Quote of the Past Week

Last weekend I was finishing up The Return of Don Quixote and found this:

It seems to be a sign of education first to take a thing for granted and then to
forget to see if it is still there. Weapons are a very good working example. The
man says he won't go on wearing a sword because it is no longer any good against
a gun. Then he throws away all the guns as relics of barbarism; and then he is
surprised when a barbarian sticks him through with a sword.

The whole rest of the paragraph this is taken from is interesting, but I'll stop there.


Religion would be another good working example of what the character I've quoted was saying. The educated modern long ago threw out religion as a relic of a superstitious past, and he is now surprised when people within his own culture still claim to hold to it and when people in other cultures do things that seem actually to be motivated by it. (Including running him through with a sword.) The idea of there really being such a thing as good and evil is something else some of our more enlightened moderns have thrown out, along with sexual morality and notions of honor, sexual chivalry, and reserve.

Oh, and let's not forget the idea of there being differences in the sexes: the educated modern has for a generation taken it for granted that the only sex differences are ones inculcated by oppressive cultures and so they must be falling away rapidly as we all grow more educated. Then is surprised when the little boys around him like knocking over block towers as much as building them, the college girls are more likely to respond poorly to binge drinking and one-night stands than their male counterparts, and the women he knows often wish they could stay home to raise their babies while the men he knows may not take paternity leave even if their employers offer it. What on earth could be going on?


But back to the book. The Return of Don Quixote is a short novel with an interesting premise: Some young people on an English estate are putting on a play set in the Middle Ages and come up one actor short. They ask the slightly obsessive, otherworldly librarian, an expert on some obscure Hittite subgroup, to fill in. He sets to by first researching the Middle Ages with scholarly zeal, then plays the part, and afterward refuses to take his costume off, because he's realized how much better medieval clothes were, in many respects, to modern ones. It all leads improbably to a return of the Middle Ages movement in England, which clashes with a trades union uprising (or sitting down), and to both the creation of romantic interests and their entanglements. I don't think I'm giving away too much if I say that all the Jacks shall have their Jills and, even if things do go ill in some wise, all shall be well.


It's all very Chestertonian and the only problem is I kind of wish someone else had written it, even though I don't know who else could have. Much as I love Chesterton's sprightly essays, I just don't like his fiction much. I know Father Brown is much beloved and for a writer to make any character that is still around after a century is an achievement not to be sniffed at, but I'm still not a fan. Father Brown makes good points in his stories, but I don't enjoy the stories. Innocent Smith (Manalive) is a great idea for a character, yet he remains more idea than character. The Flying Inn is a good idea for a story and I am sometimes reminded of part of it while reading the newspaper, but it never really came alive for me. The fictional work of his I like the best, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, has a proto-gamer as a minor character, a good idea for a book at its heart, and actually made me laugh out loud once--and yet I wouldn't call it a great novel. All of his fiction seems to suffer from a carelessness about details, and the characters often don't seem to live.

Somewhere in her Misanthrope's Corner columns, Florence King said she finally realized she couldn't write fiction because she cared more about what her characters thought than what they did. Reading The Return of Don Quixote, I found myself wondering if that was Chesterton's problem. He cared very much about what people think and spent a lot of time arguing in his essays and newspaper columns that what people think about the big subjects--God, life, death, love, war, sex, marriage, family, religion--is important and can't be dismissed with a bland, "Oh, well, it doesn't really matter, we all think the same" or never talked about because it's both vulgar and not really of as much consequence as having the correct opinion of "lawn art" or Andrew Lloyd Webber. This mindset may have helped his delightful essays, but I don't think it helped his fiction.

Most good fiction has a moral component so what a character thinks about the big things does matter and of course it goes without saying that, in even the most frivolous fiction, what the character thinks about other characters or the silly mess he's gotten himself into matters, but we don't go to fiction for philosophy, we go for a story. Things have to happen, it's better if they happen to well-rounded people we can remember afterward, and the things should mostly make sense. If an author is more interested in his characters' philosophies than in anything else about them, he's probably not going to flesh them out as much for the reader. If an author is mostly interested in contrasting how different characters think or in the interesting idea he had about a social situation or some such, he may get careless about details in his rush to get to the parts that interest him. In that flesh-out and in some of those details lie much of the appeal of the story we came for; in other of the details are the shots of realism necessary for us to buy the improbable bits. You can't use hand-wavium to explain away a major social revolution happening in a matter of a few weeks; it's not even a good way to go from no romance to romance.

But I'm just thinking out loud here. I don't really know why I find Chesterton's fiction less satisfying than you'd think I would. He had some good ideas, but the execution left something to be desired, which I can't pin down.

Never mind, I still have his nonfiction to love and, having joined the Church he loved, I can picture him in Heaven (or speeding his way through purgatory to get there, but I like to think he's St. Gilbert, however unofficially), and ready to pray for me or you if we ask. And if any Chesterton fans want to defend his fiction to me by pointing to the endurance of Father Brown or saying that The Man Who Was Thursday has never been out of print (as I think I heard was the case) or even demanding whether I can do better, I shall only take off my hat to that person and bow with a flourish. Or so I would do if I were male. Ladies do not remove their hats for such reason; perhaps I'll curtsy and say "touch'e", which sexually confused response [sings "I'm a happy fella-girly"] should give the speaker enough pause that I can wander off and find a book to read.

Incidentally, if this notion that caring more about what characters think than what they do causes trouble in fiction-writing is correct and if that was a problem of Chesterton's, then the Chesterton book I'm currently reading, The Ball and the Cross, may prove an exception. The two main characters are a committed atheist and a believing Catholic who keep trying to have a duel and keep getting interrupted. I'm not far in, but I think caring more about what the characters think than what they do may work for him in this one, since the whole point of the story is the clash of genuine beliefs.

Emboldening Our Enemies

Earlier today, when I mentioned to Uncle Pookie that Scotland has freed the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing because he has prostate cancer (see here), UP remarked that, "It would be funny if he came back as a suicide bomber. What does he have to lose?" Good question. A dying man has less to fear from a suicide mission than a healthy man, and any man might prefer going out in a blaze of what he considers glory to lingering in a hospital bed. Even John Wayne, playing an old gunfighter in The Shootist, preferred provoking a gunfight and dying in it to dying of prostate cancer.

And if he should get caught before he could carry out his suicide bombing, what of that? He would know that the last time he was convicted of terrorism by a Western nation he only had to serve less than three months per person for the people he killed (not to mention nothing for the property damage he caused), and that in the relatively cushy confines of a British prison. Why worry about that?

We in the West should worry. We've just sent the message that we consider the lives of our civilian populations to be of so little worth, that we see no reason for outsiders who murder us to get a full three months per murder in prison. I sure feel safer knowing that.
　

Some Things You're Allowed to Say and Something You're Not

In the contemporary US, there are things you're (still) allowed to say and things you're not allowed to say.

You're allowed to say that, if you have fair skin and a disinclination to get skin cancer, you ought not sunbathe. It's okay to say that if you have trouble stopping at one or two drinks, you ought not drink at all. It's okay to say that, if you have a family history of diabetes and heart disease, you ought not eat lots of sweets and other junk foods. And, while there's no shortage of people who want to sell the notion "you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want, and still lose weight" and no shortage of people wanting to buy that notion, it is still okay to say that people who do not want to become fat should avoid the couch potato lifestyle in favor of a more physically active one.


But it is not okay to say that, if you are in such a situation in your life that a pregnancy (yours or your girlfriend's) would ruin your life--i.e. cause all sorts of problems for you and wreck your plans--then maybe you should not engage in the activity that creates pregnancy until your life is in a more stable state. You're not allowed to say that.

HP and Religious & Cultural Illiteracy

I don't want to go on and on about Harry Potter, but this morning's Corner had a post with links to HP articles. One warns James Dobson and others are picking the wrong fight and should save their fire for genuine attacks on Christianity. (I've said much the same.) Another talks about Christian references in HP and his failure to convince some American evangelicals of their existence. I could quibble with a couple of his not-central-to-the-main-point claims, but why bother? His column is more worth its space than my quibbles would be, and I'd rather remark on a sad observation he makes:

...I think the problem is that so much of the religious
right failed to see the Christianity in the Potter novels because it knows so
little Christianity itself. Yes, there are a few ‘memory verses’ from Saint
Paul, and various evangelical habits like the ‘sinner’s prayer’ and the alter
call. However the gospel stories themselves, the various metaphors and figures
of the Law and the Prophets, and their echoes down through the past two
millennia of Christian literature and art are largely unknown to vast swaths of
American Christendom, including its leaders.

Let's right up front get rid of any notion that what the author is referring to is a phenomenon of evangelical Protestants only. Catholics are every bit as guilty of being ignorant of Christian heritage, and as our Christian heritage forms the bulk of our Western heritage, one could argue secularists are guilty as well.


People used to grow up hearing the Bible, even if they weren't particularly religious, and we also lived in a culture where it was okay to mention religious themes in conversation or artistic expression and so people gained some familiarity almost through their skin. That is gone. We don't know the Bible and we don't know expressions originating there.


For example, John Derbyshire once mentioned using the expression "being expected to make bricks without straw" and having not one of the group of educated Americans he was talking with know the term. As another example, I once referred to Isaac and Ishmael and the lifelong churchgoer I was talking to asked who they were. Kathleen Norris has written about her hymnal changing the term "my Ebenezer" to "my greatest treasure", presumably because people nowadays aren't expected to know what Ebenezer refers to. And lest it seem I'm only picking on other people, back in the nineties I had to ask someone where the phrase "through a glass darkly" came from. I wasn't a Christian, but considering what our Western heritage is, that is no excuse. I didn't know any Ebenezer other than Scrooge, either, and while I assumed it came from the Bible like so many old-fashioned names, I didn't know who the Hezekiah my busdriver was named for was.


And taking my examples away from the Bible itself, I can remember as an older child reading a magazine my mother sometimes got at church (I read everything...well, except the Bible) and seeing an article in which the author mentioned attending Handel's Messiah. I'd never heard of the Messiah, I'm not sure I'd ever heard the term messiah, and I don't think I was aware of any classical music having been informed by Christianity. Yet I was more culturally literate and well-read than any of my classmates. And, at least through the elementary school years, my religious education was the equal of any of theirs. I may have read lots of novels and plays and recognized lots of paintings and sculpture, but there was any number of things I didn't know about the Christianity I'd supposedly been raised in and even when I recognized something came from the Bible or was a religious concept I often couldn't tell you what the reference was or define the concept.

Is any of this important? Well, when as a teenager I was told by various sources that Christianity hates life and regards the natural world as evil, I believed it because I was too ignorant to know otherwise. That mental path--or chute--was already well-greased by years of media depictions of Christians as ignorant hicks who were apt to be bigots as well and I'd already long since rejected Christianity, but that one particular lie which I did not have the knowledge to refute, more than anything else, resulted in my becoming a pagan. So is it important for people to know what Christianity teaches? If you're a Christian parent who doesn't want your teenager to leave Christianity for something else, I think you'd say yes.

And as to Christian history--or the general history of those parts of the world formerly known as Christendom--and the artworks inspired by Christianity, you do not have to be Christian to believe it is important to know about those. Friar Tuck, the Holy Grail, the Nun's Priest, the fleur-de-lys, the Pieta, De Profundis, and Judith Beheading Holofernes belong to all of us.

Non-Diva

I saw this post on "hip-hop syndrome" last week, and I wanted to mention it for somewhat tangential reasons. It quotes a City Journal article by Myron Magnet that references Wynton Marsalis.

Wynton Marsalis’s scathing critique of rap understands how hip-hop relates to the larger problem. Leaving aside the lyrics, rap is musically “ignorant,” Marsalis says. “Rhythms have to have a meaning. If the rhythm is corrupt, the music is corrupt and the people become corrupt.” (And, one might add, rap also subverts music’s aim of creating a realm of harmony and beauty.) As for the lyrics, Marsalis says, “I call it ‘ghetto minstrelsy.’..."

I am not well able to comment on the musical opinion Marsalis is quoted on (although I find the idea intriguing), and I refer people to the City Journal article for a discussion of hip-hop syndrome. What I wanted to share was something about Wynton Marsalis, the man.

Eighteen or so years ago, I had the good fortune to hear Mr. Marsalis play. I enjoyed the experience, although I was well aware that my place would have been better filled by a more musical person who could more fully appreciate the obvious artistry. What I best remember is a non-musical thing. I was seated near the stage and could see everything. Mr. Marsalis' piano player was blind and before the performance began, Marsalis led the piano player to his seat himself. And after the performance, Marsalis, the man we were all there to see, gave the piano player his arm once again and led him off the stage. Now, that might seem just common courtesy, but there were other band members, less famous, who could presumably have been made to do it. And there was something thoroughly humble about the manner in which this action was carried out. Mr. Marsalis' name and his face was the one on the tickets and the posters, but he clearly did not consider himself above the un-glamorous task of helping a colleague to his seat. Moreover, it seemed to me by the way he introduced his fellow musicians that he respected them; he really seemed to be more interested in the music than his own ego.

This may seem like a very small thing to relate, but it impressed me at the time. And really, can anyone imagine Barbara Streisand helping her underling to his seat with her very own hands? Or any of quite a lot of other famous people putting aside their own applause for a moment so they can look to someone else?

I may not know much about music, but I do know that I have a lot more respect for any man (or woman) who is more interested in practicing his craft and in being a decent person than in behaving like a prima donna. No one will ever write "Decent Guy" out in sequins and sparkly paint on a tee-shirt, the way they do with "Diva", but we'd all do a lot better to aspire to decency and humbleness than to diva-hood. Or to hip-hop values.

Small HP-related Update

I spent Saturday doing what a great many other people worldwide did, reading Deathly Hallows. I was a satisfied reader; Uncle Pookie seemed a little bit less satisfied than I, but part of that is his ongoing frustration with the Ministry of Magic's failure to come up with better preventive measures--e.g., spells or devices for detecting Imperiused employees. Anyway, I don't want to give any spoilers away for those who haven't yet read it, so I'll just say I liked it and that I was mostly right in the things I guessed would happen. One important thing, on which I'd disagreed with UP, I was wrong about, but to be totally fair I had said that if that thing had happened, it was surely an accident, not deliberate, because doing it deliberately would have been a really bad idea. And I was right about that part of it. (Cryptic enough?)



But I did want to point people to Thomas Hibbs' review, "Harry Potter & the Art of Dying Well" on NRO. Hibbs is a good reviewer, and this review is no exception. I also recommend the Alan Jacobs review that Hibbs links to. I'd read it a couple of years ago on the First Things website, but I read it again and, although it was published when there were only three books in the series, it is well worth reading; there is some really interesting stuff about magic and technology that would be interesting even to people who haven't read or who don't like the Harry Potter series.



And speaking of people who don't like HP, I do not recommend the Ron Charles article Hibbs links as an example of "it's for the masses, therefore it must be bad" type of thinking. (Unless of course you need to see such an example, and in that case I guess it is a pretty good example. I'm only linking it myself because the link in Hibbs' article is broken.) I do not say this because Mr. Charles does not like HP. I do not care whether other people like HP or not, except insofar as I might have more chance of a fun conversation about the books with someone who does. Someone once said that, "in literature, as in love, other people's choices astound us"--in other words, tastes vary; I've seen any number of couples whose reason for being together is completely inexplicable to me, and I'm far too old to think that my tastes in books, anymore than my taste in romantic/marital partner, is or ever will be universal. So the dislike doesn't matter.



But a couple of the reasons for the dislike do. I do not care for the "for the masses=bad" notion, popular though it is among some. I myself often fell prey to that type of pointless sneering when I was young, but I have recognized it as groundless elitism, resting on, insofar as it rests on anything, the faulty idea that something popular can't be good and worthwhile. Of course popular things can be bad, but it is going a long way from that fairly obvious truth to say they're popular because they are bad or that if Billy Bob and Sally Mae like it, it must be crap. And I don't care whether we're talking books, movies, Wal-mart, crafts, or what have you, I do not care for this attitude.



Far more important is one of the other reasons Mr. Charles dislikes HP and it is the reason I bothered to say I do not recommend the piece: Charles refers to "Rowling's little world of good vs. evil". That's a telling phrase if I ever heard one. Hear the contempt? The dismissiveness? People who believe in good and evil, even just to the point of being willing to entertain the idea of a fantasy world in which such things exist, are so-o-o-o medieval! Who knows what sort of backward, incorrect thinking such might get up to? I do believe in the existence of good and evil, and I believe that they are in conflict not only in fictional worlds, both well and poorly written, but in this world, within and without ourselves. And I consider the idea that good and evil do not exist to be a pernicious belief which we entertain to our own destruction. I am completely serious here. Act as if good and evil do not exist or as if they are beneath consideration by intelligent, educated people and you will begin to damage your own self and the wider society. The phrase "rot from within" comes to mind. Much better to dislike the HP books because you think they are badly written or juvenile or boring or even for the reason that they're popular, than because they depict good and evil. That is a hopeless, dead-end sort of thinking that affects far more than your opinion on one series of children's books.

Anyway, I recommend as thought-provoking both the Hibbs review and the Jacobs article. Uncle Pookie also found them interesting.

Also This Past Week--Two Feasts

St. Francis' Day

Wednesday (October 4) was St. Francis' Day. St. Francis is the one post-Biblical saint that everybody knows and likes, whether they're Catholic or not. Everybody has at least a vague idea of who the brown-robed figure preaching to the birds is. Something a lot of people don't know, however, is that Francis once set out--probably foolishly; certainly in the sense of "being a fool for Christ"--to convert Muslims. Unsurprisingly to a cynical person such as myself, he didn't have much success with that. Still, I've wondered for several years now why we don't ask him to pray for the conversion of Muslims today; I know some contemporary American Catholics now consider it taboo to suggest that Christianity is something non-Christians might want to convert to, but personally I'd think Francis might like having a crack at it from Heaven. I mean, I don't want to interfere with the custom of taking animals to church to be blessed on St. Francis' Day, but if all the non-pet-owner Catholics, Anglicans, and others who recognize St. Francis were to pray for conversions to Christ on that day, it could only work to the good, right?


(Re praying to saints, for any non-Catholics reading this: Catholics believe that it is beneficial for people to pray for one another. We also believe that the pool of people we can ask to pray for us is not limited to those currently alive on Earth, but that people who are alive in heaven can also pray for us. When we pray to a saint we are asking that person to pray to God for us. A saint is anyone in heaven, not just famous ones like Francis whom the Church officially recognizes as such. You can ask anyone you believe to be in heaven to pray for you; for example, the priest who baptized me said he frequently asks one of his aunts, who was a very holy woman, to pray for him.)



Remember Lepanto!

The day before yesterday (October 7) was the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Why it is the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary may be unexpected to some--it commemorates a coalition of Christian forces, gathered at the Pope's request, turning back the further incursion of Turkish forces into Italy. The Pope attributed the victory to the rosaries prayed for the Christian forces--although I'm sure the soldiers and their weaponry had something to do with it; "trust God, but keep your powder dry", as the saying goes--and instituted this annual feast to celebrate. This was the 1571 Battle of Lepanto, and you can read more about it here and here.

Why I think we should remember Lepanto is that it shows that people in those parts of the world formerly known as Christendom--we'll just call it the West now--can band together to defeat an enemy who does not share our values and who would enslave us.

If you'd like a literary remembrance, you can read The Battle of Lepanto at G. K. Chesterton's Works on the Web here or at Bartelby here. (Although I must admit that, much as I like Chesterton, I have trouble reading this poem's lines about "Don John of Austria" without thinking of Don John from Much Ado About Nothing--another bastard--which rather spoils the effect.)

Of course, it's probably un-PC of me to suggest that we should remember Lepanto, that Western civilization might be worth fighting for, that Christianity might have anything worth converting for, etc. A nice, tolerant person would remind you that all cultures are equally worthwhile--except for ours, which is tyrannical and fascist; that all religions are equally wonderful--except for Christianity, which is always and in every way oppressive, and Judaism, which unforgiveably contributed to the creation of Israel; that only poor, ignorant people would join the military; and that only "prey-ers" would pray for victory or even for the safety of our troops. What can I say--I'm not a nice person.

Old Biddies and Mother Hens Trying to Look Like Young Chicks

Women have always had a desire to look good, especially to men, and as anyone who's worked in a nursing home or around old people in a hospital can tell you, that desire doesn't go away with age. It's why you'll see 70-somethings sitting under the hairdryer at the salon and 80-something ladies with a smear of bright red lipstick. But in the past most women aged more or less gracefully and didn't try to look twenty when they were well past forty. They recognized that to do otherwise was futile and a bit silly and they had a term for women who tried, through dress, to look like girls--mutton dressed as lamb.

Nowadays it's different, and many women think they really are supposed to look like twenty when they're forty--or at least that they're supposed to try their darnedest. Fifty is supposed to be the new thirty, we're told.* So exercise classes are filled with middle-aged mothers trying to attain the relatively flat bellies of their teenage daughters, diet books are always on the bestseller list, and info-mercials abound for wrinkle creams and makeup that will "turn back the clock".** Thirty-something mothers sport tattoos, forty-five year old redneck grandmothers wear low-cut jeans and belly-baring shirts to show their belly button piercing, and fifty-something women with breasts not far shy of wrinkling wear plunging necklines--all in the name of looking young. Wealthy women come closest to achieving the new goal of eternal girlhood, thanks to the "miracle" of plastic surgery. But, aside from the sometimes creepy results, look at the cost they pay--not just the money, but the physical pain. Cutting, pulling, puncturing, and bruising their flesh. Burning it with lasers or injecting it with poison. All so they won't look as old as they are.

Why?

The worship of youth that boomed with the boomers, but probably goes back to the Romantics or further. Boomer narcissim. A culture of shallowness. Better nutrition and health care that, while providing actual improvements in appearance and function, may create unrealistic expectations about what else is possible.

But personally I wonder if the breakdown of marriage doesn't have something to do with it. Back when marriages could reasonably be expected to last forever, a woman could age gracefully. Her husband wasn't going to leave her because she had wrinkles. Neither was he going to divorce her because his secretary was better in bed or because he'd decided he wasn't "fulfilled" and the answer must be returning to bachelor life. For that matter she wasn't going to leave him for those reasons, only to discover she's now having to date men her own age who have--sorry, but it's true--a natural, biological preference for youthful-looking partners. Divorced women (and those in shaky marriages) can get used to sleeping alone or compete with college students for unattached males. What a choice. Women were, in this one sense anyway, more secure in the past. So a fifty year-old woman in the past could do the basic grooming that comes from the natural desire to look good and otherwise just let herself be a fifty year-old woman. There's a kind of freedom in that.


*These things really escalate. It's less than a decade and a half since we were told that thirty was the new twenty-one. I guess the next slogan will be "Seventy is the new forty" or "Life begins at eighty".

** NASA should really look into that. Think of the benefits for long-range space travel.

Sign of the Times

Out in Los Angeles some members of an Hispanic street gang are being tried for hate crimes for allegedly conspiring to kill blacks. Here's part of their defense:

Defense attorney Reuven L. Cohen told jurors last week that one of
the slayings cited in the charges — the 1999 shooting of Kenneth Wilson — was
not a hate crime but "a simple gang killing committed out of boredom."

See, they didn't kill him because they hated him, they killed him because they were bored.

Oh, well that's a relief.

Wait--no it's not. I'd rather live sandwiched between a family of KKK members and another of Louis Farrakhan's followers than have even one person on my block who's decided that murdering fellow human beings is an acceptable solution to the problem of boredom. Really. The latter is clearly the more dangerous. The racists might hate me (or other people on the block), but they probably don't hate enough to kill and even if they do, it will likely take some grievance, real or imagined, to set them off. With the murder-to-alleviate-boredom guy, everyone on the block is in danger every time there's nothing good on TV.

In a sane society "I killed him because I had nothing better to do that day" could not be considered a defense--no way, no how.

Polonius May Not Have Been Perfect, But At Least Laertes Had a Father

At a recent library book sale, I picked up some old magazines, including an Oxford American that listed "Drunk on Shakespeare: A Family Drama" on its cover. This personal essay by an Eric Ormsby turned out to be a not-very-interesting account of how his dysfunctional household communicated (or not) by hurling quotes at each other. But there was one bit that struck me. At ten or eleven the author was taken to see his first performance of Hamlet and found himself fascinated, not just by the familiar words put into action on stage, but by the actor playing Hamlet. "Coming as I did from a house dominated by women, I had a frank curiosity about men," he says, and he found himself wanting to imitate everything about--in fact, to become--that man. He says,

"A boy without a father is supremely vulnerable. He has
inexhaustible resources of love and loyalty and devotion. And he aches to bestow
these on some man who shows him what he might, if he is lucky, become. The heart
of such a boy hangs on the smallest of tokens and is to be had for the slightest
expression of regard; is to be had, I mean, passionately, irrevocably, and for
life. And for what? For a glance of interest, a question, an autograph on a
program."

I don't care for the way the writer expresses this, but I think he's telling the truth here. Boys need fathers. Boys without fathers are vulnerable, because they are looking for any man who will give them some attention, some evidence of concern. Grown women can say children don't need fathers as much as they want, but the boys themselves are apt to feel differently. If I were a single woman with a son, I'd be asking myself what kind of men my son is being exposed to, both in real life and in the media, and if I'd want him to grow up imitating any of them.

Best Quote and Strangest Thing

Best Quote I've Seen Lately:

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were
faced with the practice of "suttee" - the tradition of burning widows on the
funeral pyres of their husbands. Gen. Sir Charles Napier was impeccably
multicultural:
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We
also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their
necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will
build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow
ours."

(Mark Steyn column 3/25/06)

Strangest Thing I've Seen Today:

McCall's 4103. It's a children's pattern for a gi, basic pull-on pants, and what looks for all the world like a scrub top. The gi I understand--lots of children take karate or other martial arts classes--and a child could wear the pants just about anywhere, but how many children need scrubs? And why is McCall's catering to the niche market of children hospital workers when the company doesn't currently carry so much as one pattern for men's basic fly-front, zippered pants?

A Nice Place to Visit, But They Wouldn't Want You to Live There

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that this weekend evangelical Christian teenagers rallied in San Francisco. The rally, "Battle Cry for a Generation", was held by a group called Teen Mania whose goal is to guide teenagers away from the negative influences of pop culture. Not surprisingly for an evangelical group, they also want to create more youth who are evangelizers, helping other young people with problems and trying to bring them to Jesus.

A San Francisco Assemblyman said of the evangelicals, "they're loud, they're obnoxious, they're disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco." I suppose rallies of any kind are bound to get loud, but funnily enough, the article does not mention even one act by the rally attendees that might earn them the designations "obnoxious" or "disgusting". Could it be there were unreported incidences of rude behavior or crimes by the attendees that made the Assemblyman hostile to them?

According to the article I linked, the city's Board of Supervisors "earlier in the week"--i.e. before the teenage evangelicals got to San Francisco--passed a resolution condemning the gathering. Hmm. The city officially condemned the evangelicals before they had a chance to do anything. That makes it sound as if the problem the city has with them is their presence--perhaps even their very existence--not anything they've actually done.

I don't have a problem with the private citizens who protested the rally (even if they do bring out the rather tired epithet "fascists"), because I would expect it and because I support freedom of speech and assembly--even by people assembling for speech I disagree with. But it seems kind of odd for city officials to say these things. As long as the rally members are law-abiding, gathering peacefully, and not endangering the community by committing or encouraging others to commit dangerous & illegal acts, shouldn't the city be neutral?

I don't necessarily agree with everything the rally organizers and attendees believe. For one thing, I find their referring to the filth of much pop culture as "virtue terrorism" distasteful. For another, I'm neither an evangelical nor a fundamentalist. I'm a Catholic. I consider the people at that gathering fellow Christians--what many Catholics call "separated brothers and sisters"--but at least a few of them probably think I'm a heathen statue-worshipper, so needless to say there's some theological differences. But we're more alike than we are different.

I guess that means San Francisco wouldn't want me either. Maybe I should be impressed by myself. Considering some of the pictures I've seen of various protests & gatherings (none condemned by the city, as far as I know), being too "disgusting" for San Francisco is quite a feat.

Conservatives and Promiscuity

This weekend there was some discussion on NRO's CrunchyCon blog of whether conservatives are willing to oppose sexual promiscuity. I believe that, while it is undeniable that what little discouragement of promiscuity there is comes from conservatives, the people who say conservatives don't do much in this regard are right. Nobody does much in this regard anymore. Go back a few decades and everyone thought society was served by people controlling their sexual passions; nowadays only social conservatives ever say such a thing, for the most part they don't say it often, and when they do everyone knows they're talking into the wind. I'm generalizing, yes, but then this is generally true.

I think the reluctance of conservatives to oppose sexual promiscuity goes back to the reader email Jeremy Beers posted 2/24. It said that there were three main methods of promoting Good, namely

"1) Personal suasion, religious teaching, conversion, appeals
to beauty and justice;
2) Social pressure, the threat of ostracism,
moralistic disapproval;
3) Governmental diktat."

and that Americans have little tolerance for the second one. There's some truth in that. How many of us, when a coworker announces her unmarried twenty-year old child is about to become a parent, are willing to ask, "When is the wedding?" How many of us, when we've just watched a movie with friends and are discussing it, are willing to say anything against the movie having depicted it as completely natural that its unmarried hero and heroine were having it off a few hours after they met? How many of us are willing to so much as frown slightly when someone we know announces he or she is about to start cohabiting?

Anybody? I doubt it. We don't want to seem intolerant or judgemental or, worst of all, prudish. Besides, we're hip, we're not old-fashioned, easily-shocked people; if we say anything against promiscuity people will think we're not only judgemental and un-hip, but too uptight to be any good in the sack. Can't have that.

I disagree slightly with the author of that email I quoted in that I don't think this sort of thing is a product of the American frontier mentality (although there may be a little of that contrariness in it.) I think it's a product of more recently developed attitudes. Americans used to be more willing to say that promiscuity and having children out of wedlock was wrong. For example, when I was a child in the '70s the pejorative term "shacking up" was used to refer to cohabiting outside of marriage; the way adults used the term left no doubt that they considered the practice at worst highly immoral or at the very best a trifle declasse. Even on frothy '70s television, it wasn't considered outrageous that Mr. Roper would refuse to rent an apartment to a (straight) man and two girls; can you imagine that situation on a sitcom today? Mr. Roper would be hauled into court on a discrimination charge faster than you can say "intolerance", and Jack Tripper and the girls, if not actually involved with each other, would be giving us quite a lot of details of their very active sex lives--or else complaining humorously and in detail about how the only sex life they have is with themself.

Nowadays nobody even bothers to be discreet about their promiscuity, much less be chaste. I live in the Bible Belt where we're supposedly more conservative socially, and yet it's nothing any more to hear young coworkers talking about their "booty calls" or hear your cashier casually telling the cashier next to her about how she was having a shower with her boyfriend in their apartment before work, yada yada yada. One of the few things you can bet on not hearing is terms like "shacking up" or "illegitimate"--nobody wants to be so negative as to use terms like that.

And I'm as guilty of it as anybody. Just writing this makes me afraid I sound like a prude and makes me want to add that, "I'm not offended by any of this myself, oh no, it's just that I don't think rampant promiscuity is good for society." I think we could use more people willing to cluck their tongues disapprovingly when promiscuous behavior is mentioned, but I'm not eager to be the one of the first to revive that practice and I'm willing to bet not many conservatives are. It's one thing to say "promiscuity is socially destructive" in an online opinion piece or a church group discussion, but how many are willing to say it to a neighbor or coworker?

***

I wrote the above Sunday night, but have been hesitant to post it. Like many, I don't want to be mistaken for a prude or a puritanical killjoy. Possibly like some others who've only come to realize that promiscuity is a disintegrative force in society relatively late in life and whose pasts were more checkered or even hedonistic than we now know to be good for people, I have a niggling fear of laying myself open to charges of hypocrisy. Like most, I don't want to be viewed as nosy. Like many, I don't want to be seen as advocating social disapproval.

But I am advocating social disapproval. I don't see how conservatives can get around the fact that if we want to decrease the incidence of family-destabilising behaviors, we have to disapprove of those behaviors. Not just in the things we say in internet discussion groups but in the things we say in real life, to our family, friends, and acquaintances. "I love you, but I can't approve of what you're doing." "You're my friend and you're welcome in my house, but I can't allow you to do X in front of my children." "I like him, but I wish he wouldn't behave like that." Things like that can be really uncomfortable to say, but if we never say them, what is the message we send?

I hope it goes without saying that our words then have to be supported by our actions.

More of That "Freedom of Choice" We Hear So Much About

Wal-Mart has chosen not to carry the "morning after pill" in its pharmacies, except in Illinois where it is required to do so by law. Now three women, reportedly backed by abortion rights groups (big surprise), have sued Wal-Mart for not carrying the morning after pill in its Massachusetts stores. They sued on the grounds that state law requires pharmacies to stock all "commonly prescribed medicines", which I believe is the same reason Wal-mart is required to carry it in Illinois--though it remains unclear to me how commonly morning after pills are prescribed and whether megadoses of hormones given to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg really constitutes "medicine". Nevertheless, the Massachusetts pharmacy board has ruled that Wal-Mart must carry the drug. If forcing a business to sell a product it does not want to sell constitutes a blow for freedom, then we may count this as a victory for freedom of choice and assume the Massachusetts pharmacy board is pro-freedom--you might even say pro-choice.

One of the plaintiffs applauded the ruling, because now her patients won't have to "shop around." Yes, heaven forbid that.

NARAL Pro-choice America (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League), either anticipating this victory or celebrating after it, announced that it would be bombarding Wal-Mart with letters urging it to carry the drug. Well, good for them; all Americans have the right to try to influence a business' decisions by telling it what we, as consumers, want to buy. But it goes further than that. NARAL Pro-choice America's argument, in their petition, is that Wal-Mart has no right not to carry the drug. Wal-Mart's choice not to stock it interferes with a woman's decision to take the drug--or the doctor's decision to prescribe it or--well, it interferes with someone's decision about something. And that interference doesn't promote freedom. Fortunately, if Wal-Mart doesn't change its mind and choose to carry the drug in all states, the lawyer for the Massachusetts women says he is ready to sue in other states. Viva freedom!

I must say I find this all very instructive. I never before knew that if I couldn't find a product I wanted at one store, I could sue to make them carry it. Silly me thought I had to go down the road to a store that did carry that product. A couple of weeks ago I wanted to buy a loop turner for sewing and the Wal-Mart fabric department doesn't carry them, so I foolishly went to Hobby Lobby and bought one. Now I know I can just sue the store to make it carry everything I want so I don't have to shop around.

For instance, I have checked several Wal-Mart stores and two Sam's Clubs in south Mississippi and Louisiana multiple times over the past few years and, as best I can tell, Wal-Mart does not carry Catholic bibles in its stores--no, not even in south Louisiana, which has a high proportion of Catholics. Clearly they are trying to limit my freedom of choice to buy those products. Because Wal-Mart did not carry them, I was forced to shop around for my purchases, and if I want to buy more copies I will be forced to shop around again, rather than enjoying the convenience of buying my Bible at the same time I buy my eggs and toothpaste at the local Supercenter. Or I would have been forced to do so. Now I know I can simply sue them and force them to carry all the products I want.

And now I think about it, why should anyone have to shop around for anything? Everything should be available at Wal-Mart. If my neighbor wants to buy the latest copy of Hustler or Spanking Feminists, why should he have to shop around to find an adult bookstore? Shouldn't he have the right to pick it up as he goes through the Wal-Mart checkout line with his milk and doughnuts next Sunday morning?

I assume NOW will also want to see freedom of choice extended and will be carrying ads for these products in their newsletter. (Yes, they advertise products; I used to get the newsletter.) And feminist bookstores will start carrying Phyllis Schlafly's oevre, lest their customers be forced to shop around for her books. It's all about freedom.

The Marriage Gap--Separate and Unequal Families

This article on the "marriage gap" by Kay S. Hymowitz is a must-read. In fact, I recommend reading it, bookmarking the site, and reading it again later.

I only wish more people--especially parents and church leaders--would talk about the economic and social benefits of marriage to young people. Maybe if young women who are buying into the "I don't need a husband and children don't need fathers" line were confronted with the fact that not being married to their children's father greatly increases the chance their children will be poor--with all the disadvantages that entails--they will rethink their position. Just saying, "Don't do it!", probably won't help (although it's better than nothing), but encouraging them to think reasonably about the future before acting might, because every woman, however young, wants her children (already here or potential) to have a good life.

Something Else

Related to that last post--specifically to Mark Steyn's talk about modern Westerners' lack of confidence in our civilization and the Morse columnist's pointing out that Islamists believe in themselves enough to replace themselves--is this quote from Thomas Sowell:

"No society can survive in the long run without the allegiance of its people. Undermining a sense of the worthiness of a society undermines that allegiance -- and, without allegiance, there is no defense." (Thomas Sowell)

This is true. For the obvious reasons that people who continually downgrade everything their civilization has produced and stands for are unlikely to support it against attack, intellectual or otherwise, or to build it up by continuing and strengthening its traditions and accomplishments. But perhaps also they may be less likely to want to reproduce--if they sincerely believe their civilization is worthless, that is.

Don't get me wrong, I think selfishness and a desire to overplan and overcontrol every aspect our lives is behind most of the childlessness in our society (I say this as a childless woman), but I can see how thinking your whole civilization is without redeeming features could make you reluctant to reproduce. Animals caged in zoos often don't want to reproduce, even though you'd think, if nothing else, they'd welcome the change in routine that a spot of reproductive fun could bring; it may just be my fruitcakey side speaking, but I've always thought it might be because they sense they are not free animals and aren't really content with that that they are able to override the second or third most powerful urge any of us have. Why should a human that views its society and heritage as worthless be any different from the zoo animal that finds little to live for in its environment?

It's All About Sex and Babies

Mark Steyn had a longish, must-read article called "It's the Demography, Stupid" at WSJ.com a few days ago. None of it was new to me, but it was still well worth reading. It starts off frightening:

"Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries."

And it doesn't get any less so as it goes on, so if you like to be frightened, you can pop a bowl of popcorn and sit back to listen to someone read this aloud instead of watching yet another tedious slasher movie.

Some points Steyn makes: Islamism is not metaphorical HIV, but the pneumonia that endangers the patient who already has HIV; our demographic crisis "ought to be the left's issue" because "[w]ho, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates?"; and "A society that has no children has no future."

Today's Townhall has an answer to Mark Steyn, "It's the Sex, Stupid" , from Jennifer Roback Morse--not a disagreeing answer, but an elaborating answer. Morse says, "The modern view of sex [sex as a consumer product] has created the demographic collapse of the West, and the human void into which Islamic fertility is rapidly flooding." And she tells us who can help most to preserve the West:

"What women do and want will be decisive in determining whether the West survives the demographic clash with Islam....stay at home moms, don’t let anyone tell you that you are wasting your talents. Without your contribution of a healthy, functioning next generation, all the strength of the U.S. military won’t be enough to protect us from the primal force of Islam that believes in itself enough to replace itself."

These things need to be said and heard. I hope more columnists respond to Steyn's essay.

More Crunchy Talk

More clearing up things I meant to post before now.


Rod Dreher, probably as a sort of lead-up to his forthcoming book, recently had a piece in the Times on crunchy conservatisim. It was mostly about crunchy conservatives' reactions to our consumeristic, materialistic society. Here's a quote:

"A society built on consumerism will break down eventually for the same reason socialism did: because even though it is infinitely better than socialism at meeting our physical needs, it also treats human beings as mere materialists.

It cannot, over time, serve the deepest needs of the human person for stability, spiritual idealism and authentic community. We should not be surprised that all our freedoms have led to a society in which too many people see, as the London stage play had it, "shopping and f******" as the highest ideal to which we should aspire. "


Although I use the term myself, I actually tend to agree with Jonah Goldberg that the attitudes Dreher attributes to crunchy-granola conservatism are really just conservative. I wrote about this before but couldn't find Jonah's piece to link to. Here it is and a quote:


"...if you read closely, about 90 percent of the attitudes [Dreher] attributed to crunchy cons point to their hostility toward the Republican party, not with conservatism.... "Republican" and "conservative" are not now and never have been particularly synonymous. Conservatives have always had an uneasy relationship with the Republican party."

Our Enemies, Our Siblings

The United States is fighting a war against terrorism. I think we can all agree that terrorism is a bad, terrrible thing and should be fought against, no matter who the terrorists are. But, un-PC though it may be to notice it, let alone call attention to it, most acts of terrorism are committed by Muslims. I have come to think that we have to regard not terrorism but that form of Islam which fosters terrorism as our real enemy; whether we call it Islamism, militant Islam, radical Islam, Islamofascism, or fundamentalist Islam, it is the enemy of not just the US, but all of Western civilization. We nurture it to our own endangerment.

But part of Western civilization is the Christian precept of remembering the humanity of our enemies, reminding ourselves that they too are children of God, whether they believe it or not (which in fact Muslims do, though they would quarrel with Christians about the nature of God.) This facet of the West's great Judeo-Christian tradition is shown in a piece NRO has today by a US military chaplain. It is an emotional piece, but I was struck by this line:

"...isn’t this the kind of world we are fighting for — a world where an
Imam teaches a Rabbi words from the Holy Koran to comfort a young Muslim boy,
and that rabbi himself is comforted by a Christian, a Catholic priest."

Yes. I don't think we should downplay the dangers of radical Islam and as a Catholic I wish more people would come home to the Church, but yes, this is the kind of world I want to live in.

A Dose of Dalrymple

I've mentioned Theodore Dalrymple's excellent, clear writing before--especially in his book Life at the Bottom--and here's another dose:

"The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris", an article Dalrymple wrote three years about the Muslim immigrant-filled suburbs of Paris.

"The Suicide Bombers Among Us" , in which Dalrymple tries to get inside the minds of people most of us shrink from thinking about too much.

And as a bonus, an interview with Dalrymple.