The kids in elementary school who were ardent campers never seemed to be very pleasant. Early in life, we moved from a small suburb into a more heavily wooded area (now scarcely wooded at all, I understand) & we always had to travel by the deep waters of a reservoir. Decades later, "The Blair Witch Project" would capture my feeling about the woods of my home state, and about Nature (capital N) in general: I always feel like a stranger & intruder, not kindred at all, amazed & overwhelmed by beauty, but also sensing a huge antagonism from the life in these spaces.
The new series by Ken Burns on PBS has built a bridge to the natural world for me, by showing me the activity of those who, a century & more ago, saw the threat unchecked exploitation of resources posed to the immense & rare natural landscape of the country, and out of a love for it & for future generations, set out to do what they could to preserve it from being ravaged even further. The words of John Muir, of John Burroughs, of Theodore Roosevelt supply something that isn't in my temperament. For me, the awe has always been accompanied by a terror; partly, probably, from my feeling that mountains & rivers & forests are things without human language, apart from the human story. Through the narrative, written by Clayton Duncan, linked to these images, Ken Burns supplies the story that I haven't wished to discover on my own.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Creation
Divine-Watchmaker sorts of arguments, in any guise, for God's existence leave me cold. What seems far more persuasive to me is the feeling that comes from the sense that comes to everyone at some point in their lives that the beauty we see, the intimacy we enjoy, the sudden overwhelming senes of what an astonishing thing it is simply To Be, makes us experience the world & creation as a gift, that a Giver specifically has handed it to us, and that this outweighs all other doubts & experiences & arguments. Just as Christ comes in a backwater stable & goes around with a dozen ill-equipped men teaching among a people under a foreign power, our clues to God come humbly, mounted on a donkey.
Monday, September 21, 2009
'Heart speaks to heart'
'Because of the increase of evildoing, the love of many will grow cold,' Jesus warns, as St. Matthew's gospel reports. It's part of a general warning that, because of persecution, many will be led into sin, will hate & betray each other, and false prophets will come & deceive many -- as a result, love, divine charity, will grow cold in the faithful.
St. Paul tells us what charity is in the famous passage in 1st Corinthians -- and this is the love that's to be practiced especially with regard to those who don't share our own faith. Even if people are up to their eyeballs in dreadful things, divine love prompts us to believe that whatever their sins or errors, they're seeking God & looking for truth. The opposite attitude is pride, the belief that we can never be "like that": but St. Paul warns us that we can fall, can be cut off from Christ, through the failure of love and its corollary, humility. Love is transient when it isn't joined to humility, to the recognition that we're fallible & changeable & wholly subject to our own passions & bigotries, without the help & mercy of God.
There is a mercilessness in the air in the U.S. and elsewhere, a madness that resembles something out of Dante's inferno. We can't drive it out: but we can make certain that it doesn't drive us. Heart needs to speak to heart, in hope & in humility, or the fiery gales will be fed by our own worst impulses.
St. Paul tells us what charity is in the famous passage in 1st Corinthians -- and this is the love that's to be practiced especially with regard to those who don't share our own faith. Even if people are up to their eyeballs in dreadful things, divine love prompts us to believe that whatever their sins or errors, they're seeking God & looking for truth. The opposite attitude is pride, the belief that we can never be "like that": but St. Paul warns us that we can fall, can be cut off from Christ, through the failure of love and its corollary, humility. Love is transient when it isn't joined to humility, to the recognition that we're fallible & changeable & wholly subject to our own passions & bigotries, without the help & mercy of God.
There is a mercilessness in the air in the U.S. and elsewhere, a madness that resembles something out of Dante's inferno. We can't drive it out: but we can make certain that it doesn't drive us. Heart needs to speak to heart, in hope & in humility, or the fiery gales will be fed by our own worst impulses.
"What is truth?" asked jesting Pilate . . .
" . . . and would not stay for answer."
Our drive to discover the truth is the defining characteristic of our nature: our capacity to reason, but more than just the capacity: the NEED for truth, and the irritation and anger we feel when we've been misled or duped or used by someone promoting something else.
The shadow that follows the truth is the delight in falsehood, misrepresentation, and the fruits of deceit, especially when the deceit is undetected: when people simply glory in a lie, and spread it eagerly, and make no attempt to discern whether it's true or false, but revel in it because they want to feel the force of a rebellion or a reaction, the power of an angry mob.
By making the search for information easier, the internet makes the discovery of truth harder. Instead of the labor involved in copying passages out for ourselves, a few keystrokes allow us to cut and paste a link or a series of paragraphs: there's no need to re-assess the material as we repeat it. Poisoned-pen letters & chain letters have nothing on email; recipients of the former might suspect more readily that the contents were unreliable; but with the excitement of being Paul Revere, people pass on emails now, and rouse all the worst passions, waking the shadow of truth, the appetite for lies that curls in us always ready for stimulation & food, ready to be poked, ready to spring into action.
Our drive to discover the truth is the defining characteristic of our nature: our capacity to reason, but more than just the capacity: the NEED for truth, and the irritation and anger we feel when we've been misled or duped or used by someone promoting something else.
The shadow that follows the truth is the delight in falsehood, misrepresentation, and the fruits of deceit, especially when the deceit is undetected: when people simply glory in a lie, and spread it eagerly, and make no attempt to discern whether it's true or false, but revel in it because they want to feel the force of a rebellion or a reaction, the power of an angry mob.
By making the search for information easier, the internet makes the discovery of truth harder. Instead of the labor involved in copying passages out for ourselves, a few keystrokes allow us to cut and paste a link or a series of paragraphs: there's no need to re-assess the material as we repeat it. Poisoned-pen letters & chain letters have nothing on email; recipients of the former might suspect more readily that the contents were unreliable; but with the excitement of being Paul Revere, people pass on emails now, and rouse all the worst passions, waking the shadow of truth, the appetite for lies that curls in us always ready for stimulation & food, ready to be poked, ready to spring into action.
The Place of Refuge
St. Augustine wrote The City of God in response to the pagan Romans who had taken refuge in the churches, which the barbarians spared in the sack of Rome, but who then blamed the Church for the abandonment of the city's old divinities.
The revisionist attempt to class Pope Pius XII as a collaborator or at least as someone who was too silent during WWII on the Nazi persecution of the Jews is a very similar smear. A member of my parish was in the army that entered Rome after driving out the German army; on being shown around one of the city's churches, he was told that he was the first to have seen the relics & historical features of the church in several years, because on Pope Pius' orders, the churches had been turned into refuges for Rome's Jewish population & all Italian Jews who could be accommodated. -- On Hitler's ascent to power, then-Cardinal Pacelli had rebuked an Italian aristocrat who said "At least he's against the communists." "Don't talk such nonsense," the future pope replied, "the Nazis are infinitely worse." The Church in Germany was viewed as a foreign & race-mixing power, and all means were used first to bind, then to harass and silence the Church in Germany; in the three years in which Hitler held sway in Europe, the heaviest blows fell on Polish Catholics. Pope John Paul II's spiritual understanding of human suffering & evil & the need for grace & mercy was formed against the backdrop of what he experienced & shared as a young man; and the father of the current pope would move continually during the Third Reich in order to keep his sons away from the satanic monstrosity which gripped Germany during those years.
Throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, the non-Catholic parties, all the anti-clerical parties, had aimed at getting the Church out of political affairs; and the same people who condemn the Church now for interfering are those who blame the Church for not stopping the Nazis or for facilitating their rise or collaboration. Pope Pius X, the first pope of the 20th century, did all that he could to try to avert the first World War; and his successor, Benedict XV, elected at the start of that war, tried to recall Europe from the holocaust of that time. Both Paul VI and John Paul II, despite the calls of militants to confront communist powers politically, both followed a path away from conflagration & to living Christ wholly, even under the circumstances in the Soviet bloc and elsewhere, to avoid plunging humanity into yet another war.
Catholics are often foolish & purblind & wayward & stubborn & dim, whether lay or clerical; but the body & mind endure & surpass the quality of its members, because it is THE body that the Holy Spirit animates & gives a divine endurance & direction, so that Christ crucified & risen always be the center, so that the cross "be not emptied" of its power. What is not The Church, capital C, is built from its members, and has only what natural qualities they have: were the Catholic Church built from its members, rather than being Christ's body on earth, it would, having suffered the many losses & defeats over the ages, have fallen long ago. It's she who shapes us & places Christ in us, and then makes more of us than we can possibly be on our own. She takes us in that we may be taken out of ourselves, and remade in Christ: any other way is building on the sand of the self. Because we are not the stuff, the substance of the sanctuary, we find sanctuary & life there.
The revisionist attempt to class Pope Pius XII as a collaborator or at least as someone who was too silent during WWII on the Nazi persecution of the Jews is a very similar smear. A member of my parish was in the army that entered Rome after driving out the German army; on being shown around one of the city's churches, he was told that he was the first to have seen the relics & historical features of the church in several years, because on Pope Pius' orders, the churches had been turned into refuges for Rome's Jewish population & all Italian Jews who could be accommodated. -- On Hitler's ascent to power, then-Cardinal Pacelli had rebuked an Italian aristocrat who said "At least he's against the communists." "Don't talk such nonsense," the future pope replied, "the Nazis are infinitely worse." The Church in Germany was viewed as a foreign & race-mixing power, and all means were used first to bind, then to harass and silence the Church in Germany; in the three years in which Hitler held sway in Europe, the heaviest blows fell on Polish Catholics. Pope John Paul II's spiritual understanding of human suffering & evil & the need for grace & mercy was formed against the backdrop of what he experienced & shared as a young man; and the father of the current pope would move continually during the Third Reich in order to keep his sons away from the satanic monstrosity which gripped Germany during those years.
Throughout the 19th century, and well into the 20th, the non-Catholic parties, all the anti-clerical parties, had aimed at getting the Church out of political affairs; and the same people who condemn the Church now for interfering are those who blame the Church for not stopping the Nazis or for facilitating their rise or collaboration. Pope Pius X, the first pope of the 20th century, did all that he could to try to avert the first World War; and his successor, Benedict XV, elected at the start of that war, tried to recall Europe from the holocaust of that time. Both Paul VI and John Paul II, despite the calls of militants to confront communist powers politically, both followed a path away from conflagration & to living Christ wholly, even under the circumstances in the Soviet bloc and elsewhere, to avoid plunging humanity into yet another war.
Catholics are often foolish & purblind & wayward & stubborn & dim, whether lay or clerical; but the body & mind endure & surpass the quality of its members, because it is THE body that the Holy Spirit animates & gives a divine endurance & direction, so that Christ crucified & risen always be the center, so that the cross "be not emptied" of its power. What is not The Church, capital C, is built from its members, and has only what natural qualities they have: were the Catholic Church built from its members, rather than being Christ's body on earth, it would, having suffered the many losses & defeats over the ages, have fallen long ago. It's she who shapes us & places Christ in us, and then makes more of us than we can possibly be on our own. She takes us in that we may be taken out of ourselves, and remade in Christ: any other way is building on the sand of the self. Because we are not the stuff, the substance of the sanctuary, we find sanctuary & life there.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Summer's lease hath none too short a date
A good friend told me that she's fallen under the spell of autumn the last week, as the blistering summer heat retreats. Tonight, another friend & I took in a film, "Adam", centered on the title character, a young man with Asperger's syndrome whose father has just died, but who embarks on an unexpected relationship with the young woman, Beth, who moves into his building; as she begins to help him adjust & confront living without his previous security, the story develops into a study of faithfulness & falsehood & misunderstanding. Along with "(500) Days of Summer", it's romantic without the normal steps & conclusion -- and the couples don't wind up together. Instead, each comes away changed & deepened.
These seem to be signs that the film community, creating & viewing, is changing as the dynamics of blockbusters become insupportable.
These seem to be signs that the film community, creating & viewing, is changing as the dynamics of blockbusters become insupportable.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Frank Schaeffer on the same trail
During my brief years affiliated with the evangelical right wing, I read Frank Schaeffer's fathers books, only developing a more critical understanding during college. He now provides one of the strongest warning voices about what he terms a 'fifth column' of people raised in America but taught that the main culture was satanic & could be fought by any & all means. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/glenn-beck-and-the-912-ma_b_284387.html
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Language in Chains
From a 36-year-old volume by newspaperman and speechwriter Frank Mankiewicz, "Perfectly Clear: Nixon from Whittier to Watergate":
Men achieved high rank in [the WWII] years, beyond their abilities and wildest ambitions, and were understandably loath to return to selling automobiles or settling insurance claims. Fortunes were made selling equipment and weapons to the services by men and companies to whom the swelling figures on the bbalance sheet compensated for the loss of whatever morals and ethics they may have brought to the enterprise.
Politicians discovered the great truth that if "defense" or "national security" is involved, or can be made to seem to be involved, rational arguments can be easily overcome. So long as a permanent crisis exists, national priorities can be permanently reversed. . .
The very change of name of the old Departments of War and Navy to a neew Department of Defense symbolizes the shift. As Eugene McCarthy has pointed out, once a department of government is called 'Defense,' it has no effective limit. A war department after all, is to wage wars, and if there are no wars, it is hard to increase its budget. But defense? There can never, by definition, be enough defense. If one is not for defense, then one must want the country to be defenseless or undefendable. . .
. . . this made for a sort of 'CIA-ization' of domestic life and politics . . . In the 'civilian' branches of government, the methods of the soldier and the spy became the standard operating procure. 'Secret,' 'Top Secret,' and 'Eyes Only' memoranda proliferated in places like the Department of Agriculture. The bureaucrat whose paper could carry no higher classification than 'Confidential' could safely be ignored. Cable traffic to and from posts overseas multiplied and became filled with code, military-sounding abbreviations, and 'hard-nosed' technical language. Software, infrastructure, interface, signoff, quantify -- everyone wanted to sound like a crisp air traffic control operator or a weary but experienced colonel seeking 'intellegence' from a series of dangerous patrols . . .
Against this backdrop of concealment and reversals of meaning, it's easy to incite many to fury, who think that by malicious & brutal explosions, they demonstrate that they're "real people".
Men achieved high rank in [the WWII] years, beyond their abilities and wildest ambitions, and were understandably loath to return to selling automobiles or settling insurance claims. Fortunes were made selling equipment and weapons to the services by men and companies to whom the swelling figures on the bbalance sheet compensated for the loss of whatever morals and ethics they may have brought to the enterprise.
Politicians discovered the great truth that if "defense" or "national security" is involved, or can be made to seem to be involved, rational arguments can be easily overcome. So long as a permanent crisis exists, national priorities can be permanently reversed. . .
The very change of name of the old Departments of War and Navy to a neew Department of Defense symbolizes the shift. As Eugene McCarthy has pointed out, once a department of government is called 'Defense,' it has no effective limit. A war department after all, is to wage wars, and if there are no wars, it is hard to increase its budget. But defense? There can never, by definition, be enough defense. If one is not for defense, then one must want the country to be defenseless or undefendable. . .
. . . this made for a sort of 'CIA-ization' of domestic life and politics . . . In the 'civilian' branches of government, the methods of the soldier and the spy became the standard operating procure. 'Secret,' 'Top Secret,' and 'Eyes Only' memoranda proliferated in places like the Department of Agriculture. The bureaucrat whose paper could carry no higher classification than 'Confidential' could safely be ignored. Cable traffic to and from posts overseas multiplied and became filled with code, military-sounding abbreviations, and 'hard-nosed' technical language. Software, infrastructure, interface, signoff, quantify -- everyone wanted to sound like a crisp air traffic control operator or a weary but experienced colonel seeking 'intellegence' from a series of dangerous patrols . . .
Against this backdrop of concealment and reversals of meaning, it's easy to incite many to fury, who think that by malicious & brutal explosions, they demonstrate that they're "real people".
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Alpha & Omega
For me, it all begins with the mass. The sacrifice of the mass, as Catholics habitually called it for centuries.
All other disputes were secondary to this one: whether Christ is offerred to his Father at each mass in a sacrifice, so that his action in assuming the whole weight of human evil & enduring the separation from God & overcoming it is perpetuated by the priest, or whether it's the community's action of praise & thanks where Christ present, not on the altar as the Victim & Offering, but in some other way.
The first is a supernatural, transcendent action, one that declares a temporal event actually enters, encompasses, and surpasses Time, and that this is a divine action, in which the Creator assumes the entirety of all the evils issuing from the Fall of all mankind.
Get rid of that, and bit by bit, shred by shred, word by word, interpretation by reinterpretation, the transcendent vanishes in favor of a 'spiritual' naturalism. When people talk of 'spirituality' today, they're talking about sensuality in theological terminology.
The great disaster for the Catholic Church was in the attempt to bridge the absolute gap between church services which are divine pep rallies intended to inspire people to reverence or to enthusiasm, and between the one in which a God opens his wounds & feeds the communicant his own eternal substance under an appearance of unleavened bread. Anything aside from this, no matter how reverent, or no matter how exalting, is mundane & even profane.
The mystery of faith, contrary to the acclamation in the laicized mass used in the vast majority of Catholic churches today, is not 'Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,' but the complete unity & identity of the priest's sacrifice at the altar with Christ's own sacrifice, the long offering of Christ's own life culminating with Calvary & the Resurrection.
Why is this the beginning and the end, the alpha & the omega? Our life, in itself, crumbles beneath its own weight. We can't make it rise, even when we make it elaborate, amazing, energetic, even when we accomplish great things. The very attempt to take on ourselves "the mystery of things" (Shakespeare) is an impossible imitation of Christ. We didn't call the universe into being: even the small fragments of time & space & desire & imagination that fall to us drive us to break them, and ourselves, in the using.
All other disputes were secondary to this one: whether Christ is offerred to his Father at each mass in a sacrifice, so that his action in assuming the whole weight of human evil & enduring the separation from God & overcoming it is perpetuated by the priest, or whether it's the community's action of praise & thanks where Christ present, not on the altar as the Victim & Offering, but in some other way.
The first is a supernatural, transcendent action, one that declares a temporal event actually enters, encompasses, and surpasses Time, and that this is a divine action, in which the Creator assumes the entirety of all the evils issuing from the Fall of all mankind.
Get rid of that, and bit by bit, shred by shred, word by word, interpretation by reinterpretation, the transcendent vanishes in favor of a 'spiritual' naturalism. When people talk of 'spirituality' today, they're talking about sensuality in theological terminology.
The great disaster for the Catholic Church was in the attempt to bridge the absolute gap between church services which are divine pep rallies intended to inspire people to reverence or to enthusiasm, and between the one in which a God opens his wounds & feeds the communicant his own eternal substance under an appearance of unleavened bread. Anything aside from this, no matter how reverent, or no matter how exalting, is mundane & even profane.
The mystery of faith, contrary to the acclamation in the laicized mass used in the vast majority of Catholic churches today, is not 'Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,' but the complete unity & identity of the priest's sacrifice at the altar with Christ's own sacrifice, the long offering of Christ's own life culminating with Calvary & the Resurrection.
Why is this the beginning and the end, the alpha & the omega? Our life, in itself, crumbles beneath its own weight. We can't make it rise, even when we make it elaborate, amazing, energetic, even when we accomplish great things. The very attempt to take on ourselves "the mystery of things" (Shakespeare) is an impossible imitation of Christ. We didn't call the universe into being: even the small fragments of time & space & desire & imagination that fall to us drive us to break them, and ourselves, in the using.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Talkin' 'bout my education redux
The 1968 commercials for Nixon remain vivid in my memory. Along with the conversation of the Silent Majority adults in the family, they served as the roots for nearly 25 years of conservative militancy, stemming from early teens into my late 30s. That it was Roger Ailes, the grandmaster of Murdoch's tabloid tv station, who crafted the Nixon commercials -- "Look at all the evil liberal students!" -- and also refashioned the political convention into pure spectacle in 1972, was something I didn't discover until I had nearly completed the abandonment of the right wing altogether.
Buckley gave a veneer of civility and rationality to conservatism, which attracted many over the course of his three-plus decades directing the movement. As he retreated from the editorial guidance of National Review & then from any influence over the right at all, all the poisons that lurked in the mud hatched out.
WFB fooled us young turks, as Reagan, anointed by Buckley as early as 1966, did as well; but then we were ripe for being fooled, since we were unable as a nation to take the harsh lesson history always provides to powerful countries, forcing them to recognize flaws & limitations & obliging the people to gain wisdom. Operating according to such limiting wisdom was what conservatism was supposed to do, in the face of rash excitements; instead, it provided cover for a retreat to violent adolescent rage against reality.
Buckley gave a veneer of civility and rationality to conservatism, which attracted many over the course of his three-plus decades directing the movement. As he retreated from the editorial guidance of National Review & then from any influence over the right at all, all the poisons that lurked in the mud hatched out.
WFB fooled us young turks, as Reagan, anointed by Buckley as early as 1966, did as well; but then we were ripe for being fooled, since we were unable as a nation to take the harsh lesson history always provides to powerful countries, forcing them to recognize flaws & limitations & obliging the people to gain wisdom. Operating according to such limiting wisdom was what conservatism was supposed to do, in the face of rash excitements; instead, it provided cover for a retreat to violent adolescent rage against reality.
Monday, September 7, 2009
When grass was green & oh so mellow . . .
The melancholic songs in my childhood were at least not derangedly furious songs; but they were awfully sentimental.
"Try to remember/the time of September/when grass was green/and oh so mellow" -- awful lyrics.
It was the time of the changing of leaves, which always astonished me -- the autumn cascade of color was one of the most keenly-felt losses when we moved to the desert. As much as I loved the baseball season, the autumn brought the season of mystery, of a kind of aliveness in the face of cold.
"Try to remember/the time of September/when grass was green/and oh so mellow" -- awful lyrics.
It was the time of the changing of leaves, which always astonished me -- the autumn cascade of color was one of the most keenly-felt losses when we moved to the desert. As much as I loved the baseball season, the autumn brought the season of mystery, of a kind of aliveness in the face of cold.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Talkin' 'bout my education
William F. Buckley realized in the 1950s that the right wing was going to have to re-package itself, though he didn't use that term. This resolute enemy of academic freedom began with the Wilde-style paradox that he was really FOR academic freedom, while the majority of the Yale faculty, by teaching that capitalism was faulty & inefficient and that human beings were better off not ceding their decision-making to others, were in fact opposing freedom. This Orwellian inversion has been at the heart of the conservative movement: by opposing public education, they were really supporting learning. By wanting to teach evolution as a theory no different than the theory of creation, they were advancing debate and equality. By refusing to admit minorities in higher numbers, they were fighting "reverse" racism.
And so we have now the degenerate fifth-decade conservospawn with their nutso claims of that decent healthcare in fact is an attempt to kill old people and that urging children to stay in school & asking kids to help the president do that is really mind control.
These mind-manipulators should know. They've been in the business of lying & swapping labels since Billy Buckley wrote his "God and Man at Yale," the template for every other right-wring pro-American anti-socialist racist screed ever since . . .
And so we have now the degenerate fifth-decade conservospawn with their nutso claims of that decent healthcare in fact is an attempt to kill old people and that urging children to stay in school & asking kids to help the president do that is really mind control.
These mind-manipulators should know. They've been in the business of lying & swapping labels since Billy Buckley wrote his "God and Man at Yale," the template for every other right-wring pro-American anti-socialist racist screed ever since . . .
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Waterboarding and Feeding Tubes
Like those who would not admit that the technique of waterboarding is torture until they were subjected to it for five seconds, the pro-life materialists ought to be subjected to the conditions which they say are required to preserve life before prescribing their usage on others. They should be obliged to be unable to move or speak or communicate for a month, even a week, even three days, and be obliged to take the only nourishment through a feeding tube, while being cleaned, moved, have their excrement removed by assistants -- they would rapidly lose their moral certitude that this was 'preservation of life until natural death'.
Cathofrauds 2
The self-proclaimed pro-lifers are generally not pro-truth, as the bishop of the diocese of Phoenix is once again demonstrating by echoing the deceits of those who were horrified by the withdrawal of a brain-dead person's feeding tube while they were supporting war and torture -- not the 'direct killing of innocents' -- abroad. Traditional theology says that the soul is more than the body, and the insistence that life be allowed to end naturally is mocked by the presence of machines that take over or stimulate bodily functions that would have lapsed, or the demeaning and invasive procedures required to maintain physical life once the memory, will & reason have been effectively extinguished. The so-called pro-lifers are materialists -- no longer do they see the medical machinery as a presumptuous & arrogant attempt by humans to maintain organic life at all costs, but suddenly, those procedures & machinery are now subsumed under the idea that they maintain the body 'until natural death'. So much of the wealth that ought to be transferred to those who ARE suffering unnatural death due to lack of medicine & food in the impoverished places of the world is spent to prolong the body's functioning indefinitely. And those who insist that this robs human beings of the dignity of children of God are then caricaturized & stigmatized as proponents of a 'death culture'. Not only is there a not-too-obscure blanket accusation of anyone who has to endure the actual eradication of a family member's personality long before physical death, there is no real belief that God's timing is not tied to the particular state of medical technology in the wealthy countries. Judging what is and is not 'natural death' by the facilities available in the rich suburbs of the United States or the cities of Europe is the purest relativism, made worse by the attempt to make immoral what was not immoral a mere decade or two earlier.
The Cathofrauds
The American cathofrauds response to the new encyclical 'Charity in Truth' is one with the tenor of the conservative movement that I grew up with in the latter '70s and followed for many years. The right-wing public CF's, like the late W.F. Buckley and the innumerable offspring in various groups like the Federalist Society and other more professedly Catholic groups, recall Jesus' admonition, that once a pharisee has made a convert they make him twice the son of hell as themselves. Some of the CF's are cradle Catholics who contentedly pile up wealth & reputation & power in the world while robbing widows & orphans; others are converts & persoanlity-cult enthusiasts who simply have personal grievances about their own loss of prestige and power in the contemporary world & want the Catholic Church to be their vehicle to restore it.
The Catholic writers they often pretend to revere, tho', were strong critics of Church officials' innumerable disasters in the political direction of the Church in the world. As always, the real situation is ironic: few recall how Benedict XIV was slandered during the First World War for attempting to bring an end to the fratricidal conflict -- one famous French writer called him "Judas XIV" for trying to do it -- and after being universally praised during & immediately after the Second World War, Pius XII became the target, starting with David Irving's friend Rolf Hochhuth, of a revisionist campaign to change Pius XII into Hitler's accomplice. Likewise, in the '80s, it was not the crazed military build-up of the US that ended the Cold War. Despite the attempts of the cathofrauds to frame John Paul II with Ronald Reagan, it was John Paul II who constantly embodied Jesus' insistence that we love our enemies, and pray for our persecutors. But the love of Christ leading to the abandonment of war & the policies that lead to war, which has been the main thrust of Church politics, is neglected by the cathofrauds, who are happy with the new crusade & always making excuses for the bombing of civilians. A recent homolist expressed this well by his hypocritical use of moral theology: "The first principle of moral theology is that one may not directly take an innocent life." This is using moral theology as a means of keeping war going while so framing abortion that it excludes the innocence of women who fall victim to circumstance.
While Catholics are enjoined to go about their lives without fanfare, many have swallowed the bait & look to loudmouths & slanderers like Bill O'Reilly and William Donahue and the gullible priests who appear on Fox News, who loudly thank God that they are not like liberals et al. It's painful to have these stooges parading on cable tv & the web as 'faithful', when they make their daily bread from bearing false witness & drumming up hatred against their targets. Patience, the patience Christ enjoins, is hard to maintain in the face of this, and other absurdities so often committed, not just by self-proclaimed holy warriors, but also by prelates & priests eager to demonstrate their bona fides by crusades, rather than by growing silently in the mercy & charity of Christ.
The Catholic writers they often pretend to revere, tho', were strong critics of Church officials' innumerable disasters in the political direction of the Church in the world. As always, the real situation is ironic: few recall how Benedict XIV was slandered during the First World War for attempting to bring an end to the fratricidal conflict -- one famous French writer called him "Judas XIV" for trying to do it -- and after being universally praised during & immediately after the Second World War, Pius XII became the target, starting with David Irving's friend Rolf Hochhuth, of a revisionist campaign to change Pius XII into Hitler's accomplice. Likewise, in the '80s, it was not the crazed military build-up of the US that ended the Cold War. Despite the attempts of the cathofrauds to frame John Paul II with Ronald Reagan, it was John Paul II who constantly embodied Jesus' insistence that we love our enemies, and pray for our persecutors. But the love of Christ leading to the abandonment of war & the policies that lead to war, which has been the main thrust of Church politics, is neglected by the cathofrauds, who are happy with the new crusade & always making excuses for the bombing of civilians. A recent homolist expressed this well by his hypocritical use of moral theology: "The first principle of moral theology is that one may not directly take an innocent life." This is using moral theology as a means of keeping war going while so framing abortion that it excludes the innocence of women who fall victim to circumstance.
While Catholics are enjoined to go about their lives without fanfare, many have swallowed the bait & look to loudmouths & slanderers like Bill O'Reilly and William Donahue and the gullible priests who appear on Fox News, who loudly thank God that they are not like liberals et al. It's painful to have these stooges parading on cable tv & the web as 'faithful', when they make their daily bread from bearing false witness & drumming up hatred against their targets. Patience, the patience Christ enjoins, is hard to maintain in the face of this, and other absurdities so often committed, not just by self-proclaimed holy warriors, but also by prelates & priests eager to demonstrate their bona fides by crusades, rather than by growing silently in the mercy & charity of Christ.
The Enduring War
Hitler unleashed his war 70 years ago today; he remains the Great Excuse of the colonial powers that vanquished the Third Reich. The empires were obliged to dismantle themselves in the two decades following, but despite a show of trying to make amends for decades of exploitation, the desire to keep up the standard of living among the colonizers defeated any such stated goals. The Allied powers (in both wars) shared contempt for non-white races; what was exceptional among the Nazis was the reduction of the Slavic and Gallic peoples to the same level. The French have not forgotten the introduction of the STO (Service Travaille Obligatoire - Mandatory Work Service) which was intended to drain France of young men, removing both prospective fighters & reproductive resources.
Today's imperial apologists brag that their nations civilization the conquered & occupied peoples. The dark secret of the apologists for the West is that Hitler was not an exception. There is a neo-fascist contingent that asserts this, and therefore lauds him; but most of the neo-imperialists are, and remain, liberal imperialists of the Wilson-Churchill-Reagan variety. All the rhetoric about 'America's leadership' is a politically acceptable euphemism for White leadership -- even in the paradoxical situation of the present, when the president is half-and-half. (I forget which black comedian said she would be wild for Obama until he started to make mistakes, and then she'd start to complain about 'that mulatto'.) While Lincoln was right, that the Founders meant to set slavery on the road to extinction, slavery, occupation, and empire were & remain the driving forces of a country in which many have reverted to the first two decades of the 20th century, before the wars obliged earlier generations to attempt to rid themselves of that heritage.
Quentin Tarantino is only the latest to exploit the covert & consciously-denied identification with the Nazis: 'Nazis ain't got no humanity.' This is always the excuse for Nazi-like behavior -- the national enemies are always 'inhuman', and the imperialist justifies the empire on the basis that he wants to be rid of the inhuman enemies in order to let the more human ones live better.
Until the old colonial powers are capable of parting with the fruits of empire, and sharing them with equally without preaching responsibility to the recipients whose ancestors were the producers of the wealth to begin with, we can look forward to more pretend-repudiation of Hitler & more emulation, under deadly euphemisms, of the same mindset.
Today's imperial apologists brag that their nations civilization the conquered & occupied peoples. The dark secret of the apologists for the West is that Hitler was not an exception. There is a neo-fascist contingent that asserts this, and therefore lauds him; but most of the neo-imperialists are, and remain, liberal imperialists of the Wilson-Churchill-Reagan variety. All the rhetoric about 'America's leadership' is a politically acceptable euphemism for White leadership -- even in the paradoxical situation of the present, when the president is half-and-half. (I forget which black comedian said she would be wild for Obama until he started to make mistakes, and then she'd start to complain about 'that mulatto'.) While Lincoln was right, that the Founders meant to set slavery on the road to extinction, slavery, occupation, and empire were & remain the driving forces of a country in which many have reverted to the first two decades of the 20th century, before the wars obliged earlier generations to attempt to rid themselves of that heritage.
Quentin Tarantino is only the latest to exploit the covert & consciously-denied identification with the Nazis: 'Nazis ain't got no humanity.' This is always the excuse for Nazi-like behavior -- the national enemies are always 'inhuman', and the imperialist justifies the empire on the basis that he wants to be rid of the inhuman enemies in order to let the more human ones live better.
Until the old colonial powers are capable of parting with the fruits of empire, and sharing them with equally without preaching responsibility to the recipients whose ancestors were the producers of the wealth to begin with, we can look forward to more pretend-repudiation of Hitler & more emulation, under deadly euphemisms, of the same mindset.
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