Rod Dreher's Blog, page 459

View From Your Table

Puebla, Mexico

My son Matt is in Puebla, Mexico, this weekend with a friend. Matt, across the table, is eating enchiladas in mole. Our friend, who took the shot, is eating maguey worms.

More recent VFYTs:

Laguna Beach, California

The reader writes:

Sat. am jazz, Laguna Beach, CA. The eschaton hasn’t quite arrived today.

And look at this, willya?

Porto, Portugal

The reader writes:

I recently got back from a trip to northern Portugal and wanted to share a phenomenal dish with you: The Francesinha. It’s a Portuguese take on the croque monsieur. The attached video shows how one is made, although there are plenty of variations as the one that I ate had a fried egg on top. There is *a lot* of meat in this sandwich, so it’s not something to eat if you’re stationary — but we were walking many miles a day, so bom apetite!!

https://youtu.be/dcpGu8uVq_Q

This sandwich is a staple in Porto, the nation’s 2nd largest city, and we saw it on the menu board in almost every cafe. We actually had ours at the Cafe Piohlo Douro, near the University of Porto, a restaurant itself over 100 years old.

Anyways, I wanted to recommend a visit to Portugal if you have a chance.

I second that recommendation. Julie and I went to Portugal for our honeymoon. We visited the Algarve and Lisbon, with a short pilgrimage to Fatima. Best thing I ate was porco alentejo, which is pork nuggets and clams in broth. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s good.

God & The Violin

Thanks to a new German Catholic friend in Munich for sending this along.

That clip is a made-up version of this real-life experiment involving violinist Joshua Bell in the DC subway. If you don’t know this story, you should!

‘A Real Nut Job’

Deeper and deeper into the hole:

President Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office this month that firing the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a document summarizing the meeting.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”

The conversation, during a May 10 meeting — the day after he fired Mr. Comey — reinforces the notion that the president dismissed him primarily because of the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian operatives. Mr. Trump said as much in one televised interview, but the White House has offered changing justifications for the firing.

The comments represented an extraordinary moment in the investigation, which centers in part on the administration’s contacts with Russian officials: A day after firing the man leading that inquiry, Mr. Trump disparaged him — to Russian officials.

The White House document that contained Mr. Trump’s comments was based on notes taken from inside the Oval Office and has been circulated as the official account of the meeting. One official read quotations to The Times, and a second official confirmed the broad outlines of the discussion.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, did not dispute the account.

So, let’s review: the President of the United States told the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador that he fired the “nut job” director of the FBI to get the heat off of himself … because of his relationship to them.

When the Comey firing first broke, some in the media compared it to Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” I thought that was over the top. You may recall that President Nixon faced possible impeachment in part over obstruction of justice charges in the House, but resigned to avoid that potential fate. President Clinton was impeached in part on an obstruction of justice charge for lying under oath about his extramarital affair. The more this Trump-Comey thing drags out, the easier it is becoming to make an obstruction of justice charge plausible as part of an impeachment proceeding (which is not the same thing as a criminal proceeding, note well).

A country whose president fires the FBI director because he’s irritated by an investigation into members of his administration, in particular an investigation that involves possible illegal contacts with a hostile foreign power. That’s what we have become.

Lou Reed, Hater?

It is time to round up the Social Justice Warriors and drive them into the sea. Look:

The student association at a Canadian university is apologizing to members of the transgender community who may have felt “hurt” or devalued by overhearing Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.”

In a statement on Facebook, Ontario’s University of Guelph Central Student Association apologized anyone who was upset by the “hurtful” “transphobic lyrics” played during a campus event. The student association claimed the song “Take a Walk on the Wild Side” was picked for a playlist of ‘70s and ‘80s songs out of “ignorance” and showed “an error in judgement” [sic]:

It’s come to our attention that the playlist we had on during bus pass distribution on Thursday contained a song with transphobic lyrics (Lou Reed, Take a Walk on the Wild Side). The playlist was compiled by one of the Executives with the intent of feeling like a road trip from the 70s and 80s. The song was included solely on those terms and made in ignorance as the person making the list did not know or understand the lyrics.

We now know the lyrics to this song are hurtful to our friends in the trans community and we’d like to unreservedly apologize for this error in judgement.

The student association also said they are “committed” to being more “mindful” of the music they play during events in the future, and suggested students attend a meeting to “discuss how we can create better playlists in the future” with songs that are “more inclusive.”

More:

The student association page continued by saying the mere concept of the song, taking a walk on the wild side, is “problematic” and “dangerous” because it describes transgender people (reportedly 0.5 percent of the Canadian population) as being “unusual,” which they claim is “dehumanizing” and makes people somehow less supportive of transgender rights:



Additionally, stating that conversing, spending time with, or having sex with a trans person is “taking a walk on the wild side” is also problematic. It labels trans folks as “wild” or “unusual” or “unnatural” which is a dangerous rhetoric.

The song was released in 1972. There is nothing hostile to transgenderism in the song. In fact, it was considered risqué at the time because it referenced transgenderism. This lyric is about Holly Woodlawn, a trans actress who was part of Andy Warhol’s crowd (as was Reed):

Holly came from Miami F.L.A.

Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.

Plucked her eyebrows on the way

Shaved her legs and then he was a she

She said, hey babe, take a walk on the wild side,

Said, hey honey, take a walk on the wild side.

The entire song is about these outré characters … because transgenderism was walking on the wild side in 1972, and to a significant degree it is today. Reed himself had a relationship back then with a male-to-female transgender. And now Reed, who later in life married Laurie Anderson, and who died in 2013, is a … bigot?!

These puritanical progressives are horrible.

‘Shut Your Mouth. Do Your Job’

Peggy Noonan puts the smackdown on everybody. Excerpts:

Mr. Trump’s longtime foes, especially Democrats and progressives, are in the throes of a kind of obsessive delight. Every new blunder, every suggestion of an illegality, gives them pleasure. “He’ll be gone by autumn.”

But he was duly and legally elected by tens of millions of Americans who had legitimate reasons to support him, who knew they were throwing the long ball, and who, polls suggest, continue to support him. They believe the press is trying to kill him. “He’s new, not a politician, give him a chance.” What would it do to them, what would it say to them, to have him brusquely removed by his enemies after so little time? Would it tell them democracy is a con, the swamp always wins, you nobodies can make your little choices but we’re in control? What will that do to their faith in our institutions, in democracy itself?

These are wrenching questions.

But if Mr. Trump is truly unfit—if he has demonstrated already, so quickly, that he cannot competently perform the role, and that his drama will only get more dangerous and chaotic, how much time should pass to let him prove it? And how dangerous will the proving get?

Again, wrenching questions. So this is no time for blood lust and delight. Because democracy is not your plaything.

But:

It is absurd to think the president can solve his problems by firing his staff. They are not the problem. He is the problem.

… It would be good if top Hill Republicans went en masse to the president and said: “Stop it. Clean up your act. Shut your mouth. Do your job. Stop tweeting. Stop seething. Stop wasting time. You lost the thread and don’t even know what you were elected to do anymore. Get a grip. Grow up and look at the terrain, see it for what it is. We have limited time. Every day you undercut yourself, you undercut us. More important, you keep from happening the good policy things we could have done together. If you don’t grow up fast, you’ll wind up abandoned and alone. Act like a president or leave the presidency.”

Could it help? For a minute. But it would be constructive—not just carping, leaking, posing, cheering and tweeting but actually trying to lead.

The president needs to be told: Democracy is not your plaything.

Read the whole thing. Truer words…

The Day They Took Old Dixie Down

Right now, the City of New Orleans, which has been removing statues of Confederate generals, will is taking down the last one: a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee that has stood over Lee Circle, near the French Quarter, since 1884.

As a general rule, I am against taking down monuments. To me, it’s about erasing history, and that is not something we should do, even if the history is painful. I believe we should look upon our monuments, and contemplate their meaning. Why did people once revere this man, or this event? Why was this monument built? Were the people wrong to build it? What does it say about our collective history? How have we changed? Who are we, anyway?

Taking down the monuments in New Orleans will help erase cultural memory of the Confederacy. But it will not change history. For better or worse.

But I do not have a lot of emotion about these particular monuments. The city of New Orleans began by removing a monument to a white supremacist rebellion, and that was an unambiguously good thing, in my estimation. Then they took down a statue of Jefferson Davis, and one of Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. I would not have done that. Davis and Beauregard fought for the wrong cause, but that doesn’t make them non-persons. Still, I can live with their exile from public view.

The removal of the Lee statue, though, strikes me as a serious and unnecessary wound. I think it a blessing that the Confederacy lost the war. Lee fought for a bad cause. But Lee, for all his sins, was a complex figure, one worthy of honor — again, despite his sins. Very few men we honor with statuary are saints. I would have left the Lee statue alone, had it been up to me. He is a tragic figure who represents an unforgettable part of American history. For over 100 years, the statue of Lee, and his name, have been part of the city’s fabric. Until today. This is all on Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

On the other hand, I put myself in the place of black residents of New Orleans. Lee and the others fought for a government that wished to keep their ancestors enslaved and brutalized. That too is a severe wound. This is why though I regret that they’re taking the Lee statue down, I don’t grieve it. If this is the price white people pay for the sin of slavery, then so be it.

But here’s the thing: taking down the statues will embitter some white New Orleanians while doing absolutely nothing at all to make life better for black New Orleanians. Look:

Just a few miles from where crews took down the statue of Gen. PGT Beauregard in New Orleans, shots rang out 5 times in less than 10 hours.

The first shooting came around 5 p.m. when a man was murdered in the front yard of the Mount Kingdom Missionary Baptist Church in the 3700 block of Louisa Street.

Pastor Darrick Johnson said it just goes to show how times have changed in his Ninth Ward community.

“I was totally surprised because that has never happened in the 50 years of existence of this church, it has never happened in front of this church,” Johnson said.

The other shootings happened between 5 p.m. and 1:30 a.m., in the 1800 block of Forstall Street, at the corner of St. Claude Avenue and Alvar Street, in the 1200 block of Feliciana Street, where a man was gun downed and killed in the door way of a home and in the 2200 block of North Galvez Street.

A man who did not want to be identified heard the shots on North Galvez.

“Innocent people getting hit,” he said. “There’s just too much, you know what I’m saying.”

All of the shootings happened in the NOPD’s Fifth District in the Seventh and Ninth Wards.

“It was really within a nine-hour span that all of the shootings happened,” WWL-TV Crime Analyst Jeff Asher said. “It was a lot of violence concentrated area. “Five shootings in one (police) district is really a rare thing.”

Go ahead, give Lee Circle a new name. Call it the Shabazz Roundabout, if you like. Does that do anything to relieve the violence and misery of black New Orleanians? This is like the old, bitter Chris Rock joke about how streets named after Martin Luther King go through the worst parts of town. Erasing history will do nothing to make the present better. If this is a victory, it’s a Pyrrhic one.

 

The Trump Line

Hi everybody, I was offline this morning because I was traveling. I know a lot of you are sick and tired of talking about Trump, so feel free to ignore this. But if you can be civil about the topic, I’d like to pose a serious (= I genuinely want to know) question to readers who count themselves as Trump supporters, or at least enemies of Trump’s enemies.

Pat Buchanan writes a slashing column denouncing Rod Rosenstein, the deputy AG, for putting Robert Mueller on the Trump/Russia case. Excerpts:

Why did Rosenstein capitulate to a Democrat-media clamor for a special counsel that could prove disastrous for the president who elevated and honored him?

Surely in part, as Milbank writes, to salvage his damaged reputation.

After being approved 94-6 by a Senate that hailed him as a principled and independent U.S. attorney for both George Bush and Barack Obama, Rosenstein found himself being pilloried for preparing the document White House aides called crucial to Trump’s decision to fire Comey.

Rosenstein had gone over to the dark side. He had, it was said, on Trump’s orders, put the hit on Comey. Now, by siccing a special counsel on the president himself, Rosenstein is restored to the good graces of this city. Rosenstein just turned in his black hat for a white hat.

Democrats are hailing both his decision to name a special counsel and the man he chose. Yet it is difficult to exaggerate the damage he has done.

What kind of damage?

As did almost all of its predecessors, including those which led to the resignation of President Nixon and impeachment of Bill Clinton, Mueller’s investigation seems certain to drag on for years.

All that time, there will be a cloud over Trump’s presidency that will drain his political authority. Trump’s enemies will become less fearful and more vocal. Republican Congressmen and Senators in swing states and marginal districts, looking to 2018, will have less incentive to follow Trump’s lead, rather than their own instincts and interests. Party unity will fade away.

And without a united and energized Republican Party on the Hill, how do you get repeal and replacement of Obamacare, tax reform or a border wall? Trump’s agenda suddenly seems comatose. And was it a coincidence that the day Mueller was appointed, the markets tanked, with the Dow falling 372 points?

Markets had soared with Trump’s election on the expectation that his pro-business agenda would be enacted. If those expectations suddenly seem illusory, will the boom born of hope become a bust?

A White House staff, said to be in disarray, and a president reportedly enraged over endless press reports of his problems and falling polls, are not going to become one big happy family again with a growing office of prosecutors and FBI agents poking into issues in which they were involved.

Read the whole thing.  Buchanan blames Rosenstein’s alleged treachery for Trump’s miseries. This is a common theme among Trump defenders: that all his troubles have been caused by his many enemies.

Here’s my question: At what point do Trump defenders hold the president himself accountable for these travails? 

There is no doubt that Trump has many enemies in Washington. Yet almost everything bad that has happened to him since his inauguration is his own fault. Trump knew about Michael Flynn’s very serious ethical problems (for example) concerning his relationship to foreign governments, but he still made him National Security Adviser. Trump fired the FBI director under suspicious circumstances, and charged Rosenstein with writing an argument for dismissing him for poor performance in office. But a day or two later, Trump slipped up and admitted to NBC’s Lester Holt that he had the Russia investigation in mind when he canned Comey — exactly what Team Trump was trying to get people to ignore.

Yesterday, Rosenstein told a group of US senators that he knew Trump was going to fire Comey before he drafted the sleight-of-hand memo upon which, according to the official story, Trump based his decision. As I recount here, Team Trump knew it couldn’t plausibly fire Comey until it got someone of Rosenstein’s probity into the deputy AG position, so it could do its dirty work on Comey while hiding behind Rosenstein’s reputation. Rosenstein must have felt used, which is no doubt why he appointed Mueller, the ramrod-straight shooter, to handle this tainted investigation.

Why Buchanan thinks that Rosenstein should harm himself and (arguably) the public interest by running interference for Trump, the man who destroyed the cover story (and harmed Rosenstein’s reputation) on national TV is a mystery.

My point is, this is Trump’s fault. Comey was a pain in the butt to him, for sure, but he didn’t have to fire him. In fact, if Trump said the things Comey says he did to him in private, and Comey’s notes bear that out, then Trump was an impetuous fool to fire him. (And if Trump really asked the FBI director for a pledge of personal loyalty, and asked him to lay off of Mike Flynn, he screwed up massively.) And Trump sure didn’t have to go on TV, post-firing and spill the beans. But he did these things.

Last week’s shocking report of Trump inadvertently leaking ultra-secret intel to the Russians by running his mouth incautiously was denied by the White House’s spokesmen, including H.R. McMaster, in a supremely lawyerly statement. And maybe they’re right. Maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe the sources of the story are lying, though McMaster did confirm that Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert contacted the CIA and the NSA about the disclosure after the fact, as reported.  McMaster speculated that Bossert did so from “an overabundance of caution,” though he had not spoken to Bossert to find out why.

Again, maybe the official story is true. But we know that Trump doesn’t focus well on his work, and we also know that he has a habit of departing from script and saying things he shouldn’t say (e.g., in the Holt interview). It is entirely plausible that Trump did exactly what the leakers of the story said he did. In an ordinary administration, one would have reason to give the president the benefit of the doubt, versus unnamed leakers. But this administration has little right to the public’s trust.

There’s a reason why people are suspicious of Donald Trump: Donald Trump.

What a lot of Trump defenders seem to be missing is that the Trump White House is leaking like a sieve. In other words, the people Trump hired are talking to the media. In his column today, David Brooks writes:

Even before Inauguration Day, the level of leaking out of this White House was unprecedented, as officials sought to curry favor with the press corps and as factions vied with one another.

But over the past 10 days the atmosphere has become extraordinary. Senior members of the White House staff have trained their sights on the man they serve. Every day now there are stories in The Times, The Washington Post and elsewhere in which unnamed White House officials express disdain, exasperation, anger and disrespect for their boss.

As the British say, the staff is jumping ship so fast they are leaving the rats gaping and applauding.

Trump, for his part, is resentfully returning fire, blaming his underlings for his own mistakes, complaining that McMaster is a pain, speculating about firing and demoting people. This is a White House in which the internal nickname for the chief of staff is Rancid.

And as Brooks says, when Mueller’s work begins, the atmosphere in the White House is going to get much, much worse. Trump still has not fully staffed the executive branch with presidential appointments. Who would want to work for him now, given how bad it already is, how worse it is likely to get, and in the face of the culture of instability fomented by the president himself?

Who is forcing the people on Trump’s staff — the people Trump hired — to leak to reporters? Nobody. Why are they doing it? There are no doubt many reasons, but the one that unites them all is: they do not respect the president. 

If many of the people who are around him all day, and see him up close, don’t respect him enough to keep his secrets and defend his mission, what does that tell you? Something is very, very wrong here.

At some point, you have to admit that yes, even though the president has real enemies, the fact is that he his none more deadly to his presidency than … himself. Right?

So where is that point for you who are still defending Trump now? What’s your tipping point? When do you start to blame him for this mess — a mess that threatens to consume the GOP and its legislative agenda.

Think about it: there are Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, and a Republican president at the other end of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And little or nothing is going to get done with all the drama coming out of the White House. Not only that, the more chaotic it becomes, the greater the chances of the Democrats taking back one or both houses of Congress. It would be one thing if conservatives had to overlook Trump’s ethics problems for the sake of doing good and important things in terms of policy. But none of that is coming from Trump. Now, under this Commander in Chief, the US has bombed pro-Assad forces in Syria, infuriating the Russians and causing the Syrians to say, with just cause, that the US has no right to establish a base on its sovereign territory. Trump was supposed to be the president who would keep us from getting more entangled in wars that aren’t our business. So much for that.

I agree with my boss Bob Merry: there is no good way out of this horrible situation.  If Trump stays, or if he is forced out, there’s going to be hell to pay. Trump didn’t come from nowhere. He is a symbol of a dysfunctional polity. Still, even though he is hated by the same people his supporters hate, there has to be a point, if only theoretical right now, where Trump crosses a line — where the threat he poses to national security, to the GOP, to conservatism, to the common good, and what have you, becomes intolerable.

Where is that line for you?

 

Rod Rosenstein’s Reputation

Not exactly shocking:

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein knew President Trump planned to fire FBI Director Jim Comey before he sat down to write a memo criticizing Comey’s conduct.

That’s according to several United States senators who met with Rosenstein Thursday afternoon in a secure room in the Capitol basement.

“He knew that Comey was going to be removed prior to writing his memo,” Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill told reporters after the briefing.

Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin echoed McCaskill, saying Rosenstein told lawmakers that he knew of Trump’s intent the day before he wrote a document that the White House initially said was the main reason why Comey was dismissed.

Rosenstein fielded questions in the closed session for more than an hour, but many senators left the briefing unsatisfied.

Again, not shocking. But still important. It’s one of those little things that matters, and indicates how Trump corrupts the people around him.

Rosenstein knew at the time that he was concocting an official rationalization for the president to do what he was going to do anyway.

On May 10, conservative journalist Byron York reported that getting Rosenstein in place as deputy AG was necessary for the White House to fire Comey, because it gave them bipartisan cover:

Only after Rosenstein was in place did the Trump team move ahead. That was true not only for chain-of-command reasons but also — probably more importantly — because Rosenstein had the bipartisan street cred to be able to be the point man in firing Comey. Even though his confirmation was delayed, Rosenstein was eventually confirmed by the Senate by a 94 to 6 vote, meaning that the vast majority of Democratic senators voted for him along with all of the Republicans.

How important was the arrival of Rosenstein to the bid to fire Comey? This, from a source in a Senate office Wednesday morning: “Many who are suggesting that there’s something nefarious about the timing of the Comey firing are likely missing the fact that DAG Rosenstein was sworn in two weeks ago (April 26), and that the FBI Director reports to the DAG on the DOJ org chart. It seems completely normal that the DAG would review their top reports within the first couple weeks of starting.”

Discount the part about “completely normal” — firing the FBI director, who has a ten-year term and was conducting a high-profile investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election that touches on the president, was not a routine act. The point is, it took the arrival of Rosenstein to do it.

Read Rosenstein’s May 9 memo to the Attorney General detailing Comey’s failures. Rosenstein does not actually recommend firing Comey; he only provides the rationale. AG Jeff Sessions recommends the firing, and Trump executes it.

So Rosenstein knew that his reputation was being used to cover up something Trump intended to do anyway, for reasons that wouldn’t have flown politically had they been known. In other words, he let Trump’s dirty move conceal itself under his (Rosenstein’s) reputation for fairness. But Trump himself blew the story up when he told NBC’s Lester Holt that he had his anger over the Russia investigation in mind when he fired Comey. Now it’s clear from Rosenstein’s own admission that he knowingly participated in a charade.

And it’s clear (as if it weren’t already) that Donald Trump lies, and is pleased to corrupt those who serve him, to make them accomplices in his deception.

What Rosenstein did is not a crime, and for all I know, it may simply be a case of the public inadvertently getting a look at how the sausage is made. If you read Rosenstein’s firing memo, it is likely that everything in it is factually true. But if so, they were truths written down for use in the telling of a lie, for misleading the American people.

Where does Rod Rosenstein’s good reputation stand today? I wonder if anybody who works high up in this administration is going to come out of it with his reputation intact.

Out Of The Rubble, Hope

Father Martin Bernhard of Norcia (photo by Rod Dreher)

A new interview with Father Martin Bernhard, one of the Benedictine monks of Norcia. Excerpts:

“Now, we have the chance to really be like St. Benedict and those monks at the fall of the Roman empire,” said Bernhard. “When the culture and civilization [were] falling apart…morally, economically,” St. Benedict and his followers “had an opportunity to kind of be even a brighter light, a brighter beacon.”

“We kind of find ourselves in a similar situation,” he said, because the local tourism-based economy has greatly suffered and “a lot of people are out of their homes and out of jobs…and now we have an opportunity to rebuild in that context, not only [in a] culturally, morally challenged context, but an economically challenged context.”

The tragedy of the earthquake, and Norcia’s rebuilding efforts, can “show to the world that even when things go very badly or there are great difficulties around one, it doesn’t mean we have to give up hope,” said Bernhard. “The hope is that our music and our chant and our prayers and our beer and our liturgy can still be kind of given to the world and I think maybe even in a more authentic way because we will have suffered more in order to make it happen.”

Bernhard said the earthquake was the cause of “a great sense of a kind of fear and trust really in God’s providence and a great recognition of our littleness as humans.”

“When the ground shakes like it did it kind of strikes a kind of natural fear,” he explained. “You grow up your whole life thinking the ground you stand on is firm [and] it’s not going to move. But then when it starts to move, it seems like the whole world is kind of falling apart around you. And then with a lot of the tremors and everything that took place afterwards, kind of for days, you would think about, ‘if I put this here on the table, will it fall off?'”

Now you understand a bit better why the Norcia monks look at the ruins of their old monastery and the basilica and see in them a symbol of Christianity in the West. And therefore, you can see the scope of their rebuilding project. More from Father Martin:

Bernhard encouraged Christians seeking to create their own communities in the spirit of St. Benedict to pray together.

“Community life is not just a social gathering,” he said. “It’s also a moment of prayer, which has a social element because it involves more than one person.”

And read together, he recommended. “Choose good books. Choose good saints…study them together, talk about them.”

Read the whole thing. I think that Father Martin will be in Dallas next weekend for the big fundraising dinner for the monastery. Also, Father Cassian, the founding prior, and Father Benedict, the current prior. I’ll be the speaker. The dinner is sold out.

Last night, my Orthodox priest put me onto this 1968 lecture by the late Father Alexander Schmemann, titled “The Mission of Orthodoxy,” saying that it reminded him of The Benedict Option in some ways. All Christians can profit from this, I believe. Excerpts:

It is here that I must stress again the fundamental quality of American culture: its openness to criticism and change, to challenge and judgment. Throughout the whole of American history, Americans have asked: “What does it mean to be American?” “What is America for?” And they are still asking these ques­tions. Here is our chance, and here is our duty. The evaluation of American culture in Orthodox terms requires first a knowledge of Orthodoxy, and second a knowledge of the true American culture and tradition.

One cannot evaluate that which one does not know, love, and understand. Our mission, therefore, is first of all one of education. We–all of us–must become theologians, not in the technical sense of the word, but in terms of vital interest, concern, care for our faith, and above everything else, in terms of a relationship between faith and life, faith and culture, faith and the “American way of life.”

Let me give you one example. We all know that one of the deepest crises of our culture, of the entire modern world, is the crisis of family and the man-­woman relationship. I would ask, then: How can this crisis be related to and understood in terms of our belief in the one who is “more honorable than the cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim. . . “–the Theotokos, the Mother of God, the Virgin?

Where all this will lead us, I do not know. In the words of a hymn of Cardinal Newman: “I do not see the distant scene, one step enough for me.” But I know that between the two extremes–of a surrender to America, of a surrender of America–we must find the narrow and the difficult way of the true Orthodox Tradition. No solution will ever be final, and there is no final solution in “this world.”

We shall always live in tension and conflict, in the rhythm of victory and defeat. Yet if the Puritans could have had such a tremendous impact on Ameri­can culture, if Sigmund Freud could change it so deeply as to send two generations of Americans to the psychoanalytical couch, if Marxism, in spite of all its phenomenal failures, can still inspire presumably in­telligent American intellectuals, why can’t the faith and the doctrine which we claim to be the true faith and the true doctrine have its chance? “O ye of little faith …. ”

Marx and Freud never doubted, and they won their vicious victories. The modern Christian, how­ever, has a built-in inferiority complex. One historical defeat pushes him either into an apocalyptic fear and panicking, or into a “death of God” theology. The time has come, perhaps, simply to recover our faith and apply it with love and humility to the land which has become ours. And who can do that if not those who are given a full share in American culture?

Two things, then, are essential: first, the strength­ening of our personal faith and commitment. Whether priest or layman, man or woman, the first thing for an Orthodox is not to speak about Orthodoxy, but to live it to his full capacity; it is prayer, it is standing before God, it is the difficult joy of experiencing “heaven on earth.” This is the first thing, and it cannot be reached without effort, fasting, asceticism, sacrifice, or with­out the discovery of that which in the Gospel is called the “narrow way.”

And second, to use a most abused word, there must be a deep and real dialogue with America–not accommodation, not a compromise, for a dialogue may be indeed violent. If nothing else, it will achieve two things. It will reveal to us what is real and genuine in our faith and what is mere decoration. We may, indeed, lose all kinds of decorations which we errone­ously take for Orthodoxy itself. What will remain is exactly the faith which overcomes the world.

In that dialogue we will also discover the true America, not the America which so many Orthodox curse and so many idolize, but the America of that great hunger for God and His righteousness which has always underlain the genuine American culture. The more I live here, the more I believe that the encounter between Orthodoxy and America is a providential one. And because it is providential, it is being at­tacked, misunderstood, denied, rejected on both sides. Perhaps it is for us, here, now, today to understand its real meaning and to act accordingly.

After a discussion of church history, Father Schmemann says:

Our situation today is once more that of crisis, and it is the nature of that crisis that is to shape the orientation of our missionary effort. The fundamental meaning of the crisis lies in the fact that the Christian world born out of Constantine’s conversion, and the subsequent “symphony” between the Church, on the one hand, and the society, state, and culture, on the other, has ended.

Please do not misunderstand me. The end has come not of Christianity, not of Church or faith, but of a world which referred, however nominally at times, its whole life to Christ and had Christian faith as its ultimate criterion. All dreams about its restoration are doomed. For even if Christians were to recover control of states and societies, that would not auto­matically make these societies “Christian.” What happened occurred on a much deeper level.

The fact is we are no longer living in a Christian world. The world we live in has its own style and culture, its own ethos, and, above everything else, its own worldview. And so far Christians have not found and formulated a consistently Christian attitude to­wards the world and its worldview and are deeply split in their reaction to it. There are those who simply accept the world’s view and surrender to secularism.

And there are those whose nervous systems have not withstood the shock of the change and who, faced by the new situation, are panicking.

If the first attitude leads little by little to the evaporation of faith itself, the second threatens us with the transformation of Orthodoxy into a sect. A man who feels perfectly at home in the secular and non-Christian world has probably ceased to be a Christian, at least in the traditional meaning of that term. But the one who is obsessed with a violent hatred and fear of the modem world has also left the grounds of the genuine Orthodox tradition. He needs the security of a sect, the assurance that he at least is saved in the midst of the universal collapse. There is very little Christianity and Orthodoxy in either view. If some forget that the Kingdom of God is “not of this world,” the others do not seem to remember that “per­fect love overcomes all fear.”

And he concludes by calling for a new “movement” of people rededicated to the faith:

I have in mind a kind of spiritual profile of that movement and of those who will take part in it. To me, it looks in some way like a new form of monasticism without celibacy and without the desert, but based upon specific vows. I can think of three such vows.

1. PRAYER: The first vow is to keep a certain well-defined spiritual discipline of life, and this means a rule of prayer: an effort to maintain a level of personal contact with God, what the Fathers call the “inner memory of Him.” It is very fashionable today to discuss spirituality and to read books about it. But whatever the degree of our theoretical knowledge about spirituality, it must begin with a simple and humble decision, an effort, and–what is the most difficult–regularity. Nothing indeed is more danger­ous than pseudo-spirituality whose unmistakable signs are self-righteousness, pride, readiness to mea­sure other people’s spirituality, and emotionalism.

What the world needs now is a generation of men and women not only speaking about Christianity, but living it. Early monasticism was, first of all, a rule of prayer. It is precisely a rule we need, one which could be practiced and followed by all and not only by some. For indeed what you say is less and less impor­tant today. Men are moved only by what you are, and this means by the total impact of your personality, of your personal experience, commitment, dedication.

2. OBEDIENCE: The second vow is the vow of obedience, and this is what present-day Orthodox lack more than anything else. Perhaps without noticing it, we live in a climate of radical individualism. Each one tailors for himself his own kind of “Orthodoxy,” his own ideal of the Church, his own style of life. And yet, the whole spiritual literature emphasizes obedi­ence as the condition of all spiritual progress.

What I mean by obedience here, however, is something very practical. It is obedience to the movement itself. The movement must know on whom it can depend. It is the obedience in small things, humble chores, the unromantic routine of work. Obedience here is the antithesis not of disobedience, but of hys­terical individualism. “I” feel, “I” don’t feel. Stop “feeling” and do. Nothing will be achieved without some degree of organization, strategy, and obedience.

3. ACCEPTANCE: The third vow could be de­scribed, in terms of one spiritual author, as “digging one’s own hole.” So many people want to do anything except precisely what God wants them to do, for to accept this and perhaps even to discern it is one of the greatest spiritual difficulties. It is very significant that ascetical literature is full of warnings against chang­ing places, against leaving monasteries for other and “better” ones, against the spirit of unrest, that constant search for the best external conditions. Again, what we need today is to relate to the Church and to Christ our lives, our professions, the unique combination of factors which God gives us as our examination and which we alone can pass or fail.

Read the whole thing. It’s really good.

As I write this, I’m receiving texts from a conservative Evangelical friend who said his pastor this past Sunday preached on life in “post-Christian America.” The pastor had not read my book, but he has read the signs of the times. He told his congregation that the disruptive changes in our society and culture are accelerating, and that Christians have to face this fact, and prepare for it. He’s right. But as Father Martin Bernhard reminds us, there is hope! We should not expect to avoid suffering, but should be prepared to face it like Christians (not Moralistic Therapeutic Deists), and to work by the Spirit to redeem that suffering. The Monks of Norcia are helping to show the way. Get to know their story.

UPDATE: Evangelical Friend texts this addition:

I should be clear that my pastor’s conclusion was very optimistic. He said we should see the changes as an opportunity, an expansion of our mission field.

He specifically said that all of the anti-Christian people are not our enemies. They are our mission field. They are victims of the Enemy.

Twilight Of The Elites — And The Rest Of Us

If you read nothing else today, read TAC editor Bob Merry’s powerful piece explaining why removing Trump cannot solve the crisis gripping America. Excerpts:

America is in crisis. It is a crisis of greater magnitude than any the country has faced in its history, with the exception of the Civil War. It is a crisis long in the making—and likely to be with us long into the future. It is a crisis so thoroughly rooted in the American polity that it’s difficult to see how it can be resolved in any kind of smooth or even peaceful way. Looking to the future from this particular point in time, just about every possible course of action appears certain to deepen the crisis.

What is it? Some believe it stems specifically from the election of Donald Trump, a man supremely unfit for the presidency, and will abate when he can be removed from office. These people are right about one thing: Trump is supremely unfit for his White House job. But that isn’t the central crisis; it is merely a symptom of it, though it seems increasingly to be reaching crisis proportions of its own.

Seriously, read the whole thing.  Merry talks in detail about the failures of American elites, Democrats and Republicans both, to govern the country for the sake of the common good. It’s important to remember that if Trump were to go, the nation would be governed by Mike Pence, a thoroughly conventional Republican, and by a Congress in the hands of a Republican Party that has shown few if any signs of having understood the meaning of the Trump election. In other words, pretty much more of the thing we had during the Bush administration — as we would have had the third term of the Obama administration (minus the president’s personal integrity) had Hillary won.

I would broader Merry’s critique. It’s not merely a problem of the elites, but something that has engulfed us all. Here’s commenter Sam M. reacting to the Chris Arnade piece about drug-ridden Portsmouth, Ohio, that I posted last night:

““You around family members who use, around friends who use. When you start using drugs you are accepted for who you are, including your imperfections. For many people, myself, that is hard to stay away from.” [

Accepted for who you are. Interesting how completely this has overcome the communal language and filtered down to the least privileged, least educated people suffering in abject poverty. We shall be affirmed in our choices.

I think this is half-right. I think people are desperate for community, which is a human trait. One problem is that they’re so desperate for community that they will choose a bad community — one that finds solidarity in a shared vice — rather than be alone. This is not a problem that politics can solve.

Still, I think Sam is onto something about the language of acceptance, and how it corrupts. It is a dangerous misunderstanding of Christian mercy. When Jesus met the woman at the well, he diagnosed her sin, forgave her, and told her to sin no more. That is to say, he received her, told her what she had done wrong, released her from the burden of her guilt, and commanded her to repent. In our culture, we have lost the sense of the seriousness of sin, and the need to repent.

That’s a Christian judgment, which you may not share, at least in theological terms. But the phenomenon is rreal. Here’s an insight into how we got here:

That’s Google measuring the usage of the words “rights” and “duties” in published books. Notice how the lines began to diverge in the late 19th century — in the Progressive Era. The widening gap became a chasm around 1960. People focused on their rights understand themselves primarily as people to whom things are owed; those focused on duties understand themselves primarily as people who owe things.

No wonder Moralistic Therapeutic Deism has replaced orthodox Christianity as the real religion of most contemporary Americans. It is a pseudo-religion that caters to the desiring, narcissistic self. This is not merely a problem of elites in this country.

Which brings us to Donald Trump, and his tweets this morning:

This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2017

With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special counsel appointed!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2017

Yeah, “councel.” As John Podhoretz snarked, “Well, at least we know he wrote it himself.” [UPDATE: In the original tweet, Trump wrote “councel”. He deleted that tweet and sent out a properly spelled one later. — RD]

The childish self-pity of our president is breathtaking. He’s a 70 year old man whining like a five year old. It is contemptible and extreme — but it is a symbol of our time and place. I’m old enough to remember a time when people who called themselves conservatives would have heaped scorn on this kind of thing, and rightly characterized it as a sign of decadence. You still find it at times, when conservatives complain about egalitarianism gutting standards of excellence. But the Trump example reveals the hollowness of conservatives on this point. Trump is a managerial incompetent and a man of low morality, yet many conservatives turn a blind eye to his grotesque failures, because … why? Because liberals and establishment Republicans hate him? Because he makes them in some sense “feel accepted for who [they] are”? Why?

But then, we must remember that most conservatives did the exact same thing when George W. Bush failed catastrophically. And most liberals cast their standards aside to affirm Bill Clinton in his mediocrity.This is what we do in America today. Donald Trump is only an extreme manifestation of a deeper corruption, one that implicates us all, elites and non-elites alike. One completely understandable reason why many Americans outside the Beltway are reluctant to abandon Trump is that they hold the governing class he defeated (including Republicans) in contempt, and do not think a return to power for them is progress. They’re not entirely wrong, either, but the failures of the elites do not suddenly make Donald Trump morally good or administratively competent.

So, Bob Merry is right: whether or not Trump stays or goes, the underlying condition he represents will be with us. As I write in The Benedict Option, addressing my fellow conservative Christians:

Though Donald Trump won the presidency in part with the strong support of Catholics and Evangelicals, the idea that the robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it.

…  There is also the danger of Christians falling back into complacency. No administration in Washington, no matter how ostensibly pro-Christian, is capable of stopping cultural trends toward desacralization and fragmentation that have been building for centuries. To expect any different is to make a false idol of politics.

What’s more, to believe that the threat to the church’s integrity and witness has passed because Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election is the height of folly.

We are living through Big History right now. Do not be deceived that the fate of Donald Trump, one way or another, will be decisive for the fate of the Republic. Name one institution that you fully trust. If you can’t, that tells you something, doesn’t it? As Bob Merry writes:

It is a crisis so thoroughly rooted in the American polity that it’s difficult to see how it can be resolved in any kind of smooth or even peaceful way. Looking to the future from this particular point in time, just about every possible course of action appears certain to deepen the crisis.

I wish I believed that the problem was merely one of the elites, who were entrusted with power, authority, and responsibility, but who have failed so utterly to execute their duties. They bear the greater burden of blame, because to whom much is given, much is expected. But it’s not entirely their fault, not by any means. We really are like the late Roman republic, which, as Livy said, could bear neither its vices nor their cure.

Morris Berman claims that there are four signs present when a civilization declines:

(a) Accelerating social and economic inequality

(b) Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems

(c) Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness

(d) Spiritual death—that is, Spengler’s classicism: the emptying out of cultural content and the freezing (or repackaging) of it in formulas—kitsch, in short.

A confession: on the advice of reader Leslie Fain, I bought a secondhand copy of Berman’s book The Twilight of American Culture as preparation for writing The Benedict Option, but never got around to reading it. What a mistake that was! I was just googling around and discovered that in that book, Berman — a left-wing atheist — counsels people to take “The Monastic Option” as a way of preserving truth through the collapse now upon us. I think my copy of the Berman book is in storage, but I clearly have to go dig it up and read it.