quirks is an idolator; so, too, are the official who conceal the sexual predation of athletes to protect the college’s reputation, and the statesman who forces other peoples to bear the cost of the prosperity of his own nation.

Returning to Dreher:

I’m traveling right now in the Azores. One of my party is a faithful Southern Baptist layman. His confession is going through its own scandals right now. He and I were talking about Uncle Ted last night. He’s not gloating at all. Nobody should gloat. …  

Despite all that, I must tell you: this Uncle Ted story is all very good news. I mean that sincerely. Everything that was hidden, and foul, and corrupt, and that thrived in the darkness, is being exposed. My Catholic faith was not strong enough to withstand knowing that Uncle Ted, and those like him, were getting away with this injustice. I was a prideful, triumphalistic Catholic, and that set me up for a big fall. A Russian told me when I was coming into the Orthodox faith that there are so many scandals in the Orthodox Church that no Orthodox has the right to look down on Rome. If I had been the same kind of Orthodox Christian, my Orthodoxy would have been at risk. 

If you are committed to remaining a Catholic, I strongly urge you to remind yourself that God allows chastisement to fall upon his people for the sake of their repentance. Maybe you’ve fallen so in love with the institution that you’ve forgotten the One who is supposed to be at its center. That happened to me once. 

This is an opportunity to repent. This is what judgment means. This is what purification is. That same light will shine into the dark corners of your soul and mine, if we let it. 

… As a Catholic, I always imagined that one day I might have to suffer for the Church. I never imagined that I would have to suffer from the Church. Losing my Catholic faith was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but honestly, I thank God for it. It broke me, and I needed breaking. I was ideological, I was triumphalist, I was sentimental—and I was much weaker in my faith than I realized. … 

This e-mail just came in. This is a perfect example of the role the laity has played in perpetuating the scandal: I simply don’t understand your eagerness with this prosecution of McCarrick. I support the legal ramifications, but not your public dancing on his grave. You have to understand the intense hatred the media have for Catholicism. We MUST protect our brand, our shield, our faith! I fully support Pope Francis and his softened tone, and even swipes at capitalism because the media love him. And image is everything. … In short, we must handle these issues swiftly, legally, but privately! As a successful advertising executive in NYC I am looked up like an alien because I am a weekly Mass attender … Image is everything, and when it comes to the One True Church we MUST protect her!

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Francisco de Goya, 1799

Dreher’s correspondent happens to be a layman, but the attitude this person evinces is plentiful among clergy too. And in mere justice, we must concede to Caiaphas that it is expedient that one man should die for the people. Although even Caiaphas did not sink to the grotesque slogan ‘We must protect our brand.’

No matter what degree it occurs in—pope, cardinal, bishop, priest, deacon, religious, or pew-warmer—the worship of the Church is one of the wickedest and most disastrous forms of idolatry possible. The better and more plausible the idol (which is almost the same as saying: the nobler and more important the ikon that has been turned into an idol), the more loathsome and horrifying its corruption, for much the same reason that a character with lousy powers makes an unsatisfying supervillain, but a good supervillain is of the same stuff as a good superhero. The Church is a beautiful and sacred ikon; she is accordingly an ugly and powerful idol, as capable of devouring children as Ashtoreth or Tlaloc or Kālī. [3] And insofar as she is an idol the Church deserves to be smashed. Such smashing will not hurt the Church-as-ikon, the Body of Christ; for that identity is of heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. Nor is it any kindness to the Church (or to one’s neighbor) to let her be an idol to others; there is no virtue in protecting the Church’s ‘brand’; the Church’s one job is to be an ikon, and those who try to keep the popular image of Catholicism squeaky clean, by any means other than trying to keep actual Catholicism squeaky clean, are as guilty of corrupting and breaking the Church as those who blatantly attack her.

If not guiltier. For the Iconoclast may be a heretic but at least he is not a hypocrite; and our Lord was far gentler with the Samaritans than he was with the Pharisees.

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[1] On the one hand, I was and remain extremely unimpressed with his attitude toward poverty, his willingness to tolerate or even defend the President’s ugly utterances, his paranoid view of Pope Francis, and a soupçon of apparent homophobia exhibited in this very article. On the other, this article displays some of his best qualities, too: honesty about the flaws of churches, frank refusal to take pleasure in scandal, and willingness to confess his own faults (this last being a quality that many people whom I agree with far more fail to display).

[2] I use this spelling to differentiate the religious object from other uses of the word icon. The theology and spirituality of ikons is much more characteristic of the East, but it is also part of the proper heritage of the West. The peculiar heresy of Iconoclasm that shaped the East in the eighth and ninth centuries had little influence in the West, until the Protestant Reformation; and even then, the Anglican and Lutheran traditions were mostly tolerant of ikons—both retained the use of crucifixes, for instance.

[3] Many people are familiar with Ashtoreth (or more properly Ashtart) as an ancient Canaanite goddess, to whom babies were sometimes offered. Tlaloc was an Aztec deity who also received child sacrifices (many Aztec gods received human sacrifice in one form or another); apparently, because Tlaloc was a deity of fertility and rain, the children were injured before being actually killed, in order to make them cry, their tears being considered a form of sympathetic magic that would prompt Tlaloc to send rain. Kālī is a severe and terrifying Hindu goddess, normally considered a destroyer of evil and a protectress, who has often been associated with human sacrifice.

The Omen of Charlottesville

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight …

—William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

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First things first: for Heather Heyer, killed while protesting in Charlottesville last week: Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord; and let light perpetual shine upon her. Amen. ✠ May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen. ✠

Now then.

It should be, but isn’t, unnecessary to argue over whether the rally in Charlottesville was white supremacist. I can certainly allow that individuals who attended it, or who sympathized with its objection to taking down a statue of Robert E. Lee, were not. And yet—when the chosen symbols of the ralliers include swastikas, Nazi salutes, and such slogans as ‘Jews will not replace us’ and ‘Blood and soil,’ it ceases to be unfair to say that the people who chose those symbols are white supremacists. If you wish to persuade me that that rally was not white supremacist, you will have to explain what isn’t openly and horrifyingly racist to adopt the symbols and catchphrases of a perpetrator of race-based genocide. And while I have no wish to paint with a broad brush, I shall be bold to say that even people who aren’t racists themselves, but who are content to keep that sort of company for the sake of their political opinions, should ask themselves a few searching questions about those opinions.

Please note the Klansman at the lower left: this is not a man you should be comfortable next to, physically or politically.

Again, it should be unnecessary to point out that racism in any form at all is totally untenable for the Christian. One of the earliest difficulties in the Church was ethnic strife between Palestinian and European Jewish Christians, and the Apostles chose to solve it by creating the office of the diaconate, which was promptly filled exclusively by members of the racial minority.1 The single most important dispute in the first century was over whether Gentiles as Gentiles were eligible to become Christians, or whether they had to be Judaized as well; St Paul, who wrote more of the New Testament than any other single author, spent half his career battling and denouncing that one idea, calling it not merely a mistake but a false gospel. The miracle of tongues at Pentecost exhibited the coïnherence of man as man, not as this race against that; and the coïnherence is displayed again in what professes to be a vision of humanity released from the limits and illusions of sin and mortality:

After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb. And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God.2

And white supremacism is, for the Catholic, an especially silly version of heresy. Not only because white is barely an ethnicity at all.3 But because we worship a brown Middle-Eastern Jew. When God chose to take on flesh and be born of a Mother, He chose to be born a Jew. If race means anything (which, no), Caucasians are, at highest, decidedly second-fiddle.

What, then, must the Christian be prepared to do in the times we evidently live in?

1. Call racism out for what it is, without making excuses for it. As a rule of thumb: any sentence about groups who employ white supremacist or neo-Nazi symbols and ideology that begins with the words ‘Not all of them were …’, isn’t really worth finishing. Even if it’s true that not all of them were, enough of them were. And it isn’t as though most philosophical racists are going to approach you on the street and proselytize with, ‘Have you heard about how white people are intrinsically superior?’ They’re going to start with something that sounds safe and plausible; and then keep pushing the line of what’s plausible a little further, and a little further, and a little further still. It’s what’s been happening for the last decade, whether intentionally or unconsciously.

2. Look for the good in your opponents. People don’t just wake up one day and think, ‘Hmm, say, what if from now on I were just awful?’ There’s nearly always a hurt or an unmet need or a misunderstanding at the back of it. The image of God is easily defaced, but it is hard to erase it completely. There are sociopaths and monsters out there; but they are exceedingly few, and I’ve found by experiment that some of the people most of us would dismiss as obvious instances of sociopathy are nothing of the kind, and that (a lot of) patient reason and kindness can actually reach them.

Looking for the good in your opponent for compassion’s sake is, I think, the best motive. It’s certainly the reason we are given in the Gospels. But there is another and more pragmatic motive. Since most people don’t get into evil for the lulz, they generally have a reason—bad or good, personal or principled, reflective or habitual. If you don’t understand that reason, you’re fighting blind. It’s nearly always the good in an evil thing that gives it its energy, not the bad; if you can’t find and appeal to that good, it’s going to be nearly impossible to combat the evil it’s energizing, except by destroying the evildoer, and we have laws about that.

3. Be prepared to defy the government. I’d hope that every Christian would take this for granted. The Church came into existence as an illegal, underground faith, and has always had a stormy relationship with the civil powers even when she had pride of place among them. If the government pursues a racist or nationalist agenda, whether by active injustice or by mere neglect, the believer has the right and the duty not to obey commands that support that agenda.

This is easy to write, and hard to do. But there’s a reason inspiring stories get told: sometimes, they inspire.

Your chair is never softer, your study never warmer, your prospect of the evening meal never more secure than when you read about the gulag: the epic agony of the gulag. And your lecteurial love for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn never more intense. ‘How much does the Soviet Union weigh?’ Stalin once rhetorically asked a team of interrogators who were having difficulty in breaking a suspect. He meant that no individual could withstand the concerted mass of the state. In February 1974 the Moscow Cheka served Solzhenitsyn with a summons. Instead of signing the receipt, he returned the envelope with a statement that began:

In the circumstances created by the universal and unrelieved illegality enthroned for many years in our country … I refuse to acknowledge the legality of your summons and shall not report for questioning to any agency of the state.

And, for that moment, the Soviet Union and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn weighed about the same.4

Will it come to that? I hope not. I don’t want to find out that I’m not as badass as Solzhenitsyn when there’s something depending on it. But it could come to that, and while we may fail out of weakness, we should at least know our duty, in case it ever needs doing.

Like this, but with more torture and less subtle homoeroticism.

4. Be suspicious of the media. Even if they meant well in every case, the media can’t even predict the weather. And everybody, even the well-meaning, has some sort of slant. It isn’t necessarily insincere or malicious or even secret. But every news source is going to be guided, to some extent, by what it expects or assumes to be true; and they all have a vested interesting in being attention-grabbing more than in being accurate—it’s how they get clicks and attract viewers and sell newspapers. And the more a source shares your preconceptions or affirms what you’d like to be true, the more easily it will hoodwink you, no matter what your political alignment is.

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1We know this because all seven of the first deacons have Greek names, indicating that they were of Hellenistic descent, i.e. they came from the Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean rather than from the Holy Land, where the Jews still spoke Aramaic. For the story itself, see Acts 6.1-7.

2Apocalypse 7.9-11.

3I forget the source, but one of my friends recently reposted a very good mini-essay on why black pride is a thing but white pride isn’t. Namely, white pride is in one sense a thing, i.e., we have celebrations of Irish and German and Italian and Scottish and Swedish heritage, and so forth; because (to oversimplify) white people can trace their ancestry back thus, at least in a general way, sometimes quite specifically. Black people, by contrast, are mostly the descendants of slaves, and their family traditions were accordingly destroyed or distorted beyond all recognition; their shared experience as a minority in a mostly-white country is, for many of them, as much history as they have, and is an authentic history as far as it goes; celebrations of Ghanan and Congolese and Igbo heritage are lacking because they were taken away and destroyed, not because of some overarching blackness that supersedes those things. By contrast, white, voluntary immigrants to this country, even when they were despised by the elites, were able to maintain their cultural identity in an unbroken tradition. The (vaguely so-called) Native American peoples were able to do the same thing, which is why we still have things like Cherokee or Lakota or Hopi culture.

4Martin Amis, Koba the Dread, p. 59. (Koba was a nickname of Stalin. The Cheka was the ‘Emergency Commission’ of the USSR, i.e. a pack of bureaucratic thugs with the job of torture and judicial murder.)

Five Quick Takes

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I.

I haven’t forgotten my series on natural law theory and Dr Feser’s essay on the perverted faculty argument. To my surprise, I’ve found still more to disagree with in his last few pages—the range of possible thoughts is huge, isn’t it—and so I’ll be writing one last post to address that.

Chesterton probably didn’t have my sort of (ugh) lifestyle in mind when he said that the walls of Catholic dogma were the walls of a playground, but I very much find it to be true. I feel so much more at ease in a definite world, even one with aspects I definitely dislike, than I ever did as a Protestant; in nine years that delight has never gone away. Some of my optimism, not to say naïveté, about the Church has indeed gone away—heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall never pass away.

II.

Four months into Trump’s presidency, and and impeachment has already become something much more than the wishful thinking of the die-hard left. Time flies, doesn’t it.

III.

In my incessant quest to waste as much time as possible on Netflix, I’ve finally branched out a little from ‘Archer’ and started watching a couple of more controversial programs: ‘The Keepers’ and ‘13 Reasons Why.’ I’m only one episode into the former, so I won’t offer a detailed opinion on it except to say that so far it’s pretty good. I still haven’t finished the latter, so I will opine cautiously about it, but I will say a few things.

One is that I’m not totally seeing where the controversy over it is coming from.1 I thought about suicide every six months, at least, when I was in high school—actually pretty much through all my teen years. And so far the depiction of Hannah Baker’s life is pretty convincing. (And it must be said, the acting, script, and directing are all outstanding. The show should get an Emmy.) Both teens and grown-ups do act like that sometimes, up to and including the huge project that forms the framing device of the series. If people are concerned that watching a series about suicide might influence a teenager toward suicide or self-harm of their own, that’s a valid concern; but most works of art are ill-suited to some audience or other. It’s a reason to recommend the work judiciously, not a reason to criticize the art or the artist.

Of course, there is a far less creditable possibility: namely, that the people who feel themselves represented in the show resent the implied criticisms it makes of them. Teachers, counselors, and administrators aren’t portrayed in an altogether flattering light, including failure to respond adequately to allegations of sexual assault or notice signs of suicidal thoughts; but that isn’t exactly unknown. I don’t know if anybody at my school or among my friends or even in my family knew I thought about it. And the brute fact is that authority figures aren’t always appealing as confidantes, not because they can be intimidating but because they can be annoying.

See, saying cutesy stuff like this to someone whose reason was 'I was too scared to do it before 

and now I'm not' or 'Because last time my mom was still alive' is actually a fairly shitty idea.

I know that when I was young, depressed, and contemplating self-slaughter, the ‘suicide prevention’ lectures were certainly no help. From them, I learned the correct way of slitting my wrists, and that my only hope was to traipse off to the guidance office, bare the recesses of my soul to a flaky, middle-aged woman like the one hosting the series, and put myself on happy pills. I recall sitting in the back of the auditorium, with my black skirts swirling around me like a pool, ruminating on the cluelessness of the people who had arranged the lecture series. Their understanding of my psychology, I concluded, was utterly puerile.2

And leaving school personnel aside, not every person is eager to deal with the effects their actions, even the smallest ones, can have upon others. Judging from what I’ve watched thus far, Hannah’s character kills herself over an overwhelming heap of things that crushed her, not over one thing she couldn’t endure—and not over depression or mental illness, which are often but not always linked to suicidal ideation, because people are not machines where everything will go smoothly as long as you get all the default settings right.

IV.

Most of my earliest memories were made on Fort Ord, which was cheek-by-jowl against Monterey, California, and you were never too far from the sound and scent of the ocean there. Ever since, I’ve never felt totally right when I’m too far inland—I’ve got to be near a coast, at least able to drive out and see it if I have a day off. It isn’t the same as watching the sun set, red and gold, in the Pacific, sitting on one of those big, ragged rocks on the coast of Monterey Bay, while the salt wind whips against your face; but I’ll take what I can get.

I kept telling myself last summer that I was going to make a trip to Rehoboth. Or some beach, anyway, and Rehoboth happens to be one of my favorites that’s within a day’s drive: it doesn’t have the trashiness and commercial hugeness of Ocean City, or the face-dissolving pollution of the Chesapeake (and the less said about the putrescent smell of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor the better, though I’m not above going there when I really want a fix of seaside). It’s a cozily built town, and you can find parking before you gnaw your own leg off from ennui. Fingers crossed to get out there some time this summer.

V.

Bacardi white rum sucks. I said it. I’m not sorry. Tastes like margarine. What doesn’t suck is Jameson and Grand Marnier over ice with a few dashes of Angostura bitters (kind of a poor man’s Manhattan, but without the vermouth because I didn’t feel like buying any, and without the twist of lemon because I was too lazy to cut a lemon).

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1Probably the silliest critique I’ve yet encountered was by a reviewer from the New York Times, who found it unbelievable that somebody would listen to the recordings made by the suicide victim slowly instead of all in one go, saying that ‘It makes no sense as anything but a plot device,’ because people only behave in one way, ever, and would never be reluctant or intimidated to hear a close friend’s explanation of why she killed herself.

2Melinda Selmys, Sexual Authenticity, p. 30.

Five Quick Takes

I.

In Camille Paglia's interview late last month at Salon.com, she displayed a great deal of what makes her one of my favorite people in the world. Her incisive intellect, boldness, detachment, and honesty should be hallmarks of everyone who wants to be a thinking person. I've rarely found it anywhere else, except from Andrew Sullivan when he wrote for The Dish. Some samples of her brilliance, e.g. on religion:

I'm speaking here as an atheist. I don't believe there is a God, but I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system. They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves eternal principles of life and death. ... The real problem is a lack of knowledge of religion as well as a lack of respect for religion. I find it completely hypocritical for people in academe or the media to demand understanding of Muslim beliefs and yet be so derisive and dismissive of the devout Christian beliefs of Southern conservatives. ... Exactly what are these people offering in place of religion? In my system, I offer art -- and the whole history of spiritual commentary on the universe. ... [M]y generation in college during the 1960s was suffused with Buddhism, which came from the 1950s beatniks. Hinduism was in the air from every direction ... So I really thought we were entering this great period of religious syncretism, where the religions of the world were going to merge. But all of a sudden, it disappeared! ... Young people have nothing to enlighten them, which is why they're clinging so much to politicized concepts, which give them a sense of meaning and direction.

And on politics and the media:

Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk ideology ... They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers. It's so simplistic! ... When the first secret Planned Parenthood video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media was kept completely in the dark about it, even after the second video was released. But the videos were being run nonstop all over conservative talk shows ... It was a huge and disturbing story, but there was total silence in the liberal media. That kind of censorship was shockingly unprofessional. [They] were trying to bury the story by ignoring it. Now I am a former member of Planned Parenthood and a strong supporter of unconstrained reproductive rights. But I was horrified and disgusted by those videos and immediately felt there were serious breaches of ethics in the conduct of Planned Parenthood officials. But here's my point: it is everyone's obligation, whatever your political views, to look at both liberal and conservative news sources every single day. You need a full range of viewpoints to understand what is going on in the world.

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II.

I've been fumbling my way toward some outline of economics for ... well, about fifteen years now, I guess. It's hard work -- I have no head for it -- but, in the hundred years and some stretching from Rerum Novarum in 1891 to Laudato Si' this year, the Church has been grappling with the human consequences of the industrial and technological revolutions of the last three centuries.

The main thing that I feel both the capitalist and the socialist trends have lost touch with is that economics, in addition to being a science (sort of), is also a humanity: its subject matter is precisely human choice and well-being, and to isolate it from our nature and our needs -- making it all a matter of mathematics, of outlay versus intake and tax versus public spending -- is to subjugate mankind to his own machines. That is the real robot uprising (get out of here, Terminator) of which novels and movies are a pale, unconscious, yet terrifyingly true reflection; and it will probably not be able to actually destroy mankind, but it has certainly crushed the spirits of many men by robbing them of worthwhile work.

No, no one asked for you, Elysium. You sucked, and are irrelevant.

For man needs work. Work, not wages used to be a slogan of the Left, and it fits right into the creation pattern: man was made to till the garden and keep it, and to be deprived of the meaningful, creative work that that phrase symbolizes is to be condemned to perpetual boredom. Work became frustrated in its effects by the Fall, but it did not essentially change its nature, just as man became corrupted by sin but did not cease to be man. To say that man needs worthwhile work is saying that man needs purpose, and economics, isolated from the idea of purpose as it is from human nature -- relying almost entirely on his resources and his wants for its material -- is just the OS for the Matrix.

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III.

Anna Magdalena of The Catholic Transgender has posted a link to this excellent article on Public Discourse (the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute, which was heavily, and it seems justly, criticized for its publication of the Regnerus study on same-sex parenting), dealing with trans issues from a scientific angle, and coming out with an uncharacteristically generous stance for a conservative body to publish. Jennifer Gruenke, the author, writes:

... [W]e know that there are multiple pathways of sexual development and that they are not all regulated together. One pathway is the development of the gonads into either ovaries or testes; another is the development of external genitalia, and another is the development of the brain to be predisposed toward one gender. We know that the gonads and external genitals can differ from each other, and that both can differ from chromosomal sex. So we ought to expect to find people whose brain pathway differs from the other pathways. ... And I would predict that people with such a mutation would look just like cases of transgendered people. ... [C]hromosomal reductionism is an unacceptable account of sex.

This is only one step forward; where it leaves trans and intersex people theologically, I don't know (though Melinda Selmys, some time ago, posted a thought-provoking piece on the subject). I'm hopeful that the Church's grasp of this subject (and my own!) will continue to develop.

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IV.

Counterclockwise from bottom left: the dormition, assumption, and coronation of the Mother of God.

Illumination from the Ramsey Psalter, an English psalter of the late tenth century.

I always get excited as Assumption draws close (reminder to my papist readers: it isn't a holy day of obligation this year because it falls on a Saturday, but it's a good idea to go to Mass on the 15th anyway). It's long been one of my favorite feasts in the Church's year; I'm not sure why, except that it's just so cool. The idea of a person being taken into heaven bodily, like Enoch and Elijah (and just maybe St John), has always exercised an immense fascination for me. Traditional tales like the cave of the Seven Sleepers, though bearing all the hallmarks of fiction, are addressed to the same interest in a purely literary way.

The importance of the feast is not simply about the Blessed Virgin Mary, still less about assumption as either a literary or a historical phenomenon. Mary is an exemplar of the whole Church, both the Daughter of Zion and the Jerusalem above, which is the mother of us all. What has been given first and most vividly to her is, in the end, the reward of every Christian; that is, of everyone who consents to be reconciled to God. Indeed, to a Catholic, she is a prototype of humanity: where Christ is both Man to God and God to Man, Mary is more particularly Man to Christ, the Eve to His Adam and the Queen to His King -- for these are the gifts that God has always had to give to mankind. We are archetypally involved in the Assumption.

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V.

Lately, I've been thinking regularly of (and giggling at) the wonderful line that C. S. Lewis gave to Trumpkin the Dwarf in Prince Caspian: "I haven't much use for lions that are Talking Lions and don't talk, and friendly lions though they don't do us any good, and whopping big lions though nobody can see them."

I hope that God isn't offended by my giggles. Given that He is a whopping big lion, I'm sure He can handle Himself (though of course the thing to be worried about is that He can also handle me). Faith is hard; making the best of doubt seems, sometimes, to be the only thing to do. And who knows -- one day, perhaps I'll be able to laugh at the fact that, once upon a time, I needed to bother to laugh at doubt.