Rod Dreher's Blog, page 115

Lancaster’s Crazy Knife Man

This weekend, a Lancaster (PA) police officer shot and killed a lunatic who was coming at him with a knife. The officer was headed to the man’s house following a domestic disturbance 911 call. You can watch the cop’s body cam footage embedded in the tweet below. The relevant still image illustrates this post:

BLM is rioting over this shooting. The suspect chases after the cop while waving a knife in the air. The cop literally had to choose between shooting or being stabbed to death.

BLM says he’s racist for not choosing to be stabbed to death.

pic.twitter.com/QGBlDeQSPI

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 14, 2020

Naturally, activists have hit the streets in Lancaster:

Lancaster City pic.twitter.com/1T4udqBHGT

— MKViti (@selfdeclaredref) September 14, 2020

Lancaster City pic.twitter.com/ShL7mqcb13

— MKViti (@selfdeclaredref) September 14, 2020

Lots more clips here.

They’re out in the street protesting the killing of a man who charged a police officer with a knife in hand. Seems like another case of BLM protesters believing that no one should be arrested or shot unless they want to be. You watch the video; there’s no way that cop had any choice other than to shoot to save his life. In some of the clips taken from the street, protesters are saying that peaceful protest is not getting the job done — meaning that it’s time to get violent.

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‘He Is Unrecognizable To Me’

A reader e-mailed me something, and gave me permission to publish it as long as I took names out. I edited it slightly to protect his identity, and the identity of someone he mentions. It’s well worth reading:

I was very sad to read your piece on how CRT is dividing Christians because I have seen this happen in my own small circles. I attended and later taught at a school called [name], a small school operated by very conservative members of [Protestant denomination], which is a generally a very theologically conservative fellowship.

But this summer, a few individuals penned an “open letter” to the school’s administration addressing racism. You can read the letter here:

[I am not including the link. — RD]

As you can see, it is nothing more than standard Critical Race Theory.

[This is true. — RD]

Several hundred people signed this, including some former students of mine. I was stunned that something like this could garner as much support as it did. Honestly, I think (or hope) that many of the people who signed it were rightly disturbed by events in the news and wanted to do something to speak out and signed this letter without realizing what it actually represented. I spoke to a couple of people who signed it but later regretted it.

One of the most disappointing signees was a fellow minister who’s about 15 years younger than me. For years, my late wife and I often commented on his calm spirit on social media, and on the thoughtful way he interacted with people. But he has now “accepted Critical Race Theory with the force of a religious conversion” as you said in your post. He is unrecognizable as a person to me. It is one of the saddest experiences I’ve ever had.

We are going to lose a huge chunk of young disciples to the Great Awokening because they have not been taught a Christian view of the world — no philosophy, no theology, no ethics. They have little to bring to bear to complex moral questions other than emotional outrage, and they will inevitably find more in common with those who share their ungrounded outrage rather than those who share faith in Christ.

This is yet another reason the Benedict Option is desperately needed, even on the campus of small “conservative” religious schools.

I read my correspondent’s written response to the open letter’s signatories. It’s exceptionally good — full of facts and trenchant analysis, written by a white Christian who believes in fighting racism, both within and outside the church, but who rejects Critical Race Theory as anti-Christian. I fear that in this environment, though, none of that will matter. Everything is emotionalism. Nothing but passion and outrage. If you don’t accept their diagnosis and prescription, then you are on the side of racists.

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Eighth Day Books & ‘Live Not By Lies’

We are only about two weeks away from the September 29 publication date of my book Live Not By Lies — a book who subject matter (how to resist the coming soft totalitarianism) is becoming ever more relevant. I want to encourage readers to pre-order it from Eighth Day Books, the world’s greatest bookstore. The New York Times once profiled Eighth Day here. Excerpts:

Eighth Day Books lives in an old three-story house on Douglas Avenue, just east of C&R Comics and Superior Rubber Stamp. It is not exactly a Christian bookstore — while sitting at the communal table, I can pull off the shelf works like Greil Marcus’s “The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs” or scoot my chair a couple of feet and grab, Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken.”

Still, the store’s name, Eighth Day, serves as a secret handshake among Christian book lovers, and its following reaches far beyond the heartland city it serves. Popular Christian writers like Lauren F. Winner and Rod Dreher are fans and erstwhile visitors. On one wall hangs a picture of Kallistos Ware, an Eastern Orthodox bishop and theologian, taken during his visit in 2002.

Warren Farha, 59, gray-haired and laconic, is the store’s founder, custodian, clerk and sole book buyer, a job that is more complex than it would be at a typical independent bookstore. The store’s shelves are divided into sections like Monastic Writings & Studies, Patristic Writings & Studies” and C. S. Lewis & Friends, and filled only with books Mr. Farha would read. So no cooking or travel.

Yes, Hillenbrand is on the shelves. But it is Mr. Farha’s more eccentric tastes that mark his store.

“We order a lot of university press stuff, and Christian presses, of course, but since we try to carry a deep selection of Catholic and Orthodox literature, sometimes we’re ordering from monasteries,” Mr. Farha, said. “Monasteries that publish books. Quite a few of our books are English translations, but published by some monasteries in Greece — books by abbots living in monasteries on Mount Athos.”

More:

“It’s like putting together my best constellation of books,” Mr. Farha said of his inventory. “I worry from time to time if the bookstore is just a collection of my tastes. I hope it’s bigger than that.”

It is, but if it were only a collection of Warren’s tastes, it would still be my favorite bookshop on the planet. If you are ever anywhere near Wichita, you have to go to Eighth Day — but bring your credit card, because it is metaphysically impossible to leave that store without a stack of books. For a certain kind of person — and we know who we are — Eighth Day Books is the bookshop equivalent of the Eagle & Child pub for the Inklings.

This is why I have made Eighth Day the exclusive vendor of signed pre-ordered copies of Live Not By Lies. I want to do everything I can to encourage my readers to support this independent small book store, which is one of America’s treasures. If you would like my signature affixed to your copy, then click here. 

I can’t get to Wichita, and it would be cost-prohibitive for Warren to ship all this copies to me, and then me to send the signed versions back to him. So I’m signing book plates, which will be pasted into the book. Note well that Eighth Day will not be able to ship them until September 29. I believe it will be worth the wait.

Here’s a shot I took of a shelf at The Ladder, the Christian speakeasy attached to Eighth Day Books. It perfectly captures the spirit of the store: Johnny Cash side by side with St. John Maximovitch:

 

And here are Warren and Chris Farha, your generous proprietors, and two of the kindest and most loving Christians you could ever hope to meet:

 

 

There is no substitute for being there in the store, but you might want to spend some time poking around Eighth Day’s website. You will find books there that you didn’t even know you wanted.

UPDATE: Reader DJ Wambeke comments:

Cannot agree with you more about the excellence of Eighth Day Books. Thanks to your recommendations a couple years ago my wife and I made a trip to Wichita (from our home in MN) just to check it out, (all our friends thought we were nuts – “you are driving all the way to Kansas just for a bookstore???”) and were not in the least disappointed. So much so that we’ve been back two more times since!

It’s true! Eighth Day is not a large bookstore, but it is so insanely well curated that you need to mark out at least two hours to give it a proper look (I’d say four, but at least two).

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What ‘Cuties’ Really Is

There has been a lot of talk about the perverse Netflix film Cuties since I posted my remarks about it a couple of nights ago, after watching it (see “Pretty Babies”). One thing I want to clarify for you readers who will not see the film — and I recommend strongly that you skip it — is that the claim that this movie is meant to  condemn the sexualization of adolescent girls ought not to be taken seriously.

I mean, the filmmaker may say that she intends it that way, but if she is being sincere, then she is lying to herself.

I apologize, but I have to be blunt here. I blacked out the offensive word in that screenshot above. It’s a screengrab from a scene in Cuties, in which the protagonist, Amy, is in the stall in the girls bathroom at school, listening to the Cuties — four other 11-year-old girls — describing in detail a porn clip they are watching and giggling at. Here they are when Amy emerges from the toilet:

 

 

Now, there is no reason at all to believe that these child actors were watching a porno. But they had to speak the lines. This charming discourse includes these lines:

Jessica: “Look at the girl’s face. I bet it’s rape.”

[Girl 3]: “Rape?”

Yasmine: “I heard if it’s rape, it goes right through your whole body. The guy puts it in and it [deleted].”

And so forth. That’s Cuties. These children had to memorize this dialogue and perform it on camera. They also had to learn how to stroke their crotches, twerk, put their fingers in their mouths suggestively, and move like strippers mimicking vigorous intercourse.

The actors are children. Simply to play their roles, they had to have their innocence taken from them by the filmmaker — no doubt with the consent of their parent or parents. It is hard to imagine fathers and mothers allowing their little girls to be exploited in this way, but people will do anything for fame.

My point is that the intention of the director, even if noble, does not obviate the fact that for these children to play these roles, they had to say filthy things (and to imagine visually the things the script had them saying), and do filthy things with their bodies for the camera.

I am not surprised to read reviews from film critics and writers who are appalled at all the philistine normies who find this disgusting. One of the most shocking moments in my life as a professional film critic came at the Toronto Film Festival in 1998, at a screening of the Todd Solondz black comedy Happiness. If you read the plot description on Wikipedia, you will understand why I call it one of the most perverse and disgusting films I’ve ever had to sit through. The most evil thing about it is how it manipulates the viewer into rooting for a suburban dad to succeed in raping a boy, a friend of his son’s who is sleeping over at his house. I wish I had gotten up and left, but I felt it my professional obligation to stay through the end, because I was writing about it for the New York Post, and this was one of the most highly anticipated screenings of the entire festival, which is one of the world’s most prestigious. Owen Gleiberman, then a film critic for Entertainment Weekly, later reflected on that screening; this was the consensus of critics present:

One of my fondest memories of Toronto is back in 1998, when I first saw Todd Solondz’s Happiness. It was one of the most exhilaratingly unnerving movies I’d ever watched — a scandalous comedy of desperation that seemed to draw back a curtain on the sexual and romantic lives of its characters, revealing the secret things they did, some of them kinky, a few of them criminal, a lot of them just…private. The movie forced you to confront the continuity between the lust and despair it showed you and what was going on off-screen, maybe even in your own life.

The New York Times reported on the bleakness in Toronto that year, and said:

Yet it was the darker American films — some successful, some not — that seized the attention of many filmgoers here. Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, whose films here included Roberto Benigni’s ”Life Is Beautiful,” a gentle and haunting drama set in a concentration camp, said he did not fully understand why there were so many ultraviolent and dysfunctional-family movies.

”Like a year ago, it seemed to be optimistic,” Mr. Weinstein said. ”What’s in the air? There’s this new freedom to explore dangerous subject matters. People are trying to top themselves. They’re asking: ‘What’s next? What’s new? How far can you widen the envelope? How far are we really going to go?’ ”

Yeah, well, how far indeed, Harvey Weinstein.

Happiness received an uproarious standing ovation, which continued for a while when director Solondz took the stage in the hall. I got the hell out as soon as I could. On the way out of the building, I ran into a critic for a major Midwestern newspaper. We traded can you believe what the hell we just saw? looks, and he said only, “I just had to call my wife to make sure we were still on planet Earth.”

By the end of my film critic years, I understood why this happens to critics. They love novelty. They love shocking the squares. They see so many movies that they quickly become dead to the moral force of what we see on screen. Look, a movie that tries to make its audience pull for the pedophile to succeed in drugging and raping a little boy. … How about that, a movie that features little girls giggling as they describe a rape they’re watching in a porno movie? What’ll they think of next? Four stars, folks, and damn the hicks for hating this!”

As I said in my previous comment, I think the eroticization of children — boys and girls — via our pornographic culture, the Internet, and the ubiquity of smartphones, all happening because we are too cowardly as a culture to ban this poison, is a massively important story, and certainly worthy of art. But it has to be approached with extreme caution, and may not be possible to do on film without crossing moral lines that nobody should ever cross. A novel describes something that has to be created in the imagination of the reader. A film ordinarily has to show the thing directly that a novel symbolizes in words. That’s the aesthetic difference, and in films like Cuties, it makes a moral difference.

How would you feel watching your 11-year-old daughter saying those lines in a film? Dancing like these erotically charged children dance in this movie? How do you get your little girl to unlearn how to mimic rough intercourse in a dance routine after filming is over? How do you unring that bell, mom and dad?

 

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Racialism & The Demise Of Religious Conservatism

Writing in First Things, Darel Paul has a strong piece condemning the “racialism” that is au courant in American intellectual circles today. Excerpts:

The first precept of antiracism is that “racial groups are equals and none needs developing.” This is not a socioeconomic observation. Some racial groups are indeed wealthier, healthier, more educated—in short, more “developed”—than others. One may be tempted to read Kendi here as simply asserting a common humanity. That would be a grave misreading. The heart of antiracism is multiculturalist relativism fused with racialism. Kendi’s real meaning here is that every race is culturally equal, for “to be antiracist is to reject cultural standards and level cultural difference.” Yet if every ­race-culture is equal to every other race-culture, why are the races—which Kendi also calls “racialized cultural groups”—materially and socially unequal? Enter the second precept of antiracism (best stated in Kendi’s earlier volume, Stamped From the Beginning): “Racial discrimination is the sole cause of racial disparities in this country and in the world at large.” Kendi does not even try to prove this claim. Why would he? Though expressed as a sociological observation, it is in fact a dogmatic assertion introduced to save Kendi’s racialized multiculturalism from untoward conclusions. If the Light of Truth (race equity) cannot shine in the world, some Cloud of Darkness (“racist ­power”) must be obscuring it. QED.

More:

Antiracists are racialists. They believe that race is the prime matter of human society, the font of social and political identity, and the origin of political struggle. Their belief in the centrality of race dedicates them to heightening racial identity and urging that every social interaction be viewed first and foremost through the lens of race. Antiracists are particularly concerned to convince whites, far and away the least race-conscious group in ­America, to understand themselves racially. The ubiquity of antiracist terminology and slang today—“whiteness,” “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” “white nationalism,” “white fragility,” “white tears,” even “Karen” as a racial slur—shows that they are succeeding.

Though white Americans in general have not embraced this assigned identity, liberal white Americans and the educational, corporate, governmental, media, social, and cultural institutions they control certainly have. It is ironic to see a group that throughout the Obama years praised itself for its enlightened post-racial attitudes now embracing racialism. It is even more ironic to see liberal white managers and professionals marching under the banner of racial equity, a spectacle of the rich condemning riches and the powerful condemning power. More, it is the spectacle of a social class denouncing its own defining class norms and values, habits and modes of thought, as the oppressive culture of “whiteness.”

Read it all. 

Here’s something I’ve noticed: the antiracism movement is going to be the end of solidarity among religious conservative intellectuals. This is not just me theorizing; it’s based on things I’m seeing and hearing in my circles. Many of us have hung together through the LGBT wars, even though it has been difficult, as our non-religious peers (and even more than few religious ones) have joined the mainstream consensus that we are nothing more than bigots for sticking to authoritative Church teaching. But the antiracism moment, and the BLM moment, is tearing that to bits.

Here’s why. To generalize, religiously orthodox Christians have very solid Scriptural grounds (and, for Catholics and Orthodox, grounding in longstanding Church teaching as well) for the positions we hold on sexuality. All of us also agree that racism is unquestionably a sin. But how does the sin of racism manifest — and what are the morally just ways to combat it? This is where we differ — and, it turns out, differ sharply.

A number of white religious conservatives are finding themselves profoundly at odds with other white religious conservatives over the racial issues at the center of the American conversation now. Conservatives who have been united in their frustration of the unwillingness of liberals to discuss sexual morality without automatically imputing bigoted motives to conservatives are now experiencing that in arguments within conservative circles. This summer, an Evangelical law student friend passing through town told me that a number of his professor mentors at his undergraduate university, a conservative Christian college, have recently accepted Critical Race Theory with the force of a religious conversion. Its claims are now dogmatic in their minds; to dissent is to be a bigot.

I was thinking about this when reading the English conservative Ed West’s short piece in Unherd about the psychology of racial discussions these days. In it he explains why he no longer discusses race with white liberals. Excerpts:

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt once wrote that the “fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance.”

I’ve long thought that this explains most political debate, and via a Twitter mutual, another psychology paper confirms it: that when an empirical conclusion is likely to be true, but also points to something morally objectionable, people think that others should believe it less, even if it’s true.

More:

One of the main obstacles to this goal, in the eyes of conservatives and other critics, is that American policing outcomes can’t be equalised while there is such a considerable gap in violent crime rates between black and white Americans. This is a brutally uncomfortable fact to raise but it is nonetheless a fact that black Americans commit murder at around eight times the white rate; there are therefore far higher rates of violent confrontations with the police (just as Asian-Americans are shot and imprisoned at a lower rate than whites, as not shown here).

But human psychology being what it is, if someone in a discussion or a media editorial meeting raised this point, the average human being would naturally think less of them, and question their motives. What kind of person would even take it upon themselves to find that information?

Conservatives have their own realities, of course — everyone does — but this issue is so sacred to the Left that, while only a relative minority are actually engaging in cult-like behaviour like publicly washing feet, a larger hinterland at least believe the faith’s broader claims. It’s why I’m no longer talking to white liberals about race, so to speak, because I’m not sure what we can achieve beyond accepting that we see the world in different ways, and leave it at that.

He’s onto something. But what’s new here is that the line passes not just between liberals and conservatives, but also between conservatives — or at least religious ones. It’s splitting churches and intellectual circles. And here’s what makes it such an unanticipated victory for the left. Race is such a radioactive issue today that when conservatives disagree among themselves about Black Lives Matter and antiracism, those who fall on the “wrong” side of the issue become, by that fact, too toxic to tolerate on just about anything else. The result is that religious conservatives who were once allies on protecting religious liberty from attacks by those supporting full LGBT rights will find those former alliances hard to sustain.

 

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The Eyes Of Others

If you could live out one of these alter egos for two weeks, experiencing the world through their eyes, which do you think would bring you the most useful new understanding of the world:

the opposite sex
a different race
someone from a non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) country [or, for my readers who live in a non-WEIRD country, a WEIRD one]?

Explain your choice.

As a white American man, I think all of those would be useful in some way. The standout choice is to say “a different race,” given the tenor and troubles of our time. I would really like to know what it feels like to be black in this society, or at least non-white. I think it would give me a valuable experience of empathy to inform my thinking and my writing. Given the kind of work that I do, it seems kind of a no-brainer. It would be hard to pass that up.

But if I weren’t a writer about current events, then my guess is that living with a woman’s consciousness would probably be something that would do me the most good, as someone who lives in a household with a wife and a daughter. That’s what I thought at first before dismissing it as too narrow, but then I thought about something that has been on my mind all summer. A (white) female friend who used to live in the same Minneapolis neighborhood as George Floyd told me that it was men like Floyd was on the day he was arrested — drunk (or high), and belligerent — who made her life, and the lives of all women or all races who lived there, so fearful. She said that something as simple as taking the bus often required dealing with men like that, who would tell them, “I’m gonna rape you.” Not just every so often, but all the time.

When I got my hair cut recently (while wearing a mask, as my hair cutter was doing too), we were talking about crime, and I mentioned that. She said, “Oh YES, welcome to the experience of every woman who lives in a city.” She said it so emphatically that it really stuck with me. So it would probably be useful for me to know in my bones what that is like.

On the foreign choice, that would probably be the one that would shake up most people more than they can anticipate. I didn’t consider it seriously because even though my traveling has been almost exclusively in WEIRD countries, I’ve had enough travel to know how much it unsettles your view of the world as an American. Things you thought about your country and the world around you that were just The Way Things Are turn out to be contingent. This has been one of the great blessings of travel to me: learning how to see the world, at least somewhat, through the lives of people who aren’t American. I’m certainly grateful to be an American, but I’m also grateful to learn the limits of the American way of seeing the world. If I were to choose that category, I would probably wish to be someone from the People’s Republic of China, which is and is likely to grow as America’s great rival in this century. In fact, the 21st century is likely to be the Asian Century. Deep down, I have the most curiosity about the world through Chinese eyes in specific, and East Asian eyes in general — especially their concepts of religion.

So, which would I choose? My gut tells me race, but my mind tells me that choosing to live inside the head of a Mainland Chinese person would be the most important thing for me as a writer trying to understand the world as it is coming to be, and in which my children and grandchildren will grow old.

What about you? Of these three, which one would you choose? Why?

 

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Pretty Babies

Well, I watched Cuties so you don’t have to. I don’t like people condemning something without having seen or read it. So I saw it last night. It’s almost as bad as you think, and Netflix deserves all the grief it’s taking over the thing. But inside the grossness of Cuties is a reasonable point — but not one you can tell in film, or at least not in this film. Let me explain.

Back in 1978, Louis Malle made a film called Pretty Baby, starring 12-year-old Brooke Shields as a child prostitute in New Orleans. It was hugely controversial over the subject matter, and the fact that Shields did nude scenes. Cuties does not feature nudity (just a very quick glance at an adolescent girl’s breast), but it centers on the grotesque sexualization of minor girls — the title characters are a pack of 11-year-olds in Paris. Cuties is a deeply dishonest film that exploits its young cast nauseatingly, yet tries at the end to justify it with a too-pat moral. More on which in a moment.

Here, in this tweet, is why Netflix is in so much trouble:

Netflix is comfortable with this. Plenty of people will defend it. This is where our culture is at. pic.twitter.com/UlqEmXALmd

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) September 10, 2020

That tweet is essentially correct. There is no redeeming this. Cuties has lot of scenes like this. What the Avengers movies are to comic-book geeks, Cuties is to pedophiles — this, even though there is no sex in the movie. I want to make clear at the outset that I think this is a repulsive film, though the conflict it explores is dramatically worthy. There will be spoilers below, you are hereby warned.

The film centers around Amy, an 11-year-old girl living in immigrant housing in Paris. Her family is from Senegal, and are devout Muslims. When the film opens, her father has gone back to Senegal, and her mother is awaiting his return. We discover that he has gone to their homeland to take a second wife. Amy watches her mother grieve this, and try to be okay with it, because it is permitted in their traditional Islamic culture. An older Senegalese woman in the community, her “auntie,” is an enforcer of tradition.

A Muslim would no doubt see this film differently, but I sympathized strongly with Amy’s rebellion against this cruel culture. The problem is that Amy has nobody to talk to about it. She falls in with some bad girls at school — bratty, highly sexualized kids who have formed an amateur dance troupe (The Cuties), and are trying to win a competition. Amy eventually wins acceptance in the group, and steals her cousin’s smartphone so she can become part of their culture.

In what I think is the most important part of this movie — a theme that a better film could explore without descending into the filth it ostensibly criticizes — is the role that technology plays in corrupting these girls. There is no dirty old man who trains these kids to dress and act like sluts. They self-exploit through the smartphone and social media. Here’s a scene from when Amy is just beginning to hang out with the Cuties. They are in the girls’ bathroom at school. The Cuties are watching hardcore porn on a smartphone, and commenting on it in revolting detail:

 

We quickly learn that these rootless, restless girls are simply mimicking what they are seeing in pop culture, as experienced chiefly through social media. They are desperate for attention, and believe the way to get it is to sexualize themselves through scanty dressing and learning stripper-like dance routines, which they record and upload to the Internet.

At one point, Amy’s mother takes her to women’s prayer at the mosque. Amy slips a veil over her face, pretending to pray. But she’s really watching extremely provocative dancing, with nearly naked women doing lascivious lesbian routines. All of this is happening right under the noses of her mom, who has no idea what she’s up to with the smartphone (which she conceals, as she has stolen it).

The other Cuties all have smartphones too, but their less strict parents have allowed it. They are blind to how the technology facilitates the corruption of their daughters. I tell you, whatever else it is, Cuties is the best possible public service commercial exhorting parents never, ever to give their children smartphones.

At one point, Angelica, one of the Cuties, confesses to Amy that she never gets to see her parents, because they are always working in the restaurant. She believes that they don’t see her as someone of worth — at a dancer with talent. She cries. It’s clear that she is doing all this acting-out as a junior stripper-in-training because she is desperate for attention and validation.

The Cuties are Kardashianized, and have come to believe that their self-worth is based on affirmations of their social media presentation — that, and by acting sexually aggressive. The film shows on several occasions other people — older teenage boys, Amy’s cousin, an audience — reacting badly to the Cuties’ sexualization. The girls don’t actually know what they’re dealing with — they are playing with fire, and only imitating what they immerse themselves in on their smartphones. This is important: the Cuties aren’t actually rewarded with what they think they want. People just seem to think of them as weird and gross. Which they are.

In the most intense scene in the movie, Amy’s cousin, an adult man, discovers that she has his stolen smartphone. He demands it back. She refuses to hand it over, treating it like it’s more important than life itself. In a last ditch effort to save the phone, 11-year-old Amy begins to take her clothes off, and to look up at her cousin sexually, as if to offer herself in exchange for the phone. The man rebukes her (thank God), but the message is clear: Amy has already internalized the lesson that she can use her sexuality to get what she wants.

Toward the end, Amy has an epiphany that leads her to feel shame over what she is doing, and what she has become, and to turn back towards her innocence — but not in a way that affirms the patriarchal Islam against which she has been rebelling. Though one is happy that Amy is no longer going to be hanging out with the bad girls, it’s an unsatisfying ending. For one, it’s far too pat. For another — and far more significantly — it seems phony based on all that has come before. Imagine that you have just sat through a film that shows cake-and-cookie baking in the most lascivious, food-porn-ish way, but then has the obese chef protagonist deciding at the last minute to walk away from the kitchen, and to adopt a lifestyle of moderate eating. That’s what Cuties is like. Director Maïmouna Doucouré presents the Cuties’ many obscene dance routines as so alluring that the finale, in which Amy chooses another path, feels quite false.

There is a good movie somewhere in this material. The insanity into which our culture throws adolescent girls is an important topic. Pop culture bombards girls (and boys, but this is a movie about girls) with pornified messaging constantly, and really does tell them that their worth depends on self-presentation online, indeed sexual self-presentation. Where are the adults? In Cuties, the protagonist is part of a traditionalist Islamic community, but if this were true to contemporary American life, her disengaged parents might be worshippers at a suburban megachurch, and disengaged from their daughter’s life because they assume that she can be trusted with the smartphone, and besides, everybody has to have one to fit in.

We need a movie that illuminates this problem and tells the truth about it. I finished the movie feeling very, very sorry for adolescent girls today. The problem with Cuties — and it’s what destroys the movie — is aesthetic, and ultimately moral: it engages and demonstrates with great passion the very thing it purports to condemn. Again, think of a movie with an anti-gluttony message that spends half the movie filming eating pastries with lascivious abandon. It’s simply not credible. Netflix got in trouble at first for marketing this movie as eye candy for pedophiles, but it turns out that even though that is not strictly true, that tack was more true to the experience of Cuties than the revisionist marketing.

Whether the director (who is a woman) intends to or not, she has made a film that serves to accustom us to the sexualization of children. Cuties is dramatically quite bland; if it weren’t for the controversy, there would be nothing to recommend it. There’s no subtlety in it. If you wanted to make a movie or TV show that appealed to illicit prurience among the audience, you would have to make it with the pretense of condemning the thing you’re exploring in it. If you are the sort of person who finds long scenes of twerking pre-teens to be revolting, then Cuties is going to be hard to get through. If you find it exciting, well, perv, this is the movie for you.

I’m not saying that this is what the filmmaker set out to do here, but I am saying that this will be the effect. It will be the effect because the director’s aesthetic failure is a moral failure. And it’s a failure by the Netflix brass too, which tipped its hand with the botched initial marketing. It is plainly only interested in Cuties because it wanted a succès de scandale of a movie about twerking Lolitas. It has no interest at all in condemning a Kardashianized society that produces twerking Lolitas.

I have to bring to your attention the way some prominent critics have reacted to it. They cannot bear to give conservatives who have spoken out against this movie a victory. Thus, in the Telegraph — generally a conservative newspaper — we get this, as captured by the Catholic Londoner Niall Gooch:

The Telegraph film critic Tim Robey liked the paedo film a lot. I wonder whether he has any daughters. pic.twitter.com/ixKdzizWjN

— Niall Gooch

Look! A Book!

Boy, there’s nothing like holding your own book in your hand for the first time to make it real. UPS just brought me my author’s copies of Live Not By Lies, which will be published on September 29. I really love the cover design. Cassandra Garruzzo is the artist to credit — she did a magnificent job. The idea here is to use Soviet constructivist design to sell an anti-totalitarian message.

In his complimentary review this week, John Ehrett wrote:

I’m sure this is the first and last time that some of Dreher’s subjects’ stories will ever be told in the West.

He’s probably right, but I hope he’s wrong. One of the greatest blessings of my life has been the men and women I met in the former Soviet bloc — people of great faith and courage, whose stories are unknown in the West. One hope I have for this book is that it will both serve as a gateway to reading Solzhenitsyn, Havel, and the literature of Soviet-era dissent, and that it will spark widespread interest in telling the stories of the survivors of that era, while they are still alive. These men and women will not be with us much longer, and they are living treasures. Cherish them! I could only share a fraction of what I learned in their company. There is so, so much more. In a just world, there would be a library of books coming forth about them and the struggle of their peoples and nations. There would be nonstop dramas and documentaries. The fact that there hasn’t been is evidence of a ghastly erasure of cultural memory. Live Not By Lies is my very modest effort to right that historical wrong.

Here is the dedication page:

I did not know who this man was until I went to Bratislava last year, and was told about him. I’ve mentioned him many times in this space. He was a Croatian Catholic priest who escaped the Gestapo in Zagreb and hid out in Slovakia. He foresaw both the German defeat and the advent of Soviet totalitarianism for the nations of Central Europe. Despite the fact that some Catholic bishops called him an alarmist, Father Kolakovic urgently prepared young Catholic student groups for the resistance. And sure enough, when the Iron Curtain fell, the network of faithful students prepared by Father Kolakovic formed the backbone of the underground church.

Father Kolakovic’s life story is astonishing. He was God’s spy. He trained in the Russicum, the Vatican’s Russian college, for missionary work in the Soviet Union. In fact, it was his intense study of the Soviet system that allowed him to recognize what so many others would not or could not: that the Red Army was not going to allow the countries it liberated from the Nazis to be free. Father Kolakovic lived undercover in Russia, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere, but mostly his life is mysterious. It is said that nobody knows for sure where he is buried. If I had the facility in languages, and was trained to do the kind of research such a project would require, I would dedicate myself to finding out everything I could about this mysterious man, and write his biography.

If Live Not By Lies sells well, maybe someone more gifted than I will do just that. And maybe some other writers will find their way to what we called “Eastern Europe” in the Cold War, and get to know these men and women. Very few people in the United States know about Slovakia, but I found myself flat on my face praying at the tomb of Cardinal Jan Chryzostom Korec, an underground bishop in the communist period, whose acts of iron-willed faith and resistance beggar belief. I was taken to what had been his apartment, by Frantisek Miklosko, an older man who had been the late cardinal’s assistant. The stories he told about things the secret bishop did, including the time he fought off secret police who tried to seize him on the street! Eight years in a communist prison he served for his faith. Read more about him here.

It has been an extraordinary privilege to tell stories like this on this online diary, and in the pages of Live Not By Lies, and to introduce American readers to the people who saw much, and suffered much, and who have things to tell us that we need to hear.

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Sports Is For Liberals?

Gallup’s new poll has some pretty interesting news about the widening schism in American life. It seems that the Great Awokening of professional sports has alienated a lot of white non-liberal Americans:

The sports industry now has a negative image, on balance, among Americans as a whole, with 30% viewing it positively and 40% negatively, for a -10 net-positive score. This contrasts with the +20 net positive image it enjoyed in 2019, when 45% viewed it positively and 25% negatively.

This slide in the sports industry’s image comes as professional and college leagues are struggling, and not always successfully, to maintain regular schedules and playing seasons amid the pandemic. Professional football, baseball and basketball games have also become focal points for public displays of support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

While it’s not clear how much the various challenges and controversies swirling around the industry are each responsible for its slide in popularity, it is notable that sports has lost more support from Republicans and independents than from Democrats. In fact, Democrats’ view of the sports industry has not changed significantly in the past year, while Republicans’ has slipped from a +11 net-positive score in 2019 to a net -35 today, and independents’ from +26 to -10.

The sports industry’s image has also deteriorated more among women than men, and among older adults than those younger than 35. Sports has also lost more support from non-White than White Americans, but given the extraordinarily high ratings from non-White adults a year ago, this group continues to view the sports industry positively on balance today. That is not the case with White adults, who now view the sports industry more negatively than positively, and by a 22-point margin.

Here’s a graphic:

That is remarkable. Sports used to be a unifying phenomenon in American life, but no more — not since athletes got woke.

I can’t find the crosstabs for Gallup’s results about the media and the entertainment industry, but we know from other polls that conservatives feel quite negatively about them.

Look what the Madden video game announced yesterday:

pic.twitter.com/R2agq5B64p

— Madden NFL 21 (@EAMaddenNFL) September 8, 2020

Colin Kaepernick can’t get a job on a professional football team, but he has been affirmative-actioned into virtual football by the woke capitalists at Madden. Insane.

What does it portend for American life to have so many millions of Americans alienated from pop culture institutions (sport, entertainment, media)? Sports, of course, is the big one, because sports never before was politically charged. Now it is. The NFL season is going to be the big one. If conservatives and independents turn off the TV because they don’t want to be preached at by woke football players, it will signal a sea change in American life.

The post Sports Is For Liberals? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Life And Death Of Paul Mankowski

I want to tell you something about a good priest who died suddenly last week. He was a Jesuit named Paul Mankowski. I had known him for twenty years, and even though I shared my deepest pains with him over the course of our friendship, I never met him. He died suddenly in Chicago last week, of a heart attack [Note: A friend of his writes to say that actually he had an aneurysm — RD]. A light went out in this world when Father Paul died, but I firmly believe that we all gained a powerful intercessor in Paradise.

I will turn to someone who knew Father Paul very well, the Catholic journalist Philip Lawler, who shares his remembrances. This should give you a hint of what an extraordinary man Father Paul was. Excerpts:

That he was a prodigious intellect is beyond dispute. He earned advanced degrees at Harvard and Oxford. He was fluent in multiple languages. He advised Vatican prelates, and more than once I detected a familiar style of prose in an official document from the Holy See. He taught Biblical languages at the Pontifical Biblical Institute. He maintained a lively correspondence with philosophers and political leaders. And if you have read The Tragedy of Macdeth, which he wrote just for fun under a pseudonym, you know that you are not dealing with an ordinary mind.

Macdeth was Father Paul’s 1994 spoof of the Bill and Hillary Clinton saga, told as Shakespearean drama. When I read it in The American Spectator, I thought it brilliant satire. Who did this? My friend John Podhoretz said, “A Jesuit priest named Paul Mankowski. He’s insanely smart.” Indeed. Look at this excerpt (for you youngsters, Socks was the Clinton White House cat, and NOW is the National Organization for Women, which used to be a thing):

I defy you to read the whole thing without roaring with laughter, and staring gape-mouthed at the page in wonderment that someone actually wrote something so genius.

You’d think someone with that kind of wit and verbal felicity would have been raised in Waugh Manor. Nope. Says Phil Lawler:

Born into a middle-class family, Paul worked in steel mills to help pay his college tuition, and never abandoned his blue-collar approach to work. He was unimpressed with academic colleagues who, he chuckled in wonderment, “wouldn’t even know how to change a shock absorber.” Then again he was also unimpressed with his own academic achievements, and congenitally incapable of self-promotion.

As a young man Paul Mankowski developed a deep admiration for the Society of Jesus. He noticed, in his readings of history, that the Jesuits always turned up in crucial battles, defending the Catholic faith “where the fighting was fiercest.” Determined to do the same, he joined the Jesuits after graduating from the University of Chicago. He did not foresee that in our days the fiercest fighting would take place inside the Church and inside the Society of Jesus, and that—at least during his lifetime—he would be on the losing side.

The thing about Father Paul is that he was solidly orthodox in his Catholicism. His mind was playful, but about the faith, he did not play. If there was any more incisive critic of the Jesuit order, and of the contemporary Catholic Church, I don’t know of him. It’s a cliche to say that someone doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but it was invented for Paul Mankowski. Except he did suffer them with at least some gladness, in that he made fun of them, often as “Diogenes” — Uncle Di — the pseudonymous columnist at Catholic World Report, which Phil Lawler edited. Here’s Phil:

“Diogenes” was not universally popular. Father Mankowski had a special gift for satire, and—appropriately for a man who had been a boxer in student days—never pulled his punches. Perhaps at times he went too far, and as his editor I should have toned down his posts. But as it happens I too am a former boxer. Certainly Diogenes was often acerbic. At times his work was also hilariously funny, and Catholic Culture readers learned not to take a sip of hot coffee before reading “Off the Record.” Maybe it wasn’t always as charitable as it should have been. But it sure was fun.

The Jesuits were onto Paul, and silenced him, for the most part. He was obedient. I once asked a mutual friend why Father Mankowski didn’t just leave the Jesuits. The friend said, “Just because your mama is a whore doesn’t mean you don’t love her.” I don’t know if that line came from Mankowski or not, but it might have. The truth was — and this is something he told me when we finally talked about it — that Paul Mankowski felt called to serve God as a priest of the Catholic Church in the Society of Jesus, and that was a vocation he was never going to abandon. All the suffering the Society dumped on him, he endured. You can well imagine what that was like by reading his review of James Martin, SJ’s 2017 book on affirming LGBT Catholics. In the English-speaking world, at least, Father Martin is the best-known Jesuit besides Pope Francis, and celebrated for his LGBT advocacy. Here’s the first paragraph of Father Mankowski’s review:

Is sodomy a sin? Perplexed readers of Fr. James Martin, S.J.’s latest book will want to put the question to him, if only to understand why he felt it important to write at all.

Boom! And there it is. He focused laser-like on the flaw at the heart of the book and of Father Martin’s project: the pretense that it is possible to reconcile homosexual practice with Catholic Christianity.

I urge you to read this long Mankowski talk from 2003, in which he lays out “what went wrong” in the Catholic Church, regarding the scandal. This is the topic that brought Father Paul and me first into contact. I have known many wise and brave men who have helped me to understand what was at the heart of this dark phenomenon, but none like Father Paul. He was a cleric who despised clericalism. He wrote then, in part:

What we read in those files [bishops’ documents released in court proceedings] was shocking, true, but to most of us it was shocking in its sense of déja vu. In the years following the Second Vatican Council, the housewife who complained that Father skipped the Creed at mass and the housewife who complained that Father groped her son had remarkably similar experiences of being made to feel that they themselves were somehow in the wrong; that they had impugned the honor of virtuous men; that their complaints were an unwelcome interruption of more important business; that the true situation was fully known to the chancery and completely under control; that the wider and more complete knowledge of higher ecclesiastics justified their apparent inaction; that to criticize the curate was to criticize the pastor was to criticize the regional vicar was to criticize the bishop; that to publicize one’s dissatisfaction was to give scandal and would positively harm discreet efforts at remedying the ills; that one’s duty was to maintain silence and trust that those officially charged with the pertinent responsibilities would execute them in their own time; that delayed correction of problems was sometimes necessary for the universal good of the Church.

More:

What I’ve put before you are two scenarios in which complaints of abuses are brought to those in authority and in which they seem to vanish — the complaints, I mean, not the abuses. One hoped that something was being done behind the scenes, of course, but whatever happened always remained behind the scenes. As the weeks went by without observable changes in the abuse and without feedback from the bureaucracy, one was torn between two contradictory surmises: that one’s complaint had been passed upstairs to so high a level that even the bishop (or superior) was forbidden to discuss it; alternatively, that once one’s silence had been secured and the problem of unwelcome publicity was past, nothing whatsoever was being done.

Now the remarkable thing about The Crisis is how fully it confirmed the second suspicion. In thousands and thousands of pages of records one scarcely, if ever, is edified by a pleasant surprise, by discovering that a bishop’s or superior’s concern for the victim or for the Faith was greater than that known to the public, that the engines of justice were geared up and running at full throttle, but in a manner invisible to those outside the circle of discretion. Didn’t happen.

I think this goes far to explain the fact that when the scandals broke it was the conservative Catholics who were the first and the most vociferous in calling for episcopal resignations, and only later did the left-liberals manage to find their voices. Part of our outrage concerned the staggering insouciance of bishops toward the abuse itself; but part, I would argue, was the exasperation attendant on the realization that, for the same reasons, all our efforts in the culture wars on behalf of Catholic positions had gone up in the same bureaucratic smoke.

I take issue, then, with commentators who refer to the Crisis as an ecclesial “meltdown” or “the Church’s 9-11” or who use some similarly cataclysmic metaphor. Whatever there was to melt down had already done so for years, and that across the board, not just in priestly misconduct. Therefore, in addressing the question, “what went wrong, and why?” I need to try explain not simply the sex-abuse scandals but the larger ecclesial failure as well, weaknesses that existed even before the Second Vatican Council.

About the pre-Vatican II church:

Not only was the reality of priestly character in good shape, but the reputation of Catholic clergymen was likewise high. This brought with it several problems. First, being an honorable station in society, the clerical life provided high grass in which many villains and disturbed individuals could seek cover. I would estimate that between 50 and 60 percent of the men who entered religious life with me in the mid-70s were homosexuals who had no particular interest in the Church, but who were using the celibacy requirement of the priesthood as a way of camouflaging the real reason for the fact that they would never marry. It should be noted in this connection that the military has its own smaller but irreducible share of crypto-gays, as do roughnecks on offshore drilling rigs and merchant mariners (“I never got married because I move around so much it wouldn’t be fair on the girl…”). Perhaps a certain percentage of homosexuals in these professions can never be eliminated. I further believe that the most convincing explanation of the disproportionately high number of pedophiles in the priesthood is not the famous Abstinence Makes the Church Grow Fondlers Theory, but its reverse, proposed to me by a correctional officer at a Canadian prison. He suggested that, in years past, Catholic men who recognized the pederastic tendency in themselves and hated it would try to put it to death by entering a seminary or a monastery, where they naively believed the sexual dimension of life simply disappeared. It doesn’t disappear, and many of these men, by the time they found out they were wrong, had already become addicted. This suggestion has the advantage of accounting for the fact that most priests who are true pedophiles appear to be men in their 60s and older, and belong to a generation of Catholics with, on the one hand, a strong sense of sexual mortal sin and, on the other, strong convictions about the asceticism and sexual integrity of priestly life. To homosexuals and pedophiles I would add a third group, those I call “tames” — men who are incapable of facing the normally unpleasant situations presented by adulthood and who find refuge, and indeed success, in a system that rewards concern for appearance, distaste for conflict, and fondness for the advantageous lie. In sum, the social prestige and high reputation that attached to the post-WW2 priesthood made it attractive to men of low character and provided them with excellent cover.

I have to add one more thing from this extraordinary essay. Father Paul, as he often did in private conversation, blamed a culture of deep corruption among the bishops. He says in the essay that they are an old boys club, always protecting each other. But there is something darker with many of them:

A third answer to “What went wrong?” concerns a factor that is at once a result of earlier failures and a cause of many subsequent ones: I mean sexual blackmail. Most of the men who are bishops and superiors today were in the seminary or graduate school in the 1960s and 1970s. In most countries of the Western world these places were in a kind of disciplinary free-fall for ten or fifteen years. A very high percentage of churchmen who are now in positions of authority were sexually compromised during that period. Perhaps they had a homosexual encounter with a fellow seminarian; perhaps they had a brief heterosexual affair with a fellow theology student. Provided they did not cause grave scandal, such men were frequently promoted, according to their talents and ambition. Many are competent administrators, but they have a time-bomb in their past, and they have very little appetite for reform measures of any sort — even doctrinal reforms — and they have zero appetite for reform proposals that entail cleaning up sexual mischief. In some cases perhaps, there is out-and-out blackmail, where a bishop moves to discipline a priest and priest threatens to report the bishop’s homosexual affair in the seminary to the Nuncio or to the press, and so the bishop backs off. More often I suspect the blackmail is indirect. No overt threat is made by anyone, but the responsible ecclesiastic is troubled by the ghost of his past and has no stomach for taking a hard line. Even if personally uneasy with homosexuality, he will not impede the admission and promotion of gays. He will almost always treat sexuality in psychological terms, as a matter of human maturation, and is chary of the language of morality and asceticism. He will act only when it is impossible not to act, as when a case of a priest’s or seminarian’s sexual misconduct is known to the police or the media. He will characteristically require of the offender no discipline but will send him to counseling, usually for as brief a period as possible, and will restore him to the best position that diocesan procedures and public opinion will allow him to.

Note: sexual blackmail operates far beyond the arena of sexual misconduct. When your Aunt Margaret complains about the pro-abortion teachers at the Catholic high school, or the Sisters of St. Jude worshiping the Eight Winds, or Father’s home-made eucharistic prayer, and nothing is done, it is eminently likely that the bishop’s reluctance to intervene stems from the consciousness that he is living on borrowed time. In short, many bishops and superiors, lacking integrity, lack moral courage. Lacking moral courage, they can never be reformers, can never uproot a problem, but can only plead for tolerance and healing and reconciliation. I am here sketching only the best-case scenario, where the bishop’s adventures were brief, without issue, and twenty years in his past. In cases where the man continues his sexual exploits as a bishop, he is of course wholly compromised and the blackmail proportionately disastrous.

OK, for those who won’t read the whole thing, this conclusion:

Let me sum up. I believe the sexual abuse crisis represents no isolated phenomenon and no new failure, but rather illustrates a state of slowly worsening clerical and episcopal corruption with its roots well back into the 1940s. Its principal tributaries include a critical mass of morally depraved and psychologically defective clergymen who entered the service of Church seeking emoluments and advantages unrelated to her spiritual mission, in addition to leaders constitutionally unsuited to the exercise of the virtues of truthfulness and fortitude. The old-fashioned vices of lust, pride, and sloth have erected an administrative apparatus effective at transmitting the consolations of the Faith but powerless at correction and problem-solving. The result is a situation unamenable to reform, wherein the leaders continue to project an upbeat and positive message of ecclesial well-being to an overwhelmingly good-willed laity, a message which both speaker and hearer find more gratifying than convincing. I believe that the Crisis will deepen, though undramatically, in the foreseeable future; I believe that the policies suggested to remedy the situation will help only tangentially, and that the whole idea of an administrative programmatic approach — a “software solution,” if I may put it that way — is an example of the disease for which it purports to be the cure. I believe that reform will come, though in a future generation, and that the reformers whom God raises up will spill their blood in imitation of Christ. In short, to pilfer a line of Wilfrid Sheed, I find absolutely no grounds for optimism, and I have every reason for hope.

Please do read the whole thing. He wrote it 17 years ago; I doubt it has ever been bested.

I find absolutely no grounds for optimism, and I have every reason for hope. That last line was the essence of Paul Mankowski’s ministry. No one — and I mean no one — in the Catholic Church was more capable of the blackest, funniest humor about the various crises besetting the Church. But there was Paul, in the heart of it, soldiering on. Someone told me that when Paul was living in Rome, he would spend his Christmas vacations serving at a Romanian orphanage run by the Missionaries of Charity. A New York priest friend who visited Paul in Rome in those days reported back to me that his room was absolutely Spartan: just a simple bed, a crucifix, and books. I was not surprised to see this in Phil Lawler’s tribute:

Once when I visited Rome, and asked him to recommend a good restaurant, he couldn’t. Is there another priest who, after a few years in Rome, cannot tell a friend where to get a spectacular dinner?

Paul Mankowski had every right to be embittered by the life in the Church, and the maliciousness with which his Jesuit superiors often treated him. I never once heard him complain — indeed, if it hadn’t been for our mutual friends telling me what was really going on, I would not have known. I asked how it was possible that the Jesuits wouldn’t be so proud of this man. Learning the answer to that was an education in how the contemporary Church really works.

Paul’s was a hard charity, the kind that endures. He never once reproached me for leaving the Catholic Church, though it must have pained him. Perhaps because he knew better than most how hard it is to carry the burden of remaining Catholic once you have seen things you can’t unsee. I have found myself in the week since his death asking him for his prayers, as I sometimes asked for them when he was here with us in the flesh. I would sometimes ask him for more than that. In going through our e-mail correspondence from over the years, I found a letter from him from some time back, when I was suffering an excruciating burden. It was a family thing, something that I felt particularly during the holidays; I notice that my letter was dated December 23 of that year. I asked him what I should do about it. In his response, he said that indeed, there seems no clear way out of it, but to endure. He wrote:

You write of this situation as the cross God has given you to bear. It may be. I have never yet met anyone who thought that God gave him the right cross to bear (including myself); everyone looks around with a certain wistful envy at others and says to himself, “Now THAT is the kind of cross I could carry with equanimity, courage, even joy.”  But of course what makes a cross a cross is that it kills the one who carries it; it puts to death that part of the disciple that God knows must die for salvation to work.  It feels awkward to end with pious Christmas wishes, but it is worth remembering that the purpose of the Incarnation was to save what was lost.

That was the kind of man we lost when Paul Mankowski died. And that is the kind of advocate we have gained in heaven. Of that I am certain. Requiescat in pace.

Looking for a photo of him with which to illustrate this post, I came across this video of a Mankowski talk from earlier this year. I will listen to the whole thing today. I played a few seconds of it; after twenty years of letters, this was the first time I’ve ever heard his voice:

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