Rod Dreher's Blog, page 502

Anti-Modern = Pro-Muslim + Pro-Immigrant?

Matthew Loftus makes a provocative point:

If globalism and liquid modernity are the problem, then immigration restriction is cutting off one of the few sources of new citizens who might possible share your views on the priority of faith and family and the importance of religion in providing some moral undercurrent (or restraint) for the state’s actions. Both Putin and Trump appear to be happy to throw a bone to religious conservatives in order for their loyal support, but neither has any respect for human life in the eyes of the state and would happily preside over a fiefdom full of people lost in drugs, alcohol, gambling, or sex as long as they stay in power. There won’t be much civilization left to defend because modernity will continue its corrosive destruction through the institutions we love and believe in– the individualistic atomism that is hollowing out our civilization is a juggernaut that cannot be stopped by an authoritarian state and closed borders.

Refugees and immigrants overwhelmingly hail from cultures that prioritize communal values over individual expression, understand the preeminent value of marriage and family, and see religious devotion as a key process that helps to form virtuous and capable citizens. There are some legitimate differences in politics, theology, or culture, but those values tend to be more superficial when considered in light of the overwhelming overlap in social vision they have with religious conservatives.The conflicts that we might encounter in dealing with Islamic political theology and other foreign ideas might even help sharpen our particular viewpoints and force us to actually describe how we imagine religion informing politics doing rather than shrieking about Supreme Court justices ad nauseum.

He goes on to say:

Whether you want real civilization that is communal instead of individualistic or genuine ideology that governs according to principle rather than power-grabbing, immigrants and refugees are conservatives’ allies.

This is true up to a point, Lord Copper. Let me explain.

I’ve written here that I would a thousand times rather that my next-door neighbors were an observant Muslim family, which by default would mean they shared most of my socially conservative beliefs, than a secular, let-it-all-hang-out American family. It’s all about the kids, really. I could say the same about, say, an observant Catholic or Evangelical immigrant family from Mexico.

But the dynamic changes when we are talking about an entire society. It’s a useful thought experiment to play out in your head, because it forces you to think of what you value socially. I would not want to live in a society that’s majority Muslim, because despite sharing many values, there is not a majority-Muslim country in the world that I would want to live in. Visit? Yes, absolutely. But live in? No, not as an observant Christian, and not as someone who values the Western tradition.

In fact, I would not be eager to live in most countries of the world, other than my own. I fancy that I would enjoy living in the UK, Ireland, and most European countries, but that is because they are close enough to what I’m used to. The older I get, the less likely I am even to consider the possibility of doing so. Hell, I’m not quite fifty, but I’m to the point in my life where I don’t want to live outside of the American South. Austin is as far west as I want to go, and Charlottesville as far north. Don’t ask me why. I don’t owe you an explanation. I prefer what is familiar. Most people do.

Here’s the thing: I enjoy visiting different places, countries, and cultures because they are themselves. If I were Mexican, I would want Mexico to remain Mexican, not turn American. If I were Egyptian, I’d want to walk like an Egyptian, not an American. As an American, I want these people to be proud of their own countries and to keep their own traditions. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have things to learn from each other, or that our own country wouldn’t be improved by adopting this or that law or habit from another country (and vice versa). But I don’t think people should feel it necessary to apologize for wanting to be around people like themselves, and for valuing customs and peoples who are like themselves such that they wish to limit the immigration of those who, in larger numbers, undermine those values and customs.

But if one is a conservative Christian who believes that secular individualism is corrosive of the values one holds dear, shouldn’t one want to import foreigners who are more likely to share one’s values, as a way to shore up the side? It’s easy to see why the answer might be yes, but that overlooks the fact that we are never just one thing. You sometimes see in Orthodox Christian congregations a few American converts who seem to think that having adopted Orthodox Christianity compels them to start thinking of themselves as 19th-century Russian peasants. It’s comic. I am an Orthodox Christian by choice, but I am also an American, and not a Greek or a Slavic American, either. If my country were invaded by soldiers of an Orthodox Christian power, I would shoot at them and not think twice about it.

 

On the other hand, if I had to choose between my God and my country, I would hope to have the courage to choose my God.

Identity is a very complicated thing, obviously. In January 1994, I was visiting a friend in Oslo, and went to Sunday mass at the city’s Catholic cathedral. My friend, who is not religious, warned me that the church would probably be nearly empty, as most Norwegian churches are these days. It took me longer to get there than I anticipated (Southern boys don’t walk on frozen sidewalks well), and when I opened the church doors, I could barely squeeze in! It was literally packed — and maybe five percent of the congregation was white. They were black Africans, Filipinos, and Asians — all Catholic immigrants. It was a glorious sight, all those people in that church, praising God.

And yet, I can’t say that I would want Oslo to turn into Lagos, Manila, or Saigon any more than I would want Lagos, Manila, or Saigon to turn into Oslo.

Not long ago, on this blog, a reader challenged me when I said that I would rather my children grow up in a non-Western country that is recognizably Christian than in a post-Christian Western country. The reader called BS on me, and you know what? He was right to. Neither one’s culture nor one’s nationality has anything to do with whether or not you find favor in the sight of God … but it’s not negligible either. When my first child was born, we were living in New York City, a city I really loved. The thought, though, of him growing up not knowing Southern American culture really ate at me, and made me view with greater sympathy immigrant parents whose children were becoming Americanized. By immigrating, I’m sure that many, even most, of them had chosen what they believed was the greater good for their children: raising them in America, as opposed to back home, wherever home was.

I am also pretty confident that for most of those immigrant mothers and fathers, the emotional costs exacted by that choice were significant.

I’ve mentioned before on this blog a friend of mine, a Catholic Englishwoman, who with her American husband chose to settle in the US, though they could have lived in England, in part because she wanted her children to have a better chance at holding on to their faith than they would in her highly secularized home country. She told me once that she doesn’t regret the choice, but that she really misses home. I hope that I would have the same courage that she did, in those circumstances. But what if the choice were to stay in England or migrate to a Christian Third World country — that is, one significantly outside of Western culture? Latin America would be easier, for obvious reasons, but what about Africa? Or Asia?

It has been almost 23 years since I saw those Filipino, African, and Vietnamese Catholics worshiping in the Oslo cathedral. I wonder what has become of their children. Have they made Norway more Christian, or has Norway made them more secular? Do their parents regret that their kids are less like their parents, culturally?

There’s no question that the immigration tide to Europe now stands to make Europe on balance more culturally conservative, but less Christian. If I were European, there is no question that I would oppose it, in part because I would find a Muslim-dominated society more of a threat to the future of Christianity in Europe (if it has one) than a secular liberal society, and in part because to bring in more Muslim immigrants (and, to be frank, more immigrants, period) right now is to ask for trouble. But the US is not Europe. Is one immigration policy morally justifiable for American Christians, but not so for European Christians?

Tell me what you think, Christian readers. Are the similarities between immigrants from traditional cultures (Christian and otherwise) and Christians in the US so much greater than the differences as to obviate principled cultural opposition to generous immigration policies? Why or why not? I can’t settle on an answer that satisfies me.

New Orleans Mourns Its Princess

The Krewe of Chewbacchus rolls in 2013 (melanie innis/flickr)

Only in New Orleans, kids, only in New Orleans:

Science fiction fans were saddened Tuesday (Dec. 27) by the news that actor Carrie Fisher, who was best known for her iconic role as Star Wars’ Princess Leia, had died at age 60. Almost immediately, Ryan Ballard, leader of The Intergalactic Krewe of Chewbacchus Carnival marching group, began planning a second line-style parade for Friday to celebrate the memory of Fisher.

Chewbacchus, one of the fastest-growing Mardi Gras organizations, was inspired by the Star Wars series. Chewbacchus is a mash-up of the names of Star Wars character Chewbacca and Bacchus, the Roman god of wine.

The Leijorettes, a group of more than 100 marchers costumed as Princess Leia, are expected to lead the parade. Most of the Leijorettes are roller derby players, Ballard said.

(H/T: Terry Mattingly)

Turning Your Back To The Village

I had an intense experience last night, one I’m still trying to make sense of. It’s the intensity of it that mystifies me more than the specific content.

As you may recall, I was in a car accident earlier this month. Last night, I took my aching back to the gym for the first time since the wreck, and did some very light exercise (treadmill). While walking, I watched an episode of the Netflix dramatic series The Crown, which is about the early years of Elizabeth II’s reign. The episode I selected was one in which Winston Churchill, 80 years old and ailing, finally accepts his mortality and resigns his premiership. John Lithgow plays Churchill exquisitely in the series, capturing Churchill’s doggedness and vanity without ever making the great man a caricature. The tragic grandeur in this performance is how the qualities that served Churchill (and his nation, and Western civilization) so magnificently in its greatest crisis became a liability in trying to lead Britain in the postwar period.

The wifi wasn’t working perfectly in the gym last night, which made the Crown streaming on my iPad stop every so often. I fiddled with the controls a bit, but finally realized that there was nothing to be done except keep walking on the treadmill and wait for the program to load. While I was doing that, I noticed the TV hanging nearest to me on the wall. The gym had it locked onto MTV, which was broadcasting a reality program called Teen Mom 2. For some reason that television set was on mute, which meant I could read the dialogue.

I ended up watching segments of that show while waiting for the one on my iPad to load. It was horrible. I don’t suppose it was any worse than what Jerry Springer and Maury Povich have been putting on the air for a long time now, but I have been so divorced from mainstream pop culture for so long that I forgot how crappy it is.

This Teen Mom 2 show was a sleazy pageant of elaborately tattooed slatterns and the no-count men with whom they breed and on whom they cheat. To me, the most shocking thing about it was that the kind of behavior that when I was a kid was considered very low-class is now the sort of thing that — to judge by the houses these men and women live in, and the cars they drive — is totally middle class.

I would have assumed that a show like this would depict young women who got pregnant as unmarried teens, but who were working hard to take care of their child or children, and to get their lives on track. Nope, not really. True, some of them, at least, make an effort to do that, but they’re constantly sidetracked by their shocking immaturity, not least the inability to make a commitment to a man, or to find a man capable of making a commitment to them. This program at times featured men who were far too old to be dressing like high school boys, dressing like high school boys and talking about being players. Repulsive rabble, the lot. I ended up wondering what kind of mothers and fathers they were raised by — if they had a father in the picture at all.

The show made me angry, to be honest. Here were males and females capable of bringing new life into the world, but unwilling to do what is necessary to provide a decent upbringing for the little boys and girls for which they are responsible. This one young woman, Jenelle, tested positive for heroin use and lost custody of her son to her mother, and was shown on camera wailing about how the court ordered her to stop smoking pot and partying for a whole year.

My iPad’s streaming came back on, and I finally got to the end of that episode of The Crown, which ended with Churchill’s resignation. Coming home from the gym with my 12 year old son along (he had gone to exercise too), he asked me what was wrong. I told him that I had just watched part of a show about people behaving without conscience or nobility, and how shocking it was juxtaposed to the program about Churchill. My son knows something about World War II, and certainly knows who Churchill was. I told him that Churchill was a flawed man, but he was a real hero. He was a man of courage and vision, and his life shows us men how to behave when we are put to the test.

I told my son about the men — males, to be precise — in Teen Mom 2, and the dishonorable, selfish, no-count way they behave, and also about the no-good women they get involved with. Don’t be like that, I said. Never be like that. And stay away from women like that. 

I know, I know: there’s no real telling what’s true in a reality series, and what’s scripted. Still, judging by what is presented on this show, it’s a nightmare. It’s what you get when the family falls apart, when sexual norms collapse. We have to turn our backs on this culture, or it will swallow our children.

But “turning our backs” can only go so far. True, we have to keep ourselves and our kids from being absorbed by it, but if we are Christians, we can’t abandon the people who are victims of it. A friend sent me this wonderful 2004 essay from Touchstone, written by Mike Aquilina, about how the early church was centered in Christian families, and how the church grew because of the charity those families, as the church, showed to each other and to outsiders. To read the Aquilina piece is to realize that today, in a time of social dissolution — especially dissolution of the family — faithful Christians have a role to play in ministering to those who have been raised amid the moral and spiritual poverty of contemporary culture. Who will reach out to those kids who need stability? Who will reach out to the teen mothers (and fathers) who made a mistake, but who genuinely want to do the right thing, but need help?

Here’s the Benedict Option point I want to make: in order to be the church for these suffering, needy people, we are going to have to withdraw more cleanly from the degraded popular culture around us, and instead build up the hearts and minds of ourselves and our children within authentic Christian communities. We can’t simply say no to bad things (though we had better do that); we also have to say yes to good things.

An important thing I learned from reading Judith Rich Harris’s book The Nurture Assumption in my research for The Benedict Option: your child’s peer group is enormously important in forming his or her morals. Plus, you and your spouse’s own peer group is also important in forming your children’s moral imaginations, because you will be influenced a great deal by the norms your group embraces for themselves and their children. If you are a religious conservative who doesn’t adopt an adversarial stance towards contemporary pop culture, then the adversarial stance it has by nature towards you and what you hold sacred will win. If you don’t give your kids Winston Churchill (so to speak), they will get Teen Moms 2 instead.

These are the times in which we live. It takes a village to raise a child, but I want to get out of this village. That accounts for the intensity of what I felt last night watching those segments of the MTV show: the sense that this is poison, that the culture it represents is poison, and there can be no compromise with it. Alas, there’s no geographical escape from it either, not in the age of wifi and mass media. So we have to defect in place, building up our domestic monasteries.

UPDATE: Stunning comment from an anonymous reader:

It is absolutely true that as part of building a resilient community for ourselves and our children we must NOT abandon those suffering from a lack of community, family, knowledge of how to live well. These people on the TV are innocent because they don’t know any different. Really they are. I speak from first hand personal experience.

Three years ago a teen girl announced that our son was the father of her baby. Our son HAD dated her and had slept with her. He didn’t deny it but the dates were not quite right. It was a wake up call for our son but his response was to run away literally to the other side of the country.

Our response was to accept that maybe, just maybe this baby was our grandchild and until we knew differently, we would treat her as part of our family. It was a difficult thing to explain to our young children ages 9 and 11 but also a learning opportunity for them.

This “teen mom” was everything you saw on tv…a foster kid, with a drug addicted mother who had given birth to 9 kids herself, all of whom had been removed from her custody. Her dad was terribly neglectful. She did not have a CLUE about normal family life. But gosh she loved her baby daughter and even successfully breastfed her! This 17 year old black teen mother was trying to be a mother without any idea of what to do.

Eventually she ended up living with us. Many bad things happened and much suffering but through all of that we gave her as much love as we could and we fell in love with what we though MIGHT be our granddaughter

A DNA test finally showed that this little girl is not our grandchild.

But we have continued to love her and treat her as our grandchild, baby sit her, care for her, love her. Her mother has had an encounter with Christ through young life. She is still not sure how to live but she has seen an example of family life and is trying to emulate it. She knows Christ is the center of or the glue that holds our life in place and she wants that too.

I’m not trying to brag. I’m telling this story of an example of how we who already do have resilient community and family can and must care for those who don’t. And we don’t have to go out an search for people to care for. God wil bring them to us. We just have to do the right thing when He places that lost confused person in our path.

We could have abandoned that little girl when we learned she was not our son’s child. But we firmly believe that God brought her into our lives for some

Reason and we love her deeply. So even though we could rightly be done with her and her mother, we have instead committed to her for life. To me this is part of being pro-life and Christian.

We can’t fix all the teen moms and dysfunction. But we can, we must love the one person God puts in our life. It’s one at a time, this salvation thing. One at a time.

UPDATE.2: Reader Annie:

There’s the commenters saying this isn’t a big deal and it has always been going on and turn off your television because it’s distracting and we all just need to relax.

The foster care system here is snapping beneath new pressures, but it’s easy to ignore if you’ve always heard it’s stressed. There aren’t enough homes for the children. There aren’t enough relatives long enough in one place. The drugs, the brokenness, the belief that pure sensation is our purpose in life… all these contribute to the empty gazes and scarred faces I see. Say it’s not real, sure. I’ve lived in the elite centers, and worked in the no-go zones outside the gentrification circles. I know the difference between the comfortable and the broken, and I’m seeing more and more brokenness.

When I walk the streets of the dingy towns surrounding Pittsburgh, or when I glance at the local stories and arrests that come after front page politeness, I see a story unfolding of families falling apart that aren’t even families. It’s just broken people trying to catch one another, shifting alliances and living arrangements every few months. It’s children moving from parent to grandparent to foster parent to uncle with trash bags of mildewed clothing and it is a cycle that doesn’t stop.

When I talk to the aging progressive or conservative community leaders in those towns, I hear confusion and foreboding. No one, wherever they fall on the political spectrum, “feels good.” If Hillary had won, perhaps there’d be a false euphoria. Certainly much of their hysteria is a result of pernicious comfort and entitled expectations. And there is certainly a false confidence amongst the Trump supporters. But there is no one among them who says things are well, or who denies we are living beneath strange, new winds. We all know.

There’s a crisis, but some people want to say because there have always been tough times or places, it’s impossible that things could get worse. That’s simply not true. It’s wiser to admit we don’t entirely understand what is afoot than to tell Rod to fiddle while the colonies of Rome are burning.

Further On Kings And Trumps

A reader writes:

Priebus’ statement was sufficiently inartful to make me suspect he was intentionally ambiguous. I can’t prove that, of course, and in any case it doesn’t address the uncharitable or ignorant rankings of those on the left who have attacked him on it. They seem to forget, however, what it was like in 2008. Remember Renee Fleming singing “In the Bleak Midwinter” on The Prairie Home Companion? They left no doubt as to the messianic comparison:

In the bleak midwinter

at the Christmas feast,

a family leaves Chicago

and travels to the East,

for a public mansion

in Washington, D.C.

in a time of trouble

and festivity.

All across the nation

sea to shining sea,

people watch the passage

of this family.

And the loving wishes

go out to them there,

all the nation breathes

a silent, hopeful prayer.

It’s easy, of course, to dismiss this as persons who have idolized politics. But that’s not quite it. This is modern Hegelianism, which is a jealous God. It doesn’t object to the sacralization of politics, it objects to the wrong people making claims that are exclusive to the progressivist mind. It’s also why all the yattering about inclusivity would be comical if it were not tragic. But it is farcical. And it is dangerous, for it ups the ante on political life and turns it into a winner-take-all grudge match.

Elsewhere, my TAC colleague Robert VerBruggen explains why non-liberal but non-religious people like him may not have understood the Kings reference in its entirety. Excerpt:

First, a quick explanation of my background. I was raised Catholic, went to church every Sunday during some periods of my life, and attended more than a decade’s worth of what I knew as “catechism classes.” Somehow I didn’t know there was such a thing as “the catechism” when I finished those classes, though, so I guess they weren’t very good. And I suppose I dropped out rather than finishing: my senior year of high school I decided not to get confirmed, and today I’m an agnostic.

Well, let me be more generous than I was yesterday. Unlike Robert the lapsed Catholic, the first reader I quoted above is a conservative Protestant academic of real sophistication, and even he found the Priebus statement ambiguous. I concede that the innocent interpretation I gave it was less obvious than I thought. In any case, Priebus could have avoided controversy entirely by being more clear.

Secondly, though, here’s what I commented under Robert’s post:

I have a sack full of anecdotes from professors at Catholic and Evangelical colleges testifying to how ignorant their undergraduate students are about the basic concepts and vocabulary of Christianity. It’s not the fault of these students, or at least the profs aren’t blaming the students. They blame the churches, the religious education programs, and the parents. As you are demonstrably an intelligent man, I’d say that you were badly served by your Catholic religious education. In her book “The Nurture Assumption,” Judith Rich Harris talks about how all it takes is to fail to pass the tradition to a single generation for that tradition to be lost. People like me spent the past couple of days lamenting the religious ignorance and cultural illiteracy of so many people these days, and that can be true while at the same time the fault for this lying with the institutions — churches, schools, families — that failed in their duty to pass on this knowledge.

Along these lines, here’s a passage from a 2004 First Things essay by the church historian Robert Louis Wilken, one I never tire of quoting:

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture. The unhappy fact is that the society in which we live is no longer neutral about Christianity. The United States would be a much less hospitable environment for the practice of the faith if all the marks of Christian culture were stripped from our public life and Christian behavior were tolerated only in restricted situations.

If Christian culture is to be renewed, habits are more vital than revivals, rituals more edifying than spiritual highs, the creed more penetrating than theological insight, and the celebration of saints’ days more uplifting than the observance of Mother’s Day. There is great wisdom in the maligned phrase ex opere operato, the effect is in the doing. Intention is like a reed blowing in the wind. It is the doing that counts, and if we do something for God, in the doing God does something for us.

 

Even in these post-Christian times, people like me may lament the “cultural illiteracy” of those who don’t get basic references and ways of speaking within the Christian imaginary. But indignation is probably misplaced. A friend of mine’s college-student daughter was a regular churchgoer for her entire childhood, and a leader in her parachurch youth group. Yet it wasn’t until she reached college that she realized that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead in the flesh. I suppose it’s possible that she didn’t pay close enough attention in Sunday school and so forth. But based on what I hear from many others, both Protestant and Catholic, it’s more likely that the adults responsible for her spiritual formation never taught her the basics to begin with. And if you don’t live in a culture in which these things are in the air you breathe, you may never learn them — and not for lack of intelligence, either.

Let me put it to you like this. I have struggled all my life, even to this day, to understand literary references to Greek and Roman history and mythology. This is because I was never taught it growing up, and only encountered it, if I encountered it at all, in my leisure reading. I learned later that this imaginative world was considered part of the wallpaper in the mind of educated people of earlier generations. It’s gone now, and that makes a lot of our cultural patrimony inaccessible.

We are living through a time in which the Apostle Paul, King Herod, and John the Baptist are going to become as obscure to the modern mind as Mercury, Agamemnon, and Prometheus.

Last point: some friends of mine were excited to put in the program for their (church) wedding an amazing poem they ran across on vacation in Greece. Here’s the English translation.  Both raised Catholic, neither had any idea what it was, aside from a beautiful poem on the wall in Greece.

 

The Other Guy From Wham!

George Michael’s Faith album was the first compact disc I ever bought. I pretty much wore it out listening to it back then as a college sophomore. In high school, I dismissed George Michael as that ridiculous Wham! guy, but Faith — that was something far more mature. It was a great pop album, and it holds up well today. Leaving his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley behind was a great career move for George Michael, who went on to become one of the biggest pop stars on the planet before wasting his talent on drugs, rehab, and humiliating run-ins with the law, and dying in his sleep of what may have been a heart attack related to heroin abuse.

Andrew Ridgeley fell into obscurity. He made a pile of money from Wham!, but surely nothing like what George Michael made in his solo career. His attempt at a solo music career fell flat. So Ridgeley did something totally boring, but very out of character for pop stars. Read on:

Yet, still having money from his Wham! days, paired with [wife] Keren’s money from her time in Bananarama, the couple really never had to work again. So, in 1996, Keren and Andrew, along with Keren’s six year old son Thomas, bought a 15th Century farm near Cornwall, England. However, another opportunity would come to Andrew to finally put his energy into something worthwhile, and for the first time, something real. After a surfing trip with his brother in the mid 90’s, Andrew and Paul contacted a waterbone illness due to raw sewage that was being dumped into the beach. Upon recovering from his illness, Andrew went to The Times with his story, and became a vocal environmentalist and crusader for water quality. Ridgeley became a member of Surfers Against Sewage, which dedicates itself to cleaning up England’s beaches and making the public aware of the dangers of sewage near public beaches. Andrew is still involved with Surfers Against Sewage today.

These days Andrew lives a quite life where he divides his time between surfing, golfing and going to the pub.

A few years ago, a philosophy blog discussed why boring old Andrew Ridgeley is the “winner” and George Michael the “loser”. Excerpts:

80′s pop had immensely seductive ideas about sex, relationships, family life, work and personal style. It told us that nothing should stand in the way of having a good time. If anyone tells you to knuckle down, to work hard, to put others first, to feel sorry or ashamed, to think of the future – ignore them. They are conformist oppressors who don’t know what life is really about.

It is an addictive outlook. It picks up accurately on what, at moments of high excitement, feels like the truth. It lashes out at anything that causes resentment, boredom or disappointment.

It’s hugely successful. But it’s also a disaster. The trouble is that it only works for short manic bursts. Life can’t be properly lived this way. This is what Andrew has discovered. That’s why he’s so important. He’s not someone coming from the outside pouring scorn on what a lot of other people like. He’s the guy who was there. He knows exactly how big the allure is. So we can trust him when he turns his back on it.

We don’t generally think of resignation as a virtue; it sounds like failure. What it means, though, is recognising that big things in life – an OK relationship, a secure sense of self-worth – require giving up some excitement.

The pop idea of life was so unhelpful because it pretended that excitement was the way to a good life. So it made casual sex seem wonderful, it made the after-party look like the high point of social life. It was the continuation of a Romantic philosophy: the ecstasy of the moment is what counts. On the other hand, resignation means seeing that the ecstasy of the moment is often (sadly) the enemy of what we really want.

More:

Andrew’s long-passed successes as a performer and song-writer have left him well off by ordinary standards. However, he could have made a great deal more money if he had really set his sights on continuing in the world of fame and glamour. This may seem like a minor issue, but a huge part of how the world works is driven by people’s relentless ambition to have ever more status and money. One thing that Andrew therefore does is to define for us a conception of being satisfied, of having enough – even when more would have been an option, but at the cost to relationships, health and family.

It’s tempting to think that it doesn’t matter much what kind of music is popular. So long as people like it, don’t worry, it’s just a bit of fun. But music is one of the biggest influences that shapes a culture. It encourages an attitude to life. The songs get inside our heads and the ideas they carry with them stay there – influencing how we value ourselves and our goals.

The life of Andrew Ridgeley belongs in the public realm. It’s one of the great moral fables of our time. It’s the story of one man’s redemption – from manic, narcissistic pleasure seeking to maturity. But it’s not just his story. He shows us what we need to do collectively, as a nation. We live in a Wham! society – and yet we need (as it were) to move to Cornwall.

Read the whole thing. At least look at the page, and observe that Andrew Ridgeley looks like a nondescript middle-aged man, as opposed to George Michael, who was the same age, but who was obviously expensively maintained. And note well that it was written three years ago, long before George Michael’s sad, premature death, so it’s not like the philosopher is piling on. And it’s not like George Michael didn’t do good things for people (e.g., it has emerged that he quietly gave millions to charity). Despite his immense talent, even if George Michael were still alive, I can’t imagine that anyone in his right mind would prefer the hedonistic, tormented, lonely life he had been living to the one Andrew Ridgeley was living. Washing up as a pop star was a great blessing to him, just as Michael’s phenomenal success was a curse.

Andrew Ridgeley has transformed into that guy in London who’s always trying to sell me the Socialist Worker pic.twitter.com/f1BHsKkE4e

— Michael C Moynihan (@mcmoynihan) December 26, 2016

View From Your Table

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The reader (OK, Siarlys, who has never contributed a VFYT, so yay!) writes:

Family Christmas tradition… bacon with home made danish pastry and fresh squozen orange juice. The pastry requires some hours of spreading butter on rolled out dough, then doubling it over, refrigerating, roll out, repeat, before tying strips of dough into knots. But that’s the way mother made it, so I stick to the recipe.

Prince George’s County, Maryland

Says the reader:

… before the lamb and orzo.

Trump, Jesus, & Our Culturally Illiterate Elite

Of all the stupid controversies, this one is special. And liberals aren’t the only ones guilty of causing it.

GOP chief Reince Priebus sent out an anodyne Christmas greeting from the party that included this inelegantly worded bit:

Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King.

That could have been phrased more clearly, but you have to be deep inside the Blue Bubble to fail to understand that Christians consider Jesus to be, in the words of Revelation 19:16 (most memorably quoted in the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah), “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords”. It’s a messianic title. Christians join themselves with the Three Wise Men to celebrate the birth of that King. This is not some obscure theological doctrine. I mean, you only have to have heard Christmas carols. What do the “herald angels sing” of? “Glory to the newborn King.” Noël, Noël, “born is the King of Israel.” And so forth.

The Christian belief is that the King of Kings came into the world in the humblest manner, and died in ignominy. And yet, he was the Ruler of the Universe. This tells us something about the nature of God, and the nature of humanity. You don’t have to believe it, obviously, but to be ignorant of this in our culture is to evidence cultural illiteracy.

Well.

OMFG. https://t.co/XjJsaCc2o6 pic.twitter.com/Ng725lrY2m

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) December 25, 2016

 

The distinction between a president and a king is not trivial https://t.co/8At2sHon1E

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) December 25, 2016

But it wasn’t only liberals. Here’s a top Republican Party strategist:

Dear RNC: We don’t have a “new King.” What the hell is wrong with you people? #TwoPaths #Vigilance

— John Weaver (@JWGOP) December 25, 2016

Liberal writer James Fallows tries to save people from making fools of themselves:

@dandrezner The msg is tone-deaf but can be reconciled w std Christian theme. “Noel, noel, noel, noel: born is the King of Israel.”

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) December 25, 2016

To no avail:

@SaukFish @JamesFallows @dandrezner Is there really any question that it (ambiguity) was intentional? See: dogwhistle. Also: subliminal.

— Jeff Young (@jientho) December 25, 2016

Is this Trump Derangement Syndrome manifesting itself? That’s no doubt part of it. But mostly it’s theological ignorance. Again, you have to be a cultural illiterate to jump to the conclusion that Priebus was comparing Trump to Jesus Christ. An academic friend texted to me this morning:

The ignorance is staggering. I mean, these are well educated guys, and they have never (clearly) had a serious conversation about Christianity or with a Christian. Incredible. It’s clear that the expulsion of theology in any way from the academy has had DEEP consequences that I only now appreciate. For our secular friends, we are all dumb illiterate snake handlers. Some of us just wear sh!t from J Crew. But in the end, we are all Hillbillys.

UPDATE: Orthodox reader Old West adds an interesting perspective:

The distinct liturgical separation of the Nativity of Christ from the visit of the wise men/kings is a feature of Western Christianity, where Epiphany commemorates the arrival of the wise men from afar. In the Orthodox Church, they are considered part of the same story — in fact the Gospel read at the Divine Liturgy of Nativity is the account in St. Matthew of the arrival of the wise men. All of the other stories of Christmas — the accounts from St. Luke and the earlier passage in St. Matthew — are read at other, earlier services. And with regard to the many Biblical stories surrounding the Nativity of Christ, the troparion (the central hymn of a feast in the Orthodox Church) mentions only the wise men (“those who worshipped the stars were taught by a star to adore Thee”).

Since Priebus is an Orthodox Christian, it shouldn’t be surprising to have him go straight to the Magi in giving a Christmas greeting.

‘Kill Whitey!’ Says White Professor

Someone is in the holiday spirit

The Rex Tillerson Nobody Knows

Nine years ago, Emily Roden served on jury duty with a quiet, well-dressed man who turned out to be Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil and now the nominee to be Trump’s Secretary of State. Excerpts:

From the first day of jury selection, we all noticed another suited man always present in the courtroom. His presence was intriguing due to the ear piece in his ear. While grabbing lunch at Denton County Independent Hamburger on the square the second day of the trial, we noticed this mysterious man dining with our fellow juror who’d declined the foreman spot. The intrigue grew, and it was the talk of the jury: Who were these men?

Finally, during a break in the jury room, one juror had the nerve to ask: “Who are you? And what do you do?”

Our fellow jury member was reading the paper again and pointed out an article with Exxon in the headlines.

I work for them, he said humbly. There are a lot of people in this world who hate me for what I do, so they give me and my family guys like that to protect me.

On trial was a man who had been accused of sexual abuse by the daughter of his girlfriend. More:

The trial concluded, and it was time for the jury to deliberate. The story was heartbreaking, and the facts of the case were clear enough to make the majority of the jury convinced of the guilt of this sexual offender of a little girl. But the defense did a good enough job to create a couple of hold-outs. As our deliberations came to a close, it appeared we might have a hung jury.

That’s when Tillerson began to speak. Humbly, delicately and without an ounce of condescension toward those who disagreed, he began walking us all through the details of the case. I even recall being moved by his thorough explanation about the nature of doubt and the standards set forth by our justice system.

With great patience, this man who strikes multibillion-dollar deals with foreign heads of state brought our scrappy jury together — to bring a sexual predator to justice and to deliver justice for a scared and deeply wounded little girl.

Read the whole thing. There’s even more to the story, and it’s well worth reading. Roden says she didn’t vote for Trump, and she has no opinion about whether or not he would be a good Secretary of State. But she does know that people who are trashing Tillerson’s character now don’t know the man she knows.

View From Your Table

Starhill, Louisiana

This afternoon, we went to the Leming home in Starhill for a late Christmas lunch. The weather was nice outside, so Ruthie and Mike’s girls moved the family dining table out onto the front porch, so we could eat al fresco. As we were gathering at the table, Hannah put a Spotify or Pandora channel on. There was a Tracy Chapman song, then a song I didn’t recognize. It was not a set playlist, but one of those random mix channels.

I’m not making this up: the moment, the very moment that all of us sat down to say grace, the Van Morrison song “Brown-Eyed Girl” began to play over the speakers.

Here’s a passage from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:

At lunch today, when the first notes struck our ears, we all looked at each other with big eyes. Mam fought back tears. “She’s here with us now,” Mam said. And none of us doubted it a bit.

Just to emphasize the significance of this song in Ruthie’s life, here’s a clip from Leming Aid, the 2010 fundraiser Ruthie’s friends in St. Francisville threw to help with her medical bills after she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. You’ll see below Ruthie dancing with Mike, as well as our parents, Mam and Paw (who died in 2015) doing a turn around the dance floor. The singer is our cousin Emily Branton:

Here’s how I described this scene in Little Way:

By the time the sun went down a crowd of five hundred people milled around under the barn. Suddenly a few people at the far side began to cheer. Everyone turned to see Ruthie and Mike slowly making their way into the arena. Then an enormous whoop broke over the crowd like a thunderclap. Everyone stood, yelled, applauded. Ruthie, her bald head hidden under a baseball cap, brought her hands to her swollen face and stopped, overcome by emotion. Mike, beaming, steadied her and walked toward the front row of chairs. Ruthie sat with her head down for a few minutes, crying and gathering herself before beginning to receive a long line of well-wishers.

Our folksinger cousin Emily Branton opened the show. After several number Emily struck some familiar chords, then sang:

Hey, where did we go,

Days when the rains came…

Mike helped Ruthie to her feet, and led his girl to the dance floor. They couldn’t do much, given her shortness of breath, but they held each other close, Ruthie staring up at her husband with her chestnut eyes, smiling broadly through her pain.

“We love you so much, Brown Eyed Girl!” Emily called from the stage. Ruthie grinned and waved with both hands.

Had “Brown-Eyed Girl” played at some point during the dinner, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised. It’s a golden oldie. But at the very moment we all fell silent to say grace for Christmas lunch on Ruthie’s front porch, with Mike, the Leming girls, and Mam gathered round?

What a wonderful Christmas gift for us all. Hey author of this terrific column, what do you think of that?