Rod Dreher's Blog, page 205

Will Arbery’s Heroes

Decades from now, if social historians wonder what it was like to be an American conservative in this tumultuous era, they will consult Will Arbery’s breathtaking new play Heroes Of The Fourth Turning for profound insight. I have not seen the play, but I read the script last night, and I kept thinking: this really can’t be this good, can it?

It is. People like me — politically and religiously conservative — don’t expect to encounter contemporary art about ourselves. Reading Heroes brought to my mind the one other time in my life when I encountered serious art that was about my people: discovering the short stories of Flannery O’Connor in high school. O’Connor wasn’t writing about conservatives per se, but she was writing about Southern country people, and showed that you could make something deep and beautiful and universal out of our ordinary lives and struggles. That’s what Will Arbery has done for today’s political and religious conservatives in Heroes.

What surprises me is that someone so young — Will must be in his late 20s  — could write with such philosophical depth. But it really shouldn’t. I know Will’s parents, Glenn and Virginia Arbery, described by Will in an interview thus:

“I grew up with two extremely articulate, brilliant, poetic thinkers for parents; from a very young age it was very clear they were very Catholic, very conservative,” Arbery said. “But it was always poetic—I don’t know how else to describe it. It was thoughtful, it had gravitas, it was formidable.”

Yes indeed. Glenn and Ginny are two of the most amazing people you could ever hope to meet. I last saw Will over a decade ago at the Arbery house in Dallas, where we had gone to dinner. Sweet little Will, the only boy in a menagerie of eight children. When he reached out to me a couple of weeks ago to say he had written a play, and that The Benedict Option figured in it, and that he would like me to come see it, I thought, “Wait, he’s only 16 years old by now, right?”

Uh, wrong. Where does the time go? Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to see the play in its Off Broadway run (at Playwrights Horizon, through October 27), but Will did agree to send me the script, which I read last night. Look, I have no idea how much of his family’s Catholicism and/or conservatism will has retained into adulthood, but this play is deeply informed about the lives and thoughts of young Catholic conservatives in post-Christian America.

The thing is, Will doesn’t write about them in a cliched way, e.g., Catholic playwright moves to New York and vomits up vicious dramas denouncing the hypocrisies of his religiously conservative upbringing. He writes critically of his characters, but the criticism is more about trying to understand why they believe the things they do in the ways that they do. He cares about these characters. He cares about them, because he must have known them growing up. Maybe there’s some of each of them within him. I felt that way myself, reading the play. The thing is, though it’s a play about four conservative Catholics in their twenties (and one in his late 30s), Arbery writes in such a way as to draw in and challenge thoughtful progressives. Heroes is not a play that offers virtue signaling or simple answers.

The Catholic theologian Chad Pecknold saw Heroes recently, and wrote about it in the Catholic Herald. Excerpt:

Arbery’s play is remarkable for never letting progressives rest in their dismissals of conservatives, and also for holding up a critical mirror to the often messy disputes that conservatives have amongst themselves. He is not just interested in telling a richly drawn story about an ensemble of conservative Catholics in Wyoming, but he seems also interested in telling a story that starts “a big conversation” about sacrifice, suffering and community — about God, good and evil, and America. In fact, to underscore this point, the play opens with one of the characters praying at dawn, taking up his rifle, and killing a deer whose bleeding corpse he lays upon the porch where the story unfolds — literally performing the play upon blood sacrifice that the characters repeatedly cross over with their own agonies and ecstasies.

The title of the play, “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” comes from William Strauss and Neil Howe’s best-selling 1996 book “The Fourth Turning,” which argued that American history goes through 80 year cycles which each involve four turns, following the trajectory of life itself: growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction — repeat. “Teresa,” a young Bannonist blogger living in Brooklyn, tells her friends “we’re all being called to be heroes because history goes in generational cycles…[over] four turnings. Each one of them is a couple of decades.” She explains to her friends that the first turning starts high, the second is an awakening, and the third is an unraveling.

“Unraveling is weird,” Teresa tells them. “It’s like, we break into different camps. Institutions aren’t trusted anymore, and there’s a ton of emphasis on personal freedom – but more like, license. Things get a little decadent. People go off into their different camps. Culture wars. 80s, 90s.

“Then comes Crisis. That’s the fourth turning. It’s destruction, it’s revolution, it’s war. The nation almost doesn’t survive. Great example is the Civil War, and the economic crisis before that. Or the Great Depression into World War II. And it’s right now. The national identity crisis caused by Obama. Liberals think it’s Trump. It’s the fight to save civilization. People start to collectivize and turn against each other. It seems like everything’s ending – we’re all gonna die. No one trusts each other. But the people who do trust each other form crazy bonds. Somehow we get through it, we rise from the ashes, and breach back into a High.

“And those four turnings make a saeculum.” Teresa wants to reassure her friends that what looks like bad news — crisis — is really good news, as they are the heroes who will inaugurate a new high.

The four main characters — Teresa, Kevin, Emily, and Justin — are all graduates of Transfiguration College in Wyoming (based on the real-life Wyoming Catholic College), and have gathered for the installation of their favorite professor, Gina (based on Will’s mother Ginny), as president of the school. The drama unfolds in Justin’s backyard after the ceremony. The old friends are drinking and talking, and taking the measure of their time. There is all around them a sense of mounting social crisis — Teresa calls it a coming “war”. Offstage, Justin’s electric generator occasionally screeches, adding a demonic sense of menace (“War, children, it’s just a shot away/It’s just a shot away” — Gimme Shelter).

What is the nature of this war? And what should their response be? Each of the characters has a take.

Teresa is an Ann Coulter type. She lives in New York, writes a popular right-wing blog, and is admittedly ambitious. She is engaged to be married, and regards herself as one of life’s winners, and a warrior. She rebukes Kevin for being a “soy boy,” and puts him down as a loser who will never amount to anything until and unless he mans up. (She’s not wrong, either, as we see.) She admires Steve Bannon, and believes that in the coming war, conservatives (and Christians, and white people) have to fight. Though the play is set in 2017, she would be a total Ahmarist in the current French-Ahmari debate — but the Iranian-born Ahmari’s lack of whiteness might be a problem for her. Oh, and she’s also a cokehead.

That said, don’t take Teresa as a simple villain (none of his characters are that). Arbery gives her some great lines. Late in the play, Teresa gets into an argument with Gina, her old professor, over what Catholic conservatives are supposed to do in response to the current crisis. Gina is deeply conservative, and not an establishment Republican (we learn that she hosted a Pat Buchanan meeting in her home in the 1990s), but she has no regard for the Trump people. She regards them as untrustworthy radicals. Here, Teresa lays out her response to her professor:

Not being measured. Not being polite. I don’t want to be polite anymore. We can’t lie to ourselves. We’re past that. We’re in Crisis. They’re coming for our tabernacle. They want to burn it down. They want to destroy the legacy of heroes like you. So I propose leveling up. I propose looking at the truth in the face. Knowing what it looks like. Knowing what we look like to them. It’s not going anywhere. I propose not taking any shit. Not ignoring all the hypocritical bullshit. Going blow for blow. And being ready for the war, if it happens. When it happens. You call us racist, we’ll call you racist. You call us white, we’ll call you black. You call us Nazis, we’ll call you abortionists and eugenicists. You call us ignorant Christians, we’ll call you spineless hedonistic soulless bloviating bloodbags. But you stop doing that, and give this thing space and time to work itself out, we’ll stop too. You focus your efforts on making this a better nation, an American nation, a republic of ideas, we will too.

Earlier, Teresa lays into Emily, Gina’s daughter, who suffers from a disease that leaves her in constant pain. Emily is a peacemaker, and a former volunteer at a pro-life crisis pregnancy center in Chicago. But she defends her friend Olivia, who works for Planned Parenthood. Emily believes that Olivia is a good person who is doing something wicked. Teresa won’t have it:

TERESA

You’re allowed to like your abortionist friend Olivia. But you’re not allowed to tell me that she’s equally as good as you. That the work you were doing in Chicago and the work she’s doing in D.C. are equal. She’s contributing to a genocide. A pogrom.

She’s on the wrong side.

You’re on the right side.

You are the good in this world, girl.

And you know it’s true.

EMILY

Well I feel like all I’m asking for, all I’m ASKING for, is just a bigger dose of empathy—

TERESA

Oh don’t with the empathy. Liberals are empathy addicts. Empathy empathy empathy.

Empathy is empty. Hannah Arendt says we don’t need to feel what someone else is feeling – first of all that’s impossible, second of all it’s self-righteous and breeds complacency, third of all it’s politically irresponsible. Empathize with someone and suddenly you’re erasing the boundaries of your own conscience, suddenly you’re living under the tyranny of their desires. We need to know how to think how they’re thinking. From a distance.

More:

TERESA

She’s thinking: “hi, okay, I’m Olivia, I’m such a good person for helping all these women, I’m so great, and you’re about to get an abortion and you’re so great, and we’re all so great, and now let’s go into this room and do this thing and your doctor is so great, and oh btw if you start to wonder if there’s another presence here, someone small and silent with us, someone who could be just as great as us but will never have the chance, push that down, push it away, don’t think about it, we’re the great ones, here and now, because we say so.”

Amen, sister! Emily is swamped with her own suffering — so much so that her empathy clouds her ability to think clearly. On the other hand, Teresa is so Ayn Rand-like that she has developed a contempt for suffering, except in the abstract (e.g., the suffering of the unborn child). You come to see Teresa’s martial rhetoric not as real courage, but as a form of escapism — a take vindicated, I believe, by a personal disclosure late in the play.

That disclosure puts the training Teresa received at the Great Books Catholic college into a certain light. This is true of all the characters. Did Teresa learn how to think rigorously, but came to believe that her faith and her reason were nothing but weapons? In Emily’s case, has her suffering made her so empathetic that she cannot think clearly? Is her peacemaking really an attempt to keep the demons of rage at injustice and suffering in check, to keep them from overwhelming her ability to cope with life?

In Kevin’s case, he failed to launch after his education. He suffers from a lack of courage — this he admits — and from addictions that lay waste to his powers. He does not know what to do with his life. He is lukewarm, and the only passion he has is self-loathing. Justin is older than the rest of the group by a decade — he came to the college as an older student, after a stint in the Marines and a divorce — and has an outlook tempered by wisdom. He’s a strong, silent, cowboy type. Here, Kevin and Justin argue over the Benedict Option:

 

KEVIN

Yeah but look Emily I mean your parents are trying to like save the country basically. Like they’re basically the opposite of the Benedict Option – they’re going into the world rather than retreating—

JUSTIN

Oh I like The Benedict Option.

EMILY
 What is that?

KEVIN

A book that says we’re not gonna win this thing and we should just retreat.

JUSTIN

No that’s an oversimplification.

KEVIN

Whatever it’s so spineless.

JUSTIN

You don’t think Transfiguration College of Wyoming is the epitome of the Benedict Option?

KEVIN
 What?

JUSTIN

Smack dab in the middle of the least populated state in the union, six hours from the nearest urban area. Our school didn’t accept federal funding.

KEVIN

Okay well maybe this is my point, then: the school’s explicit mission was to train me to be a leader in the world, but I was not ready for the world. It’s been seven years and this whole time I’ve been paralyzed. What have I done with all of it? Maybe I need to get spanked around a little bit. Maybe I need to move to New York like Teresa did and just like, dive in.

More:

KEVIN

Okay well maybe this is my point, then: the school’s explicit mission was to train me to be a leader in the world, but I was not ready for the world. It’s been seven years and this whole time I’ve been paralyzed. What have I done with all of it? Maybe I need to get spanked around a little bit. Maybe I need to move to New York like Teresa did and just like, dive in.

JUSTIN
 No.

KEVIN
 What

JUSTIN

Stay away from New York. Deepen your spiritual life, and get away from urban temptations.

KEVIN

Maybe what I need is more urban temptations.

JUSTIN
 What?

KEVIN

Maybe repression makes me a worse person.

JUSTIN
 No sir.

KEVIN

Maybe I need to be in the den of lions, in order to really be the Catholic I was meant to be. Like there are some priests, like Jesuits, who thrive in that kind of environment. Ugh do I need to be a priest?

JUSTIN

Maybe. But I don’t know if you need to do that in a den of lions.

KEVIN
 Why?

JUSTIN

Well, as one example… cities are obviously hubs of LGBT activity, and I don’t think it’s healthy to be around LGBT activity.

KEVIN

Why – do you think I’d become gay?

JUSTIN

I just think proximity to LGBT is a threat to Christian children and families. Exposure makes you porous to infection. And all this babble about gender being fluid and non-binary. We are living in barbaric times.

KEVIN

But why can’t we meet it, engage with it—

JUSTIN

Because it’s hard to confront people who you know won’t change.

KEVIN

What’s wrong with it being hard? It should be hard.

JUSTIN

And all the power is on their side. All the bureaucracy, and soon – all the laws. Everyone working for any business or public school will be frog-marched through diversity and inclusion training. It won’t just be about tolerating, which we do, it will be about affirming their disorder. Which is a sin.

KEVIN

I don’t disagree. So what do you propose?

JUSTIN

Stay among the like-minded.

KEVIN

You want us to just become a quivering bubble of Christian cowards?

JUSTIN

Wow. No. I want us to put our heads down, preserve our culture, and wait for the hedonists to eat themselves alive.

KEVIN

Well maybe I want to save some of the hedonists.

Keep in mind these lines were written by a Catholic playwright whose father is president of the real-life Transfiguration College, and whose mother teaches there. He’s a playwright who lives in New York City, and who could hardly be more immersed in the artistic life of the nation’s cultural capital. He is also a straight man who has said, in interviews, that growing up in a house full of women, he was conscious of thought some had that he would surely be gay. This, Will has said, gave him a sense of what it’s like to be an outsider.

I say this so you’ll know that the author of this play surely does not side with Justin. On the other hand, the character who did go off to New York, Teresa, has become something of a monster. And Kevin says that he might want to save some of the hedonists, but this does not ring true. He can’t even save himself. This line comes off as the rationalization of a guilt-wracked young Catholic man who is trying to talk himself out of inertia.

There’s a great exchange between Kevin and Justin, in which Kevin is working himself up to act:

KEVIN

Yes. Pathetic and

At any moment, I feel this – I

Justin, seriously, I’m think I’m in love with… I fall in love with SO MANY

This college was the only thing keeping me from, just, dissolv

Just watch, I’m gonna get cut loose – and I’m whipping over into the

You know, The World And I might love it.

JUSTIN

This is the world.

Boom! All of us have known Kevin. Many of us have been Kevin at some time in our lives. Like so many anxious young people, Kevin thinks that the “world” is something Out There, that life — sorry, Life — is elsewhere. Justin — older, wiser Justin — wants him to wake up and see that the world, and life, is all around him, all around all of us. New York is no more or no less the world than small-town Wyoming. The drama of life and death, of salvation and damnation, of faith and reason and judgment and mercy — it’s all happening everywhere, all the time. Kevin’s concept of the world as a place and state of being foreign to him is an illusion that allows him to avoid himself, and the difficult choices that he needs to make to grow up.

You see why this is a play about Catholic conservatives, but is really universal?

The play calls its protagonists “heroes,” a designation that’s somewhat ironic — none of them seem like heroes — but that characterizes the challenges facing those of their generation in a time of fragmentation and loss of meaning. History calls on them to be heroes — but what does that mean? Fight, flight, or something in between?

The tenderest and most challenging parts of the play have to do with the metaphysics of suffering and limitation. Justin, who is 38, practices a stance of fundamental gratitude for life — a position that we are given to believe he won only through experiencing violence, suffering, and the grace of mercy shown to him when he did not deserve it. Emily, Gina’s daughter, has been carrying the cross of her physical pain. In this exchange, she and Justin talk about the body, and the inability of people in our culture to accept limitation and pain as part of the human condition:

EMILY

I want to say: begotten not made. For me it’s just that. Begotten not made. We are given ourselves. There’s a mystery in the givenness. And we’re sharing that givenness with God. And I don’t judge them, and I’m not saying they’re bad people at all. But I do feel these days that it’s like… it’s like it’s popular to reject the truth of ourselves as given.

More:

JUSTIN

Your dad was saying and I thought it was brilliant that it’s this Cartesian “neo-Gnosticism” that convinces people that their souls are somehow separate from their bodies, and their bodies can somehow be fashioned however they like.

EMILY

Oh that’s beautiful J, that’s so — my body is so much a part of me I can’t even begin And I didn’t choose this, my body is just a friggin

prairie of pain,

and I can’t choose to make it go away

It’s just what I’ve been given.

What do we do with this pain? Do we fight it? Do we accept it? Is there a way to turn it into something beautiful? How can we be sure that what seems like a healthy way of handling it is not, in fact, a delusion that sets us up for disaster? In a shocking turn near the play’s end, Arbery suggests that the inability to come to terms with the fact of limits, and the reality of evil and injustice, will bring about a sudden manifestation of savage violence that we will not see coming. As Jagger and Richards put it, “Rape, murder!/It’s just a shot away.”

Heroes pits Justin against Kevin, arguing the question about whether or not Catholic conservatives should plunge into the world (the “World”) or live at its periphery. It also pits Justin against Teresa on the question of whether an active fight with secular liberals is something our side can win. It’s important to remember that Justin is a Marine, not a soy boy like Kevin:

JUSTIN

I wanted to say something about the liberal… The nice young liberal people. And the system.

TERESA
 Okay what.

JUSTIN

So these nice young liberal people are blinded by a system that distracts them from true moral questions and re-focuses their attention onto fashionable and facile questions of identity and choice, which gender do you want to be today?, how much sex can you have today?, how many babies do you want? and how do you want them to look?, which is really all part of a larger ideological system that is rooted in an evil, early 20th-century quote unquote progressive trend towards quote unquote perfection, eugenics, and crypto-racism, endorsed by Margaret Sanger, an American eugenics system which persists, which wants to eliminate anything unclean or imperfect, including black babies and Down syndrome babies, and create a sterilized world based around state-mandated pleasure and narcissism. These are just facts, look it up y’all.

I can honestly say that, having lived in that world, and being a 38 year-old nomad, I can guarantee that 99% of them are willing to just be led blindly into the cave, hooked up to a heroin drip of self-satisfied digital activism and committing vile acts of self-gratification because they’re told that it’s important to “experience” life, when actually they’re numbing themselves to the possibility of real sacrifice or any chance of an ethical life, rooted in the grit and toil of suffering in the name of Christ.

And: there are more of them. We lost the popular vote, by a lot. Despite the indulgences afforded us by our wealthy backers and our electoral loopholes, we lack a unified youth movement. And they have that. And they’re mobilizing. In many ways, they are in power. And they’re trying to wipe us out. They’re wishing for our death. And the only way to survive is to block them out, to focus on the Lord. Try to outlive them. Bake bread, make wine, work the earth, shelter wanderers, and survive.

TERESA

You talk like they’re In Power. But they’re not in power. We are.

JUSTIN

Maybe for now—

TERESA

No, and there are more of us, too. There are. We just aren’t as loud, and we don’t have control of the media. And we need to come together to fight, not to bake bread. It’s honestly baffling to me that someone as strong as you would already be giving up the fight when it’s barely begun—

Is that true, Teresa’s assertion that the Right simply hasn’t gathered its forces? Or is Justin’s analysis correct? Notice that they agree on the diagnosis; it’s the response that divides them. This dispute is not so much Ahmari vs. French as Ahmari vs. Dreher. (N.B., in real life, Sohrab and I are friends, as are Teresa and Justin.) Teresa believes that Justin is giving up the fight, but Justin conceives the battle in different terms — and that conditions his response. To put it another way — and this becomes clear in the dramatic ending — Teresa thinks that we are in a cultural and political war, but Justin believes that the essence of the war is spiritual. He plainly doesn’t deny that there are political and cultural dimensions to the war, but to him, this is primarily about spiritual warfare.

It is a strength of this play that Will Arbery doesn’t tell his audience what to think. None of these characters has the answer. As I said, Will himself moved to New York City, and that has given him insight into the temptations of throwing oneself into the lion’s den without proper spiritual preparation. He clearly doesn’t believe that his character Justin’s way was the way for him, but I find myself thinking about Justin’s past as a Marine combat veteran and a divorced man, and how these things affected his view of culture war, and his role in it as a Catholic.

Every conservative should ponder this exchange between restless Kevin and Gina, the new college president and his old professor. Gina at times comes across as exactly what Teresa says she is — out of touch with contemporary political realities. But she also is a voice of older conservative wisdom, of a kind of conservatism that is, as Russell Kirk said, “a negation of ideology.” The fact that Gina is not and never has been an Establishment conservative gives her a lot of credibility here. Here’s how the exchange begins:

KEVIN

All we know how to do is make things Catholic. That’s all you taught us how to do. At other schools, they allow for different conclusions. But here, we’re in the pursuit of the same conclusion – what you want isn’t different conclusions, you want better poetry to get us to the same place. You chide us for not being imaginative, but you kick us out of school for smoking a joint. But there’s a whole side to life that we’re just pushing down. Like can’t we be Catholic and not, uh…

TERESA

Kevin what are you talking about

GINA

No, shush Teresa

This is beautiful Kevin, you’re so close…

Hm I want to answer

Hm, a little tipsy myself, Kevin, but let me try to…

Honey, of course we allow for different conclusions. But to focus on the conclusions is to miss the point. What we’re after is the slow pursuit. The thrill of reason and rhetoric, prayer and poetry — a slow working out — taking apart the clock and putting it back together — hearing the music of its ticking with fresh ears and precise new understanding.

And God, let the understanding be slow.

Progressivism moves too fast and forces change and constricts liberty. Gridlock is beautiful. In the delay is deliberation and true consensus. If you just railroad something through because you want it done, that’s the passion of the mob. Delaying is the structure of the republic, which is structured differently in order to offset the dangers of democracy. I believe in slowness, gridlock.

The space between the cup and the lip. Martin Diamond talked about this.

The little space between the cup and the lip. Just waiting a little longer to taste the wine…

After reading the startling conclusion, it hit me that Will Arbery has written a contemporary stage version of Dostoevsky’s Demons (also known in English as The Possessed). His characters are trying to figure out how to live and what to do in an era of tumult and transition, in which everybody knows, deep down, that some kind of war is coming — and indeed, is at the gates. In my case, I hear this over and over from people. I believe it’s true, though whether this is a metaphorical war or actual violence, I can’t say. It is most definitely a spiritual war, and Arbery seems to understand that in the same way that Dostoevsky did of his own era. Teresa, Kevin, and Emily all seemed to be possessed, in a sense, by characteristic spirits of our time. Gina is a voice of capital-R Reason, informed by Faith, though the play does not present her as an oracle. She is clearly out of touch with the times … but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Justin is a flawed character, but he seems to be the most grounded, and the one who has gained the most from suffering, and from the wisdom of his college education in the Greats.

Playwright Will Arbery

This is not to say that Justin’s is the voice of Will Arbery. It’s clearly not, and the path Justin has laid out for his own life — we discover it in a surprise disclosure at the end — is not the path that everyone can or should take. It might not even be the right way for him. It is very much a Ben Op kind of solution, though. It raises the question of what, exactly, does it mean to be a hero in a war like this one? There are revelations in the play’s final moments that make your blood run cold, as you realize how close we are to possession by the legions that, to use a very Catholic phrase, prowl about seeking the ruin of souls. And: there will be blood.

Honestly, I don’t know how anyone — progressive, conservative, everyone — walks out of Heroes Of The Fourth Turning without the conviction that somehow, they have to change their life. This is the kind of work that will inspire intense debates long after the stage lights go down. Will Arbery takes chances in this play that are so audacious you just shake your head at the ballsiness of it all. I found myself reading passages aloud to my wife last night, saying, “Can you believe this?” It tells you something about the quality of this drama that lines like those I’ve quoted above are now being spoken on the New York stage. That a pro-life Catholic who voted for Pat Buchanan is a voice of wisdom in an Off Broadway play. Will Arbery has made this happen, through sheer artistry and depth of moral vision. This play is not to be missed, but if you can’t get to it in New York during its current run (which ends October 27), don’t worry; it will be performed in many places for years to come. This is not ideological sloganeering; this is art. This is the real thing. I can’t think of a single novel, film, or play that better illustrates the spirits of our culture war than Heroes Of The Fourth Turning. Plays like this aren’t supposed to be written. But there it is, a kind of miracle.

UPDATE: In reading the comments, I’m kind of amazed that some people think the lines Will Arbery gives to his characters represent his own beliefs. I have no idea if will considers himself to be a conservative; I’m going to interview him about the play, and we’ll find out. Remember that he is an artist creating characters that represent the kinds of people he grew up with, and their points of view. And if the “arguments” made by these characters don’t sound sophisticated to you, you have to remember that he’s not writing about William F. Buckley, but creating characters who talk like real people.

Moreover, please note that I’ve only quoted parts of the play where the philosophical and political conflicts between the characters manifest most sharply. These conflicts are embedded in the messy lives of the characters. They aren’t ideological stick figures. That’s a big reason that the play is so powerful. Anyone who has spent any time on the Right, especially among conservative Christians, knows people like these characters.

 

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Scary Threats At Notre Dame

There’s Queer Blood on Homophobic Hands from Audrey Lindemann on Vimeo.

Take a look at that. It’s a deranged poem read by Audrey Lindemann, a University of Notre Dame undergraduate, who published a version of it recently in the Notre Dame campus newspaper. In the print version, she also denounces Sycamore Trust and Young Americans For Freedom.

Here is the text of the audio on the clip:

Your homophobic

discourse soiled my

air supply your ivory

tower theology

slit my loved ones’

throats I’m trying

to go to class without

dead friends in my

backpack just trying

to touch my girl’s shoulder

in the grass you want

to un-affirm me to

“lobotomize me with a

crowbar” well the murdered

trans angels (18 this year yet)

leak brimstone into your

praying mouths

Students for Child Oriented Policy

Irish Rover

(you say my piece had violent undertones that it drew hostile attention you say “expressing a Catholic viewpoint should not be equated to committing a heinous crime” you contrasted your “reasoned opinion” with my “intellectual chaos” that you are “targeted” and I must respectfully say that the blood on your names did not come from you or the hate groups you’ve been inviting to speak on campus. It was ours and my loved ones. Your reasoned opinions seep into churches, into culture, they diffuse like venomous gas from every outlet, this is the very nature of discourse. Your articles have directly affirmed violent lurkers online who would have us lobotomized with crow bars, thrown back into the closet, expelled from the school. Catholic writers feel like targets? Queer people have, since the beginning of time, flown around on wings made of bullseyes, a trans woman wakes up in a dorm of hundreds of men, a trans boy is kicked out of his home as a teenager and haunts the streets like a ghost a black trans woman is shot through the stomach with a gun a black trans woman is burned beyond recognition with only teeth left scattered in the sand and this has everything to do everything to do with the discoursal irresponsibility of privileged “scholars” like you. I respect your academic freedom I just ask that next time you type out an article from behind your thousand dollar mac book you taste a little iron in your mouth and maybe it’s the blood of Dana Martin or Ashanti Cameron and maybe you feel dust in between your fingers and its the ashes of Bee Love Slater)

this is not scholarship it’s a pained snarl

from inside the dark wet belly of chaos

and it’s clawing at your cowardly pontification

you are nothing but a bullet

at the gay massacre

you beat us in alleys you

watched us die of AIDS

and yet I’m here, laying

waste to your reproductive

futurism your procreative shackles

I’m here in class

with my gender on my

sleeve and centuries of dead

queers in my old navy

backpack if you want me gone

come to my dorm room,

you are going to need

a backbone and better

words you are going to

need a much bigger

crowbar.

I’d say that Miss Lindemann has a Rich Inner Life. But if I were on Notre Dame’s campus, and had been targeted by her with such malicious invective, and my image had been subject to a beating with a crowbar, I would be worried.

Certainly Bill Dempsey, the head of Sycamore Trust, is concerned. Sycamore Trust is a group of ND alumni who seek “Catholic renewal” at the university. He wrote to Father John Jenkins, the school’s president, today:

 

Dear Father Jenkins,

The malignant poster recently displayed on campus and the venomous video that is posted on vimeo (http://tinyurl.com/y3tns4xe) surely must be major violations of the University’s Standards of Conduct. In addition, they seem plainly to violate Indiana’s “intimidation law,” which makes it a crime to incite violence or to take action intended to expose a person “to hatred, contempt, disgrace, or ridicule.” See Indiana Code Title 35. Criminal Law and Procedure § 35-45-2-1.

The students’ malicious and culpable intention is vividly evidenced on the poster by the perpetrators’ circling in fake blood the names of student, faculty and alumni authors of Irish Rover and Observer “homophobic” articles upholding Church teaching, and on the video by one perpetrator repeatedly bashing the photos on the poster with a crowbar while another holds up a copy of The Irish Rover.

In addition, the video leader assailed students associated with The Irish Rover and SCOP collectively, and in her Observer screed this morning she included students associated with Young Americans for Freedom and alumni associated with our organization, Sycamore Trust:

“leak brimstone into your

praying mouths

Young Americans for Freedom

Child Oriented Policy

Sycamore Trust

Irish Rover”

This is beyond vile. It is provocative and dangerous.

Rod Dreher is evidently the first to pick this up, but he certainly won’t be the last. See “Anti-Catholic Hate at Notre Dame” http://tinyurl.com/yxnt8q87 .

His conclusion:

“Whoever put this sign up slandered others at Notre Dame, attacked free speech, and is clearly trying to incite violence against them with that kind of incendiary rhetoric and symbolism. A line has been crossed. What is the university going to do about it?”

Since we are included as targets, we believe we have standing to ask precisely that question. We respectfully ask what you intend to do about it so that we can come to an informed judgment as to what we should do about it. As an immediate step, we strongly urge you to require the incendiary video be taken down. The longer it spews hatred, the more the risk of another Virginia Tech.

Very truly,

Bill Dempsey

Chairman

Sycamore Trust

At about the 1:50 mark, a student in the background begins to beat with a crowbar the poster bearing images of Lindemann’s opponents on campus. Here’s a still:

This is spiritually dark stuff. “Leak brimstone in your praying mouths”?

At the University of Notre Dame.

If these were white supremacists threatening people of color with this kind of invective, Father Jenkins would know exactly what to do.

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Curry Into The Heart Of Whiteness

Oh dear. News from Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University has been accused of racism for hosting an “anti-racism” conference which banned white people from asking questions.

The event was called “Resisting Whiteness 2019” and took place Saturday. The group said its mission was to “amplify the voices of people of color” and therefore they would “not be giving the microphone to white people during the Q&As, not because we don’t think white people have anything to offer to the discussion, but because we want to amplify the voices of people of color.”

The blurb added, “If you are a white person with a question, please share it with a member of the committee or our speakers after the panel discussion.”

The reader who sent me that notice says, “Surely this must be a coincidence”:

Philosophy of race focus for major new appointment

One of the US’s foremost experts on the philosophy of race and gender is set to join the University and help establish Edinburgh as a leader in the field.

Tommy J. Curry has been appointed as Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS).

Oh joy. Now Prof. Curry can spend his time telling the pasty Caledonians how wicked they are. You might recall my posts about Curry, who is black, and his history of racist rhetoric (see here, here, and here.) In this post, I quoted at length from a 2007 paper he wrote about a “possible justification for violence against Whiteness.” Here’s Curry:

Fanon tells us that there are no innocents in the colonial situation. “Colonialism is not a type of individual relation but the conquest of a national territory and the oppression of a people: that is all.” The colonial context justifies itself to whites in the persecution and criminalization of Blacks, and in this way it knows that it is legitimate and permanent. Every white that participates in the colonial context, as if the tyranny against Blacks is the norm, and acceptable, in so far as it requires no individual action or culpability, is guilty of colonization, and as such is neither innocent nor absolved for being the particular manifestation of the colonial matrix. The possession of a white racial identity is a very real danger for African people insofar as that identity is embraced as the badge of white superiority. In this sense, every white is a concrete threat to the life of an African descended person, either as their executioner or the enforcer of white supremacy. Insofar as “whiteness” is the expectation of privilege, whiteness is also the expectation of those who cannot enjoy those privileges and the maintenance of their deprivation. Violence against whites is a revolt against both the colonial structures of the American context, as well as the rebellion against the individual whites who choose to claim the legacy of that oppression in a white racial identity.

Ah. So there are no innocent white people. White people everywhere are “a concrete threat to the life of an African descended person.” Yet amazingly, Prof. Tommy Curry has chosen to go bravely into the Heart Of Whiteness, a Scottish city that is 92 percent white, and only 1.4 percent black,to preach his racialist gospel. He had to do this, he told an interviewer, because of me:

Debates concerning the use of revolutionary violence or the ethics of Black self-defense are common areas of discussion and research in Critical Race Theory and Black Studies. Violence against Black people, Indigenous nations, and immigrant populations has, for centuries, enforced white supremacy and habituated white citizens into accepting anti-Blackness throughout the Western states. To imply that a Black full professor’s research is subject to dismissal by a white blogger is professionally insulting, suggesting that the intellectual productions and research by Black professors do not require specialized knowledge and are merely opinions that can be evaluated and discounted by your everyday white person.

That’s me: Your Everyday White Person. I am not sufficiently educated to recognize a racist when I see one. You have to have an advanced degree, I guess, to recognize that when Curry advocates racialized violence against whites, he’s not really advocating racialized violence against whites. For the record, Curry was not simply discussing the use of revolutionary violence by black people; that would be perfectly normal in his field. He was advocating for it, on the radio and in the classroom, as activists at A&M documented. My criticism was not criticism of all black academics; it was criticism of him. In a different interview in March, Prof. Curry said that his exodus from America also has to do “the limitations many Black faculty around the country have described over the last several years under Trump.”

Right. Ri-i-i-ght. This guy is a Grievance Grifter par excellence. Anyway, he’s Edinburgh’s problem now. I am reminded of this passage from the UK writer Douglas Murray’s great new book The Madness Of Crowds, which covers, in part, the cultural change that grants department chairmanships in Grievance Studies to activists like T.J. Curry:

In March 2019 Professor Robin DiAngelo of the University of Washington gave a speech at Boston University. DiAngelo specialises in ‘whiteness studies’ and has written a book, White Fragility. Since DiAngelo is herself white she has to do a certain amount of self-abasement to earn the trust of her audiences. She does so by assuring them that she is aware that just by standing on a stage and speaking she is ‘reinforcing whiteness and the centrality of the white view’. She asks for forgiveness by stating, for instance, that, ‘I’d like to be a little less white, which means a little less oppressive, oblivious, defensive, ignorant and arrogant.’ To her audience in Boston she also explained how white people who see people as individuals rather than by their skin colour are in fact ‘dangerous’. Meaning that it took only half a century for Martin Luther King’s vision to be exactly inverted.

More Murray:

Today there appears to be a return to a heightened level of rhetoric on race and a great crescendo of claims about racial differences – just when most of us hoped that any such differences might be fading away. Some people in a spirit of resentment, others in a spirit of glee, are jumping up and down on this quietly ticking ground. They can have no idea what lies beneath them.

No, they don’t.

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Escaping The Nothing

The writer Tara Isabella Burton is one of the most interesting people you could ever hope to meet in New York City. In this essay, she writes about how she threw herself into the occult in a Romantic effort to escape meaninglessness … but ended up, in the end, becoming a Christian. Excerpts:

Trieste was a liminal, crossroads place. It was not beautiful, exactly, but full of Habsburg nostalgists and strange but friendly middle-aged occultists, who would draw Hermetic sigils on the back of notepaper for me, and explain that I had been preternaturally chosen to bring Trieste to public prominence because I was the great-granddaughter of the travel writer Sir Richard Francis Burton, who once lived there.

Incidentally, Sir Richard (d. 1890) was a hero of the occultist Aleister Crowley, who dedicated his autobiography to him. He is commemorated in the “Gnostic Mass” written by Crowley and celebrated by his followers. More:

Trieste is the sort of place you go if you want to transmogrify your life. Most of the bad decisions I’ve made, I’ve made in Trieste.

A friend came to visit me there, right in the middle of my breakdown. She was in a comparable place, emotionally, as I recall, although it is likely that I, in my solipsism, collapsed any distinctions between us. I can’t speak for her. What I remember is this: We sat right on the Adriatic, where the piazza drops straight into the sea. We watched the sunset. We talked about what being unafraid of passion might look like. We decided. We would become maenads.

The original maenads were the followers of Dionysius: god of wine, but also of mysteries, but also of torn animal pelts, of blood, of madness, of a certain kind of chosen fatality. Maenads means “the raving ones,” and because they are mad, and wine-drenched, and followers of a dark god, it also means they are unafraid of anything.

That is what we meant when we said maenad. Women who tore into life. Women whose blood flowed. Women who did not stop themselves from raving.

So they enacted a rite they made up, to consecrate themselves to the maenad life. More:

I am not saying that magic is real. Who knows if magic is real? I am saying, only, that for most of my life I had two options: a world that was enchanted, and one that was not, and the one that was enchanted was the only one I could bear to live in. I was—as it happens—in graduate school for theology, and would have called myself some kind of anodyne Episcopalian, but at my core I was thoroughly pagan. I believed in forces that had no names. I bargained with them and expected to win.

I wanted magic. I didn’t think too much about meaning. Or at least, as long as everything meant something, the specifics didn’t seem to matter. Basil could mean love. Thursdays could mean power. The full moon purity. Why not?

The alternative was that nothing meant anything at all.

That was a false choice. Eventually she began to see the shadow side of this kind of life.

In Euripides’ The Bacchae, the maenads are exciting, until they’re not. They rave—and you can almost forget, watching them, that there are real people, among the bacchae, whom raving hurts. There are people whom raving kills.

Why did she open herself to these mad spirits?

I wanted to outrun the Nothing. There was nothing I would not have sacrificed—friendships, relationships, the blood from the heel of my foot—to get it.

Read it all, and to learn about TIB becoming a Christian.

Much of this resonates with my experience. I never flirted with the occult, but I understood, and understand, why a soft version of it appeals to people. Like TIB, I couldn’t bear to live in a world of metaphysical meaninglessness. I don’t know if I can speak for her here, but I also believed that there really was meaning there, behind the veil of matter. That is, I believed (and do believe) that transcendent meaning exists, whether or not individuals believe it does. Our task in life is both to perceive that meaning, insofar as we can in our mortal states, and to integrate ourselves harmoniously with it. Like TIB now and in her pagan years, I cannot find stability in a religion that seeks to anesthetize. To set boundaries around the wildness, and to order it rightly, yes, absolutely; but to deny its spiritual power by turning the living God (and the demons who oppose him) into a denatured form of ethics or therapy — no. Never. 

The state that drove TIB to become a self-styled maenad was the same one St. Augustine lived through, and that led him to declare, famously, that our hearts are restless until the rest in God. TIB says that being a maenad delivered her from meaninglessness, and made her a “not-nothing,” but she overlooked the cruelty and the darkness of that way of living. It was only through discovering Christianity that she became a “Something” (her word). In other words, her embrace of magic was about running away from Nothingness; her embrace of Christianity was about running towards Reality.

TIB’s next book, Strange Rites: New Religions For A Godless World, will be a journalistic journey through spirituality in post-Christian America. Pre-order it here. She’s a terrific writer. I can’t wait for this book.

Just this morning I was trading e-mails with a Christian writer friend, who said, “Really, you can’t underestimate how powerful the fear of meaninglessness is.” Reading Hannah Arendt’s study of the origins of totalitarianism, I learned that this was one of the prime reasons for masses of people giving themselves over to Nazism and Communism in the early 20th century. These political religions gave them a sense of purpose.

 

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America: A Child Pornocracy

I still can’t get over the big story in Sunday’s New York Times about the explosion in child pornography in the age of the Internet: last year, investigators found over 45 million videos and images of child pornography on the Internet — over twice what had been reported in the previous year.

None of these photos accompany the piece, obviously, but at one point, deep in the story, there are brief descriptions of some of the material that investigators have found — descriptions of the filmed sexual torture of children so horrible that I warn you in the strongest terms not to read the story if you aren’t prepared for this. When I read this part of the piece, I very nearly cried tears of anger, and immediately wished there were hit teams dispatched to take out anyone who produces this material. It’s exactly that evil.

So: you have been warned. I won’t quote from that particular material in this post, so you can read on without having to worry. I want you to keep in mind as you proceed here that I’m talking about the sexual torture of children filmed and distributed widely for the pleasure of adults.

Here is the lead section:

The images are horrific. Children, some just 3 or 4 years old, being sexually abused and in some cases tortured.

Pictures of child sexual abuse have long been produced and shared to satisfy twisted adult obsessions. But it has never been like this: Technology companies reported a record 45 million online photos and videos of the abuse last year.

More than a decade ago, when the reported number was less than a million, the proliferation of the explicit imagery had already reached a crisis point. Tech companies, law enforcement agencies and legislators in Washington responded, committing to new measures meant to rein in the scourge. Landmark legislation passed in 2008.

Yet the explosion in detected content kept growing — exponentially.

An investigation by The New York Times found an insatiable criminal underworld that had exploited the flawed and insufficient efforts to contain it. As with hate speech and terrorist propaganda, many tech companies failed to adequately police sexual abuse imagery on their platforms, or failed to cooperate sufficiently with the authorities when they found it.

Law enforcement agencies devoted to the problem were left understaffed and underfunded, even as they were asked to handle far larger caseloads.

The Justice Department, given a major role by Congress, neglected even to write mandatory monitoring reports, nor did it appoint a senior executive-level official to lead a crackdown. And the group tasked with serving as a federal clearinghouse for the imagery — the go-between for the tech companies and the authorities — was ill equipped for the expanding demands.

A paper recently published in conjunction with that group, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, described a system at “a breaking point,” with reports of abusive images “exceeding the capabilities of independent clearinghouses and law enforcement to take action.” It suggested that future advancements in machine learning might be the only way to catch up with the criminals.

The next section:

The Times reviewed over 10,000 pages of police and court documents; conducted software tests to assess the availability of the imagery through search engines; accompanied detectives on raids; and spoke with investigators, lawmakers, tech executives and government officials. The reporting included conversations with an admitted pedophile who concealed his identity using encryption software and who runs a site that has hosted as many as 17,000 such images.

In interviews, victims across the United States described in heart-wrenching detail how their lives had been upended by the abuse. Children, raped by relatives and strangers alike, being told it was normal. Adults, now years removed from their abuse, still living in fear of being recognized from photos and videos on the internet. And parents of the abused, struggling to cope with the guilt of not having prevented it and their powerlessness over stopping its online spread.

Many of the survivors and their families said their view of humanity had been inextricably changed by the crimes themselves and the online demand for images of them.

“I don’t really know how to deal with it,” said one woman who, at age 11, had been filmed being sexually assaulted by her father. “You’re just trying to feel O.K. and not let something like this define your whole life. But the thing with the pictures is — that’s the thing that keeps this alive.”

The Times’s reporting revealed a problem global in scope — most of the images found last year were traced to other countries — but one firmly rooted in the United States because of the central role Silicon Valley has played in facilitating the imagery’s spread and in reporting it to the authorities.

While the material, commonly known as child pornography, predates the digital era, smartphone cameras, social media and cloud storage have allowed the images to multiply at an alarming rate. Both recirculated and new images occupy all corners of the internet, including a range of platforms as diverse as Facebook Messenger, Microsoft’s Bing search engine and the storage service Dropbox.

In a particularly disturbing trend, online groups are devoting themselves to sharing images of younger children and more extreme forms of abuse. [The volume of imagery is now so overwhelming that when] reviewing tips from the national center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has narrowed its focus to images of infants and toddlers.

The story goes on to point out that the federal government, including Congress, has dramatically failed to take this issue as seriously as it ought to do.

In reading the piece, if you are especially sensitive, stop reading when you see a headline that says “The Cutting Edge.” If you have been sexually abused, what follows after that may well trigger you. There are brief descriptions of the kinds of things investigators have found. One tells the Times that in the old days, no one would ever walk into a shop and request hardcore porn involving three year olds — but now that’s what they can and do do from the privacy of their own homes, with the right Internet connections.

And it’s easier than it should be to hide this:

Exhibits in the case of the Love Zone, sealed by the court but released by a judge after a request by The Times, include screenshots showing the forum had dedicated areas where users discussed ways to remain “safe” while posting and downloading the imagery. Tips included tutorials on how to encrypt and share material without being detected by the authorities.

The offender in Ohio, a site administrator named Jason Gmoser, “went to great lengths to hide” his conduct, according to the documents. Testimony in his criminal case revealed that it would have taken the authorities “trillions of years” to crack the 41-character password he had used to encrypt the site. He eventually turned it over to investigators, and was sentenced to life in prison in 2016.

The site was run by a number of men, including Brian Davis, a worker at a child day care center in Illinois who admitted to documenting abuse of his own godson and more than a dozen other children — aged 3 months to 8 years — and sharing images of the assaults with other members. Mr. Davis made over 400 posts on the site. One image showed him … raping a 2-year-old; another depicted a man raping [an infant].

The Times reports that tech companies have historically been slow to report on their users who have been doing this stuff. Before it was purchased by Verizon (which recently sold it), Tumblr even let one user know that his account had been turned over to authorities, giving him the chance to destroy the child porn evidence ahead of the authorities.

Look at this:

“In a recent case, an offender filmed himself drugging the juice boxes of neighborhood children before tricking them into drinking the mix,” said Special Agent Flint Waters, a criminal investigator for the State of Wyoming. “He then filmed himself as he sexually abused unconscious children.”

Mr. Waters, appearing before Congress in Washington, was describing what he said “we see every day.”

He went on to present a map of the United States covered with red dots, each representing a computer used to share images of child sex abuse. Fewer than two percent of the crimes would be investigated, he predicted. “We are overwhelmed, we are underfunded and we are drowning in the tidal wave of tragedy,” he said.

Mr. Waters’s testimony was delivered 12 years ago — in 2007.

The Times story — which is so brutal, but so very important that I ended up re-subscribing to the newspaper, to support journalism like this — details how all of us are failing to take this problem seriously enough. More:

But the problem of child sexual abuse imagery faces a particular hurdle: It gets scant attention because few people want to confront the enormity and horror of the content, or they wrongly dismiss it as primarily teenagers sending inappropriate selfies.

Some state lawmakers, judges and members of Congress have refused to discuss the problem in detail, or have avoided attending meetings and hearings when it was on the agenda, according to interviews with law enforcement officials and victims.

Steven J. Grocki, who leads a group of policy experts and lawyers at the child exploitation section of the Justice Department, said the reluctance to address the issue went beyond elected officials and was a societal problem. “They turn away from it because it’s too ugly of a mirror,” he said.

Yet the material is everywhere, and ever more available.

“I think that people were always there, but the access is so easy,” said Lt. John Pizzuro, a task force commander in New Jersey. “You got nine million people in the state of New Jersey. Based upon statistics, we can probably arrest 400,000 people.”

Please read the whole thing — if you can stomach the brief descriptions of what investigators have found in some cases. The descriptions are not at all gratuitous. They are necessary, I believe, to compel readers to understand what we’re talking about. So we don’t “turn away from it because it’s too ugly of a mirror.” If you want a shorter, less detailed version that conveys the basic information, read here. 

I saw this from Twitter friends the other day, commenting on the Times story:

Read the Times story, and tell me that the sexualization of children by our media and other elites is harmless. Here is Good Morning, America with a story celebrating Desmond Is Amazing, the child drag queen. These stories are everywhere. Here’s an Instagram photo of that same kid dancing for money at a gay bar in Brooklyn:

Read the Times story and think hard about Drag Queen Story Hour, where little children are explicitly encouraged to think of themselves as sexual beings, and as sexually fluid. Here’s a funny 1980s skit from the Canadian comedy show SCTV, in which John Candy plays the (at the time) legendary drag queen Divine, portraying Peter Pan in a children’s play.

The joke is that it’s outrageous to think that drag queens would be hired to entertain little children. The reader who sent this clip in said that within a generation, we’ve gone from this kind of thing being hilarious satire to being reality — and not only reality, but a reality that you have to approve of, or stand accused of being a hateful bigot.

Look: as a society, we are grooming children to be sexually abused, and we are grooming teenagers and adults to be sexual abusers.

More broadly, this makes me wonder if humanity can survive the Internet. I’m serious. When our most disgusting, savage, darkest fantasies can be indulged with a few clicks, what hope is there for us? The late media theorist Neil Postman said that when children can have instant access to all the “secrets” of adulthood, childhood (as a social construct) ends. He wrote that in the early 1990s, during the cable TV era. Had he lived to see the Internet, and the hardcore porn available to children there, Postman would have despaired unto death.

This demon is not going to be cast out voluntarily. It’s going to take a massive ramping-up of the state to deal with it effectively. If we don’t do it, though, this is going to destroy us.

In the meantime: parents, when I tell you not to give your children smartphones, this is why!

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Francis Trolls US Conservatives

Pope Francis today met with his fellow Jesuit, the LGBT advocate Father James Martin. From the Jesuit magazine America:

Pope Francis received James Martin, S.J., in a 30-minute private audience in the papal library of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace this morning, Sept. 30, in what is seen here as a highly significant public statement of support and encouragement for this U.S. Jesuit. Father Martin is well known as a public speaker, author and for his pastoral ministry to L.G.B.T. people.

“I was very moved by my encounter with a real pastor,” a joy-filled Father Martin told America after the meeting. “I am most grateful to the Holy Father for his generosity in granting me an audience in the midst of his busy schedule,” he said.

Father Martin would not reveal what the pope said to him in the course of their conversation, except that “we both laughed several times.” He did say, however, that “among other things, I shared with Pope Francis the experiences of L.G.B.T. Catholics around the world, their joys and their hopes, their griefs and concerns. I also spoke about my own ministry to them and how they feel excluded.” He concluded, “I saw this audience as a sign of the Holy Father’s care for L.G.B.T. people.”

America added:

By choosing to meet him in this place, Pope Francis was making a public statement. In some ways, the meeting was the message.

That is certainly true. Francis the other day trolled US conservative Catholics by publicly endorsing a 2017 article appearing in the Jesuit journal Civiltà Cattolica, in which the two non-American authors wrote an analysis of US politics and theology that was so laughably off-the-mark that even some American liberals criticized it:

Pope Francis endorses controversial 2017 article by @antoniospadaro and @marcebiblia on the “ecumenism of hatred” between U.S. “evangelical fundamentalists” and Catholic conservatives. https://t.co/Dkr7Bi9Lph pic.twitter.com/pOfy32dBzH

— Francis X. Rocca (@FrancisXRocca) September 26, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I am hearing from various sources that more and more orthodox Catholics are concluding that the future in Francischurch is grim. Instead of fighting to reform it, they are instead committing themselves to defending their own families and local communities — in some cases, from the institutional church, of which they remain a part.

In other words, they are taking the Benedict Option within the Catholic Church, to save the Catholic faith for themselves and their children in the face of what this progressive pope and his many acolytes throughout the system are doing. What an extraordinary time we’re living in.

Are you a conservative Catholic who is doing that? If so, what tipped you to that point of view? Or are you still fighting within the system? If so, why are you hopeful that the resurgent progressivism can be resisted?

 

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Woke Math In Seattle

In the future, historians will look back upon the suicide of our civilization and will see this poison for what it is. In Seattle, the city’s public schools have decided that everything, even mathematics, has to be seen through the lens of oppression and racism. Below are actual screenshots from the guidelines for math education there:

Read the whole thing here. 

The young people who are going to learn real math are those whose parents can afford to put them in private schools. The public school kids of all races are going to get dumber and dumber … and this is going to compel the wokesters in charge of Human Resources at institutions along life’s way to demand changing standards to fit political goals. Eventually, bridges are going to start falling down. That too will be the fault of Whiteness.

Are there any officials in the Democratic Party with the courage to stand up to this? How is it that the people of Seattle, of all races, support this ideologized education? This represents a total corruption of standards. Rochelle Gutierrez is an award-winning professor of education at University of Illinois, and an advocate for the idea that mathematics is deformed by Whiteness. Check out one of her videos here. In it, at one point she says that refusing to politicize math instruction is “dehumanizing.”

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Dreadlocks Hate Hoax

Verily, our president is a crackpot. He might or might not need to be impeached — that remains to be seen. But if you want a good example of why a lot of conservatives are not going to be quick to surrender him, look no further than this disgusting story from suburban Virginia, via the Washington Post:

The sixth-grade girl at a private Virginia school who accused three classmates last week of forcibly cutting her hair now says the allegations were false, according to statements from the girl’s family and the principal at Immanuel Christian School in Springfield. School officials met with the girl and her family Monday morning before releasing the statement.

The 12-year-old, who is African American, said three white boy students held her down in a school playground a week ago during recess, covered her mouth, called her insulting names and used scissors to cut her hair.

The grandparents of the girl, who are her legal guardians, released an apology Monday.

“To those young boys and their parents, we sincerely apologize for the pain and anxiety these allegations have caused,” the grandparents wrote in a statement sent to The Washington Post by the school. “To the administrators and families of Immanuel Christian School, we are sorry for the damage this incident has done to trust within the school family and the undue scorn it has brought to the school. To the broader community, who rallied in such passionate support for our daughter, we apologize for betraying your trust.”

Last week, NBC Nightly News broadcast the allegations from coast to coast — proving that the mainstream media learned nothing from the Jussie Smollett hoax, or the Covington Catholic boys witch hunt. From the print version of the story:

Three sixth-grade white boys at a Christian school in Virginia where Vice President Mike Pence’s wife works cut a black girl’s hair, calling it “nappy” and her “ugly,” the girl says.

Amari Allen, 12, told NBC Washington that she was about to go down a slide during recess at Immanuel Christian School in Springfield on Monday when one of the boys grabbed her and put his hand over her mouth. The second boy grabbed her arms, while the third cut off some of her dreadlocks.

“They said my hair was nappy and I was ugly,” she said.

The key phrase in this story is “where Vice President Mike Pence’s wife works.” That’s the only reason why an unproven incident of schoolyard bullying makes national news: because it’s something that the media can use to trash Republicans. Of course this black 12-year-old who claims she was bullied on the playground at a conservative Christian school that employs Mike Pence’s wife must be telling the truth, because that’s exactly how white male conservative Christians behave — right? And of course a playground incident, the truth of which had not even been established must be reported as nationally relevant news.

I feel sorry for Amari Allen’s grandparents, her caretakers. They had the courage to come forward with the truth … but not after they had chosen to go on national television to denounce the school. Now Amari Allen has put her grandparents in a position to be horribly treated by racists — something that would not have happened had NBC and others waited to see if the story was true, or at least given some basis other than the testimony of one child, before reporting it.

I urge you all to read Douglas Murray’s book The Madness Of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity. Our nutty president tweets about a new civil war, but I tell you, if anybody is going to spark a civil war in this country, it will be people like this girl, and more importantly, the media that credit racist slurs like hers without investigation, because it fits their pre-determined narrative. In his chapter on the race madness that has overtaken America, Murray writes, of Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Coates not only exaggerates hurt, but does so knowing that all of the weaponry is now on his side. There is a gun loaded on the stage, but it is not the white men who are holding it, it is him. When students starting out on campuses across the US wonder whether making insincere claims and catastrophizing minute events can be rewarding, they can look to Coates and know that it is.

And:

Today there appears to be a return to a heightened level of rhetoric on race and a great crescendo of claims about racial differences – just when most of us hoped that any such differences might be fading away. Some people in a spirit of resentment, others in a spirit of glee, are jumping up and down on this quietly ticking ground. They can have no idea what lies beneath them.

They really don’t. And these are not things that occur separately from each other. If you read Murray’s book, you will see that the progressive ideology — intersectionality — links contemporary feminism, LGBT activism, and racial activism. These people have a lot of power in this culture — in the media, academia, in corporations, in other institutions, and in the government — and the prospect of them consolidating even more power quite rightly frightens conservatives.

Liberals love to tell themselves that we on the Right are exaggerating this stuff. We aren’t. This deranged ideology is taken as reality by progressives in power today. It may be the case that some conservatives decide that the danger posed by the Trump presidency is greater than the danger posed by progressive ideology in power. But many more will weigh the choice and decide that despite his flaws and failures, Trump in power is less damaging than handing over the state into the hands of ideologues who believe that white people (or straight people, or men, etc.) are guilty until proven innocent.

The Covington Catholic boys were held up to national spite by the media, based on something they did not do, but that the media wished that they had done. Now the same thing has happened on a smaller scale to three white male Christian middle-schoolers in Virginia, whose names, thank God, were not released. This will not be the last time this happens.

UPDATE: Of course. Of course!

.@NYTimes removed race references from story after it turned out to be a hoax: https://t.co/1UNOhJobP6

— Maxim Lott (@maximlott) September 30, 2019

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Mistah Trump — He Crazy

Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2019

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This is fake outrage. Here’s a link to Schiff’s opening statement. At the four minute mark, just before he says the words that so offend POTUS, Schiff says that he’s paraphrasing the president. Schiff made it clear that he was not quoting the president, but offering an interpretation of the transcript’s meaning. And for that, Trump is publicly speculating on arresting the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee for treason.

This, in the United States of America, in 2019.

Quoting his de facto chaplain:

….If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Pastor Robert Jeffress, @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2019

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So: the President of the United States has raised the prospect of arresting a leading opposition legislator for treason, because the president objects to the opposition leader’s characterization of his phone call. And he has approvingly quoted the prospect of something like the Civil War arising from an attempt to impeach him.

This is unhinged. It really is. Trump’s paranoia, à la Nixon, is going to destroy him. Thomas Bossert, the first director of Homeland Security in the Trump administration, is now saying that Trump’s obsession with 2016 persisted even though officials tried to explain to him that the Ukraine theory was not true:

“It is completely debunked,” Mr. Bossert said of the Ukraine theory on ABC. Speaking with George Stephanopoulos, Mr. Bossert blamed Mr. Giuliani for filling the president’s head with misinformation. “I am deeply frustrated with what he and the legal team is doing and repeating that debunked theory to the president. It sticks in his mind when he hears it over and over again, and for clarity here, George, let me just again repeat that it has no validity.”

He added that pressing Ukraine’s president was disturbing, but noted that it remained unproven whether Mr. Trump’s decision to withhold aid to Ukraine was tied to the demand for investigations into former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.

“It is a bad day and a bad week for this president and for this country if he is asking for political dirt on an opponent,” Mr. Bossert said. “But it looks to me like the other matter that’s far from proven is whether he was doing anything to abuse his power and withhold aid in order to solicit such a thing.” On Twitter later on Sunday, he added that he did “not see evidence of an impeachable offense.”

Other former aides said separately on Sunday that the president had a particular weakness for conspiracy theories involving Ukraine, which in the past three years has become the focus of far-right media outlets and political figures. Mr. Trump was more willing to listen to outside advisers like Mr. Giuliani than his own national security team.

Mr. Trump has known Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, for years and likes his pugnacious approach and the fact that he never pushes back, said one former aide, who like others asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. Mr. Giuliani would “feed Trump all kinds of garbage” that created “a real problem for all of us,” said the former aide.

Read the whole thing. In it, Bossert explains in greater detail how Trump would perseverate on that conspiracy theory, despite his people telling him it’s not true. Bossert says this is going to destroy the Trump presidency if he doesn’t let go of it.

The thing is, we know that Trump will neither arrest a member of Congress, nor start a civil war. By now, we just roll our eyes at this garbage. Nevertheless, the same crazy streak that led him to say things like this over Twitter also overwhelmed the normal restraints that would have prevented him from risking his presidency over obsession with the 2016 election which he won. 

Ross Douthat wrote on Sunday:

But if Trump survives impeachment and somehow gets re-elected, there will be no after Trump, not yet and not for four long years. Instead Trump will bestride his party like a decaying colossus, and his administration’s accelerative deterioration will be the G.O.P.’s as well. There will be no second-term policymaking, no John Kelly to stabilize the ship — just a floating hulk drifting between the icebergs of recession and foreign crisis, with all American conservatism onboard.

“Accelerative deterioration,” aye. He’s already tweeting about the arrest of his political opponents, and a new Civil War, as prophesied by a court-evangelical TV preacher. Seriously, everybody, this is a problem. This is a big problem. As ever with Trump, he is his own worst enemy.

UPDATE: If you want to know why a lot of conservatives find crazy Trump less of a threat than crazy liberals, read this about the new Tawana Brawley. 

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Superman As Good As Gatsby

A reader who is a high school English teacher writes:

Just opened the latest edition of the Council Chronicle, the quarterly magazine of the National Council of Teachers of English. It’s my first issue in awhile, because I was teaching in another department for the last few years. The table of contents is below [The photo above is the one the reader sent; all the articles are behind a subscriber paywall. — RD].

This publication used to be a great resource for lesson plan and assessment ideas. Now it’s a guide for how to politicize instruction and dumb down the curriculum. Just about every article mentions free choice as the standard — in other words, letting students read whatever they feel like instead of choosing works of substance for them. (Actual quote from a university instructor: “Why do we think The Great Gatsby is great when Superman has been around for almost as long?”) Sorry, but there’s no way I would have voluntarily picked up most of the classics that made me love literature — but having been assigned them in my courses, I discovered ideas and styles that stretched my perspective and challenged my intellect. Now the only leading we’re encouraged to do is toward “activism and joy,” in that order.

I was planning to attend the annual convention this year, but at this point I can’t see spending professional development funds on this hogwash. And this joke of a magazine is going straight to the recycle bin.

Readers, do you know if the English teachers at your child’s school follow these culturally Marxist pedagogical trends? Shouldn’t you know, one way or the other? If this is how your kid is being taught English literature, you need either to get your kid to a different school, or to do what Czechs did under communism, and find some way to give private instruction in real literature and humanities subjects to your young people.

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