VDH, the Man

He lays it all out for us denizens of Oceania, the kingdom of lies.

I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.

In the old Cold War days, the two major Russian newspapers were Izvestia (The News) and Pravda (The Truth). A joke of the period: There's no truth in the news and no news in the truth.

Crusader?

One of the rules of the current PC regime is that the Crusades were evil Western invasions of Muslim lands, for which we should ashamed and for which current retaliation is understandable.

Is there an instance where the question of whether the fault lies in the West or elsewhere and it does NOT belong with the West?

I remember when Clinton made these and similar remarks. He was a pretty good President, but when he says shit like this my blood boils. Believe me, repenting to Muslims gets you nothing, ever, but their contempt for your weakness and a reassurance of their superiority.

What Muslim of any repute or authority whatever has ever apologized for the invasion, conquest and occupation of Christian lands? Spain, for instance? Or sacking St Peter's in Rome? (I bet you didn't even know that happened.) Or the millenial Muslim slave trade in Christians?

None. Ever.

Deus vult.

Detestable enormities

In the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, part of the English Litany contained these charming words:

...from the tyrannye of the bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities..
                                                    Good Lorde, deliver us.

The Pope as The AntiChrist

ShowtimeTV has begun its new series on The Borgias, the ancestors of the Corleones and the Sopranos, and their papal standard-bearer, Rodrigo, who became Alexander VI, father of Lucrezia and Cesare. Practically the epitome of religious nadir (!), The Catholic Encyclopedia writes of him, "So little have Catholic historians defended him that in the middle of the nineteenth century Cesare Cantù could write that Alexander VI was the only Pope who had never found an apologist." Wikipedia points out:

Such was Rodrigo's unpopularity that the priests of St. Peter's Basilica refused to accept the body for burial until forced to do so by papal staff. Only four prelates attended the Requiem Mass. Rodrigo's successor on the Throne of St. Peter, Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini, who assumed the name of Pope Pius III (1503), forbade the saying of a Mass for the repose of Rodrigo Borgia's soul, saying, "It is blasphemous to pray for the damned". After a short stay, the body was removed from the crypts of St. Peter's and installed in a less well-known church...

Twill be a mix, no doubt of both historical and fantasied enormities. Example, the background music for Pope Jeremy Irons Borgia's coronation in 1492 is Handel's Zadok the Priest, written for King George II's..in 1727. 

Compared to these folks, the sins of omission and cowardice of the current hierarchy seem almost
pathetically tame. Context. Context.

If America is so racist

why does such an irredeemably homely guy as Forest Whitaker have a successful acting career?

Young'n

Actor Johnny Lewis, not quite 30. Quite the mug. 

And I've seen him on Criminal Minds. A fine actor.

And quite the mug.

Update Sept 2012:
the fella ended his life quite badly, it seems.

Testosteronian synchronicity

Having just visited the local Nike missile base yesterday, today I switched on the tube and found myself watching Dr. Strangelove, set in the midst of the Cold War.

Being a deeply evolved citizen of our global village, this snobby and probing cinematic meditation on the extremes of human fear led me to realize ...what a hunk Sterling Hayden was.

For other pix, clink on the "hunk" link. The dude was a dude.

Rough men standing ready

I often quote the line attributed to Orwell, that "good people sleep in peace at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

As part of my birthday, I was treated to a visit to the Nike missile installation at Fort Cronkhite in the Marin Headlands, just a few miles north of SF. On the first Saturday of the month, the restored site --the only one of the 300 that used to function-- has "docents" who used to work there and explain the workings of this part of the Cold War defense system. It was great to hear these guys talk about the jobs they did, where they worked, the procedures for for tracking and launching, see the machines, the kind of technology, and the missiles themselves. On the one hand, they looked and felt so antique and clunky, like an old scifi movie, but they were perfectly lethal. Very impressive. The missiles, both nuclear and conventional, could rise to 4000 feet in 3 seconds.

One funny moment was the guard room in the middle of the base, decked out as it would have been in the 60's, books, music playing, etc. And a big sign: Smoking allowed in the this room, but outside only in designated areas...

Made me wish my Dad was still alive. I'd like to tell him about it and how much I enjoyed it. (He was a Navy pilot.)

And it made me nostalgic for the Cold War. At least we were not making believe about who our enemy was.

Beautiful dreamer

Hunka hunka burnin' book

So some offended Muslims (that's almost a redundancy) in Afghanistan rioted and murdered a dozen human beings because they found out belatedly when their President told them that a group of Christians in Florida burned the Koran.

I have mixed feelings about this.

First, of course, is that Western condemnation will fall on the Christians who burned a book, not on the Muslims who shot and beheaded a group of people who had nothing to do with it. That is because too many Westerners have neither balls nor a moral sense grounded in reality and many Muslims are barbarians and worse.

Is there a contemporary religion that can remotely compete with Islam for the number of dead bodies?

I will join with a lot of other Righties and point out that when Andres Serrano's PissChrist, picturing a crucifix in a jar of pee, was exhibited as art in the Brooklyn Museum, with government funding, no one rioted and no one was killed.

Now here's my mixed feeling. I am not so sure that the Muslims haven't got it right.

I understand better than most that the Koran is more sacred to them than the Bible is to Christians. It is rather more like the consecrated host of the Catholic Mass than the text that Reformed preachers pound on in pulpits. The book is a sacred object containing the exact uncreated and eternal Arabic words of Allah, the closest they can get to him in this life.

But then, given the current Islamic mood, all offenses and any offense can provoke murder, be it a Salman Rushdie book or a picture of Mohammed or a speech by the Pope which quotes a Byzantine Emperor, or a Koran in the toilet or the furnace. People in France have been beaten up for eating lunch in front of Muslims during Ramadan. Hey, if the resistance killed German soldiers in WWII, how often did the Germans then take out ten civilians for each of them? Should the resistance then be blamed and stop fighting?

But Mohammedans do have this going for them. They do not politely roll over when their identity is insulted.

No one in the West will now turn to our local Muslims and demand that they condemn the riots and the killings. They get to sit on the sidelines, unaccountable. And if they do make a pro forma statement of regret, it will be followed by a much stronger plea and or outrage about the bad-behaving Christians. Coddled and protected, no one will call them on it. **

Islam is a highly concrete and extraverted faith: dominance performances of its rites and the presence of its symbols in public places is crucial to its identity. It is a territorial religion indistinguishable from politics and ownership of space and resources. Ask a Copt. Read the life of Muhammad. It's all there.

Barbarians and savages though they be*, they cow a lot of Westerners into adapting to their sensibilities out of fear. Or, disguised as highminded multicultural politness, out of unacknowledged admiration as well. Despite the public Western liberal liturgy of disavowing and abhoring violence, humans admire strong men. Especially leftists, who have, in their barely one century history, produced some of the most tyrannical mass murders in all of history. They still worship thugs like Castro, Guevara and Chavez.

No slight against The Religion of Peace © goes unpunished. It is like living in a house with a rage-a-holic or a borderline or a nasty drunk; when the eruption happens, someone in the family gets blamed for the provocation, not the perpetrator.

So my final very politically incorrect thought is wondering if it would have been better for us in the West after 9/11 if there had indeed been massive outbreaks of violence against mosques. Weepy Muslim apologists act as if there had been, when what is most astounding is the almost total lack of violence in the wake of that jihadi crime. We were so civilized.

But I suspect our civility comes not from principle but from fear or, as Yeats would say, the lack of all conviction.


* I will say again that your nice Muslim neighbor or coworker is insignificant in this regard. I know some. Lovely people. But Muslims in groups are what count.

I once had a Russian Orthodox professor who ran up against the cool leftism of Columbia University in the 60's. He made this point: "A Marxist in a university classroom is an entirely different animal from Marxists in power. Lectures by Marcuse turn into gulags by Stalin."


** Peter King's House hearings became Muslim political theatre. Hostile groups intermittent with weepy victims.

In festo fatuorum

I feel a certain affection for this day, having been a fool too often in my life.

I still sometimes surprise myself at my conservative responses. Although I have not read Sr Elizabeth Johnson's recently condemned book, I did read She Who Is, so I have some notion of her theological "shape."

She describes her formative influences as follows:

In the decades since then, my theological thought has been influenced, challenged, expanded, and prodded forward by successive encounters with other theological movements. Each has influenced my approach to different questions, in some cases very substantially. In chronological order, my intellectual autobiography includes the following:

• the documents of Vatican II, especially Gaudium et Spes;

• biblical scholarship flourishing since the council;

• American death of God theology;

• European Catholic theology, especially Rahner, Metz, and Schillebeeckx;

• European Protestant theology, especially Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Pannenberg, on whom I wrote my doctoral dissertation;

• Latin American liberation theology, enhanced by its expression in the South African context;

• feminist theology, with its diverse voices in womanist, mujerista, Asian-American, and third-world women's theologies;

• currently underway: encounters with comparative theology, ecological theology, and postmodern thought especially as mediated through feminist theory.

Is there anything trendy she not been influenced by?

When I was involved in the Church, which accounts for 20 years of my life, I was certainly not a conservative. But I hoped I was, in most respects*, in the classical and orthodox tradition. And when I realized that I could not be, I left.

Whether it's just my aging or a somewhat right perception, I experience the Western tradition in which I was raised to be under serious threat. Internally, so many of the decent impulses of that tradition have turned, well, pardon the dramatic metaphor, cancerous. There seems to be, within the progressive movement so powerful now in our culture, a suicidal drive masked by high-mindedness.
I am not inclined to open my culture's veins to placate its despisers.

It may be a lost cause. I watch the case of Western Europe, with its double metastasis of EU regulation and Muslim immigration. I watch Canada, always a more European culture than our Revolution-shaped Yankeeness, with its self-erasure to please aliens and its hideous human rights commissars. I may support American exceptionalism, but I do not think it a magic shield.

Anyway, whoever seems to me to be a bulwark or pillar of the West has my default support.

So even though I had to part ways with my Mother Church, I have not the slightest desire that she turn into the Episcopal Church, which has kowtowed to every progressive movement in sight and continues to be both moribund and increasingly irrelevant.

Liberals are often, at first blush, nicer people than conservatives. Until you challenge them. Then the amount of bile can be truly stunning. Not to say conservatives are always charming, but I find most of them care more about the survival of what I care about.

Sister Johnson is not one of them.

*The exception is obvious by now, I hope. But even there, I decided that the Church could not change to accomodate me. And later came to think that it shouldn't. At least not in the way I wanted it to.

PS. I checked out several sites that featured the story and allowed comments. The anti-bishop comments were that they were  1. old. 2. men 3. who had not handled the sex abuse issue well 4 who were all about control and 5. were narrow minded and old-fashioned. Impressive argumentation.