Rod Dreher's Blog, page 144

Birth Of A Baker

My daughter Nora is 13. She has enjoyed baking on her own for the past year or two, but things have ramped up considerable for her during the lockdown. Her mom and I have been really strict about online access with our kids, but owing to the social effects of the lockdown, we gave her greater access to the Internet, because she wasn’t able to see her friends, but we discovered that we did not like what it was doing to her. She didn’t seem to be herself anymore. It was as if online life was a black hole. She didn’t read as much as she used to, and she was spending more and more time texting with friends. Her personality seemed to be changing in ways we thought unhealthy. So we brought all online life to an end for her, for the time being.

Turns out that was the right thing to do, for reasons that we didn’t anticipate. For lack of anything better to do, Nora dove wholeheartedly into baking. She has been experimenting with different kinds of breads, as well as cookies and cakes. It has been remarkable to watch how seriously she takes it, and what a passion it has become for her. I like to cook too, but I am not adventurous in the kitchen. She is. Nothing daunts her. If things don’t work out, she isn’t discouraged — she just tries something else. But things usually work out; she’s good at this.

One night last week, she and I watched a couple of episodes of that great Netflix series, The Chef’s Table. One of them was a profile of Christina Tosi, the young American chef behind the popular Momofoku Milk Bar dessert shop in New York City. Tosi is from the Midwest, and is an irresistibly cheerful person.

I don’t know what it was about the Tosi episode, but it lit up Nora like a Christmas tree. Maybe it was because Tosi bakes the kinds of things Nora likes to bake. Maybe it was because Christina Tosi is so relatable. Whatever it was, as we watched the episode, I kept glancing over at Nora, seeing the gears turning in her head. We have watched a decent number of cooking shows together, but I had never seen her like this.

After she went to bed, I ordered a hard copy of the Milk Bar cookbook for her, but said nothing. I would let it be a surprise. It arrived yesterday, just after noon. By late afternoon, she had gone through the entire book, and was baking croissants from it. Do you know how hard it is to make croissants? I wouldn’t even try. Nora did … and they were really good. She also made Tosi’s confetti cookies, which also turned out well. She did all this while also getting a sourdough starter going.

Today she has taken over the kitchen, and is making brioche. She is also trying one of Tosi’s signature bakes: Birthday Cake.

Christina Tosi’s Birthday Cake (Bon Appetit)

“But you don’t have the acetate sheets she uses to put it together,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I’ll figure it out.”

I find this really inspiring. How many young bakers would get a cookbook written by a chef they love, and within 24 hours have plunged in and baked two of the most challenging things in the book? That’s how Nora rolls. Until this point, baking was a hobby for her, but over the course of the lockdown, I have watched it become something more. She might have found her vocation. I’m serious. I now know what she saw when she watched Christina Tosi on TV the other night. She saw a possibility for her own future. She heard Tosi talking about the joy she gets baking, and it all resonated deeply within Nora.

I bring all this up not to brag on my kid — though I am not above doing that! — but to point out that I don’t know if any of this would have happened if not for the lockdown, and if not for her mom and I deciding that online access was bad for her. Being stuck in the house for this extended period, without the Internet, compelled her to bake more, just for something to do. That externally imposed discipline has compelled her to discover something about herself that was always there, but might never have emerged had she been able to dissipate her energies in texting and screwing around online. If Nora becomes a professional baker, she will owe a lot of it not only to Christina Tosi, but to the spring of 2020, and the obstacles it put in the way of a normal teenage life.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

Yes this! My son is a bit younger than Nora but what he discovered during the lockdown was the piano. He’d had some lessons a few years ago but with school out it was like a lightbulb turned on. In 8 weeks he went from scales and children’s exercises to playing simplified classical music and teaching himself chord theory. It’s amazing what young ‘uns will do when parents and schools get the hell out of the way and let them find their passion.

Fortunately for me, my kid’s passion doesn’t end up around my waistline. I don’t know that i could resist fresh bread around the house like that- pass the olive oil and let’s get started.

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Sexual Revolution Without End

Over the weekend I finished reading Rites Of Spring: The Great War And The Birth Of The Modern Age, by Modris Eksteins (only $7.21 on Kindle). It’s as good as people say; thank you Rob G. for recommending it. Eksteins is a (now retired) Latvian-born Canadian historian who specializes in German culture. This book is a cultural history of the West from the 1913 premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (the ballet choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and produced by Serge Diaghilev) till the death of Hitler in 1945. Eksteins focuses on the transgressiveness of Western culture in Modernism. I found this passage especially interesting:

Diaghilev’s ballet enterprise was both a quest for totality and an instrument of liberation. Perhaps the most sensitive nerve it touched—and this was done deliberately—was that of sexual morality, which was so central a symbol of the established order, especially in the heart of political, economic, and imperial power, western Europe. Again, Diaghilev was simply an heir to a prominent, accumulating tradition. For many intellectuals of the nineteenth century, from Saint-Simon through Feuerbach to Freud, the real origin of “alienation,” estrangement from self, society, and the material world, was sexual.

“Pleasure, joy, expands man,” wrote Feuerbach; “trouble suffering, contracts and concentrates him; in suffering man denies the reality of the world.” The middle classes, in particular, of the Victorian age interpreted pleasure in primarily spiritual and moral rather than physical or sensual terms. Gratification of the senses was suspect, indeed sinful. Will, based on moral fervor, was the essence of

successful human endeavor; pure passion, its opposite. That the issue of sexual morality should become a

vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values for the modern movement was inevitable. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change. In the United States Max Eastman shouted, “Lust is sacred!”

The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Of her Bloomsbury circle of gentle rebels Virginia Woolf said, “The word bugger was never far from our lips.” André Gide, after a long struggle with himself, denounced publicly le mensonge des moeurs, the moral lie, and admitted his own predilections. Passion and love, he had concluded, were mutually exclusive. And passion was much purer than love.

And:

Despite a fascination among the avant-garde with the lower classes, with social outcasts, prostitutes, criminals, and the insane, the interest usually did not stem from a practical concern with social welfare or with a restructuring of society, but from a desire simply to eliminate restrictions on the human personality. The interest in the lower orders was thus more symbolic than practical. The search was for a “morality without sanctions and obligations.”

Hannah Arendt said something similar about pre-totalitarian culture. She said intellectuals and artists were happy to see the habits of civilization destroyed just for the fun of transgression. That worked out well for us, didn’t it?

Certain liberals in this blog’s comments section love to scratch their heads and puzzle over why social and religious conservatives are so preoccupied with sex. They ought to read a little history. Sexual revolution was at the core of the Modernist revolution. In the 1960s, Philip Rieff, the great interpreter of Freud, said this cultural revolution — of a morality based on feeling, and of forbidding to forbid — was more significant than the Bolshevik Revolution, because the Bolsheviks, atheists though they were, still believed in a binding transcendent order.

With the Eksteins passage above in mind, take a look at Carl Trueman’s latest in First Things. He’s writing about Critical Theory, of which Queer Theory is a part. Excerpts:

What exactly is the endgame here? What do these people want in terms of positive philosophical and political construction? I eventually concluded that the answer was really quite simple: The purpose of critical theory is not to establish anything at all. Rather, it is to destabilize as potentially oppressive any claim to transcendent truth or value. Its target is the destruction of all metanarratives, and thus the bombastically rebarbative prose is itself part of the “argument.” Leaving readers hopelessly confused about even the simplest things is an important part of the game, pellucid simplicity being one way the oppressors made their oppression seem natural.

Trueman explains why the acceptance of transgenderism and queerness is so extremely radical, far moreso than many people (especially Christians) realize. More:

The debate over LGBTQ issues is not a debate about sexual behavior. I suspect it is not really at this point a debate with the L, the G, or the B. It is the T and the Q that are carrying the day, and we need to understand that the debate is about the radical abolition of metaphysics and metanarratives and any notion of cultural stability that might rest thereupon. Until we clarify that and adjust our strategy of engagement accordingly, we cannot develop the arguments needed to persuade our fellow Christians of the truth, let alone anyone else.

Read the whole thing. Carl has a fantastic book about modernity, expressive individualism, and the sexual revolution coming out in November. You can pre-order it here. I read it, and wrote an introduction to it.

Don’t forget this:

Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2020

No journalist ever asks him about this — and you watch: they won’t ever do it, not even a Fox journalist. Yet this is a massively important issue: whether or not the law will deny biological reality, and make it a civil rights offense to assert that biology matters.

It would be easier to remove a cuttlefish from the jaws of a hungry moray eel with a pair of chopsticks than change your average modern person’s mind, pulverized by propaganda, about the sacredness of their sexual liberty. But at least orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, and fellow travelers ought to understand exactly what we are up against — and how deep the roots of the revolt go. They have been at this for over a century, and still act as if the real problem in our culture is repression.

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Trump’s Twitter Madness

A blow to her head? Body found under his desk? Left Congress suddenly? Big topic of discussion in Florida…and, he’s a Nut Job (with bad ratings). Keep digging, use forensic geniuses! https://t.co/UxbS5gZecd

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2020

He’s talking about Joe Scarborough. We have reached a point in American politics where the President of the United States can accuse a man of murder (for the fourth time on Twitter), and nobody much notices, because the President is such a crazy, say-anything buffoon that nothing he says surprises or shocks.

We arrive at Memorial Day Weekend with 100,000 dead from a pandemic, yet the man-child in the Oval Office finds it more urgent to carry out a grotesque feud with a television host. In a normal country, this kind of thing would spark a political crisis. But we aren’t a normal country anymore.

Trump has also been active on Twitter these past few days trying to sabotage the campaign of Jeff Sessions, his former Attorney General, to return to the US Senate. Ann Coulter has unleashed the fires of hell on Trump over it. Coulter recognizes that Sessions was the real deal on immigration reform, but Trump, of course, got rid of him because Sessions actually believed he should be loyal to the rule of law, not to the president personally. In this series of tweets, Coulter recalls how Trump spoiled what should have been an easy win for the GOP in the race to replace Sessions (who had resigned to become Trump’s AG) by coming out for the seriously flawed Judge Roy Moore (‘memba him, the jailbait stuff?) instead of the candidate preferred by the Republican establishment. Thus did a Democrat flip a Republican safe Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama. Coulter is afraid Trump, out of personal pique, is about to do the same thing, returning Democrat Doug Jones to Washington. Gaze upon these fireballs, would you?:

 

Believe it or not, there’s more, at her Twitter feed.

Look, I get it: But Biden! is a serious point. There will be a lot of conservatives who hate the way Trump behaves, but who find it an easier pill to swallow than four years of Custard-Brain Biden releasing an army of little SJW Robespierres throughout the federal government. But there will also be some conservatives who can’t stand Biden, but who are so disgusted with Trump, and discouraged by the prospect of four more years of this stupidity and self-owning chaos, that they either don’t vote, or vote third party. Or, they will be considering the long run, and thinking about whether four more years of Trump will discredit in the eyes of most voters the populist-nationalist causes that got Trump elected.

I mean, honestly, of all the political fights to have right now, with 100,000 dead from the virus and 40 million unemployed, accusing a TV host of murder, and trying to knock Jeff Sessions out of the Alabama Senate race? Really? It’s deranged. If the Republicans lose the White House (and the Senate) this November, it will all be on the head of one man: Donald J. Trump.

UPDATE: A couple of you have rightly pointed out that Trump didn’t initially endorse Roy Moore, but the appointed incumbent, Luther Strange. I could have this wrong, but I seem to recall that there was a conservative US Representative in the GOP primary, the kind of figure that could have easily beat Doug Jones had he won the nomination. Trump’s endorsement of the lame Establishment Republican over the GOP Representative split the mainstream GOP primary vote, allowing Roy Moore to win, and go on to be whipped by the Democrat in the general.

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John MacArthur: ‘Come Back To Church’

The popular and influential Evangelical pastor John MacArthur announced on Friday that he is reopening his church, because Trump said churches should reopen. Here’s his short statement:

John MacArthur Announcement – May 22, 2020 from Grace Community Church on Vimeo.

In the clip, he frames the decision as being obedient to President Trump’s leadership. Note well that Trump did not order churches to open; the US president does not have that power, which resides with states. MacArthur is engaging in rhetorical sleight of hand here.

MacArthur says in the video that they are going to come to church on Sunday, and nobody is going to wear masks, because we all know that “masks don’t work” (he seems to believe that masks are prescribed to prevent one from catching the disease; in fact, they are intended to slow down the spread of viral particles from the mask-wearer, in case he is sick). If they are planning to do any kind of social distancing in the church, he didn’t mention it. He simply said that you can sit wherever you feel “comfortable.”

MacArthur is pastor of a non-denominational megachurch whose weekly attendance is just over 8,000. Here is a shot from a Grace Church video of MacArthur preaching to a normal Sunday congregation:

Get this: MacArthur says that his congregation is going to sing (“In fact, we’re going to sing our hearts out”), with eight or nine hymns. This is truly crazy! Singing in chorus is one of the worst things you can do in terms of spreading the disease. One superspreader in Washington state infected over 50 fellow choir members at practice in March; two died.

Judging from his video, MacArthur’s large and influential California church is throwing all caution to the wind, based on magical thinking and a weird “trust-Trump” twist on patriotism. Think of how much pressure this puts on other pastors to follow suit, even if they believe it’s too dangerous. Think of the message that Russian Orthodox bishop who was hospitalized with Covid-19 put out after his release, talking about how he and his fellow monks bowed to pressure from the crowd to have services, and most of them got sick with Covid as a result.

It is certainly true that some state governors have gone too far in their church lockdowns. But that still doesn’t change the fact that the coronavirus doesn’t care about our politics. What happens if there is a large Covid outbreak in that congregation (and those that follow suit) because MacArthur and his team chose to act like a viral pandemic is a political problem that can be wished away because Trump says so? How will that affect the faith of the people of the congregation? What kind of trust will they have in the church’s leadership?

Beyond the public health issues, this act by MacArthur, one of the most influential pastors in America now, as he construes it in that message above, ties Evangelicalism more tightly to Trump and Trump’s Covid-19 response. One hopes that nobody gets sick at that church (or at any church) from all that singing close-up … but what if they do? This week, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on a Georgia Baptist church that had re-opened for services in April, but had to close down a second time after Covid-19 reappeared. That congregation reportedly followed social distancing guidelines, but still, it happened.

Either MacArthur (and those pastors following his lead) is showing rare courage, or rare recklessness. We are going to find out one way or the other over the next few weeks.

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Trump Christian Base Eroding

Politico says that some recent polls showing the president’s support among his white Christian base is eroding has prompted Trump to call for churches to re-open. Excerpts:

The anxiety over Trump’s standing with the Christian right surfaced after a pair of surveys by reputable outfits earlier this month found waning confidence in the administration’s coronavirus response among key religious groups, with a staggering decline in the president’s favorability among white evangelicals and white Catholics. Both are crucial constituencies that supported Trump by wide margins in 2016 and could sink his reelection prospects if their turnout shrinks this fall.

The polls paint a bleak picture for Trump, who has counted on broadening his religious support by at least a few percentage points to compensate for weakened appeal with women and suburban populations. One GOP official said the dip in the president’s evangelical support also appeared in internal party polling, but disputed the notion that it had caused panic. Another person close to the campaign described an April survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which showed a double-digit decline in Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals (-11), white Catholics (-12) and white mainline protestants (-18) from the previous month, as “pretty concerning.”

More:

Following the PRRI survey, which was conducted while Trump was a dominant presence at televised daily briefings by his administration’s coronavirus task force, Pew Research Center released new data last week that showed a 7-point increase from April to May in white Catholics who disapprove of Trump’s response to the Covid-19 crisis and a 6-point decline among white evangelicals who previously gave him positive marks.

The open-the-churches call from Trump today is just rhetorical. The president doesn’t have the power to re-open them; state governments do. The president is trying to send a signal that he is on the side of churchgoers. Not sure that’s going to do the trick. From Politico:

It’s unlikely that critics of church closings alone are responsible for the decline in Trump’s favorability among critical religious demographics. According to the Pew survey, 43 percent of white evangelicals and 52 percent of white Catholics think the current restrictions on public activity in their areas are appropriate versus 42 percent and 31 percent, respectively, who think fewer restrictions would be better. Greater shares of white evangelicals and white Catholics also said they are more afraid about their state governments lifting restrictions on public activity too soon than they are about leaving the restrictions in place for too long.

Read it all.

Maybe the truth is that conservative Christians may prefer Trump to Biden on issues that matter to them, but his handling of the global pandemic overrides everything else this year. No doubt that many Christian voters would vote Trump no matter how he performed on pandemic response. Andrew Sullivan writes today:

A year ago precisely, Trump’s approval rating was, in FiveThirtyEight’s poll of polls, 53.8 percent disapprove, 41.1 percent approve. This week, the spread was 53.1 percent disapprove and 43 percent approve. Almost identical. None of the events of the last year — impeachment, plague, economic collapse — have had anything but a trivial impact on public opinion.

Sullivan unspools a merciless reel of Trump’s failures in the crisis — really crushing stuff. TAC’s Bob Merry wrote earlier this week that Trump will probably lose this fall because he has not been a very good president. Excerpt:

It is true also that Trump’s knot of popular support–about 43 percent of the electorate, based on approval surveys–is remarkably solid, willing to accept just about anything he does or says so long as he continues to attack those dastardly elites.

But presidential elections also don’t turn on any incumbent’s base of support. Reelection requires that a president build upon that base and create a governing coalition by bringing in new converts through Oval Office achievement. Richard Nixon, a 43 percent president following the 1968 election, pulled to his party much of the George Wallace constituency, nearly 14 percent of the popular vote in 1968. The result was a reelection landslide. Similarly, following the 1980 election Ronald Reagan pulled to his banner the so-called Reagan Democrats, which contributed to his margin of victory in numerous congressional battles and in his own landslide reelection in 1984.

Or consider the case of Bill Clinton, like Nixon a 43 percent president after his 1992 victory against incumbent George H. W. Bush and upstart candidate Ross Perot, who garnered 19 percent of the popular vote. Clinton had his head handed to him in the 1994 midterm elections following a sub-par performance during his first two years in office. But after that he brilliantly calibrated his leadership to capture a significant portion of the Perot vote. Thus did he build on his base through performance in office and become a two-term president.

Trump has proved himself incapable of this kind of political calibration. He can’t even talk to those Americans who might be receptive to his policies but haven’t yet joined up. He talks only to his base.

This is true. If Trump gets bad news, he blames the messenger. He attacked Fox News today over a poll showing him behind Biden nationally — as if reporting what their poll actually found was an act of disloyalty. As Sullivan writes,

 Directly challenging him, even when his numbers are wrong, appears to erode Mr. Trump’s trust, according to former officials, and ultimately he stops listening. In other words, the officials who tell him things he doesn’t want to believe are soon sidelined or fired.

Again, everybody knows that there is a solid rock of immovable Trump voters — I’m guessing that the 44 percent of Republicans who believe that Bill Gates wants to inject microchips into people with a coronavirus vaccine are part of that crowd — but they are not enough to win Trump a second term. What about everybody else? Why are those Christian voters who had a favorable opinion of Trump now abandoning him? I’d say a lot of it has to do with exhaustion. The country is facing a crisis like none it has seen in a century. It is crashing the economy. We can re-open, but if people start getting sick again, everybody’s going to stay home. These people who are normally inclined to Trump, but now going off of him — they’re going to make the difference between victory and defeat for the president. And they’re worn out with all this instability, and the stupid, pointless drama.

I mean, look at this. Whatever you think of Jeff Sessions, he stood by Trump early, when few others in Washington did. But he made the mistake of putting duty to the law above personal loyalty to Trump. This is the kind of thing that once upon a time, conservatives thought worth supporting. Trump has never forgiven him for it. Sessions is running for his old Senate seat back — and Trump is trying to keep him from getting it. Look:

.@realdonaldtrump Look, I know your anger, but recusal was required by law. I did my duty & you’re damn fortunate I did. It protected the rule of law & resulted in your exoneration. Your personal feelings don’t dictate who Alabama picks as their senator, the people of Alabama do. https://t.co/QQKHNAgmiE

— Jeff Sessions (@jeffsessions) May 23, 2020

See what I mean? What is the point of doing this to Jeff Sessions, except spite? I mean, come on, Jeff Sessions? Really? There are a certain number of conservatives who are just fed up with crap like this, and can’t stand the thought of four more years of it.

That’s my guess — but then, I’m talking about somebody like myself: never a fan of Trump, and genuinely frightened about what a Democrat in the White House would do, especially if the Dems take the Senate (which they will likely do if Trump loses in a landslide). But nobody knows what the future holds for the country in this pandemic, either in terms of public health or the economy. Can we risk four more years of this chaos and craziness and overall incompetence, especially not knowing what’s ahead on the virus and the economy? Is that prospect scarier than a Democratic president and Democratic Senate naming and confirming judges?

Maybe. I did not imagine anything like this in January, but then, I didn’t imagine that we would get to Memorial Day weekend with almost 100,000 Americans dead, and 40 million unemployed.

 

 

 

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Signs And Wonders, Will And Intellect

Last night, I spent about an hour on the phone with a friend who is going through a real tough time right now. She had some hard trauma earlier in her life, and never quite got over it. She lives alone, so maybe the isolation from the virus is bringing it all back up now. I’m not sure, but we talked about it. After we finished talking, I prayed for God to comfort and heal her.

This morning I received a call from my pal. She was beside herself. She said that after we finished our conversation last night, she brushed her teeth and got in bed. As soon as she turned the lights out, she said her bedroom was filled with the aroma of roses.

“It was so intense,” she told me. “It felt like I was lying down in a rose garden.”

My friend is neither Catholic nor Orthodox. I know she’s a believer, but when we speak, it’s never about spiritual stuff, so I wasn’t sure how much she was aware of the Christian mystical tradition. I told her that the aroma of roses appearing like that is associated with the Virgin Mary, and that I have experienced that miracle myself in the past. I told her that I believe this was the Mother of God visiting her to comfort her.

She told me that she was aware of roses being associated with the Virgin, and even though she’s not Catholic, she remembered the “Hail Mary,” and said it out loud. She told me she just laid there in bed after that saying “Thank you, Mary,” for about half an hour, before the aroma faded.

I told my friend that I had been praying for exactly that thing — that God would somehow bring her comfort in her pain. “He sent the Mother of Our Lord to you,” I told my friend. She agreed.

Later, I was thinking about my friend’s case, and why it was so appropriate for the Theotokos (as we Orthodox call her; it means “God-bearer,” and is a title adopted as a way of asserting Jesus’s humanity as well as his divinity) to visit this friend. I texted her to share my further thoughts, and to remind her that she has received a powerful miracle of consolation. Please, I told her, don’t doubt that all of Heaven sees you, and that God loves you, and is with you always, even when you feel down and out.

She wasn’t the only one to receive the miracle. For me, it was a reminder that God really is present, and hears our prayers. I needed that consolation too.

Now, I offer you that story side by side with this account from the San Francisco Chronicle of a death metal drummer who nearly died from Covid-19, and who had a near-death experience. Excerpt:

While in the coma, Carroll said he had dreams of visiting the afterlife. He saw himself leave his body and plummet down to hell, where Satan — a woman in his case — punished him for the deadly sin of sloth, morphing him into a Jabba the Hutt-like-monster who vomited blood until he had a heart attack.

“I woke up on the hospital bed with tubes coming in and out of me, and there was a nurse right there and my first words were, ‘Am I still in hell?’ ” Carroll said. “She ignored me.”

Carroll, who celebrated his 47th birthday on Wednesday, May 13, said his near-death experience gave him a new outlook on life. He now plans on living a healthier life without hard alcohol or bong rips, though he’ll still drink the occasional hard cider and narrow his marijuana use to edibles. He also adopted a belief in a higher power; he feels the prayers from his family and friends helped him pull through.

“I’m still going to listen to satanic metal, and I still love Deicide and bands like that,” Carroll said. “As far as for my personal life and my experience of what I went through, I don’t think Satan’s quite as cool as I used to.”

Read it all.

The word “dreams” is the journalist’s. It sounds like Will Carroll, the drummer, believes it wasn’t a dream, that it was real, not a dream. Here’s what I don’t get: you have a life-after-death experience in which you go to Hell, and you genuinely believe that you came face to face with the ultimate personification of evil, and you come out of it convinced that you should change your life … but you’re still going to listen to music that openly glorifies Satan, who is “not quite as cool” as you once thought?

I don’t get it. Maybe this is just the first step on his conversion, but still, if something like that had happened to me, and I was convinced that it was real, not a hallucination, then the last thing I would want to have anything to do with is satanic metal. Wouldn’t you?

This reminds me of the time back in 1994 when all kinds of supernatural things started happening around my father in the week after his dad died. We ended bringing in a Catholic priest and a Cajun grandmother who was mystically gifted. My folks weren’t Catholic, but they had both seen and heard the poltergeist stuff, and were willing to let their Catholic son call his priest friend if that might make the weird activity stop. The Cajun lady discerned what was going on, and did so in front of all of us, in a way that made our jaws drop. She told my dad that the Lord was not letting his father move on until my dad forgave him the wrongs that he (my grandfather) had done to my dad. And the priest led my father to forgive his father, then blessed the house. The activity stopped.

My father was not in the least bit mystically inclined. He lived for over twenty years after that, and until the last, testified to the truth of what happened that week. I had talked to him about the miracle we all witnessed, and the power of forgiveness, of letting go of grudges, to set people free, even in the spiritual realm. He would agree that yes, this is the meaning of what he saw, and what we all saw. And yet! He changed not one bit. He was as dedicated to grudge-holding as ever.

Understand: when people say that they would believe in God if only they would see some proof of His existence, some sign that there is life after death, don’t believe them. Maybe they’re telling the truth, but I’m more inclined to think that they’re lying to themselves. They construe the challenge as one of the intellect (= if only they had evidence, they would believe) when in fact it is a problem of the will (= they just don’t want to believe, because they are unwilling or afraid to change their lives). Jesus talked about that in the parable of Lazarus, in Gospel of Luke:

Now there was a rich man dressed in purple and fine linen, who lived each day in joyous splendor. And a beggar named Lazarus lay at his gate, covered with sores and longing to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

One day the beggar died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side.d And the rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham from afar, with Lazarus by his side.

So he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue. For I am in agony in this fire.’

But Abraham answered, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things. But now he is comforted here, while you are in agony. And besides all this, a great chasm has been fixed between us and you, so that even those who wish cannot cross from here to you, nor can anyone cross from there to us.’

‘Then I beg you, father,’ he said, ‘send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also end up in this place of torment.’

But Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let your brothers listen to them.’

‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone is sent to them from the dead, they will repent.’

Then Abraham said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.’”

UPDATE: A reader offers a reason why Will Carroll might be reacting the way he is (still listening to satanic metal, etc):

I think the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel could give you an answer. In The Milky Way, we see Jesus heal two blind men. When they recover their eyesight, they follow Jesus–but they’re still using canes to feel their way forward. Bunuel explained that of course the recently blind men would continue to use their canes for a time: how would they know what a ditch looked like?

Will Carroll has been blind, and now he sees–but he’ll still be using a cane for a while.

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Honky Cat Biden’s Ugly Truth

Elderly white man Joe Biden appeared on The Breakfast Club, the No. 1 radio talkshow for America’s black community today. Here is how he signed off:

That has not played well:

Oh my god.This is mortifying (on Biden’s behalf for that gratuitous use of “ain’t”) and revolting (on my own behalf) for that condescending racial essentialism. I say this as someone who would vote for my son’s diaper over Trump. https://t.co/nlfDjbgOGx

— Thomas Chatterton Williams

Italy Flat On Her Back

The Wall Street Journal reports that as Italy begins to emerge from lockdown, it faces a steep uphill climb back to normal. The article is paywalled; here are excerpts:

The coronavirus pandemic has precipitated one of the worst economic downturns in generations across the world. But few major economies are likely to fall as far as Italy’s, or take longer to recover.

Although Italy’s lockdown officially ended on May 18, many restrictions remain, and the economic impact will be long lasting. The new poor include small-business owners such as shopkeepers, restaurateurs and market vendors, as well a vast number of workers employed in sectors such as tourism and entertainment, which have little prospect of reviving any time soon.

The health emergency has left hundreds of thousands of Italians unable to pay for their own food for the first time, the biggest jump in poverty since the aftermath of World War II.

More:

Italy is ill-prepared to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. The country never fully recovered from the 2008 global financial crisis and the eurozone debt crisis that soon followed in 2010-12. Those events left Italy a poorer country and the government much more indebted today than it was then.

 “In 2008, Italian families were in a much more solid situation,” says Cristiano Gori, professor of political sociology at Trento University. “This crisis is hitting Italy after 10 years of constant decline.”

Since the financial crisis, the number of people living in absolute poverty has continued to increase, doubling to a record high five million in 2018, according to Italy’s statistics agency. That number is expected to rise much more rapidly now, with the Italian trade union UGL estimating it could soar above nine million people over the next few months.

The Italian economy is expected to contract by 9.5% this year, according to the European Commission, more than any country in the European Union except for Greece.

“We are witnessing a further erosion of the lower middle class,” says Pierluigi Dovis, a representative of the Catholic charity Caritas in northern Italy. “Only some of them will eventually be able to lift themselves up again. Many of them never will.”

Read it all, if you have a subscription.

Poor Italy. As much as I love that country and its people, this hurts. It’s the kind of thing I was thinking about earlier in the day, when I wrote that post about how this pandemic could change the world along the lines of World War I. Italy has been hit harder than any of the other major industrial countries, but if this crisis continues for a long time, eventually all of us may be in as much trouble. What happens when a country has gotten used to a certain level of wealth and security, and it all goes away, just like that, for millions of its people? [Psst: Nobody mention Weimar Germany!] We are about to see in Italy’s case — and maybe in our American case too.

One thing is for sure: Covid-19 is going to take care of the immigration crisis to Europe. No government will be able to remain in power if it allows more of the Third World poor to flood into their nation under these economic conditions.

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Norma McCorvey Was Truly Pro-Life

Frederica Mathewes-Green, who has long been active in the pro-life movement, e-mailed me about Norma McCorvey. I share this with her permission, though I obscured one name at her request:

I knew her, just a bit. We used to have meetings of pro-life leaders in Washington, and I met her there. So I got to know her a little; she was drawn to me, I think, and always looked at me with a kind of interested curiosity. (There was real intelligence in her eyes, which I think some people didn’t notice.) When we would meet up at a conference or banquet it was easy to hang out together. She seemed to think I had some spiritual wisdom. I bet I have a note from her somewhere.

When Norma first came to one of our meetings she was nervous, but we received her very warmly, of course. That may have taken her by surprise; it seems like pro-choicers expect pro-lifers to despise them, so they’re taken aback when we treat them cordially. (I remember the first time I met [a leading pro-choice figure] –we had agreed to meet for lunch at Kramerbooks. When I found her in the bookstore she was literally shaking. She said it was the first time she had ever met a pro-life person.)

So we embraced Norma, literally and figuratively, and maybe that surprised her. Norma said pro-choice people had treated her very differently. They were glad to recruit her, but they didn’t care for her personally. Her lower-class roots were too obvious. They were glossy, educated upper-class women, and evidently found her embarrassing.

Norma said, and I never forgot it, that the one exception was Gloria Allred. Gloria made time for Norma personally, and helped her in practical ways, talking with her and advising her about more-polished clothing and grooming choices. God bless Gloria for that. But the pro-choice movement in general left her feeling out in the cold. Flip’s [Operation Rescue pastor Flip Benham] kindness to her, normal behavior for any Christian, was dramatically different. He just kept responding in love, no matter what she said to him.

Norma never asked me for money; I never heard her say anything about money. She appeared at our gathering a few times, and never said anything about money.

In fact, that’s the thing that doesn’t fit about this story. When it comes to money, the pro-life movement doesn’t have much. There are a handful of wealthy pro-life people–but there are many more wealthy pro-choice people. Pro-life organizations are consistently poor. I recall seeing a TV show, back in the 90s, that depicted the bad-guy pro-life leader sitting in her spacious paneled office at a beautiful imposing desk. It was hilarious. National Right to Life was the premier pro-life organization, and their office was a set of small rooms–I recall the Washington Post calling it “a warren”–in an old office building. You could probably make an observation about the relative budgets of pro-life and pro-choice organizations just by comparing their DC addresses.

It’s natural that the pro-choice side would have money: it has, not just more wealthy donors, but also a product to sell. Pro-lifers have nothing to sell–on the contrary, money is constantly flowing in the opposite direction, as they give help to pregnant women in need. Among the organizations at that meeting, there was none that could have directed part of their budget to Norma. If all Norma wanted was money, it would have been much more strategic to stay pro-choice.

No one knows the truth except Norma, of course. But my experience of her was that, when we talked privately about her convictions, her conversion to the pro-life position was authentic and deep. And I never heard her say anything about money. In any case, pro-lifers would have been much less able to give her money than pro-choicers could.

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How Fast The World Ends

New unemployment numbers are out today. After reading them, I told my wife, “If a soothsayer had shown up on New Year’s Eve and said that by summer, 40 million people would be unemployed in this country, we would have thought he was crazy.”

A global economic crash like 2008, sure, that we could understand — but even then, the job losses weren’t this bad, and they happened over 18 monhts. This thing, though? Forty million made jobless in 10 weeks? Seriously, if someone had told you that this was going to happen, and you believed them, what kind of plausible scenario would you have come up with to explain this catastrophe? I don’t know if most of us could have done it.

And yet, here we are.

An aside: it’s a tale that has been told many times: how World War I destroyed European civilization, and ushered in modernity in full force. I don’t know when I last read it told with such insight than by the historian Modris Eksteins in his acclaimed 1986 book The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, which is available on Kindle for just over seven bucks. I downloaded it the other day after reader Rob G. recommended it. It’s very hard to put down. Eksteins begins with the 1913 Paris premiere of the Nijinsky ballet of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a scandalous event at the time. To have been present in the hall that night, he says, was to witness the violent birth of modern art. This essay tells you what happened, and why it happened. Excerpt:

What is certain is that the audience was shocked – and with good reason. Stravinsky’s score for The Rite of Spring contradicted every rule about what music should be. The sounds are often deliberately harsh, right from opening Lithuanian folk melody, which is played by the bassoon in its highest, most uncomfortable range. The music was cacophonously loud, assaulting the ears with thunderous percussion and shrieking brass. Rhythmically it was complex in a completely unprecedented way. In the ‘Ritual of the Rival Tribes’ the music unfolds in two speeds at once, in a ratio of 3:2. And it makes lavish use of dissonance, i.e. combinations of notes which don’t make normal harmonic sense. ‘The music always goes to the note next to the one you expect,’ wrote one exasperated critic.

Then there was the dance, choreographed by Nijinsky. According to some observers this was what really caused the scandal at the first night. When the curtain rose the audience saw a row of ‘knock-kneed and long-braided Lolitas jumping up and down’ as Stravinsky called them, who seemed to jerk rather than dance. Classical dance aspired upwards, in defiance of gravity, whereas Nijinsky’s dancers seemed pulled down to the earth. Their strange, stamping movements and awkward poses defied every canon of gracefulness.

Both the music and the dance of The Rite of Spring seemed to deny the possibility of human feelings, which for most people is what gives art its meaning. As Stravinsky put it, ‘there are simply no regions for soul-searching in The Rite of Spring’.

The Paris premiere was 107 years ago this week. Just over a year later, Europe was at war. Four years after that, the old world was dead, dead, dead.

I am still reading the book, and have just reached the end of the war in the narrative. I expect I’ll have more to say about it when I finish the book, but here, let me simply say that it never fails to shock me how innocent Europeans were of what they were about to do to themselves.

This isn’t in Eksteins’ book, but it is in my upcoming book. It’s a toast that Serge Diaghilev, the impresario behind the Ballets Russe (and the 1913 Rite of Spring ballet), gave at a banquet in the Hotel Metropol in 1905:

We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, with fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.

Eksteins writes about how this mentality was everywhere in pre-war Europe — this idea that the old world was past its prime, and that a new world — a world of speed, of sensuality, of passion, of the machine — was going to clear away the rottenness in the system, and replace it with something fresher and more vital. War, especially in Germany, was seen as a source of life and renewal. So too was sexual permissiveness. Eksteins writes that the artists and intellectuals of the era believed that Christian sexual morality was anti-life. Prostitutes, homosexuals, and others that bourgeois society regarded as outlaws became heroes. Eksteins writes:

Despite a fascination among the avant-garde with the lower classes, with social outcasts, prostitutes, criminals, and the insane, the interest usually did not stem from a practical concern with social welfare or with a restructuring of society, but from a desire simply to eliminate restrictions on the human personality. The interest in the lower orders was thus more symbolic than practical. The search was for a “morality without sanctions and obligations.”

The ballet [Rite of Spring] contains and illustrates many of the essential features of the modern revolt: the overt hostility to inherited form; the fascination with primitivism and indeed with anything that contradicts the notion of civilization; the emphasis on vitalism as opposed to rationalism; the perception of existence as continuous flux and a series of relations, not as constants and absolutes; the psychological introspection accompanying the rebellion against social convention.

Germany was the epicenter of the sexual revolt among artistic and intellectual elites:

None of this is meant to suggest that Germans welcomed or were prepared collectively to tolerate homosexuality publicly — they were not — but the relative openness of the movement in Germany does indicate a measure of tolerance not known elsewhere. Moreover, homosexuality and tolerance of it are, as many have suggested, central to the disintegration of constants, to the emancipation of instinct, to the breakdown of “public man,” and indeed to the whole modern aesthetic.

Sexual liberation in fin-de-siècle Germany was not limited to homosexuals. There was a new emphasis in

general on Leibeskultur, or body culture, on an appreciation of the human body devoid of social taboos and restrictions; on the liberation of the body from corsets, belts, and brassieres. The youth movement, which flourished after the turn of the century, reveled in a “return to nature” and celebrated a hardly licentious but certainly freer sexuality, which constituted part of its rebellion against an older generation thought to be caught up in repression and hypocrisy.

In the 1890s Freikörperkultur, or free body culture — a euphemism for nudism — became part of a health-fad movement that promoted macrobiotic diets, home-grown vegetables, and nature cures. In the arts the rebellion against middle-class mores was even more dramatic: from Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, which celebrated the prostitute because she was a rebel, through Strauss’s Salome, who beheaded John the Baptist because he refused to satisfy her lust, to the repressed but obvious sexual undercurrent in Thomas Mann’s early stories, artists used sex to express their disillusionment with contemporary values and priorities and, even more, their belief in a vital and irrepressible energy.

Again: Eksteins writes that prior to the Great War, the fascination with war as a source of renewal was widespread. In the summer of 1914, as Europe lurched toward the abyss, the German public in particular was ecstatic. Finally! They weren’t the only ones, either. Interestingly, Eksteins says it’s not fair to blame the war on German aristocrats. It was above all the middle class that wanted the war, and wanted it to be “total war.”

It is well known that the European powers expected the war to be quick and decisive. It was anything but. The casualties of that war still shock: around 10 million military, and between 8 and 13 million civilians. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1916), over 19,000 British soldiers died. Eksteins said Germany went to war to fight for spiritual and ideological ideals of what it thought the world should be, while Britain fought to defend a legacy, a historical and cultural order. Though Britain and its allies won the war, they really lost. The incomprehensible savagery of the war, especially trench warfare, obliterated the ability of many people to take the prewar order and its values seriously.

I’ll write more about the Eksteins book when I finish it. As I said, I’m only halfway through it. The reason I bring it up in context of the Covid-19 pandemic is that Europeans had no idea what had overtaken them. Their blind optimism — see Diaghilev’s toast — that whatever was coming had to be better than the exhausted forms and beliefs of the old world kept them from seeing their own fragility. Eksteins understands that the Rite of Spring prefigured the annihilation of the Great War by revealing the passions roiling beneath a cultural order that was dying.

Admittedly this analysis can only go so far. The war was an act of the will by states and peoples; the coronavirus pandemic is a natural occurrence. The comparison is only really valid in that both events are extreme catastrophes that will have massive effects for a long time to come. It is unlikely that this pandemic will kill anywhere close to the numbers that died in the Great War, but it doesn’t have to to have a civilization-altering effect. I was talking to my mom on the phone last night, and she expressed her conviction that “this thing” is going to end soon. She has no reason to think so; this is what she is telling herself, because she can’t bear to think that it will go on for much longer. You can imagine what was on my mind listening to this, given my reading of Eksteins.

Forty million suddenly unemployed, with no prospect of them regaining employment soon, and with the likelihood that many more will join the ranks of the unemployed before the virus burns out — no society can go through a trauma like that without grave repercussions. We all hope that scientists can deliver a cure, or protection, as soon as possible, but at this point do we have solid reason to think that this will happen? I don’t see that we do. The Great Powers all figured that their troops would be back home for Christmas 1914. They failed to imagine the civilizational catastrophe that was upon them.

Mind you, I stress that I don’t think that this pandemic is going to be the epochal event that the Great War was. I think it will be more like the Great Depression. But remember, the Depression affected an America that was much more cohesive as a society, and bound, however imperfectly, by a common religion. Today, the radical individualism, including the valorization of outlaw sexual behavior, that was avant-garde in the early years of the 20th century is now mainstream. The rise of totalitarianism was a direct effect of World War I and the destruction of the old order. My sense is that the pandemic and the economic catastrophe it is causing, and will yet cause, will change our world far more than most of us can yet imagine, and in ways in which we can only guess.

Think about it: if 40 million people can lose their jobs in 10 weeks, from a threat that was on almost nobody’s radar four months ago, what’s next?

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