Rod Dreher's Blog, page 505

All I Want For Christmas

Get one for me, one for John Waters, and one for Uncle Chuckie.

‘My Fellow Liberals, I’m Tired Of You’

Amazing letter today from a reader. I’ve hidden a bit to protect her identity:

I’m a secular/agnostic Californian and longtime reader of your blog. I’ve enjoyed your books beginning with Crunchy Cons, and have valued your insights over the years.

Though you don’t know me, I feel like I know you and your family. And I want to share with you, from the liberal bastion of Northern California, that I am officially tired of the type of people who have surrounded me my entire life. In the wake of Trump’s election, I am experiencing “tribe fatigue.” I’m not tired of The Other, Detestable Tribe. I’m tired of my own.

A bit about me: I am a [deleted] with two young children. My parents were non-religious Democrats, and my ex-Catholic mom loathes organized religion to this day.

So I was raised a secular liberal. My college professors were secular liberals. During my journalism phase, my newspaper colleagues were secular liberals. My law school professors and peers were – in the vast majority – secular liberals. Almost everyone at my corporate law firm was a secular liberal. My California neighbors and friends are secular liberals, as are my fellow government lawyers. My mother, siblings, and their spouses are all secular liberals.

By all rights, I should be a member in good standing of their tribe, “liking” their Facebook posts and joining their candlelight vigils against the evil Trump Administration. But November 8 and its aftermath revealed to me that I am just so tired of these people. I can’t be like them, and I don’t want my kids turning into them.

I am tired of their undisguised contempt for tens of millions of Americans, with no effort to temper their response to the election with humility or empathy.

I am tired of their unexamined snobbery and condescension.

I am tired of their name-calling and virtue-signaling as signs of supposedly high intelligence.

I am tired of their trendiness, jumping on every left-liberal bandwagon that comes along (transgender activism, anyone?) and then acting like anyone not on board is an idiot/hater.

I am tired of their shallowness. It’s hard to have a deep conversation with people who are obsessed with moving their kids’ pawns across the board (grades, sports, college, grad school, career) and, in their spare time, entertaining themselves and taking great vacations.

I am tired of their acceptance of vulgarity and sarcastic irreverence as the cultural ocean in which their kids swim. I like pop culture as much as the next person, but people who would never raise their kids on junk food seem to think nothing of letting then wallow in cultural junk, exposed to nothing ennobling, aspirational, or even earnest.

I am tired of watching them raise clueless kids (see above) who go off to college and within months are convinced they live in a rapey, racist patriarchy; “Make America Great Again” is hate speech; and Black Lives Matter agitators are their brothers-in-arms against White Privilege. If my kids are like that at nineteen, I’ll feel I’ve seriously failed them as a parent. Yet the general sentiment seems to be these are good, liberal kids who may have gotten a bit carried away.

I am tired of their lack of interest in any form of serious morality or self-betterment. These are decent, responsible people, many compassionate by temperament. Yet they seem two-dimensional, as if they believe that being a nice, well-socialized person who holds the correct political views is all there is, and there is nothing else to talk about. Isn’t there, though?

I am tired of being bored and exasperated by everybody. I feel like I have read this book a thousand times, and there are no surprises in it. Down with Trump! Trans Lives Matter! Climate deniers are destroying the planet! No cake, we’re gluten-free!

These are good people in a lot of ways. But there has got to be a better tribe.

That leads me to . . . drum roll . . . the Christian Right. It is no small feat, switching tribes. It feels stressful and weird to abandon your tribe for the Detested Other Side.

Since November 8, my husband and I have been taking the kids to church. (He is politically conservative with a religious bent, so no argument there.) I have come this close to buying a giant poster of the American flag for the living room. I may do it still.

Right now, I am struggling to accept the basic Christian doctrines (virgin birth, resurrection, second coming) because I feel the Christian tribe may be the right tribe for my family. We just finished watching a BBC miniseries about the birth of Jesus, which was so beautiful and moving compared to secular TV. My nine-year-old really enjoyed it. I want to prepare my kids to live according to some unchanging truth, not subject to every passing trend, and this felt like a start. But I worry that an inability to believe in the supernatural aspects of the faith will limit my ability to be a “real” Christian.

Last Sunday’s sermon mentioned 1 Peter:18-19, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors.” This may be obvious to you, but secular liberalism does seem empty in some way, despite all the things my educated, middle-class tribe has to be grateful for. If that’s what’s been handed down to me, I want more, especially for my precious kids. I’m trying.

I plan to respond to this reader privately, but she said I could share this letter as long as I protected her identity. What a courageous person she is. God bless her on her journey.

‘Rivers Of Blood’ In Berlin

The view of a British tourist present at the Berlin Christmas market yesterday:

Tourists saw a young child being crushed underneath the hijacked truck which ploughed through a Berlin Christmas market last night, killing 12 and wounding around 50.

Mike Fox and his partner were a ‘few metres’ from being run down by the lorry driven by a Pakistani asylum seeker Naved B, 23, who has only been in the country a few months.

‘There were children in the market. My girlfriend saw a child under the truck,’ Mr Fox said shortly after the attack near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on Breitscheidplatz.

Witnesses saw bodies strewn across the a backdrop of colourful market stalls and Christmas lights as ‘rivers of blood’ flowed from the scene of the attack, which has again sent shockwaves of fear throughout Europe.

More, this from an American witness:

Mr Theis and his girlfriend Lara Colombo, 22, were on their way to the besieged market when they heard sirens and saw people running frantically from the scene.

He said: ‘It was carnage everywhere. There was blood all over the floor. There were people lying on the floor.

‘Nobody was really helping anybody. People were running. It was like every man for themselves. It was dusty and chaotic.

‘The biggest mental image I have is there were two rivers of blood going down the floor.

Rivers of blood, eh? The reader who sent me that link says she was reminded of Tory MP Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech warning Britain against mass immigration. The speech caused a huge outrage, but also drew lots of support. You can see why if you read the full text of it. Here’s how it opens:

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

Powell’s speech, which I’d never read in full until today, reminds me of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, which I wrote about here. Raspail’s book came out in 1973, and was roundly denounced as racist. It is a fictional tale of how France reacts when it becomes known that millions of Third World migrants are headed toward its shores. The novel excoriates French governmental, academic, media, and religious elites for collapsing in the face of the crisis. The book is undeniably racist in parts, just as Powell’s speech is. But the racist material makes it far too easy for those who don’t want to take the main message seriously to dismiss the warnings as bigoted dystopian fantasy.

Meanwhile:

Yeah, I’m starting to believe this is like a summoning spell. https://t.co/C1FNY8ulel

— Michael B Dougherty

Racist, Sexist MTV

That clip from MTV News is a piece of work: a nasty example of virtue signaling that’s both racist and sexist — but that’s okay because the target of its mockery is white men. If I were running Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, I would tweet that thing out incessantly, saying, “This is what the cultural left thinks of you.”

Transcript:

Hey fellow white guys, it’s about to be a new year and here are a few things we think you could do a little bit better in 2017.

First off, try to recognize that America was never great for anyone who wasn’t a white guy.

Can we all just agree that ‘black lives matter’ isn’t the opposite of ‘all lives matter’? Black lives just matter. There’s no need to overcomplicate it.

Also, blue lives matter isn’t a thing. Cops weren’t born with blue skin, right? I mean yeah, they weren’t born blue.

Stop bragging about being woke. Stop saying woke.

Learn what mansplaining is and then stop doing it

Oh, and if you’re a judge don’t prioritize the well-being of an Ivy League athlete over the woman he assaulted.

We all love Beyonce and yeah she’s black, so of course she cares about black issues. I’m talking to you Fox News.

Feel free to take Kanye West though. You guys can have him. (You know what you did, Kanye.)

Nobody who has black friends says that they have black friends. And just because you have black friends doesn’t mean that you’re not racist. You can be racist with black friends.

Look guys we know nobody’s perfect but honestly, you could do a little better in 2017. Some of you guys do a great job. Some of you don’t. Please, because 2016 is bad; 2017 can’t be worse than this, right? Because this is bad.

There is not another ethnic or gender group in this country that MTV would dare to abuse in a bit like this. You will not see a genial clip telling black men how to clean up their act for 2017 (“Stop committing violent crimes wildly out of proportion to your numbers in the population”). You will not see one telling unmarried women to take greater responsibility for their sexuality, given the enormous numbers of births to unmarried women (“If you don’t want to get pregnant, take the pill or use the condom”). You will not see MTV offering advice to gay men to quit being so promiscuous (“Have you guys seen your STD rates lately? Pathetic”). And so forth.

But see, the people who wrote and produced this spot are no doubt all graduates of colleges that fill their heads with left-wing cant and propaganda that attributes all social evils to white men. Or at least feels privileged enough to mock them because of their race and their sex. I’m talking about places like the University of Wisconsin – Madison:

A class to be taught next semester at the University of Wisconsin Madison called “The Problem of Whiteness” aims to “understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy,” the course description states.

“Whites rarely or never questioned what it is to be white,” Assistant Professor Damon Sajnani, who will teach the course, told The College Fix in a telephone interview last week. “So you go through life taking it for granted without ever questioning or critically interrogating it.”

For Sajnani, one way to solve this is to offer “The Problem of Whiteness,” an analysis of what it means to be white and how to deal with it as a “problem.”

“The idea of talking about the problem of whiteness is to turn the question back to where it belongs,” he said.

One of the main goals in the class will be to understand race and identity and how it impacts lives on a daily basis, he said. One of the talking points is juxtaposing white privilege and white power, and how the two can be intertwined and similar to each other, the scholar said.

“The problem of racism is the problem of whites being racist towards blacks,” he said.

That’s mighty convenient, innit?

How far do you think anybody could get at a university with a proposal to teach a course on “The Problem Of Blackness,” or “The Problem Of Jewishness,” and so forth? Yet it is fine to demonize white people as a “problem.” If I were a Wisconsin taxpayer, I would be on the phone to my state legislator demanding to know why my tax dollars were going to subsidize a class that propagandizes students to hate white people.

These progressives — the ones in universities, the ones in MTV and other media — have no idea what demons they’re summoning with their snotty bigotries.

TV For The Trump Era

Ruthie and me, on our parents’ front porch, 2011

The Hollywood Reporter says television executives are starting to wonder if they’re telling the right stories. Excerpts:

In the days following Donald Trump’s stunning presidential win, ABC Studios chief Patrick Moran called Black-ish creator Kenya Barris. The men had a project at ABC about a pair of politically divided pundits who fall in love. Suddenly it felt more relevant.

But now Moran wanted to be sure both sides of the spectrum were being presented with equal credibility. “In years past, it would be very easy to let one side feel like the cartoon and have the show assume that the audience is siding with the other,” Moran says of the liberal slant that often permeates Hollywood output. Barris agreed and has begun courting right-wing voices for his writers room: “There was no way I wanted to do something that was going to further the divide in this country.” On Dec. 6, the project was ordered to pilot.

That exchange came on the heels of what Moran describes as a “wake-up call.” Over at ABC, entertainment chief Channing Dungey acknowledges that the rise of Trump and his blue-collar support forced her to question whether her programming was too focused on upper-income brackets. Similar check-ins have taken place across the TV industry as executives try to better understand and appeal to a demographic to which many hadn’t paid enough attention. “[The election] made the ground shake underneath media,” TLC president Nancy Daniels tells THR, “and now everybody is taking a hard look: Are we telling the right stories? Are we reaching the right people?”

One of you readers sent me the link to this story. The first thing it made me think of was the bit I posted the other day (“Same Bar, Different Worlds”) about sitting in a blue-collar bar here in Baton Rouge, and being more tuned in to what was happening within my network of websites and correspondents and Twitter friends on the laptop in front of me than with anything the man sitting next to me had to say, or any of the other white working-class people talking in the bar. It was as if I were a foreigner on my own country.

I don’t say that in a self-deprecating way. As one of you commenters pointed out, the blue-collar man sitting next to me likely knew as little of my world as I did of his, even though we’re both two middle-aged white guys from the same area. Again, this is nothing really new. It’s not like class and cultural differences only became a thing recently. So what’s different now?

At least two things, I’d say, both related to social and cultural fragmentation. Our two counterparts back in the 1960s, the era when Blue Collar Guy and I were born, would have shared a lot more in common than he and I do today. They read the same newspaper, watched the same news on TV, rooted for the same teams, had the same cultural references, and so forth. If we had lived in the same school district, then we would have gone to the same public school, unless one of us had been Catholic and our parents had decided to put us in parochial school.

Very little of that is true today. This is in large part a function of mass media and technology. This is good in some ways, bad in others, but the truth of it can’t be denied.

Second, the prospects Blue Collar Guy and I would have had for our children would be significantly different today than it would have been for men of the 1960s sitting at that bar in our places. We would have expected our kids to go to college or into the trades, or into work at one of the petrochemical plants around south Louisiana. The college they would have gone to would have been LSU, most likely. Our 1960s doppelgangers would have been confident that their kids were going to do better economically than they had done. And they would not have worried about divorce destroying families, much less the eventual normalization of out-of-wedlock births. The future was more predictable to them, and gave them a greater sense of security.

We don’t have that anymore.

As most of you readers know, I have been heavily invested, emotionally and otherwise, in trying to understand the story of my own family, which has been carried along by these same cultural currents. I left my hometown after college, and didn’t plan to return. The liberty I had in my imagination to leave home and make a way for myself wherever I wanted to be — this was something that my generation experienced as more normal than any previous one. There was this new thing called MTV that came us via a big satellite dish my dad installed in the backyard. I watched it constantly, and dreamed of London. My sister Ruthie didn’t watch it, because she liked country music, and that wasn’t the kind of music they played on MTV. I made it to London at 17, because my mom won a trip in a church drawing. I’ve been to Europe maybe twenty times since then. Ruthie died at 42, and never went abroad. Never wanted to go. Though it was stupid to want things like that.

Well, I wanted those things, and worked for them. After I launched myself into a journalism career in Washington in my mid-twenties, Ruthie gave birth to her first child, a daughter she and her husband named Hannah. The birth of that child drew me strongly South towards home. But I discovered shortly after I got there that there was no coming home for me, not unless I was willing to do exactly as my father demanded that I do. After three months, I left home a second time, returning to Washington, with no guilt.

I worked as a journalist in DC, in South Florida, in New York, Dallas, then Philadelphia. The older I got, the more interested I became in rootlessness, and its cost. The thing is, the worldview I had taken in from my heavy consumption of media — entertainment and news — had pretty much ruined me for putting down roots anywhere. I was doing the right thing according to the ideology of American success in the late 20th and early 21st century. But the anxiety that came with that rootlessness was hard to live with.

This was not an anxiety that my sister lived with. And it’s not just because of the place she lived in, but the mindset she had.

As you know if you read The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, or have read this blog for the past few years, you know that the dying and death of my sister forced me to resolve the question of exile in my life. I saw the love and goodness of the people of my hometown as they cared for her and her family throughout her cancer fight. After she died, I moved with my wife and kids back to Louisiana. Thought that was the end of the story.

It wasn’t. I had nearly finished the manuscript for the book, and had used some of the advance to take Hannah, now 19, to Paris, as I had promised to do years earlier, if I ever had the money. On our last night there, walking up the Boulevard Saint-Germain, she told me this:

So there it was: I could never come home, not really, because leaving had been the unforgivable sin. And not just leaving: being different. Wanting things other than they wanted. The strength of the family had been in its uncompromising sense of loyalty. I had been disloyal. If you read J.D. Vance’s great Hillbilly Elegy, you know that a certain kind of Southern white person — those of Scots-Irish descent — are intensely loyal, even to their own destruction. My family aren’t hillbillies, but for my dad, loyalty was the supreme virtue, the standard by which a man proved his honor. My father inculcated that uncompromising standard into my sister, thinking somehow that it would make our family invincible.

It didn’t save his daughter. She did everything right by her own and our father’s code — and still, she died. But I lived, and prospered. In truth, there was never any reason to believe that people who stayed behind would live, and those who left would die, but that’s how they saw things. The legacy of that belief has been deeply tragic, in more ways than I care to say.

And yet, had I been the one to develop terminal cancer, the story would have been a conventional one. I would have come home to die, and they would have welcomed me and cared for me until my very last breath. The tragedy might have been seen that I spent my life searching for what was always there at home, had I obeyed the family code and stayed home. I might have written it that way myself — but it would not have been true. If you read Little Way, you know that near the book’s end, my father made an uncharacteristic confession, one that put the decision he made to sacrifice his future for the sake of serving the family code in a different light.

That said, even though I came to the decision to return home on false pretenses, it was the right decision, for hard reasons I wrote about in How Dante Can Save Your Life. I happen to be reading a Jungian interpretation of the Divine Comedy, written by Helen M. Luke, who offers an insightful interpretation of the first lines of the poem. Those lines in Italian are:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

che la diritta via era smarrita

The standard English translation is:

In the middle of the journey of our life

I came to myself in a dark wood

for I had lost the straight path

 

Helen Luke writes that this translation doesn’t convey the full complexity of Dante’s meaning, and in truth, it probably cannot be done in English without many more lines. She says:

For Dante does not say, “mi retrovai in una selva oscura” — he says, “per una selva oscura” — and although it is perfectly correct to translate per by “in,” the more usual and basic meaning of the word per is nevertheless “through” and not simply “in.” The image is of a man stumbling about without direction in a dark wood, but the poet is surely also telling us in those few words that it is precisely through the terrifying experience of the dark wood that we find the way of return to innocence; that indeed it is because of his lost state that a man is able consciously to refind himself.

Luke’s words have been front to mind for the past two or three days. There’s no doubt that the profound inner healing that I found after I returned home came only because I entered against my will a very dark wood. Now, I’m about to publish a book in which I propose a way for Christians to stay on the straight path through the dark wood we’re now in, and will be in for the foreseeable future. I’m talking, of course, about the fragmentation of our culture, of our society, and indeed of world order. And I’m talking about the fragmentation happening in our communities, in our families, and in ourselves. I believe that I have learned some things through my own travels that can help people who stayed home. And I know that the people who stayed home have learned things that can help me. They already have.

If Ruthie had lived, and I had moved back, I wonder what our lives would have been like. How we would have fought, with our clash of worldviews. If we ever would have made up, or if, after our father died, I would have left again, unable to withstand her unyielding judgment. We’ll never know. I know for sure we would have argued about Trump. She would have been all for him, and I would (mostly) not have been.

But here’s something you didn’t know: her daughter Hannah left for northern California the summer after graduating college. She wanted adventure, and she wanted to run away from the pain of her mother’s death, and all the unresolved feelings she had over the way she handled her mother’s illness (by running away as best she could from it all, and denying that it was really happening). She’s been working at wineries, and enjoying her life. Hannah, who is now 23, returned to St. Francisville this past October to be in a friend’s wedding, and felt gripped by a desire to come home. I know this feeling; I had it myself when I was 26, and she was born. She went back to Napa, gave notice at her job, and two weeks later, drove back across the country. South toward home.

Now she’s wondering if she made the right decision, and if she should go back. I haven’t seen her since her return, so I don’t know what’s going on, but we’ll be seeing each other on Christmas Eve. Maybe I can help. Maybe not. We’ll see. It’s so familiar, though, this story. She believes, as I did when I was her age, that there’s a geographical cure for this restlessness. The heart is a dark wood.

It might well have been a stroke of good fortune that the reader sent me the Hollywood Reporter story when he did. The hour I spent at the bar, eating my shrimp poboy and reading websites on my laptop while ignoring the man sitting next to me (except to eavesdrop on his conversation with the others) has been on my mind. My sister never would have missed the opportunity to make a human connection. I’m the guy who sits there theorizing about the loss of community. She was the gal who talked to the friendly workman sitting next to her having lunch at a bar.

But she was far from perfect. Ruthie deliberately ignored things going on in the wider world, the currents of culture and history, because she wanted so badly to hold on to her vision of innocence, which held our country town as a simple place where the bad things of the world never intrude. When she learned she had cancer, she refused to believe that it was going to kill her. She thought that she could defeat it by the grace of God and her own iron will. Because of that, she did not prepare her family for the world as it was, and was going to be. This exacted a serious cost.

Over and over in this space I return to the line spoken by the character Tancredi in The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” How do we today, we 21st century Americans, know what has to change so things can stay as they are? By “stay as they are,” I mean keep vitality within stability in our families and communities in a period of rapid, even revolutionary, change. It is an enormous challenge. And interesting aspect to my own story is that Ruthie and I were both conservatives, though of very different temperaments and outlooks. A simple conservative vs. liberal, Archie-vs-Meathead conflict would not have been so interesting. She was a conservative of the heart, and I am one of the head. Neither of us was complete. I am fairly confident that I will be trying to figure Ruthie, and our relationship, out until the day I die.

I think in some ways, the conflict between my good and great sister and me, and how it is playing out across generations, is the story of our time. I don’t know how this works, but I’m going to find out how to write a proposal for a dramatic TV series, and do one based on Little Way and its themes. I’ve written four books in five years, and would like to try a different kind of writing. My favorite television series of all time is Friday Night Lights, not because I care about football (I don’t, not really), but because of the way that terrific show portrayed small town life in all its humanity and complexity. The whole world was there, in Dillon, Texas. Also in Starhill, I think. We’ll see.

 

Jihadis Vs. ‘Christendom’

This is extremely bad news:

Russia’s ambassador to Turkey was assassinated at an Ankara art exhibit on Monday evening by a lone Turkish gunman shouting “God is great!” and “don’t forget Aleppo, don’t forget Syria!” in what Russia called a terrorist attack.

The gunman, who was described by Ankara’s mayor as a policeman, also wounded at least three others in the assault, which was captured on Turkish video, before he was killed by other officers in a shootout.

The assassination instantly vaulted relations between Turkey and Russia to a new level of crisis over the protracted Syria conflict on Turkey’s southern doorstep. It came after days of protests by Turks angry over Russia’s support for Syria’s government in the conflict and the Russian role in the killings and destruction in Aleppo, the northern Syrian city.

The envoy, Andrey G. Karlov, was shot from behind and immediately fell to the floor while speaking at an exhibition, according to multiple accounts from the scene, the Contemporary Arts Center in the Cankaya area of Ankara.

The gunman, wearing a dark suit and tie, was seen in video footage of the assault shouting in Arabic: “God is great! Those who pledged allegiance to Muhammad for jihad. God is great!”

He shouted, “Allahu akbar!” Don’t they always. Here’s the video:

This is a clarifying moment. Yesterday I found myself at a public event sitting next to a French man who lives here in Louisiana. We were talking geopolitics. He told me he reads the French media closely, and says that something big is coming, both in France and in Europe. “We are still building to the crescendo,” he said, explaining that Europeans are fed up with Muslims and with the migrant horde. He said we probably won’t like what we get, but that people back home — even at the left-wing grassroots — have had enough of the multiculturalism lie.

So, why clarifying? The US strongly opposed Russian policy in Syria, but let’s not be fooled: the US is fighting the same people in northern Iraq that Russia has been fighting in Syria. We are all the same to the jihadis, and despite our rivalries, we had better think of ourself as on Russia’s side in this epic battle. This is not so much a question of Islamism vs. the West as it is Islamism vs. Christendom. Mind you, there is no such thing as Christendom anymore, but that’s not how the jihadis see it.

I fear that we are in a clash of civilizations whether we want one or not. If liberal democracies in Europe cannot defend European security and liberty from Islamism and Islamic terrorism, Europeans may well choose governments and political systems that will. Voters among our European allies may soon be asking themselves who is more trustworthy on security issues: leaders in the Angela Merkel mold, or the Vladimir Putin one?

UPDATE: Nine killed and 50 injured in attack on Christmas market in Berlin.  It’s turning out to be a big day for jihad.

UPDATE.2: Some top Russian politicians are blaming the assassination on the West. Fools.

I should clarify that I don’t believe there is any such thing as “Christendom” anymore (alas!). The point I’m trying to make is that we may be post-Christian in the West, but that doesn’t mean that jihadists accept that. If there is to be any chance of uniting Russia and the West against jihad, it will have to be on the basis, somehow, of our shared religious heritage. I’m not hopeful.

Meanwhile, in Germany:

Only minutes after alleged attack: MEP and regional head of AfD Marcus Pretzell calls victims at #Berlin#Breitscheidplatz “Merkel’s dead” https://t.co/V3MEnzyabY

— StefanieBolzen (@StefanieBolzen) December 19, 2016

UPDATE.3: Of course my gut analysis was based on wishful thinking. This piece about why the assassination is likely to bring Russia and Turkey closer together, because it will serve the broader interests of both Putin and Erdogan, makes far more sense.

‘We Had A Future. And A Past.’

I’m telling you, the book Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich is a stunner. I’m finding it hard to put down. It’s an oral history of life in post-Soviet Russia. Alexievich simply lets people talk — all kinds of people. In the US, most of us figured that all Russians, aside from Communist Party officials, would be thrilled to be done with the Soviet Union, and that they would rejoice in their new freedom. It wasn’t true. What is most fascinating about this book is the interviews with the people who know Communism was evil and unsustainable, but who miss it — or parts of it — anyway. Why? Lots of reasons, but so far, mostly because it gave them a sense of order, purpose, and meaning. Reading the transcripts of these interviews is to confront flesh-and-blood people struggling to make sense of what has happened to them and to their country.

Take, for example, Margarita Pogrebitskaya, a 57 year old doctor. She recalls her childhood, filled with color and passion and patriotism. For her, it was a wonderland. She cries talking about her memories of Soviet-era Moscow as a child and then as a young woman.

We went to school with cheap pencil cases and forty-kopeck pens. In the summer, you put on some canvas shoes, spiff them up with tooth powder, and they’re pretty! In the winter, it’d be rubber boots, the cold would burn the soles of you feet– it was fun! We believed that tomorrow would be better than today and the day after tomorrow better than yesterday. We had a future. And a past. We had it all!

We loved our Motherland, our love for her was boundless, she was everything to us! The first Soviet car — hurrah! An illiterate worker unlocked the secret to making our own Soviet stainless steel — victory! The fact that everyone in the world had already known this secret for a long time is something we only found out later.

So, Dr. Pogrebitskaya knows the story the Soviets gave her was manufactured, was a lie. But she misses it terribly.

And yes! Yes! Yes! My greatest dream was to die! To sacrifice myself. Give myself away.

She sold her soul to the Party with the confident ardor of a religious zealot. She adored Stalin. Worshiped him, even.

Ask me … You have to ask how these things coexisted: our happiness and the fact that they came for some people at night and took them away. Some people disappeared, while others cried behind the door. For some reason, I don’t remember any of that. I don’t! I remember how the lilacs blossomed in the spring, and everyone outside, strolling; the wooden walkways warmed by the sun. The smell of the sun. The blinding mass demonstrations: athletes, the names of Lenin and Stalin woven from human bodies and flowers on Red Square. I would ask my mother this question, too …

The doctor recalls stories her mother told her about the famine Stalin caused in Ukraine, to destroy the kulaks. Of starving mothers murdering their own children and feeding their bodies to their neighbors. Of Ukrainians digging up the soil and eating earthworms. Of Soviet soldiers surrounding the Ukrainians, treating them like they were inmates at a “concentration camp.” And still:

I loved Stalin … I loved him for a long time. … I was a Stalin girl for a long time, a very long time. Yes … that’s how it was! With me … with us … With that life gone, I’m left empty-handed! I have nothing … a pauper!

She reminisces again about her youth, and the idealists who marched off to build socialism in the remote parts of Russia. They were lied to by the government:

They never made it to the Virgin Lands, they were sent to the taiga somewhere to build a railway, dragging rails on their backs, waist-deep in ice water. There wasn’t enough machinery … All they had to eat were rotten potatoes, so all of them came down with scurvy. But they did it! There was a girl, too, seeing them off, brimming with admiration. That girl was me. My memories. … I refuse to give them up for anyone: not the communists, not the democrats, not the brokers. They’re mine! All mine!

Now, a caveat: I am told that many Russians do not like Alexievich. One put it to me like this: “This lady belongs to the category of people who love truth and demonstrate their love every day and every night (until someone sees them in the dark).” I’m not entirely clear whether this means that she’s guilty (in their eyes) of moral preening, or also of stretching the truth. I am eager to hear from Russian readers of this blog on this point.

That said, assuming the quoted material above is true and accurate (in that it faithfully represents the views of a particular Soviet-era doctor), it says a lot about not only the Russian character, but also human nature.

The doctor preferred Soviet life because it gave her meaning, purpose, an identity, and order. It did not matter to her that that order meant mass slaughter, and the Gulag archipelago. Or to be precise, it mattered, because she knows she can’t simply deny its existence. But she compartmentalizes it such that those horrors cannot taint the perfection of her Soviet memories.

One thinks of the testimony of certain released prisoners who, having spent most of their lives in jail, find upon release that they cannot cope with freedom. I thought about what it must have been like for white people in the American South after losing the Civil War. At some level they have to have known that the entire social and economic order could only exist at the cost of a monstrous injustice, and yet, the nostalgia for it was undoubtedly powerful, even overwhelming, in the same way that Dr. Pogrebitskaya’s longing to have the Soviet world back. That’s a banal observation, I suppose, but here’s what’s interesting to me about these cases: I expect that just like Pogrebitskaya, many Southerners would not have been able to justify the institution of slavery if pressed. But like Pogrebitskaya, they would have partitioned it so that it didn’t contaminate their memories of and longing for the ancien régime, and its certainties. I can’t say that for sure, but I believe it is possible.

Mind you, I’m not saying that this renders Progrebitskaya or any of my putative postbellum Confederates beyond judgment. Not at all. I’m saying that the human heart is fathomlessly intricate and complicated.

In my personal experience, I find the material I read in this book somewhat relevant to how many Catholic people experienced the sex abuse scandal. I never could understand why so very many ordinary Catholics seemed untouched by it, even though it was all over the media. Why they didn’t demand to get to the bottom of it, to insist on accountability on the part of their bishops and priests. My belief has always been not that they were (are) intentionally indifferent to the suffering of victims and their families. Rather, they could not admit into the fullness of their imagination the horrible facts of the scandal, because they had to preserve the ideals upon which so much of their lives are based. So, they were like the nostalgic Soviet doctor in that they could recognize that something went terribly wrong, and innocents suffered, but they minimized it or in some other way compartmentalized it to buffer themselves emotionally and psychology.

I have also seen this dynamic work itself out in families. I’m thinking of a friend from my school days whose mother was an abusive alcoholic, but whom he worshiped, because with his father out of the picture, she was all he had. He needed her to be a much better mom than she was, so he edited out the truly appalling parts of her in the narrative of his life.

Anyway, if you are truly flummoxed, even at this late date, by how anyone could vote for Trump, think about Dr. Pogrebitskaya. The other day, in a post about the book in this space, I quoted some anonymous Russian saying that he (she?) longs for the greatness of the Soviet Union, even though he is too young to remember it. He knows that his country used to be great. It’s not anymore. People can endure a lot of pain and hardship if they believe that they are part of something greater than themselves. And they will be easy — too easy — to trust those politicians who say they will get it back for them.

On the other hand, those politicians and leaders who believe that the sum total of politics is hammering out policies to maximize efficiency and material comfort ought to take a lesson from this too. It is interesting, though, to think about why the project of building a united Europe through the EU has not captured the imaginations of the peoples of Europe (aside from the Eurocratic elites). Is it because the EU is an empire united not by blood or religion (and Soviet communism was a form of religion)? George Weigel speaks to this problem in his short book The Cube And The Cathedral.

Nobody dies for a cube, so nobody lives for it either.

UPDATE: Some of you have asked how a 57 year old woman could have been a “Stalin girl” given that the dictator died in the 1950s. I should have mentioned that the interviews in Alexievich’s book too place from 1991 to 2012. There was no date attached to the doctor’s interview. If she had been interviewed in 1991, that would have meant she was born in 1934.

Young Americans

The Wall Street Journal reports on families who relocate for the sake of their young sports prodigies. Excerpts:

Last year, Peter and Jackie Hunt moved to Bradenton, Fla., to enroll their two sons, Ethan, 13, and Conrad, 9, in IMG Academy, a sport-oriented boarding and day school where they play soccer. The school, formerly known as the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, touts tennis stars Andre Agassi and Maria Sharapova as alumni. It has 16 soccer fields, four baseball diamonds, three football fields and 57 tennis courts. It costs roughly $50,000 a year for day students.

Mr. Hunt, a real-estate investor, was living with his family in the Bahamas for a few years abroad from their home in Weybridge, England, when friends told them about IMG. Mr. Hunt said specialty sports schools can provide a competitive edge.

“That could help you get into a better university than you would through your regular schooling,” said Mr. Hunt, 48.

More:

The Hunts rented a large, four-bedroom apartment on campus for $9,000 a month. Delighted by how much less expensive Bradenton property is compared with the Bahamas and their hometown in England, they purchased a $310,000 house near campus in October. They are going to spend $300,000 to “completely gut” and rebuild it into a British West Indies-style house, said Mr. Hunt. They plan to stay there until their kids graduate from high school, he said.

Meanwhile, in the same edition of the Journal (December 16), there’s a report about kids who live in the same country, but in different worlds:

The police officer who entered Mikaya Feucht’s Ohio apartment found it littered with trash, dirty dishes and plastic milk jugs full of the opioid addict’s vomit.

He also found two toddlers, aged 3 and 2, who watched as the officer uncovered the track marks on their mother’s arms and looked in vain for any food to feed them.

That was three years ago. By the time Mikaya overdosed and died from the elephant tranquilizer carfentanil this summer, her sons were living with their grandparents. But the chaos of watching their mother descend into addiction will burden them for years. They were often hungry and dirty in her care, and spoke of being hit with a belt by her boyfriend, according to their grandparents.

At the funeral home before Mikaya, 24 years old, was cremated, her younger son, Reed, clung to her through the open casket. “And it wasn’t just a quick hug. It was heartbreaking,” says Chuck Curran, his grandfather.

More:

Widespread abuse of powerful opioids has pushed U.S. overdose death rates to all-time highs. It has also traumatized tens of thousands of children. The number of youngsters in foster care in many states has soared, overwhelming social workers and courts. Hospitals that once saw few opioid-addicted newborns are now treating dozens a year.

And many of the children who remain in the care of addicted parents are growing up in mayhem. They watch their mothers and fathers overdose and die on the bathroom floor. They live without electricity, food or heat when their parents can’t pay the bills. They stop going to school, and learn to steal and forage to meet their basic needs.

And:

Many who were preparing for retirement are suddenly faced not just with the unraveling of a previously functional adult child, but with several young mouths to feed.

Paula and Jim Meisberger, of Lebanon, Ind., adopted three of their grandchildren last year, after heroin addiction overcame the youngsters’ parents.

“For my husband’s 35th anniversary at the company everyone asked if he was going to retire. He said, ‘No, I have a newborn,’ ” Ms. Meisberger says of her husband, a 56-year-old UPS driver. “Don’t get me wrong, I love the kids with all my heart and soul. But this should be our time,” she says. “I would love to be able to spoil them and send them home.”

Read the whole thing. I really wish you would.

I learned about these two stories from a reader, who sent me a copy of a letter he wrote to the Journal. It reads as follows:

I do not have the sense that The Wall Street Journal’s journalistic or editorial staffs are particularly sensitive to irony, but the juxtaposition of the articles “The Children of the Opioid Crisis” and “Families on the Field of Dreams” in one issue (December 16) was either truly inspired or remarkably obtuse. What a wonderful illustration of the hollowed-out world we have made. On the one hand, you have children irreparably scarred by a society without strong religious, community or familial bonds, where values like prudence, temperance and simplicity have been replaced by a mindless pursuit of a pleasurable fix, the logical outcome of a world in which the only values are a mindless, soulless pursuit of material goods and an almost totalitarian hedonism. And the story only featured the luckiest cases, children who had grandparents who were able to intervene or were lucky to find a kindly foster family. Think of the poor angels who have not even been that lucky. Jesus wept.

On the other hand, you have stories of parents, all wealthy, all white, all ostensibly educated, whose highest telos seems to be water polo or soccer or skiing for their coddled teenage children and who therefore uproot themselves from whatever home and community they and their children have known to pursue such big goals as playing hockey for Boston College. Big dreams! What lessons are these children learning? That the pursuit of some solipsistic and socially worthless goal involving sports (!) should supplant the needs and company of their immediate families, not to mention those of grandparents and uncles and aunts and childhood friends. That your father should live in an upper-crust boardinghouse so you can play a sport that only seemed meaningful when the Russians and the Hungarians left blood in the Olympic pool in 1956.

This is the world we have all made and the shame and the blame extends to all of us. Because we listened to the free traders for whom the value of cheap goods from China via Walmart was more important than the industrial jobs that sustained young families and provided some discipline and dignity to young lives. To the entertainment elites that cynically peddled a culture of indulgence and irresponsibility in various seductive packages, wherein the only value is to have a good time and whose narrow idea of consequences is confined only to the immediate participant, not those whose lives the participant touches. To the professional elites who looked down on their fellow citizens who had to do society’s dirty jobs and who were more worried about some carbon dioxide in the air than what would happen to those miners and processors when all their jobs were gone. To the political class, who among many crimes on the road to the welfare state abetted the baby daddies abandoning their offspring, paid unmarried women to have more children and offered a vision of society in which you are either a winner or a hand-out recipient. Even to those saintly grandparents featured in the opioid story, who could not figure out how to protect their children from the corruption all around them.

Some of us are considering the virtue of a retreat into smaller communities in which traditional values can be supported, what the essayist Rod Dreher calls the Benedict Option. Stories such as these may give us the push we need, although we must also maintain hope for those left behind.

Pat Maloney

Winnetka, Illinois

Fantasy Islands

From VividMaps.com. Go to the site to see the reverse (that is, what America would look like if it only consisted of places that voted for Trump).

View From Your Table

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Sushi, German beer, and binge watching the second season of The Man In The High Castle, which premiered today. (That’s cava too; not everybody likes beer in mein Haus).