A Day Without A Caucasian

Blacks love to complain that The Man Holds Them Down. 

The truth is, without The Man Holding Them Up, 

they'd sink like a stone.

I have come up with two thought experiments, based on the reality of racial groups. Not about how we're told we should (or must) think of racial groups, nor based on individual exceptions to their larger patterns. These experiments seem to me to provide a sense of reality about race that our Liberal masters do not want us to have.

To paraphrase infamous Jewish NeoCon Dragonlady Midge Decter's nostrum on gays and apply it to the races: to really know them, you have to know them as a group. 

Basic sociology, no? True of all groups. (Including Ms. Decter's.)


So what follow is all about groups, how they mostly are, most of the time and how, as groups, they impact the world around them. Exceptions are just that: exceptions.

EXPERIMENT #1:
RACIAL TAKE-AWAY

The first thought experiment is to take the following groups, one by one, and remove them from the country, imaginatively, and then ask how that would affect the rest, pro and con.

US Census Info 2010

The most interesting one to me, it turns out, is to remove all the Whites from America and have a totally POC (people of color) nation of Latinos, Blacks, Indians and Asians. A Day Without A Caucasian.

"Racism" = "Witchcraft"

Now that would be amusing. All the White Racism would be gone and so the various POC groups could turn on each other without the Melanin-Deprived to distract them. In this imaginary land, 80% Black and Hispanic, what do you really think it would be like? Like all the other places which are predominantly, or even significantly, Black and Hispanic? (If not, why not?)

Hey, I'm jus' keepin' it real.

EXPERIMENT #2:
PLURIBUS E UNUM

The second is to divide the country up, first into simply racial units: a White country, a Black country, etc. and imagine the outcome. Or to split it in two, a White/Asian country and a Latino/Black/Etc. country. Again, hilarity ensues.

On a smaller scale, choose 10,000 people at random from each racial group and move them to encampments --far separated from one another--where they have equal resources provided for them, all waiting and ready. Then leave them alone. White, Black, Hispanic and Asian cities. Then come back in a year's time and observe the results. What's your guess?

As a sideline, I imagined an independent LGBTQ city-state, all of America's 10 million or so queers of all colors and genders in one place. Think about the LGBTQs vs The Asians for possession of SF. Talk about funny. Portlandia with Dykes On Bikes and Drama Queens. (Eventually, though, it would be Stalinism with wheelchair access).

If you had an LGBTQ Rapture and all these folks, around 3.5% of the population, suddenly disappeared from America, what would be the result? (No more Ex Cathedra blogging...a tragedy, of course.)  Ornamentation and decoration industries would be decimated. There would be noticeable gaps in the clergy and teaching sectors. Broadway shows and operas would have a hard time recruiting choruses. Otherwise?

What would be the effects of separating out the Jews from the Gentile Whites, having A Day Without An Ashkenazi? Even though most people recognize the hugely outsized role of Jews in America, given their mere 2% of the population, I think it would still be astonishing how much would change without them. The worlds of politics and government, education and scholarship, finance and business, law, medicine, science, the arts and literature, news media, entertainment of all kinds...all would be dramatically different. The gaps would be glaring. (The military and the police and anything involving physical work or skilled blue collar trades would be wholly unaffected.)

Two (imagined) results of this passtime struck me.

The first result has to do with the issue of "who creates wealth". If you had an All-Black American republic, there would no longer be any grounds for complaint about White Racism; we'd all be gone...although, as I said, I can guarantee you that "The Legacy of White Racism" would replace it in ten seconds as the blame/excuse mechanism du jour. Race-hucksters are big on "legacies": slavery, Jim Crow, etc*. Or they could fall into the Third World style of complaint. Like the pathetic African Dominican student in England who wanted to blame the Rwanda genocide on "faulty evangelization by the Europeans". That's "The Legacy of European Colonialism." The Debt, in case you didn't know, is eternal.

The most powerful --and rationally empty-- word in contemporary English.

Master AG Eric "My People" Holder said that Americans (meaning Whities) were cowards who did not want to talk about race. He's right. But his idea of a "national conversation" is pretty clear: Blacks whine and Whites concede. Affirmative Action Now, Affirmative Action Forever!

After more than fifty years, the difference between the promise and the reality of what the Civil Rights movement brought about is bitterly stunning. It has made me re-assess the respect for "Dr." Martin Luther King that I was brought up on.  On my darker days (oops, is that a triggering microagression?) , I wonder if these two races, Blacks and Whites, are not like hyenas and lions, simply natural and implacable enemy groups. After all, where have we ever met up and trouble has not followed?  And I wonder if all that blood and treasure spent to reconcile these two alien groups has been a complete waste.

What we were sold...

The famous Norman Rockwell

What we actually got instead:

Bitches and Ho's At Play

and continuing the cycle:
more Baby Mamas producing fatherless offspring.

So, yeah, thanks Dr. Rev. King.

But back to my experiment...


Who would create wealth? If you assess the "cultural capital" of the 40 million Black Americans --what kinds of jobs they mostly do (government paid or low-level service and security), what kind of family structures they currently favor, (70+%  of births are out of wedlock), their truly operative value systems (as opposed to the PR ones), their social habits, their education levels, numbers of skilled professionals --engineers, doctors, cyber-pros, pilots, teachers, etc. --to say nothing of the deeply taboo 15 point IQ issue-- it's hard to imagine an impressive outcome. And what would be done with the .85 million Black men now in The Man's prisons? The Legacy of the War On Drugs.  Who'd run the hospitals, the schools, maintain the technology, handle the finances? In a White World, Blacks, as a group, don't do well. In a totally Black World, evidence is that they'd do far worse. Think Detroit. Think Birmingham. Newark and Camden. Baltimore. Post-Katrina New Orleans? Haiti? Zimbabwe? The post-apartheid Black South African paradise where crime, (especially rape), poverty and corruption are, well, what you'd expect? The list goes on.

If I may be so indelicate as to ask,

how long is the list of places or institutions where Blacks become demographically and/or politically dominant and things improve: stability, safety, civility, prosperity, etc? Even maintain prior levels rather than dismantle them? 

Examples?

Blacks love to complain that The Man Is Holding Them Down. 

The truth is, without The Man Holding Them Up, they'd sink like a stone.

PS. If you removed all the Blacks from America --as I imagined with the Jews or gays above-- what would be lost? The entertainment industry --music most of all--would be severely affected, as would sectors of professional sports. The police and the prison system would have a lot of time on their hands since crime rates would plummet. A great many social service organizations, both private and governmental, would likewise have much less to do and a good many government bureaucracies would lose a lot of employees. We would lose a fertile source of slang and catch-phrases. Have I missed anything? Oh, yeah. Joe Biden would be president...

The second result is that an All-White America, although it would have huge benefits in terms of stability and economy, would immediately reproduce the bitter ideological divide that we currently have and threaten to further split into White Right and White Left nations, deadlocked in battle and continuing to hate each other, now with less immediate distraction. After all, the Libs who wanted to leave the USA during the Bush era really wanted to get away from other Whites, not the POC's. In Leukotopia we'd have Noam Chomsky and Rick Santorum stuck together at even closer quarters. And since feminism is a largely White female passtime, the war between the sexes would continue unabated. What's not to love?

This suggests to me that the culture wars and the civil-war-without-guns that we have now is basically an internal fight AMONG Whites, but largely ABOUT non-Whites. 

Below, n the left, racial % of the electorate; on the right Blue vs Red percentages of same.

Whites are the only significant race group who do NOT vote in a Democrat racial bloc.

The 1860's War Between the States was just such a war between Whites but largely about Blacks. In a way, the foundational North/South, City/Country, Industry/Agriculture division among the Original Thirteen Colonies gets replicated over and over again in our history, intra-Caucasian battling, with People of Color the contributing background issues: What do WE do about THEM?

[The primal, primary and classic example of a country that has been obsessed with minorities, allowing its national life to be driven by them. Now, for instance, because a tiny tiny minority of gays want to get married, we are asked to re-frame one of the most fundamental societal institutions.]

The Liberal Whites would form their own country, (Urbania or Sophisticasia or Nuancia or Pacifica or Vaginopia), and then try to reunite with their beloved People of Color in their republics of Aztlan and Freedomstan (or Trayvonia). But if these Black and Brown republics turned out to be like all the other Black and Brown republics, they would be trapped between a desperate need for the Whites as funders, competents and scapegoats and a visceral envy of and loathing for their honky asses. Maybe they could swap the Asians for them.

Where would the non-Liberal Whites go? A further thought experiment about this, a tribal reservation for the EuroCaucasians, came to me on April 1st. A fella can dream, no?

Apparently I am not the only Leukophore April Fool. This fella repeats an interesting, very unPC question to his fellow EuroAmericans:

"If we had a country of our own, would this be happening?"

I really think I have the seeds for a long-running sitcom here. The United States of Tara's multiple personalities playing out through her unravelling eponymous nation.



*You can bet that when Whites become a less-than 50%  minority in our own country several decades from now, we will be referred to as "The Historically Majority Community" or "the Dominant Minority" so that the blame/excuse trope can be kept alive.

---

Pascha

 ¹The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.
 ²Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the LORD out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.
 ³Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre.
 ⁴So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.
 ⁵And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in.
 ⁶Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie,
 ⁷And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.
 ⁸Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.
 ⁹For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.
 ¹⁰Then the disciples went away again unto their own home.
 ¹¹But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre,
 ¹²And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.
 ¹³And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my LORD, and I know not where they have laid him.
 ¹⁴And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.
 ¹⁵Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

 ¹⁶Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.
 ¹⁷Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.
 ¹⁸Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the LORD, and that he had spoken these things unto her.

Pro crastina die

Found an interesting article on my most problematic vice, procrastination. I'll read it some other time.

St Expeditus, above, soldier and martyr, raises the cross of Today (Hodie) and crushes underfoot the dark crow of Tomorrow (Cras). St Expeditus, pray for us...when you have time.

The last refuge

of inequality.

The more I look, the more I see the cultural complex of egalitarianism at work: the sense of outrage and scandal at the mere existence of any kind of inequality, regardless of reason.

But oddly, one place where a fair number of Americans take inequality for granted is travel, as long as the carrier is privately owned. Air travel is the most obvious example. First class, business class, economy class. You can see the barrier right away. Priority boarding and deplaning, nicer seats, better food, their own bathroom. Why are not people horrified by this?

Historical laws

I would consider something a historical law if it tends to repeat far more than it tends to produce exceptions. I'm neither a positivist nor a Hegelian, so this is more about seeing repetitive patterns than drawing larger conclusions from them.

Aboriginal Disaster: I would say that is a historical law that when advanced civilizations encounter less advanced or tribal or hunter-gatherer or nomadic peoples, regardless of the advanced society's goals or intentions, the less advanced suffer massive cultural dislocation and usually fail to adapt, even over time. When the Europeans discovered North and South America and Australia, the result for the aboriginals --be they primitive Australians or Aztecs and Incas-- has been disastrous for them. Whatever the mix of forces, most of them have not thrived in the new order, even five hundred years later.

Islamicization is Forever. Another historical law is that when a society is governed by Muslims --as when the Byzantine, Visigoth and Persian nations were conquered in a single century by the newly Mohammedan Arabs--, over time that society will become thoroughly Muslim and the remnants of the original peoples --regardless of original treaty provisions-- will shrink in numbers and become inferior minorities whose security will wax and wane with the Islamic mood. Example: all the remaining Christians (Copts, Armenians, Orthodox, etc.) in the Muslim world. Once Islamicized, it is the rare society ceases to be so.

The Anglosphere. Another one. If a society combines relatively high degrees of personal freedom, stable government and economic prosperity, it was probably shaped primarily by British men (or other North/Western European men.)

Ashkenazi Power. When Ashkenazi Jews live even in small single digit percentages in a society and there are no legal barriers against them, (even more so when social barriers are thin) they will come to play a hugely disproportionate role in that society, especially in business, law, finance, education, government, communication and the arts. And to the extent that they are secular, as most contemporary Jews are, rather than observant, they will be massively leftliberal, hostile to Christianity and hostile to any national identity based on common ethnicity or race. They will promote secularism and multiculturalism.

Host and Parasite. Some groups, on their own, will always alternate between anarchic gang rivalries and Big Man tyrannies. When inserted into more advanced societies, they will fare better compared to their original matrix but worse compared to the surrounding peoples that created the advanced societies, rarely creating anything but a largely parasitic and crisis-ridden relationship with the host society.

Appeasement. Appeasement of a barbarian group by an advanced society will eventually lead to the barbarian conquest of that society because barbarians, driven by a testosterone value system, will interpret accomodation not as reasonableness but as corruption and weakness.

Culture Trumps Law. Regardless of pre-existing structures and institutions, when you significantly alter the demographics of a society, you alter that society's culture, regardless of what you call it. Eventually the culture will rule and institutions, regardless of formal shape, will serve it. A variation of "demography is destiny".

First Peter 3.19

For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:¹⁹By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;

A fragment on Holy Saturday from the mythic works of the Dragoman Gnostics,

medieval Byzantine Slavic provenance,with connections to the heterodox Khazari Jews.

When Jesus descended into Hell in spirit,

he broke down the doors

and entered in power.

He called out to Adam and Eve

and all their just offspring who had died.

They all came with joy and took refuge in his body,

entering into him through the gates of his shining wounds.

The Descent of Christ into Hell
Andrea Bonaiuti: The Spanish Chapel in S Maria Novella, Florence
1365

And he called out to his heavenly mother,

Shekinah, who had long ago left

Yahweh’s side to share exile with

the fallen creatures.

She came out of the darkness and took his hand

and together they ascended on high,

taking captivity captive.

Jesus stood before the gates of Heaven

in glory, carrying inside him

all the prisoners of Sheol

and the company of heaven rang out with joy.

But when Shekinah came to the threshold of Heaven,

wherein Yahweh awaited her,

she stopped and would not enter in.

She turned around and looked back

and in the depths she saw her other children,

Satan and Sheol,

the first offspring of her union with Yahweh,

the elder brother and sister of the Christ.

They howled with rage

that Christ had entered their kingdom

by trickery, hidden in the flesh of a mere man,

and had despoiled their realm by stealth,

leaving them poor of their subjects

and stealing their mother,

who had comforted them in their long exile.

“I will not enter”, said Shekinah,

“until all my children are reconciled”.

And she became a great pillar of cloud

stretching from earth to the threshold of Heaven.

Lady Sabaoth, the seraph who was her servant,

heard and saw all this

and she returned to the gate of Hell.

She spoke to the elder children of Shekinah

and Yahweh,

she spoke to Satan and to Sheol,

and said,

“What can be given you, O great Aeons of God,

Lord of Light, Queen of Darkness,

to calm your anger, so that you might be reconciled

to Heaven?”

And they spoke to her the words of

a final covenant which would bring peace

to the Aeons.

Sabaoth returned to the gate of Heaven

and in the sight of the Father and the Son,

in the presence of the Mother

and of all the angels,

she spoke the dreadful words of the covenant of peace

which Satan and Sheol had given her.

Earth and heaven were shaken when they heard her words,

thunder rang out and lightning filled the skies

and the veil of the Temple was torn in two.

But the Father gave his consent

and Jesus, too, accepted this covenant.

Shekinah was grieved, but said to Sabaoth,

“Go now to Miriam our daughter

and bring her this word,

for her Amen is the foundation.”

So the archangel Sabaoth went down to Jerusalem

and found Miriam the mother of Jesus.

She was in mourning for the cruel death of her firstborn.

Sabaoth opened herself to Miriam and said,

“Peace, daughter of Zion!

…

Satan said, “We have seen that our brother

the Christ has become a son of Adam and Eve.

And we acknowledge that he is faithful and humble.

But he has invaded our realm by stealth

and by trickery has stolen the souls of humankind

and taken away our mother.

And so we make a covenant with our mother Shekinah

by your message, O Sabaoth.

This is our covenant:

We shall return to the circle of God

at an appointed time

but this shall be the ransom and the sacrifice,

and the peace-offering for us:

in exchange for our mother

we shall have the mother of the Christ;

and for the despoiling of our realm,

Jerusalem and the Holy Temple shall be laid waste;

and for the theft of the race of Eve and Adam from their exile

Israel shall again go into exile out of its land

This shall be the ransom for the peace of Heaven.”

Miriam said to her, “After all that I have borne,

how shall I carry this great sorrow, too?

Sabaoth replied, “The Spirit which overshadowed you

shall overflow. Nothing is impossible with God.”

Miriam was silent a long time and then she said:

“Amen. Let it be done as you say.”

The Seraph Sabaoth bowed low before her on the ground

and did homage to Miriam

and cried out:

“You are greater in honor than the Cherubim,

beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim!

Virgin, unmastered and untamed,

You have brought forth the Word divine.

O Woman, now truly you give birth to God.

Glory to you!”

and then she left her.

And so a covenant of peace was made

between Heaven and Hell:

as the blood of the Son

had made one the human and the divine

so the blood of the Mother and the People

would make one the divine and the divine.

Jesus arose on the third day, the Firstborn of the Dead,
he returned to his disciples

with peace and forgiveness.

He promised them another Advocate,

she who was to come,

and he departed from them.

The template in the Temple

Rachel Donadio is female NYT writer, book reviewer and Rome bureau chief. My guess is that she is an American Jew of Italian background. Not numerous, they do exist.   Not everyone is a fan, apparently. And with a 1996 Humanities degree from Yale, I can only assume she is steeped in the world of PoMo and "cultural studies" where all of Western history is a passion play of oppression about race, class and gender. To a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Since it is fitting on Good Friday that I somewhat defend former enemies, I found the opening lines of her piece of the Pope's Holy Thursday sermon typically cartoonish and wholly predictable, fitting the template people of her ilk use to inform the rest of us about the real world.

Several hundred Austrian clerics* recently published a manifesto calling for disobedience in order to effect the same kinds of changes in the Church that liberals have been calling for since the Sixties and which now characterize Western churches that are disappearing or breaking apart. They seem utterly unable to understand the meaning of the word "No".

The accompanying pic (probably not her doing) shows the vested, mitred and crosiered Pope, from the back, an isolated figure standing against a blurry mass of worshippers.

While she trots out the "God's Rotweiler" moniker, even the priests who are on the receiving end of the Pope's rebuke make it clear that his words were "not harsh" nor implied any "threat or sanction".  While it is unusual for him to make a direct confrontation in such a venue, only a fembot with an agenda could find Benedict's papal displeasure Rotweilerian.

While I'm at it, one of the structural ironies of our journalism system is that they reveal very little about themselves, in order to continue the charade of "objective" reporting. It dawned on me years ago, perhaps even prior to my migration to the Right, that when Dan Rather was going on, I had no idea about who he was other than the talking head on my screen. While reporters make much of their moral task as investigators, they are uncommonly unforthcoming when it comes to being investigated. Or perhaps they believe that because of their undoubted probity and intelligence, no one should bother asking, or if they do ask, the answers shouldn't make any difference.

With HT to my FB buddy Geoff Faustmann, this note from fellow Columbia grad Dennis Prager:

I grew up in New York, and I realized at a young age that, for all intents and purposes, I was living in a liberal Jewish ghetto. I rarely met non-Jews and do not recall ever meeting a conservative, Jew or non-Jew (certainly not at Columbia University).

I came to realize how insular New York City was. What really blew my mind was that liberal New Yorkers considered themselves among the most universal, cosmopolitan, worldly and intellectually open people in America.

Yet, these people socialized with, dined with, read, listened to and married people who agreed with them on virtually every significant issue of life. If the archetypical New York Jewish liberal, Woody Allen, had to spend a week alone in a small town in Idaho or Alabama, he would probably feel as if he had traveled in a time machine or been transported to a foreign culture.** He would feel much more at home in Oslo or Paris even if he didn’t speak a word of Norwegian or French.

It was one of the revelations of my early life that a Tennessee or Montana conservative was far more familiar with liberals and liberalism than a New York or Los Angeles liberal was with conservatives and conservatism.

*She is a Middlbury-educated speaker of French and Italian, but apparently not German. She mistranslates as Preachers' Initiative the term Pfarrer-Initiative. Pfarrer means "parish priest". The German for preacher is Prediger.
** Professor Stephen Bloom incarnates this type.

No place like homeworld

If the bloody, murderous and soul-destroying effort to create classless societies was proven, in less than a century, to be an impossible dream become a living nightmare, why would anyone think that societies which overlook race or gender (or age, or beauty or skill, etc) and treat everyone equally are possible?

My least favorite character in that Brit scifi program, Outcasts, was a utopian moralist*. When she learns that the head of the colony --a deliberate, sage, righteously secular and consensus-seeking former professor-- secretly ordered a mass murder for, in his mind, the survival of the group, she explodes and implodes simultaneously. "But I thought we were making a new start, that it would be different here, that we had learned from the mistakes we made back on earth..."

LOL. Silly wabbit.

When pacifist types (or San Francisco police chiefs) go on about "an end to violence", I shake my head. My typical internal question is, "What planet do you think you're living on?" Does anyone really expect that somehow human beings will no longer lust or be gripped by anger or envy or greed or sloth or arrogance?

And even if, after many decades of life, making your own messes and learning a bit from them, you find, as you age, a modicum of wisdom...that's just you. Each human has to go through their own history of mistake, error, sin and perhaps wisdom. Each one. There is no Lamarckian shortcut. That fact alone ought to give pause to the Disciples of The Light.

In my unreconstructedly Christian days, I understood these things to be sins, the capital sins, painful effects of the primal Fall from Grace. And they are sins, much of the time, in that they wreak havoc. But I eventually realized that they are also inescapeable elements in the human condition, the human predicament, or as my friend Rosamonde says "the nature of this planet of which we are a part." Each of them is a kind of excess of what is inborn in us for our very survival.  No sense moaning about their existence; the issue is how you handle these things, realistically. (I do moan, of course, about stupidity. I grant myself a dispensation in that regard...I am, after all, Ex Cathedra.)

I have often joked that Original Sin is the one Christian doctrine which requires no faith to accept, all you have to do is look around. And that's not far off. But what sticks in my craw still is the notion that it could ever have been different, that the trainwreck of history could have gone down a different track but for some kind of human choice. That it was contingent, avoidable, merely voluntary. That seems vastly more unlikely to me than Transubstantiation or the Trinity.

Like most people in my culture, I basically buy the theory of evolution. Some day it may be proven to be as wrong as Ptolemaic astronomy. But no other cosmology is remotely believable to me. Given that limit, if our species did evolve from primates --in a world fundamentally and ab initio structured on scarcity of resources and armies of hungry predators, competition for space and food and mates and status, full of contingencies, etc. then what other possible outcome for Homo sapiens could there be?  This is not a Fallen World that we created. It is the only world in which we find ourselves, fully, independently and bloodily in operation long before the first self-conscious humans blinked themselves awake.

As my favorite apocryphal line of St Thomas says, "It would be a sign of credulity to imagine that, prior to the Fall of Adam, lions ate grass."

Update 2016. It is not apocryphal but is found in Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Question 96, Article 1, reply to Objection 2.

Utopia means no-place. So you may as well get used to where you are.


*Utopian moralists are pretty much my least favorite characters wherever they appear.

Newtista

Despite his having some very good ideas, one of the things that put me off Gingrich was his constant creepy connection to his wife. I realize I don't know the names of the wives of Romney or Santorum or any of them. (Why should I? I'm not gonna be voting for them.)  But Newt's regular chant of "Callista and I" informed me of hers.

It's creepy and unmanly when, as in current Hollywood magazine parlance, a man is so enmeshed with his woman that they get a hybrid name like Brangelina or Bennifer or Billary*. Women, the queens of enmeshment and overinvolvement, love this shit. It creeps me out.

Ms Gingrich's recent desire to break into --no other word for it-- the all-male Augusta golf club further puts me off. Men need all-male spaces and connections, free from women. Any "conservative" woman who does not respect that is just another fembot.



*PS  I just noticed how the sad oppressive patriarchy continues even here. The guy's name comes first, Priority Male. If these were justly reversed, we'd have Angebrad, Jennbenn and Hillbill....y?

Poetics and kenotics

One of the half-jest bestemmie that B is so fond of concerns today, Holy Thursday as "the day God turned himself into a loaf of bread." Despite his two college degrees, he retains the voice and view of the Calabrese peasant. Magical, and formally heretical, rather than sacramental --in the eyes of the theologically pointy-headed-- he nonetheless gets to the heart of the matter.

Holy Week is also the time for the celebration of Tenebrae, shadows. It is a specially solemn performance of the Office of Matins. The psalms are about death and betrayal. The readings are chanted from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. And fifteen candles are lit and then slowly extinguished until all that is left is darkness and silence.

Andrew Sullivan's disappointingly trite plea for a "pure and simple" kind of Jesus morals religion is well unravelled here. What strikes me is his focus on power and its renunciation. What folks like this often fail to notice is that once he stepped out into the public world, after his baptism and time in the desert, until the moment when he was arrested, Jesus never once gave up his authority or his power. Even then, it was his choice; he knew it was coming and did not try to escape (though --Mt 26.39--he wished he could.) He was always in charge. No one on earth was master of the "Lord and Master" (John 13.14).

The foot-washing in which that phrase occurred is instructive. He did perform a task for his disciples that was beneath him. But it was only because it was beneath him that it was noteworthy. And it was not an act of submission to them; on the contrary, it only strengthened his position as Lord and Master. He chose to do it. No one required it of him.

When a scandalized Peter refused to accept this confusing gesture, Jesus did not sympathize, empathize, identify with or enter into dialogue with him; He made it authoritatively and magisterially clear to him: Take part or get out. (Jn 13.8)

Power is not simple. Nor was Jesus. Nor is darkness. Nor is bread.