Rod Dreher's Blog, page 457

Smerdyakovism

A reader posted a link to this 2014 essay by Costica Bradacan, talking about how Russia can be understood through Dostoevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov. Bradatan begins by saying that there is something demonic in the Russian soul, something that cannot be explained rationally. Excerpt:

Vladimir Putin’s sudden decision to start slicing up Ukraine must have reminded East Europeans of Russia’s traditional expansionism, but also of something else, something even worse. For there are still vivid in Eastern Europe’s collective memory episodes of Russian brutality so ferocious, so nightmarish that they can’t have anything to do with politics, not even with its most cynical variety. No matter how you look at them, even within a logic of repression, these acts just don’t make sense; they are too extreme to serve any punitive or preventive function — or any other rational purpose, for that matter.

One of those events was the great famine that Stalin imposed on Ukraine to punish it politically. Excerpt:

In a recent book, Bloodlands, Yale historian Timothy Snyder estimates that approximately 3.3 million people died then of starvation. (Some three millions were ethnic Ukrainians; the rest were Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews.) How was this done? First, when the peasants could not meet the excessively high quotas of grain set by Moscow, all their food supplies were confiscated. “The authorities searched for that grain as if they were searching for bombs and machine guns,” writes Vasily Grossman, whose book Everything Flows offers one of the most compassionate accounts of the Ukrainian famine. Everything edible was taken away by party activists and OGPU (Soviet security services) officers. Their entire seed fund was seized; even cooked food, dinner already set on the table, was swept away.

Once that was done, people were left to die the slowest of deaths: “The village was left to look after itself — with everyone starving in their huts. […] And all the various officials from the city stopped coming.” To make sure nobody escaped, roadblocks were set up by the OGPU, and the railway stations were guarded by armed soldiers. Through Party and OGPU channels, Stalin was kept abreast of what was going on.

As an American, there is a lot that I admire about Russia. But if I were Ukrainian, I think I would hate Russia from the depths of my soul for this.

The other incident mentioned by Bradatan was the massacre at the Katyn forest of Polish army officers and soldiers who had been defeated by the invading Nazis, and surrendered to the Red Army rather than be taken by the Germans. They were slaughtered, every one of them:

The killings were performed individually: two NKVD officers would hold the victim by the hands, while a third would shoot him in the head, from behind. One victim at a time, some 21,892 times. Why did they kill unarmed, defenseless prisoners like this? Just because.

“Just because” — that’s what defines these episodes. They are enormously brutal, gratuitous, and incomprehensible. They seem to emerge from some dark corner of human nature: no matter how intently we scrutinize it, we cannot make anything out.

Russians have done this to themselves as well, of course. This is what the Gulag and the Great Terror essentially were: just because. Bradatan quotes the prosecutor at the end of The Brothers Karamazov, saying that the Russian character is stretched between “two abysses”: one abyss its lofty ideals, the other its foul degradation. Russia is capable of the highest highs and the lowest lows. Bradatan argues that the Russian soul was captured well by Dostoevsky in that novel, in his portrait of the brothers.

There is Ivan, who is relentlessly philosophical. Alyosha represents the heights of Russian spirituality. More:

Dmitri Karamazov is the face of ordinary Russia. The prosecutor who sends him to Siberia says as much. “She is here, our dear mother Russia, we can smell her, we can hear her!” As Russians, “we are lovers of enlightenment and Schiller, and at the same time we rage in taverns,” he says, “an amazing mixture of good and evil.”

Symbolically, the most important character is the bastard son Smerdyakov, who stands for the aspect of the Russian soul that nobody wants to recognize. He’s a nobody in the novel, though he ends up being very important because of his deeds. The most important thing about him, says Bradatan, is that he does evil for its own sake. “He kills just because.” More:

Smerdyakovism is an obscure, yet tremendous force that runs deep throughout Russian history. Its basic principle is formulated succinctly by the lackey himself: “The Russian people need thrashing.” Why? Just because. Smerdyakovism flares up especially in the form of leaders and institutions that rule through terror alone; repression for the sake of repression. Its impact is overwhelming, its memory traumatic, and its social effects always paralyzing. Joseph Conrad sees “something inhuman,” from another world, in these Smerdyakovian institutions. The government of Tsarist Russia, relying on an omnipresent, omnipotent secret police, and “arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation.” And that was just the beginning.

It was Stalin who brought Smerdyakovism to perfection. Under his rule, Smerdyakov starved to death millions of Ukrainian peasants and killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners. In Siberia he built a vast network of camps and prisons whereby a significant part of Russia’s population was turned into slave labor. All this for no particular reason — just because. In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documents the whole thing in maddening detail. The Great Terror that Stalin orchestrated and put into practice with the help of the NKVD in the late 1930s is perhaps the most eloquent example of Smerdyakovism in 20th-century Russia. Without any trace of rational justification, the country’s artistic, scientific, political, and military elites were decimated within a few years. Some of its best writers, scientists, engineers, and generals received then a bullet in the head.

Bradatan goes on to say that Putin has to be understood as a manifestation of Smerdyakovism — not a Stalin-level example, but an example all the same. Read the whole thing. 

I defer to you readers who know something about Russia and/or Russian literature to comment on this essay. I found it fascinating, and am eager to hear what you have to say. To me, the most interesting aspect of the piece is its central claim that the greatness of Russia and Russia’s wickedness are all part of the same organic unity. Bradatan quotes from the prosecutor’s speech in The Brothers K:

“Two abysses, gentlemen,” says the prosecutor, “in one and the same moment — without that […] our existence is incomplete.”

This image of the two intertwined abysses can be said to be a picture of Russia itself. The basest and the highest, the most despicable and the noblest, profanity and sainthood, total cynicism and winged idealism, all meet here.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Occurs to me that something similar might be said of the American South. Minnesota is by most standards a better place to live than Mississippi, whose history includes great poverty and racist cruelty. But then again, Minnesota never produced a Faulkner, a Welty, or a Percy, and could not have done. I’m not putting Minnesota down over this. I’m just saying that Mississippi, and the American South in general, is abyssal in the same tragic way as Russia’s. Think about it: Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit is Smerdyakov.

UPDATE.2: OK, OK, Minnesota has produced some fine writers. I didn’t say they did not. I don’t think any of them come up to Faulkner’s status, but that’s me.

Whatever Happened To Claire?

Ruthie Leming and her daughter Claire

This was one of the iconic photos in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: a shot of Ruthie’s daughter Claire, coming to see her mother in the hospital several days after Ruthie’s Stage Four cancer diagnosis. Look how beatific she was, just snuggling in next to Mama. This was 2011.

And here is 2017, Claire’s graduation from high school She’s going to college in the fall to study nursing. Seeing how much of a different good nurses made for her mother inspired Claire to follow in their footsteps. Just though you Little Way readers would like to know.

For The Love Of St. Benedict

(L to R) Area Man, Father Martin Bernhard, Father Benedict Nivakoff

I spent the weekend in Dallas, where I spoke on Saturday night about the Benedict Option at a fundraiser for the Monks of Norcia. As you know, their monastery was heavily damaged by last October’s massive earthquake, the one that reduced the medieval basilica to rubble. God spared the monks, and all the people of Norcia (though every church in the ancient town was leveled). All heeded the warnings from the early tremors, and evacuated before the big one hit. As I tell it in The Benedict Option:

With dust still rising from the rubble, Father Basil knelt on the stones of the piazza, facing the ruined basilica, and accompanied by nuns and a few elderly Norcini, including one in a wheelchair, he prayed. Later amateur video posted to YouTube showed Father Basil, Father Benedict, and Father Martin running through the streets of the rubble-strewn town, looking for the dying who needed last rites. By the grace of God, there were none.

Back in America, Father Richard Cipolla, a Catholic priest in Connecticut and an old friend of Father Benedict’s, e-mailed the subprior when he heard the news of the latest quake. “Is there damage? What is going on?” Father Cipolla wrote.

“Yes, damage much worse,” Father Benedict replied. “But we are okay. Much to tell you, but just pray. I am well, and God continues to purify us and bring very good things.”

The next morning, as the sun rose over Norcia, Father Benedict sent a message to the monastery’s friends all over the world. He said that no Norcini had lost their lives in the quake because they had heeded the warnings from the earlier tremors and left town. “[God] spent two months preparing us for the complete destruction of our patron’s church so that when it finally happened we would watch it, in horror but in safety, from atop the town,” the priest-monk wrote.

Father Benedict added, “These are mysteries which will take years—not days or months—to understand.”

Surely that is true. But notice this: the earth moved, and the Basilica of St. Benedict, which had stood firm for many centuries, tumbled to the ground. Only the facade, the mere semblance of a church, remains. Because the monks headed for the hills after the August earthquake, they survived. God preserved them in the holy poverty of their canvas-covered Bethlehem, where they continued to live the Rule in the ancient way, including chanting the Old Mass. Now they can begin rebuilding amid the ruins, their resilient Benedictine faith teaching them to receive this catastrophe as a call to deeper holiness and sacrifice. God willing, new life will one day spring forth from the rubble.

“We pray and watch from the mountainside, thinking of the long three years Saint Benedict spent in the cave before God decided to call him out to become a light to the world,” wrote Father Benedict. “Fiat. Fiat.”



Let it be. Let it be.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

Here is an image from the piazza in Norcia shortly after the basilica collapsed. These people are only yards away from the pile. That is the monk Father Basil:

I wrote at the time:

There is a man driven to his knees, on the piazza, surrounded by nuns, the elderly, and someone in a wheelchair. The weak, the frightened, those without a roof over their heads. What did the priest-monk Basil do? He went to his knees to pray. This is the fruit of the spiritual training, day and night, that Brother Augustine talks about — the training that simply is the Benedictine life. This is the core of the Benedict Option: building up the daily habits of prayer, asceticism, and charity that allow the Holy Spirit to make us resilient. If you think losing their basilica and monastery is going to stop the Monks of Norcia, you badly underestimate them. All the prayer, worship, fasting and brotherhood they’ve been living these last 16 years, this ordering their lives around the service of Christ, has rooted them deeply in the faith. This terrible calamity shows their human weakness, but it also will reveal their inner strength, for as God said to St. Paul, “My power is made perfect in weakness.”

The monks have been living in temporary quarters on their property outside the town since last October. With donations of money, supplies, and labor, they built two temporary wooden structures for themselves so they could retire the tents. The quarters are spartan, but … enough. They continue to live out the daily Benedictine life of prayer, fasting, work, worship, and Scripture study — just as Benedictine monks have been doing in this land for 1,500 years.

Some of their friends and supporters in Dallas held a benefit dinner for them this past weekend. People came in from all over the country for it — and not everybody there was Catholic. There were a couple of us Orthodox, some Episcopalians (including the Bishop of North Dakota), at least two Anglicans (ACNA), a Lutheran, and no doubt others — all there out of love and respect for the mission of the Monks of Norcia. Father Cassian Folsom, the founder of the monastery, also came.

The monks are trying to raise $5 million to build a new monastery on their hillside property, upon which lie the ruins of a much older monastery. The Diocese of Spoleto actually owns their old, badly damaged monastery inside the Norcia walls, and says it needs the space. But this is a blessing in disguise, the monks now believe. Cloistered, traditional Benedictines do not usually live in urban spaces. Though their property is only a short distance from the town itself, it’s far enough away to be tranquil, and to give the monks the kind of solitude they need. Here’s a short video showing what they’re doing now:

I had the opportunity to speak privately with all three monks present in Dallas — coffee with Father Cassian, and a meeting in their hotel with Fathers Benedict and Martin. I reminded the younger monks that one of their number told me in Norcia in February 2016 that they could not be for the pilgrims who come who they (the monks) are supposed to be without spending so many hours behind their monastery walls, living out the Rule in prayer, contemplation, Scripture study, and the rest. They reaffirmed it in our meeting, and agreed that we lay Christians living in the world need to do something like this as well.

This came up in a Sirius XM radio interview I did with the terrific Catholic channel host Jen Fulwiler as I was driving to Dallas on Friday. Jen began the interview by saying that she has never seen a book that so many commentators have mischaracterized so wildly as this one. She asked me for my guess as to why that is.

Of course it’s true that some critics have genuine and perfectly legitimate criticisms of the book and the concept. I honor them, and have learned from their comments. But a huge number of critics rail against straw men — and these are the people Jen’s talking about. I told her that my sense is that they are afraid that my diagnosis of this culture’s crisis is true , and that frightens them. So they distort what I say in the book, or construct straw men that they knock down as a way of telling themselves that they’ve dealt with the Benedict Option, and now don’t have to take it seriously.

As you know, the main straw man these dishonest critics bring up is “Dreher Is Saying We All Have To Head For The Hills And Build Compounds!” I was very pleased, then, to hear Father Cassian himself knocking this falsehood down in the comments he made introducing me.

It was a great evening, and it was a special treat to meet a couple of folks who read this blog and comment here from time to time. Sandra Embry from the Dallas area introduced herself. Dr. Thomas Tucker and his wife Melanie came down from Washington state for the event. Thomas and I have been e-mailing each other and conversing in the comments section here for at least a decade. At long last we met. I had a wonderful time sipping Manhattans and talking with the Tuckers, as well as Baylor philosopher Tom Hibbs and his son Dan, until past midnight.

The next morning I went to liturgy at St. Seraphim cathedral, my old Orthodox parish in Dallas. What a joy and a blessing to be with old friends in that beautiful church. After coffee hour, I joined my friend and Orthodox godfather Vladimir Grigorenko and his daughter Masha for a messy, glorious lunch at Torchy’s Tacos:

In Waco, Alan Jacobs first introduced me to Torchy’s, a small Texas-based chain. Since then, I eat every possible meal at a Torchy’s, if there is one locally. I don’t think that I’ve had better tacos anywhere, ever. Normally I’m indifferent to queso, but Masha ordered some for the table on Sunday, and holy cow, Torchy’s is transcendent.

Vladimir, who is Ukrainian, challenged me on this post of mine from the other day, and warned me against any kind of romanticization of Russia and its culture. He strongly rejects the idea that the West, despite its spiritual malaise, should take advice from contemporary Russia. Vladimir counsels the “Dmitri Option,” named after the late Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas, whom Vladimir loved and served. The Dmitri Option is basically this: love and welcome all, go to church, say your prayers, live out the Gospel, bear one another’s burdens, confess, repent, and rejoice.

I’d say that that’s just the church being what the church is supposed to be. But then, I say that about the Benedict Option too. It’s nothing more than the church returning to traditional Christian spiritual and moral discipline, inspired by the monastic life.

After lunch, I got on the road for the eight-hour drive home. I found myself praying that some rich Catholic would take an interest in the Monks of Norcia, and give them what they need to build the permanent monastery. I’m not even Catholic, but I’m passionate about these monks’ mission, and consider their monastery to be a spiritual lighthouse to all of us in the Western world in a very dark time. I wish I had $5 million to give them, because I believe that the future of the Western world that my descendants will inhabit depends in part on what will happen now and in the decades to come inside the spiritual stronghold those monks intend to build on the side of that mountain in Umbria, a short walk from the very spot from which, in the year 480, came the blessed spark that God used to help save Western civilization in its last existential crisis.

If you know any rich Catholics (or anyone else) who wants to invest in the future of Western civilization, ask them to get in touch with the Monks of Norcia. It is one of the great privileges of my life to be able to tell others about them, through The Benedict Option, this blog, media interviews, and otherwise. I don’t have $5 million to give, but I can give the gift of my words, which, by the grace of God, may reach someone who can see the beauty and worth of these lean men scratching out a prayerful, ascetic existence on an Umbrian mountainside, and who has the means to fulfill their dreams of a permanent home as a place of prayer, pilgrimage, and witness to all who seek God.

Over the weekend in Dallas, so many people introduced themselves to me and told me that their churches are doing congregational or Sunday School class studies of The Benedict Option, with the idea of discerning together what they could do, in their own church, to live out the Ben Op. Two people — one Catholic, one Evangelical — told me this past week that their pastors preached sermons based on the book. This is so gratifying. It’s exactly what I hope for the book: that it gets all Christians thinking and talking with each other about how to meet this crisis upon us. We’re not just lamenting the darkness, but we’re actually doing something constructive and hopeful!

As important as it is to dig into the chapters about Politics, Technology, Sex and Sexuality, Education, and so forth, nothing in the book is more important than Chapter Three, the one in which I introduce the monks, and they talk about the actual spiritual practices that they do day in and day out — all of which keep them oriented to God, and deepens their conversion. That’s the heart of it. Without that, nothing we do matters.

View From Your Table

Austin, Texas

Everybody who was at the Monks of Norcia fundraising dinner received two bottles of Birra Nursia in their gift bags. One of the attendees drank one of his this Memorial Day, and sent in the above photo.

Black Like … Me?

So, I sent a DNA sample to 23andMe to find out my genetic ancestry. The results came back this morning:

My genetic profile. Light blue is Northwestern European.

Mostly unsurprising. I’m 99.3 percent European. About 67 percent of that ancestry is Anglo-Irish, with 9 percent “French and German” (they can’t yet distinguish between French and German ancestry, so my ancestors came from that region; it’s got to be German, because the first Dreher to come to the US came from Germany; Dreher is a German name meaning “turner”), and 4 percent Scandinavian. The rest is “broadly Northwestern European”.

But here’s the surprising part: 0.6 percent of my ancestry — the thin red slice — is West African. The genetics timeline indicates that five to eight generations ago (the test can’t be more specific), I had an ancestor who was 100 percent West African. That ancestor was likely born between 1700 and 1820. That means he or she was a slave. Because African slave males did not generally mate with European females, that means that my African ancestor was almost certainly female. So, great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother was probably a slave woman.

Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud! Heh.

I’m guessing that that woman’s child passed as white, and married a white person, and that couple’s children married whites, and on and on.

(The test also found that a little farther back on the family tree, I have an ancestor who was 100 percent Native American. Given the time line, this probably means that one of my European ancestors during colonial days married a Native American woman, as happened back then given the relative shortage of European women in North America at that time.)

This is amazing information. Focusing on the slave ancestor, this means that under the so-called “one drop rule” that was the law in some Southern states in Jim Crow times, I and my children would have been considered black, and subjected to segregation and persecution. Of course it’s highly unlikely that anyone would have known, not even us back then. Our physical appearance is, um, very white. But had genetic testing been around at that time, and had my ancestors been subject to it, the state would have learned that despite the whiteness of their skin, some of them were black, according to the law, and treated them unjustly.

I don’t know if my slave ancestor descends from my maternal or paternal line. My father is dead, but my mother is alive. I hope she will do the 23andme test to see what her ancestry is. That will tell me which line my African grandparent came from. Still, it’s almost certain that some of my ancestors fought a war whose goal in large part was to keep descendants of other ancestors enslaved. Genetically speaking, the story of the African slaves in North America is my story and my children’s story, too. And somewhere in this country, I may have black distant cousins alive today.

America, man.

Have you had your ancestral DNA profiled? If so, were there any surprises?

My genetic ancestry, according to 23andMe

UPDATE: Of course there’s no way to prove that my West African ancestor was a slave. It seems the most likely explanation given the time period in which West African DNA entered my line. But really, I don’t know.

Memorial Day In Deep America

Dairy Palace, Canton, Texas

That’s the sign outside the Dairy Palace in Canton, Texas.

May God bless the souls of the armed forces dead who perished in battle. And may God comfort those who called them their own.

Yale Rewards Student Thugs, Bullies

James Kirchick reports the jaw-dropping news in Tablet that Yale University has given an award for improving race relations on campus to Alexandra Zina Barlowe and Abdul-Razak Zachariah, two leaders of the 2015 mob that bullied Prof. Nicholas Christakis over his wife’s suggestion that Yale shouldn’t try to police Halloween costumes. Excerpts:

But Nicholas Christakis was doing more than just defending the honor of his wife that afternoon in the Silliman courtyard. As video of the several hours-long ordeal revealed, Christakis was defending the most fundamental principle of higher education: that the university should serve as a place of free inquiry where individuals can respectfully engage with one another in the pursuit of knowledge.

At least, that’s what places like Yale claim to stand for. Not anymore.

Of the 100 or so students who confronted Christakis that day, a young woman who called him “disgusting” and shouted “who the fuck hired you?” before storming off in tears became the most infamous, thanks to an 81-second YouTube clip that went viral. (The video also—thanks to its promotion by various right-wing websites—brought this student a torrent of anonymous harassment). The videos that Tablet exclusively posted last year, which showed a further 25 minutes of what was ultimately an hours-long confrontation, depicted a procession of students berating Christakis. In one clip, a male student strides up to Christakis and, standing mere inches from his face, orders the professor to “look at me.” Assuming this position of physical intimidation, the student then proceeds to declare that Christakis is incapable of understanding what he and his classmates are feeling because Christakis is white, and, ipso facto, cannot be a victim of racism. In another clip, a female student accuses Christakis of “strip[ping] people of their humanity” and “creat[ing] a space for violence to happen,” a line later mocked in an episode of The Simpsons. In the videos, Howard, the dean who wrote the costume provisions, can be seen lurking along the periphery of the mob.

More:

The Orwellian veneration of racial agitators as racial conciliators is the logical conclusion of Yale’s craven capitulation to the hard left forces of identitarian groupthink. From the very beginning of this ordeal, the Yale administration refused to state some simple but necessary truths: that the missive Erika Christakis wrote was entirely appropriate; that the “demands” issued by protesting students (such as an “ethnic studies distributional requirement”) were ridiculous; and, most important of all, that the rude and insubordinate treatment to which Nicholas Christakis was subjected rose to the level of a disciplinary offense. (It was not so long ago that mobbing a professor, physically threatening him, and screaming in his face, for hours, would result in expulsion).

But Yale’s spineless leaders were never willing to say these things.

Read the whole thing. Nicholas Christakis stepped down as master of Silliman College in the wake of the controversy, and his wife Erika resigned her position at the university.

Here’s a 12-minute documentary on the event that reveals the kind of man Yale allowed bratty students to intimidate. What you reward, you’ll get more of:

In November 2015, I wrote in this space:

If the Yale administration gives a single inch to these people, they will have disgraced themselves. Mark my words, though: these young left-wing, anti-liberal tyrants will move into elite positions in the American establishment, because Yale is a gateway to that kind of privilege. And when they do, they will exercise that power against anybody who doesn’t bow down to their radicalism.

Now Yale has honored two of the leaders of the mob for … leading the mob. This is what Yale University, one of this country’s most elite and influential institutions of higher education, values. Please take note of it.

The Hunting Of Bret Weinstein

The Evergreen State University in Olympia, Wash., promotes itself as a “progressive” liberal arts college. Here’s what that means: Watch Evergreen biology professor Bret Weinstein set upon by a mob of Social Justice Warriors. What was his sin? Objecting to a student demand that all white people get off campus for a day, because Racism:

What did these young scholars say to the professor?

The missive became public, resulting in an on-campus confrontation Wednesday between Weinstein and student protesters, in which Weinstein attempts to engage in dialogue with the students, who in turn call him a “piece of shit” and ask for his resignation, as seen in video footage of the altercation.

“Stop telling people of color they’re fucking useless,” a female student demands of Weinstein at one point.

“You’re useless, get the fuck out of here,” she adds, saying “fuck you, you piece of shit” as her peers ask Weinstein for an explanation of his email.

Weinstein attempts to answer–asking “may I answer that question?”–butthe student protesters suddenly decide that they no longer want his explanation, and respond with a resounding “no!”

They drove him off campus out of fear for his own safety:

As a biology professor for 15 years at Olympia’s The Evergreen State College, Bret Weinstein has seen his share of protests, but he’s never been afraid of being on campus until this week.

“I have been told by the Chief of Police it’s not safe for me to be on campus,” said Weinstein, who held his Thursday class in a downtown Olympia park.

An administrator confirmed the police department advised Weinstein it “might be best to stay off campus for a day or so.”

Demonstrations involving as many as 200 students filled classrooms and the President’s office on campus on Tuesday and Wednesday. Protesters are upset over what they believe are racist policies at the college, and some called for Weinstein to resign.

Every one of those students who intimidated that professor should be disciplined, and probably expelled. Every one. Including this nitwit:

But when student Marissa Parker, one of the protesters, heard Weinstein was advised to stay off campus, she responded, “If he feels unsafe or frightened for two days, he can only imagine what black and brown bodies have feared for years.”

According to the report from Seattle’s KING television station that I linked to above, Evergreen State officials are considering changing the school’s racial policies in response to the protesters. And look at this — the administration is gutless:

My students are being singled out for disagreeing with the conventional wisdom. Witch hunt, 2017. @EvergreenStCol is silent on the matter. pic.twitter.com/8LXlV5kRTx

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) May 25, 2017

The President @EvergreenStCol is barricaded w/ protestors. Police forced to stand down by Pres campus under protest-control. Students Unsafe

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) May 25, 2017

@EvergreenStCol To be clear: the police told me I am not safe on campus. They can not protect me. Students in jeopardy. No contact from admin. George?

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) May 25, 2017

What’s it going to take to make this evil stop?

The backlash is coming, though not fast enough. But it’s coming.

UPDATE: Or not. Reader Jonathan comments:

What makes you think there’s a backlash coming? I wish you were right or at least had any grounds for hoping as much, but such a pronouncement sounds like some pagan philosopher dismissing the rise of Christianity and declaring c. 500 AD that there will be a pagan backlash, just you wait, this insanity can’t last. . .

My wife is an academic in the humanities. She related to me just last night how she was at a colleague’s house with other faculty from her department and someone said to her, apropos of this person’s transgender male friend who was going to start breastfeeding his infant, “isn’t that cool?” And my wife said nothing, walked into the kitchen to put the food she had brought in the fridge. Don’t you think, she later said to me, that my silence would have given her (the colleague with the trans friend) pause? No, I said. No, you were the one being tested there, and after all it was you who were struck speechless. The only thing your colleague might have paused to wonder is how far astray you might be from the New Morality and whether she might be able eventually to leverage this against you. It was indeed a moment of confrontation, I told my wife, but it was you who were being confronted, not you who were confronting your colleague. The culture has swung round. We’re the freaks. (Catholics).

Not that I care. And you shouldn’t either, Rod. I don’t want to contribute to the prevalent misunderstanding of the BenOp as pure withdrawal, but the fact is the universities aren’t worth saving and the only reason you should focus on stories like this is to bring home the point that the Christian population needs to establish its own shadow-culture. If there’s a positive focus like that, about building up an alternative, I might care about a story like this. Otherwise, no, I don’t care about “stopping the evil,” let the schools burn, let the dead bury the dead.

What Was ‘Star Wars’ Like In 1977?

Charlie Camosy asks on his Facebook page what it was like to experience Star Wars in 1977. He was two years old, and (obviously) has no memory of it. I was 10, and I do.

I had been hearing about the Star Wars phenomenon for a few weeks, I guess. I really don’t remember, but back then, it was kind of a big deal to drive from our place into Baton Rouge, 30 miles away, and we didn’t do it often. Being a nerd, I would have watched the TV coverage of the Star Wars phenomenon obsessively, and aggravated my parents incessantly to take me to Baton Rouge to see the movie. And they would have put it off until they couldn’t stand it anymore.

My father dropped me off one afternoon at the University 4 theater just north of the LSU campus. He hated sci-fi, and wasn’t going to endure the thing. I was on my own. I remember being so excited I hardly knew what to do with myself. There wasn’t a line, which tells me that the film had to have been out for a while. I walked into the lobby, smelled the popcorn, looked nervously around at the movie posters on the wall, spotted the particular theater showing Star Wars (it was on the right side of the lobby, to the left), and hustled in. If you were 10 years old, and you were me, sitting in the darkness waiting for the movie to start was like being strapped into the top of an Apollo rocket waiting for ignition.

As I write this, I have a chill run down my back recalling the STAR WARS logo appearing on the big screen. Liftoff! As far as I was concerned, the crawl setting the stage for the drama (“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire…”) may as well have been unfurled from the summit of Sinai.

And then Princess Leia’s ship shot across the screen, pursued by the Imperial star destroyer. The wedge of its prow appeared at the screen’s corner … and the thing kept coming. It was massive, just massive! The vastness of the thing! I remember shivers racing through my body. That had never happened to me in a movie before, at least not that at that degree of intensity.

I don’t need to recount the plot for you, of course. For our purposes here, the important thing is to say that the experience was so overwhelming, so hyperrealistic, that I lost myself in the story. The climactic assault on the Death Star was so anxiety-producing that it’s a wonder my heart didn’t burst. I can see it in my mind’s eye now. And then, the medal ceremony brought it all to an end. I didn’t want it to end. Did not. How could something so unutterably great exist in the world?!

I walked out of the theater into the brightness of the lobby. Nothing looked the same. Nothing. It was as if I had come down the mountain with my face shining from having seen God. I walked like a pudgy little zombie out of the theater and to my dad sitting in his pickup in the parking lot.

“How was it?” he must have asked. I can’t remember. I’m sure I had no words that could have conveyed the sublimity of the experience. I still don’t. I only have the memory of how it felt.

All summer long, all I thought about was Star Wars. Riding the lawn tractor mowing our big yard, I was Darth Vader hurtling through the galaxy in my special TIE fighter, with the crimped wings. (Yes, I loved Vader, who was so scary and mysterious; Luke was a bland, whiny punk.) Of the Star Wars narratives I invented for myself that summer, there was no end. And this lasted with me far, far past that summer. It dominated the conversation of us boys at school that fall, and even for a year after that. It occupied nearly all of my thoughts for a very long time. I bought the John Williams soundtrack, put the vinyl disc on my cheapo GE stereo, and listened to the theme constantly. Constantly. 

I also listened to this monster radio hit. Remember, Star Wars debuted smack dab in the middle of the disco craze:

Even that was good. Hell, it was great! Because Star Wars, that’s why.

My room and my life filled up with Star Wars junk. I even had this:

wcm1111/Flickr

I remember standing with my mother in the corner of our living room late one Saturday night, begging her to iron a couple of these onto my Hanes t-shirts. I remember the way the overhead light was as I waited impatiently for her to quit pressing the fabric with the hot iron. I don’t think it worked very well.

I feel sorry for 10 year old kids today, who can never, ever have that experience, with any movie. There was never anything like Star Wars, not in terms of special effects. Just today, my kids watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Blu-ray, and were like, meh. They had seen it before. Even if they had not seen this particular film before, they still had seen it before, if you take my meaning. Because Star Wars changed everything. Is it over the top to call it the Woodstock of my generation?

Were you there? What was it like for you?

Middlebury Spinelessness, Republican Gianfortitude

Middlebury College has ended its semester by doing nothing more than tut-tutting students who prevented Charles Murray from speaking on campus, and assaulted him and a Middlebury professor. And so, this kind of thing will continue.

Last week, I was invited by a student group at a prestigious college to come speak to them in the fall. I thought about it, but turned them down, because this college has been in the news for illiberal shout-em-down student activism, and a pusillanimous reaction by the university administration. Frankly, I don’t want to take the chance that some student hotheads may decide to no-platform me, and I would not only not be able to speak, I would be dragged into a drama that I don’t care to be part of. And if it happened, I don’t have any faith that the university would lift a finger to prevent it, nor do I have any faith that if it happened, that there would be any repercussions for the little Maoists. It’s not that I’m afraid; it’s that it’s just not worth doing, at least not to me.

Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I’ve got a number of invitations to speak at colleges this fall, and I can’t accept all of them. I’m going to go to schools where I have faith that people who want to hear me will be able to hear me, and those who want to disagree with me will do so respectfully, within the bounds of civil discourse.

A lot of us conservatives have made hay out of illiberalism on campus, but now we have an egregious, high-profile example of brutal behavior on our side. Montana Congressional candidate Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter who asked him a perfectly normal question (about health care) that he didn’t care to answer. From a Fox News crew member’s eyewitness account of what happened:

During that conversation, another man — who we now know is Ben Jacobs of The Guardian — walked into the room with a voice recorder, put it up to Gianforte’s face and began asking if he had a response to the newly released Congressional Budget Office report on the American Health Care Act. Gianforte told him he would get to him later. Jacobs persisted with his question. Gianforte told him to talk to his press guy, Shane Scanlon.

At that point, Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him. Faith, Keith and I watched in disbelief as Gianforte then began punching the reporter. As Gianforte moved on top of Jacobs, he began yelling something to the effect of, “I’m sick and tired of this!”

Jacobs scrambled to his knees and said something about his glasses being broken. He asked Faith, Keith and myself for our names. In shock, we did not answer. Jacobs then said he wanted the police called and went to leave. Gianforte looked at the three of us and repeatedly apologized. At that point, I told him and Scanlon, who was now present, that we needed a moment. The men then left.

To be clear, at no point did any of us who witnessed this assault see Jacobs show any form of physical aggression toward Gianforte, who left the area after giving statements to local sheriff’s deputies.

It’s one thing for idiot college kids to be violent. But a middle-aged Congressional candidate?

It is disgusting to me that some conservatives are defending this thuggery, saying that the reporter had it coming. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh:

“In Montana — ladies and gentlemen, I must do something,” Limbaugh said. “I must join the chorus of people condemning what happened out there. This manly, obviously studly Republican candidate in Montana took the occasion to beat up a pajama-clad journalist, a Pajama Boy journalist out there.”

“The story is he grabbed his neck and threw the guy to the ground because the journalist was being insolent and disrespectful and whiny and moany and accusatory,” he explained. “And the manly, studly Republican simply didn’t realize that on the big stage you can’t do this kind of stuff and kicked the guy’s ass to the ground. This cannot be accepted. This must be condemned. I wonder how many people in Montana are now gonna vote for the guy, though?”

“And there’s a brave newspaper out there,” he continued, “a brave newspaper withdrew its endorsement for this studly, manly, brutish Republican. His name is Gianforte, Greg Gianforte, and he didn’t like this reporter who’s indistinguishable from your average Millennial man today, virtually indistinguishable. He’s from the U.K. Guardian.”

These people are making America worse by legitimizing violence against non-violent people whose politics or identity they don’t like. We need fortitude in support of civilized norms of behavior, not Gianfortitude.

But then, don’t forget that this is also true:

Democrats: Punch Nazis!

Guardian reporter (Allegedly) gets his glasses broken

Democrats: This Violence is intolerable#Gianforte

— Massive Dynamic