Rod Dreher's Blog, page 536

Ben Op Community Support Bleg

Readers, I’m revising the Work chapter of The Benedict Option at the moment, and need your help. I’m looking for examples of Christian church communities whose members patronize each other’s businesses and otherwise support each other economically. Can you give me some concrete examples of how specific Christian communities help meet each other’s financial needs, provide medical care, or meet each other’s practical needs in some other way? I have some examples from the LDS community, but I’m looking for Catholic, Protestant, and/or Orthodox examples.

What I’m looking for are examples for the rest of us to follow if, in the future, Christians begin to lose their jobs because of their faith. What kinds of resources will we, as Christian communities, be able to do offer them? What should we start doing now, to prepare for this day? Are there businesses we can and should start as Christian communities, and commit to hiring each other, and patronizing business and tradespeople in our own circles?

Talk about it in the comments section, or drop me a line at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com 

 

Ruthie’s Farewell, Five Years On

Ruthie Leming and Lucas Dreher, Starhill, Summer 2011

From this blog, September 15, 2011:

Back when I was doing my Beliefnet blog, I wrote often about my sister Ruthie Leming, who was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer at the age of 40. She was healthy, had never smoked, and had none of the risk factors. Yet, there she was, with a husband, three children, and a terminal diagnosis.

I wrote about her a lot, not only because I love her, but because the way she handled her diagnosis was absolutely extraordinary, and so full of grace. In one post I turned into a magazine article, I touched on this:

Local folks who came to see Ruthie would tell our family about things she had done for them that won their hearts. People began posting comments on my blog about ordinary kindnesses that, in retrospect, meant so much. A colleague of Ruthie’s remembered the time they were running in a race, and she fell; Ruthie stopped, picked her up, and hung back with her until the finish. Several recalled mercies she’d bestowed upon their difficult children as their teacher, out of her boundless patience. Ruthie’s class this school year has a reputation for bad behavior, and her teacher friends had asked her once how she could put up with the little terrors. She said to them, “Because I love them, and they might change.”

By week’s end, I could see that the fearlessness, the tranquility, and the big-heartedness with which my sister accepted her grim cancer diagnosis didn’t come from nowhere. She could be so marvelously brave in the face of her own mortality because she had lived her life by virtue. Virtue can be such a prissy word (ironic, that, given its roots in the Latin word for “manliness”), and Ruthie would no doubt roll her eyes at its being applied to her. But the quiet, modest life she’s lived at home illustrates Aristotle’s idea that virtue is a habit of the heart. That is, by “doing the right thing,” as she would put it, day in and day out, by persevering in charity and patience, and by rejecting anger, over time Ruthie became a woman of deep virtue, the greatness of which became fully apparent only in this crisis, not only in the measured fortitude with which she’s accepted this severe blow, but also in the way her friends and neighbors have responded.

That, by the way, has taught me something about the virtue of living in a real community. The outpouring – an eruption, really – of goodness and charity from the people of our town toward Ruthie and her family has been quite simply stunning. Folks tend to respond kindly when others get their ox in a ditch, as they say back home. But in Ruthie’s case, what’s happened here, and is happening every day, is a revelation. The acts of aid and comfort have been ceaseless, often reducing our parents to tears of shock and awe that the love of others could be so intense. Even two of Ruthie’s oncologists wept over her, one confiding to a colleague that he’d “fallen in love with that little family, and I’m going to give them my very best.” As a teacher told me, “Ruthie’s earned this. She’s drawing this out of people because of the way she’s lived her life, and the way she’s always treated others.”

I talked to her the other day, and knew from what my folks had been telling me that she was in steep decline. Losing weight, on oxygen again, in lots of pain. But if it hadn’t been for Mama and Daddy, who live next door to her, telling me these things, I would never have known. She never, ever complains. She mentioned to me that she had been dreaming lately of family members who had died. Our grandfather Dede. Our grandmother Mullay. Our Aunt Julia. She said they appeared to her in different dreams.

“Did they say anything to you?” I asked her.

“No, they just smiled,” she said.

“Do you think they were preparing you for something?”

“No, I didn’t get that sense.”

Of course she didn’t. Ruthie has so much hope for survival.

But she was wrong. They did come to prepare her. This morning Ruthie died at home.

You can read the whole thing there.  The longer version, and an appraisal of her extraordinary ordinary life, is in my book The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming, which is taught in college classes in some places — a fact that would make Ruthie roll her eyes and say, “Me? What in the world do people want to study my life for?” She had no idea how much she had to teach the world. Through this book, she’s still doing it.

Five years ago today. Seems like just yesterday. That photo above is of the last time my son Lucas, who was especially devoted to Ruthie, saw her alive. He was on my mom and dad’s back porch, telling her goodbye, because we were about to fly home to Philadelphia. It’s been a hard day for him too. He loved her so very much. Still does.

Ruthie’s oldest daughter, Hannah, posted this reflection today on Instagram, along with a photo. If you liked Little Way, you’ll want to see this.

UPDATE: My friend David Mills lost his sister to cancer a couple of weeks ago. Here is his beautiful, heartbreaking meditation on the loss.

The Despair Election

My friend Michael Hanby, the Catholic philosopher, and I were having an e-mail conversation about the Late Unpleasantness. He said something that I thought was too good not to share. I post it here with his permission:

I really think there is a pervasive, but unarticulated sense that liberalism is exhausted, that we are at the mercy of systematic forces, difficult to name, which can be manipulated by the powerful but not governed by them, and that our problems are unsolvable.   The reasons for this anxiety are manifold and cannot be reduced to politics or economics, though there are obvious political and economic dimensions that defy easy demographic categorization.  In other words, the fact that we are in civilizational crisis is becoming unavoidably apparent, though there is obviously little agreement as to what this crisis consists in or what its causes are and little interest from the omnipresent media beyond how perceptions of crisis affect voter behavior.  This seems to me a crucial part of the point and a key to understanding the sudden collapse of ‘movement conservatism’ on the one hand, and the increasingly shameless sophistry and cynicism of progressivism on the other hand.  Part of what it means to say that liberalism is exhausted is that liberal order–which is more fundamentally a technological order–cannot even supply the conceptual categories and thought forms necessary for understanding our predicament.

In fact, I doubt we any longer possess enough of a ‘civilization’ to understand what a ‘civilizational crisis’ would really mean.  We would not see it as a crisis of soul, but a crisis of management, in other words, another technical problem to be solved.  We would no doubt think of it as something to be diagnosed by a battery of journalists, economists, evolutionary psychologists, and sociologists, who could then show us what levers to pull in order to fix it.

But if this is anywhere close to correct, then it seems to me that what we have in this election is fundamentally a contest between two forms of despair:  Hillary represents despair in the form of cynicism and resignation, as evidenced by the fact that neither she, nor her surrogates, nor even her flacks in the press really pretend to believe in what she is selling.  There is obvious cynicism within Trumpism as well; his supporters, on those rare occasions when he makes sense, seem to know that he is lying to them.  But Trump represents despair in the form of anger and desperation, the willingness to embrace a strongman and a charlatan in the (false) hopes of regaining some kind of control over ‘the system’, whatever it is (which is a fascinating question, by the way.)  Both are absolutely awful, indeed unthinkable, albeit in different ways, and yet this is what liberal order has come to.

It’s a pretty bleak picture, I know, and I’ve been accused of indulging in despair myself whenever I paint it.  Hope is hard, I admit.  But my response is that it is not the pessimist about liberalism who lacks hope, but the optimist who cannot see beyond its horizons.  This is extremely difficult since liberal order IS the horizon of American thought and life and casts such a powerful spell over our imaginations.  But it seems to me that the test of your Benedict Option, and really of Christianity, as well as our own individual lives, is precisely this question of where our hope really lies and whether we can see that there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in liberal theory.  In other words, we’re back to the basic question of God or Nothing which is imposing itself on us in ever new and more urgent and indeed more painful ways.  But as C.S. Lewis reports when Puddleglum puts his foot to the fire for the sake of Narnia, “There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic.”  Perhaps this is something to hope for.

Can Vienna Be Saved Again?

This is a sign of our times. September 11 marked the 333rd anniversary of the day Vienna was saved from the Ottoman army. Had the Sultan’s forces taken Vienna, they might easily have pushed further into Europe. It’s the anniversary of the day Christian Europe was saved from Islamic conquest. Never again did the forces of Islam threaten Europe. Until today.

Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn, the Catholic archbishop of Vienna, delivered a homily on September 11 in which he mentioned, near the end, that contemporary Europe has become like the Prodigal Son, having “squandered and wasted our Christian heritage.”

“What will become of Europe?” he asked. And then:

Today, 333 years ago Vienna was saved. Will there now be a third attempt at an Islamic conquest of Europe? Many Muslims think and wish that and say: This is the end of Europe.

The Cardinal said Europe should pray, as Moses prayed for Israel, “Lord, we are your people. Please, give us another chance!”

There is nothing inaccurate in what Schoenborn said. There are many Muslims who wish for an Islamic takeover of Europe, and who say that post-Christian Europe is exhausted, ripe for the taking.

Naturally, though, there was an uproar from the usual liberal suspects. The cardinal felt compelled to issue a clarification, explaining what he meant by his remarks. He said (correctly) that he simply exhorted his congregation to return to following Christ in the face of the threat. But he added this:

This context makes it clear that the Cardinal was not championing a sort of defensive battle, defending Christian values against Islam. Cardinal Schönborn offered the official Newspaper of the Archdiocese of Vienna, “der Sonntag” (“the Sunday”), the following clarification: “Europe’s Christian legacy is in danger, because we Europeans have squandered it. That has absolutely nothing to do with Islam nor with the refugees. It is clear that many Islamists would like to take advantage of our weakness, but they are not responsible for it. We are.”

The Cardinal makes clear: “One must not take my homily to be a call to defend ourselves against the refugees, this was not at all my intention. The opportunity for a Christian renewal of Europe lies in our hands: if we look at and come to Christ, spread his gospel and deal with our fellow men, strangers included, as he has taught us, in love and responsibility.”

Well, look, if Austria’s Roman Catholic cardinal, on the anniversary of the salvation of Vienna from Islamic conquest, and faced with a situation in which Islam — radical Islam — presents a long-term threat to the Christian character of his nation — if a cardinal cannot openly and without apology defend Christian values against Islam, then Austria is doomed.

Note that Schoenborn makes it clear that he was not even trying to defend Christianity against Islam! But even if he were, so what? He’s a Catholic cardinal!

This is what is so repulsive about the liberal establishment (media, academia, political). It compels anybody who stands against their pieties to remain silent and capitulate before the forces that seek to destroy traditional culture, including religion. We cannot even talk frankly about the problem, much less work towards a real solution. None other than Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual director of the Muslim Brotherhood, has said:

“What remains, then, is to conquer Rome. This means Islam will come back to Europe for a third time, after it was expelled from it twice. We will conquer Europe! We will conquer America! Not through the sword but through our Dawa [proselytizing].”

Western liberalism, with its death wish, demands that we ignore that, just as within living memory they insisted that we ignore the stated goals of Soviet communism. One gets the impression that today’s European liberals are ashamed that the armies of the Christian West prevailed and broke the Ottoman Siege of Vienna.

Russian Church & Russian State

The NYT had an interesting piece yesterday about how the Russian Orthodox Church is a part of Vladimir Putin’s aggressively nationalist agenda. Here are some excerpts:

While tanks and artillery have been Russia’s weapons of choice to project its power into neighboring Ukraine and Georgia, Mr. Putin has also mobilized faith to expand the country’s reach and influence. A fervent foe of homosexuality and any attempt to put individual rights above those of family, community or nation, the Russian Orthodox Church helps project Russia as the natural ally of all those who pine for a more secure, illiberal world free from the tradition-crushing rush of globalization, multiculturalism and women’s and gay rights.

More:

Thanks to a close alliance between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin, religion has proved a particularly powerful tool in former Soviet lands like Moldova, where senior priests loyal to the Moscow church hierarchy have campaigned tirelessly to block their country’s integration with the West. Priests in Montenegro, meanwhile have spearheaded efforts to derail their country’s plans to join NATO.

But faith has also helped Mr. Putin amplify Russia’s voice farther west, with the church leading a push into resolutely secular members of the European Union like France.

The most visible sign of this is the new Kremlin-financed spiritual center here near the Eiffel Tower, now so closely associated with Mr. Putin that France’s former culture minister, Frederic Mitterrand, suggested that it be called “St. Vladimir’s.”

The piece goes on to talk about how Russia sees itself as a guardian of Christian values. One bishop tells the reporter that Europe has “definitely given us lots of money, but wants too much in return. It demands that we pay with our souls, that we alienate ourselves from God. This is not acceptable.”

Much of the story focuses on Russia’s push, through the Church, into western Europe. More:

Opposition to gay rights has also been taken up with gusto by Russia and the Orthodox Church in Western Europe.

The Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, a research group in Paris headed by a former Soviet diplomat, threw its support behind opponents of a new French law in 2013 allowing same-sex marriage. It organized a conference on “defense of the family,” and promotes Russia and its Orthodox faith as protectors of Christian values across Europe.

Natalia Narochnitskaya, the institute’s head, told an Orthodox Church website run by Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, a Moscow monk close to Mr. Putin, that Europeans are fed up with what she called the “victory parade of sin” and increasingly look to Russia for guidance and solace. “We have started to get letters at the institute: ‘Thank you Russia and its leader,’” Ms. Narochnitskaya said.

What role the new cathedral complex in Paris might play in this agenda will not be clear until it opens later this year, but those who have studied Mr. Putin’s methods predict it will serve as a megaphone for his take on the world.

“This cathedral is an outpost of the other Europe — ultraconservative and anti-modern — in the heart of the country of libertinism and secularism,” said Michel Eltchaninoff, a French writer and author of “Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine,” a book about the Russian president’s thinking.

Read the whole thing.  It would be an understatement to say that as an Orthodox Christian, I have very mixed feelings about this. Mostly it troubles me deeply to see the Church become an instrument of State policy. It is naive and foolish to expect Russia to have American-style separation of church and state. Even some western countries don’t have that yet (e.g., England, the Scandinavian countries), though the state churches are mild and have become nearly impotent, as those societies have secularized. Things like this make me grateful that we have that separation in the US. If I had to watch my church cheerleading for the policies of the US president, as opposed to playing a prophetic role, it would be profoundly discouraging. As I write this, I have a particular Moscow friend in mind, who despairs over what’s happening to his Church.

On the other hand, as Western societies disintegrate under aggressive secularism, individualism, materialism, and hedonism, it’s hard as a traditional Christian not to sympathize with the general thrust of what Russia is doing, if not in certain particulars. When I was in Italy in the summer of 2015, I was surprised to have a couple of conversations with practicing Catholics who, when learning that I am an Orthodox Christian, assumed that I approve of Putin, and began praising him and the Russian Orthodox Church for its strong voice for traditional Christian morality. I was genuinely surprised to hear this from them, but I understand where they’re coming from. They see their own society drifting far from the faith, and the Catholic Church unable to halt the slide, and often unwilling to lift a finger to try. Put another way, they see Putin, for all his flaws, trying to protect his country from sliding into the moral and cultural abyss.

Again, I think it’s a devil’s bargain for the Church, but at the same time, I grudgingly admire Putin’s unwillingness to capitulate in the face of the worst aspects of Western liberalism. The fact that Orthodoxy is “ultraconservative and anti-modern” is a feature, not a bug — but to be clear, its conservatism is not the sort that would find much favor in the GOP.

It shouldn’t be hard for you to understand why I, as a Westerner, find so much to criticize in Putin, and in his relationship to the Russian church. I’m guessing I don’t need to rehash that here; just think about murdered journalists and political opponents, the relative lack of religious liberty for sects not approved of by the state, aggression towards Russia’s neighbors (especially Ukraine), etc. It may be hard for you to understand why I find anything at all to approve of in Putin, and his militant defense of traditional Christian social values. These quotes from a Vox interview with Sebastian Junger, about his new book Tribe, gives you an idea. The interview focuses on Junger’s point, expressed in the book, that an extraordinary number of US soldiers have trouble reintegrating back into American society because they see it as purposeless and fragmented — unlike what they experienced in deployment. Excerpts:

[Vox:] You write that “[t]oday’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it.” What do you mean?

Junger: I wasn’t a soldier, I’m not a veteran, but the impression I get from talking to them is that their sense of purpose and their sense of devotion to a common good is foremost in their minds in combat. The common good, by the way, not being the country so much as the platoon.

Then they come back and they see a country which is racially divided, it’s economically divided, it’s politically divided. There are powerful, wealthy people frankly getting away with enormous financial crimes without consequences.

It’s a country at war with itself, and I think on some level, unconsciously or consciously, it must be quite complicated for soldiers who risked their lives for this country, were wounded maybe, lost friends, to come back and see that the thing they were fighting for is fighting with itself. I think that must be incredibly demoralizing.

More:

[Vox:] Reading your book, it seemed to me that you were using the psychological state of our veterans as a measuring stick for the health of our society. So let’s close with the obvious question: After writing this book, do you believe we’re a good or healthy society?

Junger: When you use the word bad or good, those are relative terms, they’re moral terms, and it depends on how you define them. We’re a good society if you define good in the terms that our society defines good as. Every society does that — it’s natural.

But if you step back and ask, are we a human society? In evolutionary terms, no we are not. We do not elevate the moral values that have always kept humans safe and happy and secure for hundreds of thousands of years. We do not elevate those qualities on a national level. In that sense, we are way outside of our evolutionary past and, in many ways, are an anti-human society.

Read the whole thing — it’s important, and I thank the reader who sent it to me.

It is my view that American society — and the West in general — has given itself over to a way of life that is anti-human, and unsustainable. I don’t know what specifically Junger has in mind when he says that we don’t elevate the moral values that have kept humans safe and happy and secure for hundreds of thousands of years, but I would say that the family is one of them, and so is religion which, from a sociological point of view, provides cohesion at the horizontal level (in part because it teaches us what the common good is) and meaning at the vertical level, in that it assures us that there is something greater than ourselves, and so calls us out of ourselves.

In the West today, nothing is sacred, except the individual Self, and the future. We are happy to overthrow the conditions that make for a healthy society, one that balances individual freedom with the common good, and call it progress. It can’t last. In fact, I believe that more than a few Americans know, in their hearts, that there is something deeply wrong with us, and that neither Clinton (who represents the status quo) nor Trump can fix it. The liberalism of our culture (by “liberalism,” I don’t mean merely the philosophy of the Democratic Party) dissolves everything in its path. Eliot’s “permanent things” remain permanent, but become almost unrealizable under these conditions. I promote the Benedict Option for the sake of encouraging Christians to hold on to what is true and what is truly human in the Dark Age now upon us.

Obviously I have no idea what Vladimir Putin’s personal views are, or of the state of his soul. But if I were the leader of Russia today, I would reflect on the moral and social devastation wrought by 75 years of communism, which very nearly destroyed all that was human in Russia. (Vaclav Benda, a Czech dissident, said that the communist regimes controlled the people by isolating everyone through the annihilation of civil society.) Russia’s leader would be faced with trying to put back together a society in shambles. He would look to the West, and see good things, certainly — much more wealth and physical health than Russia has, certainly — but he would also see a civilization that has lost its will to live, and that is rapidly disintegrating. Large parts of it has lost its religion, and the rest is well on its way to that place. The West is losing the idea of marriage and family, and now, even the concepts of male and female — and all this is hailed as progress. Young people are ruining their hearts and minds by dosing themselves heavily with pornography, and there’s nothing in Western culture to stop them. And on and on. How could the West be a positive model?

Russia does not have the answers, but it is asking necessary questions, questions that our liberal ethos, in both its left-wing and right-wing forms, deem off limits. But the questions remain. From a purely secular, evolutionary point of view (which I take to be Junger’s), the West is living through an experiment that will answer the question, “Can a materialistic civilization that places individual liberty and individual self-expression over all other goods survive?”

Here’s another clue as to how I think and why I think it. Last week, there was an outcry among some readers because I did not disagree with the Russian state for arresting the young atheist provocateur who went into an Orthodox church to play Pokemon Go, deliberately breaking the law and defiling the church, then bragged about it on YouTube. I only protested that the potential sentence was far too long. People couldn’t believe how I could be so illiberal as to believe that it should be against the law to play Pokemon Go in church. Well, this address about the liturgy, given by the American philosopher and Orthodox layman David Bradshaw, conveys something of the intensity with which Russian Orthodox Christians regard their churches. Here’s an excerpt:

Eastern Orthodoxy holds what may appear to the non-Orthodox to be a remarkably exalted view of the status and significance of its liturgical services. Possessing no Pope, magisterium, or universally agreed catechism, and for many years being unable (owing to various forms of persecution) openly to teach their faith, the Orthodox have long looked to the divine services as the surest and most profound repository of Orthodox theology. St. Theophan the Recluse, a nineteenth-century Russian monk and bishop, well expressed this attitude of reverence:

All of our liturgical hymns are instructive, profound, and sublime. They contain the whole of our theology and moral teaching, give us Christian consolation, and instill in us a fear of the Judgment. He who listens to them attentively has no need of other books on the Faith.

Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, in a lecture entitled “Orthodox Worship as a School of Theology,” has discussed at length the theological content of the divine services. He adds, however, that the value of the services does not lie exclusively or even primarily in their teaching function, but in their power of placing man in the presence of God. Everything about the services—including not only the words, but the architecture and ornamentation of the church, the icons, the chanting, the candles, the incense, the liturgical vestments, the making of the cross, the kneeling and prostrating, and the processions of the clergy—constitutes a single harmonious whole, a kind of perpetually enacted drama in which all have a role. Crucially, the drama is not limited to its earthly participants but incorporates God himself as auditor and (through the reading of Scripture) as speaker. Metropolitan Hilarion quotes in this regard another Russian of the nineteenth century, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, whose description of traditional Russian chant captures something of this sense of a continual ongoing interchange with God:

The tones of this chant are majestic and protracted…they depict the groans of the repentant soul, sighing and longing in the land of its exile for the blessed, desired country of eternal rejoicing and pure, holy delights…These tones now drag on lugubriously, melancholically, drearily, like a wind through the wilderness, now gradually disappear like an echo among cliffs and gorges, now thunder suddenly…The majestic “Lord, have mercy” is like a wind through a desolate place, so sorrowful, moving, and drawn out. The troparion “We hymn thee” ends with a protracted, shimmering, overflowing sound, gradually abating and imperceptibly fading under the vaults of the church, just as an echo dies out under a church’s arches. And when the brethren sing at vespers, “Lord, I have cried unto Thee, hearken unto me,” the sounds emanate as if from a deep abyss, are quickly and thunderously wrested therefrom and rise to heaven like lightning, taking with them the thoughts and wishes of those at prayer. Everything here is full of significance and majesty, and anything merry, light-hearted, or playful would simply seem strange and ugly.

Above all it is in the Divine Liturgy, the Eucharistic service celebrated on Sundays and feast days, that God is felt to be palpably present.

The West, then, appears to many Orthodox eyes as a civilization that has lost a sense of the sacred, of the holy, and is willing to profane holy places and trample holy things (and not just church buildings) for the sake of individual self-expression. To a believing Orthodox Christian, matter matters. The church building is not simply a meeting hall for Christians, but a place halfway between heaven and earth where God’s people communicate (= share communion with) the All-Holy, in a special way. We cannot treat the material world, including the human body, as if it were nothing more than material for us to fashion as our wills dictate. If the Soviet experiment proved anything, it’s that. However brutish and cynical Putin may be, he is intelligent enough to have learned that from 20th century Russian history. If he looks to Russia’s recent past, he sees 1984. If he looks West, he sees Brave New World, a materialist anti-human civilization that is being chosen by its people, and called Good. And he does not want that for Russia.

Maybe Putin himself doesn’t think in those terms. I don’t know. Like I said, I have deep, deep misgivings about the Russian state (or any state) entangling itself with the church, though it should be said that it has always been that way in the Christian East, back to the days of Byzantium. And I deplore the thuggishness with which Putin rules. But those who see the disintegration and decline of the West in the grips of secularism and civilizational acedia may be forgiven for not being willing to call Putin the devil incarnate, because whatever his motives, he is at least unwilling to throw Christian civilization onto the ash heap of history. The survival of his nation is at stake. Alas, our leaders don’t see it this way.

UPDATE: Reader Blackadder writes:

As an Orthodox Christian with friends in Moscow and who visits Russia frequently (just got back, actually), and is no fan of Putin and his authoritarian kleptocracy, allow me to throw in my two mites.

1) Just because there is no opposition to Putin that is reported on in the west doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Aside from the immediate threat of state retaliation, Russians as a rule don’t have much of a tradition of in-the-streets-with-signs protesting, for obvious historical and current reasons. Rather, those conversations are carried out in private, and countermoves are done subtly. Trust me, the opposition to the Kremlin within the Russian Church is stronger than you think – it’s just that its happening below the radar of most outside observers.

2) To add to the point made above, Russians are culturally *extremely* protective of churches and other holy spaces, a trait reinforced by their cultural tendency towards conformism. There are churches in even small-town Russia whose splendid interiors could compete with the most famous in mainland Europe, but photographs of them are tragically often nonexistent. The reason is that the mere use of electronic devices in a holy place is often seen as an affront to God Himself, and pulling out a camera (or heaven forbid, a cell phone) will get you a very stern lecture and possibly expelled from the building. The idea that religious spaces might be considered cultural and artistic monuments and objects of tourism to foreigners is largely lost on them. So when you see people being charged for putting on a profane rock concert in a cathedral, or livestreaming playing Pokemon Go, you have to realize that there’s a deep-seated cultural revulsion to those actions that goes beyond mere politics, but that kind of mindset is incomprehensible to most Westerners, who default to materialist political explanations.

Clintons Still Puttin’ On The Ritz

Let’s see. A month ago, while Donald Trump was down in Louisiana handing out relief supplies to flood victims, Hillary Clinton was at Lady Rothschild’s mansion on Martha’s Vineyard at a $50,000 a plate fundraiser. She spent much of August collecting millions from rich people, not campaigning, and not talking to the press. Less than a week ago, at an LGBT campaign fundraiser at Cipriani Wall Street (top ticket: $250,000), Hillary, in the company of Barbra Streisand and rich, liberal Manhattanites, denounced “half” of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables,” and some of them as “irredeemable.”

This Friday night, while she’s at home in Chappaqua recovering from what is said to be pneumonia, and perhaps contemplating her weakening position in the polls, husband Bill will be at another elite Manhattan venue, the Rainbow Room, high atop Rockefeller Center, hosting — wait for it — a fundraiser. Politico reports:

Even as the Clintons are touting plans to distance themselves from their foundation and limit its fundraising if Hillary Clinton is elected president, they’re planning one last glitzy fundraising bash on Friday to belatedly celebrate Bill Clinton’s 70th birthday.

The fundraiser is being held at the Rainbow Room, a fine-dining restaurant on the 65th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. Plans called for performances by Wynton Marsalis, Jon Bon Jovi and Barbra Streisand, according to people briefed on the planning. They said that major donors are being asked to give $250,000 to be listed as a chair for the party, $100,000 to be listed a co-chair and $50,000 to be listed as a vice-chair.

More:



Michael Duga, a former Bill Clinton White House staffer now running the Say No To Trump PAC, conceded that “the optics are less then optimum.”

Ya think?

Take a look at this punchy, populist Howie Carr column in the Boston Herald, suggesting to readers how they can know if they count as “deplorable”. Excerpt:

Or if when you go to Market Basket, you tend to buy generic products, because you’re using your own money, not an EBT card.

You may be a deplorable if you just got your car inspected.

If you’re deployable, you’re definitely deplorable.

If you wake before noon, if you call Islamic terrorists Islamic terrorists, if you don’t have an Obamaphone and you don’t believe that global warming is “settled science” — can you say deplorable?

You may be deplorable if your passport, driver’s license and credit cards are all in the same name.

Saying Merry Christmas — Deplorable with a capital D!

You may be a deplorable if you wouldn’t mind showing some ID at the local precinct before you vote.

You are most assuredly a deplorable if you have more than one job.

You may be a deplorable if you’ve never used Western Union to wire welfare cash south of the border.

You may be a deplorable if all of your children have the same last name — and it’s your last name.

Or if while watching the second Monday night NFL game you were less irritated by the streaker than you were by all the fawning coverage of Colin Kaepernick on the pre-game show.

You may be a deplorable if you resent training your H1-B replacement.

You get the point. Honestly, the Clintons. Why do they do this? Can’t they help themselves?

Chris Cillizza of the WaPo points out the danger to Team Clinton:

Something very interesting has happened over the past two weeks in the presidential campaign: Donald Trump has seized the momentum from Hillary Clinton and is climbing back into contention in both national and key swing state polling.

New polls released over the past 24 hours confirm this momentum.

More:

But with Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway installed as campaign manager in mid-August, Trump began to regulate his behavior — somewhat. He, generally, stuck to his central message — system is broken, Clinton is part of broken system, we need an outsider to fix broken system — and, again generally speaking, stuck to his teleprompter while speaking in front of crowds.

Nothing says “insider” and “system” like a gaggle of wealthy globalist elites gathering at the Rainbow Room at a fundraiser for a foundation that has been a source of controversy for Hillary. As The New York Times reported last month:

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated more than $10 million. Through a foundation, so did the son-in-law of a former Ukrainian president whose government was widely criticized for corruption and the murder of journalists. A Lebanese-Nigerian developer with vast business interests contributed as much as $5 million.

For years the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation thrived largely on the generosity of foreign donors and individuals who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the global charity. But now, as Mrs. Clinton seeks the White House, the funding of the sprawling philanthropy has become an Achilles’ heel for her campaign and, if she is victorious, potentially her administration as well.

… The Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the State Department — before, during and after Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary — criticized for their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues. The countries include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei and Algeria.

Of course Trump has his own big conflict of interest messes to deal with regarding how he would run foreign policy as president. The point here is not who is worse. Everybody knows who Trump is now and what he’s about. If you haven’t decided to be #NeverTrump by now, it’s hard to imagine him doing much to put you off him at this stage (though hey, this is a crazy year). The point is that the Clintons keep doing things that reinforce the narrative that hurts her and helps Trump: that they’re reckless, greedy, shady, elitists who manipulate the system and don’t care who they run over to get what they want. In other words, as Maureen Dowd keeps saying:

And that’s the corkscrew way things go with the Clintons, who are staying true to their reputation as the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American politics. Their vast carelessness drags down everyone around them, but they persevere, and even thrive.

Finally, look below at the direction of the polls, via Real Clear Politics’ average. If I’m worried about Donald Trump becoming the next US president, I’m starting to get really worried about the Clinton brand. It takes real talent to be a Democrat who lets a brash Manhattan tycoon come off as the populist presidential candidate, doesn’t it?

Clintons’ Still Puttin’ On The Ritz

Let’s see. A month ago, while Donald Trump was down in Louisiana handing out relief supplies to flood victims, Hillary Clinton was at Lady Rothschild’s mansion on Martha’s Vineyard at a $50,000 a plate fundraiser. She spent much of August collecting millions from rich people, not campaigning, and not talking to the press. Less than a week ago, at an LGBT campaign fundraiser at Cipriani Wall Street (top ticket: $250,000), Hillary, in the company of Barbra Streisand and rich, liberal Manhattanites, denounced “half” of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables,” and some of them as “irredeemable.”

This Friday night, while she’s at home in Chappaqua recovering from what is said to be pneumonia, and perhaps contemplating her weakening position in the polls, husband Bill will be at another elite Manhattan venue, the Rainbow Room, high atop Rockefeller Center, hosting — wait for it — a fundraiser. Politico reports:

Even as the Clintons are touting plans to distance themselves from their foundation and limit its fundraising if Hillary Clinton is elected president, they’re planning one last glitzy fundraising bash on Friday to belatedly celebrate Bill Clinton’s 70th birthday.

The fundraiser is being held at the Rainbow Room, a fine-dining restaurant on the 65th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper. Plans called for performances by Wynton Marsalis, Jon Bon Jovi and Barbra Streisand, according to people briefed on the planning. They said that major donors are being asked to give $250,000 to be listed as a chair for the party, $100,000 to be listed a co-chair and $50,000 to be listed as a vice-chair.

More:



Michael Duga, a former Bill Clinton White House staffer now running the Say No To Trump PAC, conceded that “the optics are less then optimum.”

Ya think?

Take a look at this punchy, populist Howie Carr column in the Boston Herald, suggesting to readers how they can know if they count as “deplorable”. Excerpt:

Or if when you go to Market Basket, you tend to buy generic products, because you’re using your own money, not an EBT card.

You may be a deplorable if you just got your car inspected.

If you’re deployable, you’re definitely deplorable.

If you wake before noon, if you call Islamic terrorists Islamic terrorists, if you don’t have an Obamaphone and you don’t believe that global warming is “settled science” — can you say deplorable?

You may be deplorable if your passport, driver’s license and credit cards are all in the same name.

Saying Merry Christmas — Deplorable with a capital D!

You may be a deplorable if you wouldn’t mind showing some ID at the local precinct before you vote.

You are most assuredly a deplorable if you have more than one job.

You may be a deplorable if you’ve never used Western Union to wire welfare cash south of the border.

You may be a deplorable if all of your children have the same last name — and it’s your last name.

Or if while watching the second Monday night NFL game you were less irritated by the streaker than you were by all the fawning coverage of Colin Kaepernick on the pre-game show.

You may be a deplorable if you resent training your H1-B replacement.

You get the point. Honestly, the Clintons. Why do they do this? Can’t they help themselves?

Chris Cillizza of the WaPo points out the danger to Team Clinton:

Something very interesting has happened over the past two weeks in the presidential campaign: Donald Trump has seized the momentum from Hillary Clinton and is climbing back into contention in both national and key swing state polling.

New polls released over the past 24 hours confirm this momentum.

More:

But with Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway installed as campaign manager in mid-August, Trump began to regulate his behavior — somewhat. He, generally, stuck to his central message — system is broken, Clinton is part of broken system, we need an outsider to fix broken system — and, again generally speaking, stuck to his teleprompter while speaking in front of crowds.

Nothing says “insider” and “system” like a gaggle of wealthy globalist elites gathering at the Rainbow Room at a fundraiser for a foundation that has been a source of controversy for Hillary. As The New York Times reported last month:

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated more than $10 million. Through a foundation, so did the son-in-law of a former Ukrainian president whose government was widely criticized for corruption and the murder of journalists. A Lebanese-Nigerian developer with vast business interests contributed as much as $5 million.

For years the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation thrived largely on the generosity of foreign donors and individuals who gave hundreds of millions of dollars to the global charity. But now, as Mrs. Clinton seeks the White House, the funding of the sprawling philanthropy has become an Achilles’ heel for her campaign and, if she is victorious, potentially her administration as well.

… The Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from countries that the State Department — before, during and after Mrs. Clinton’s time as secretary — criticized for their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues. The countries include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei and Algeria.

Of course Trump has his own big conflict of interest messes to deal with regarding how he would run foreign policy as president. The point here is not who is worse. Everybody knows who Trump is now and what he’s about. If you haven’t decided to be #NeverTrump by now, it’s hard to imagine him doing much to put you off him at this stage (though hey, this is a crazy year). The point is that the Clintons keep doing things that reinforce the narrative that hurts her and helps Trump: that they’re reckless, greedy, shady, elitists who manipulate the system and don’t care who they run over to get what they want. In other words, as Maureen Dowd keeps saying:

And that’s the corkscrew way things go with the Clintons, who are staying true to their reputation as the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American politics. Their vast carelessness drags down everyone around them, but they persevere, and even thrive.

Finally, look below at the direction of the polls, via Real Clear Politics’ average. If I’m worried about Donald Trump becoming the next US president, I’m starting to get really worried about the Clinton brand. It takes real talent to be a Democrat who lets a brash Manhattan tycoon come off as the populist presidential candidate, doesn’t it?

‘Blasphemy Of The Left’ File

Novelist Lionel Shriver gave a talk at an Australian literary festival, and things did not go well:

Officials in charge of an Australian writers festival were so upset with the address by their keynote speaker, the American novelist Lionel Shriver, that they censored her on the festival website and publicly disavowed her remarks.

The event, the Brisbane Writers Festival, which ended Sunday, also hurriedly organized counterprogramming, billed as a “right of reply” for critics of Ms. Shriver, whose speech had belittled the movement against cultural appropriation. They scheduled the rebuttal opposite a session Saturday afternoon in which Ms. Shriver was promoting her new novel, “The Mandibles.”

Ms. Shriver had been billed as speaking on “community and belonging” but focused on her views about cultural appropriation, a term that refers to the objections by members of minority groups to the use of their customs or culture (or even characters of their ethnicity) by artists or others who do not belong to those groups.

Ms. Shriver criticized as runaway political correctness efforts to ban references to ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation from Halloween celebrations, or to prevent artists from drawing on ethnic sources for their work. Ms. Shriver, the author of 13 novels, who is best known for her 2003 book, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” was especially critical of efforts to stop novelists from cultural appropriation. She deplored critics of authors like Chris Cleave, an Englishman, for presuming to write from the point of view of a Nigerian girl in his best-selling book “Little Bee.”

Thanks to Erin Manning, here’s a copy of Shriver’s entire speech. Excerpts:

In the latest ethos, which has spun well beyond college campuses in short order, any tradition, any experience, any costume, any way of doing and saying things, that is associated with a minority or disadvantaged group is ring-fenced: look-but-don’t-touch. Those who embrace a vast range of “identities” – ethnicities, nationalities, races, sexual and gender categories, classes of economic under-privilege and disability – are now encouraged to be possessive of their experience and to regard other peoples’ attempts to participate in their lives and traditions, either actively or imaginatively, as a form of theft.

Yet were their authors honouring the new rules against helping yourself to what doesn’t belong to you, we would not have Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. We wouldn’t have most of Graham Greene’s novels, many of which are set in what for the author were foreign countries, and which therefore have Real Foreigners in them, who speak and act like foreigners, too.

In his masterwork English Passengers, Matthew Kneale would have restrained himself from including chapters written in an Aboriginal’s voice – though these are some of the richest, most compelling passages in that novel. If Dalton Trumbo had been scared off of describing being trapped in a body with no arms, legs, or face because he was not personally disabled – because he had not been through a World War I maiming himself and therefore had no right to “appropriate” the isolation of a paraplegic – we wouldn’t have the haunting 1938 classic, Johnny Got His Gun.

More:

The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University who for the record is white, defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

What strikes me about that definition is that “without permission” bit. However are we fiction writers to seek “permission” to use a character from another race or culture, or to employ the vernacular of a group to which we don’t belong? Do we set up a stand on the corner and approach passers-by with a clipboard, getting signatures that grant limited rights to employ an Indonesian character in Chapter Twelve, the way political volunteers get a candidate on the ballot?

I am hopeful that the concept of “cultural appropriation” is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life.

But this latest and little absurd no-no is part of a larger climate of super-sensitivity, giving rise to proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice that constrain fiction writers and prospectively makes our work impossible.

Seriously, we have people questioning whether it’s appropriate for white people to eat pad Thai.

She continues, talking about a white male Westerner who writes in his new novel about a teenage Nigerian girl:

Of course he’s exploiting her. It’s his book, and he made her up. The character is his creature, to be exploited up a storm. Yet the reviewer chides that “special care should be taken with a story that’s not implicitly yours to tell” and worries that “Cleave pushes his own boundaries maybe further than they were meant to go.”

What stories are “implicitly ours to tell,” and what boundaries around our own lives are we mandated to remain within? I would argue that any story you canmake yours is yours to tell, and trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.

I’m hoping that crime writers, for example, don’t all have personal experience of committing murder. Me, I’ve depicted a high school killing spree, and I hate to break it to you: I’ve never shot fatal arrows through seven kids, a teacher, and a cafeteria worker, either. We make things up, we chance our arms, sometimes we do a little research, but in the end it’s still about what we can get away with – what we can put over on our readers.

Because the ultimate endpoint of keeping out mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction. Someone like me only permits herself to write from the perspective of a straight white female born in North Carolina, closing on sixty, able-bodied but with bad knees, skint for years but finally able to buy the odd new shirt. All that’s left is memoir.

And here’s the bugbear, here’s where we really can’t win. At the same time that we’re to write about only the few toys that landed in our playpen, we’re also upbraided for failing to portray in our fiction a population that is sufficiently various.

And:

Worse: the left’s embrace of gotcha hypersensitivity inevitably invites backlash. Donald Trump appeals to people who have had it up to their eyeballs with being told what they can and cannot say. Pushing back against a mainstream culture of speak-no-evil suppression, they lash out in defiance, and then what they say is pretty appalling.

Read the whole thing. It’s wonderful. That this speech is considered so controversial to organizers of a literary festival that they believe it should be removed from the festival website, and the schedule rearranged to give multiple dissenters a platform, marks a complete collapse of intellectual standards and moral courage.

If you want to see the kind of nitwit the festival hastily invited to speak to rebut Shriver, take a look at the op-ed The Guardian published by Yassmin Abdel-Magied. It is the purest possible distillation of political correctness, right down to the crybully hysteria. Excerpt:

It was a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance and delivered with condescension.

As the chuckles of the audience swelled around me, reinforcing and legitimising the words coming from behind the lectern, I breathed in deeply, trying to make sense of what I was hearing. The stench of privilege hung heavy in the air, and I was reminded of my “place” in the world.

See, here is the thing: if the world were equal, this discussion would be different. But alas, that utopia is far from realised.

It’s not always OK if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can’t get published or reviewed to begin with. It’s not always OK if a straight white woman writes the story of a queer Indigenous man, because when was the last time you heard a queer Indigenous man tell his own story? How is it that said straight white woman will profit from an experience that is not hers, and those with the actual experience never be provided the opportunity? It’s not always OK for a person with the privilege of education and wealth to write the story of a young Indigenous man, filtering the experience of the latter through their own skewed and biased lens, telling a story that likely reinforces an existing narrative which only serves to entrench a disadvantage they need never experience.

I can’t speak for the LGBTQI community, those who are neuro-different or people with disabilities, but that’s also the point. I don’t speak for them, and should allow for their voices and experiences to be heard and legitimised.

So access – or lack thereof – is one piece.

But there is a bigger and broader issue, one that, for me, is more emotive. Cultural appropriation is a “thing”, because of our histories. The history of colonisation, where everything was taken from a people, the world over. Land, wealth, dignity … and now identity is to be taken as well?

Read the whole thing, and marvel that crackpot censors like this have the power to silence a writer who defends fiction and free speech at a writer’s festival.  They have the power to get college students and professors silenced or punished. They have the power to subject blasphemers to an inquisition.

If you sympathize with the Brisbane censors and this protester, ask yourself: What if Lionel Shriver had given a speech challenging figures in the church who were demanding that novelists quit writing about religious characters, except in a positive way? Or what if she were standing up to nationalists who said novelists should not write about themes and characters that were unpatriotic? How would you feel then? I know how I would feel: that the churchmen and the nationalists were wrong to demand such restrictions on fiction writers.

Now, keep in mind that what Abdel-Magied and her posse of left-wing bullies demand is much worse than either of those scenarios. They don’t demand that writers only pen positive portraits of certain kinds of people. They demand that writers not write anything about them at all! As Shriver rightly points out in her speech, that would mean the end of fiction.

It is long past time to stand up to these people and fight them hard. To paraphrase Heinrich Heine, those who start by banning books from being written will not stop there. They will find some way to ban the “wrong sort of people” from existing.

(And before any of you start with me, this is not the same thing as my defending the right of the Orthodox Church in Russia to prevent blasphemy or religious defilement inside its own churches. What Lionel Shriver is fighting is an attempt to keep writers from writing the fiction they want to write at all. It’s an attempt to turn all the world into a “safe space,” where certain thoughts cannot be expressed by certain people.)

The Todgers Of Traitors

Inmate Bradley Manning, currently serving a 35 year prison sentence on an espionage-related conviction, is going to get his sex change, thanks to the US military and the American taxpayer:

Chelsea Manning, a transgender soldier imprisoned for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, says she is ending a hunger strike after the U.S. Army agreed to allow her to get medical treatment for her gender dysphoria.

She began the hunger strike last week to protest her treatment at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., vowing to persist until she was treated better.

The medical treatment will begin with the surgery that was recommended by her psychologist in April, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.

To date, the ACLU says no transgender individual has received gender-affirming surgical treatment in prison despite medical recommendations for such care in prisons across the country.

A taxpayer-funded sex change for a jailed traitor. What a country. Basically, America has become Sweden.

Trump’s Scam Charity

We know how crooked the relationship between Secretary of State Clinton and the Clinton Foundation was. Now take a look at the gobsmacking fraudulence that is the Donald J. Trump Foundation. From the Washington Post:

The Donald J. Trump Foundation is not like other charities. An investigation of the foundation — including examinations of 17 years of tax filings and interviews with more than 200 individuals or groups listed as donors or beneficiaries — found that it collects and spends money in a very unusual manner.

For one thing, nearly all of its money comes from people other than Trump. In tax records, the last gift from Trump was in 2008. Since then, all of the donations have been other people’s money — an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation.

Trump then takes that money and generally does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump’s own money.

In two cases, he has used money from his charity to buy himself a gift. In one of those cases — not previously reported — Trump spent $20,000 of money earmarked for charitable purposes to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself.

Money from the Trump Foundation has also been used for political purposes, which is against the law. The Washington Post reported this month that Trump paid a penalty this year to the Internal Revenue Service for a 2013 donation in which the foundation gave $25,000 to a campaign group affiliated with Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi (R).

More:

About 10 years ago, the Trump Foundation underwent a major change — although it was invisible to those who received its gifts.

The checks still had Trump’s name on them.

Behind the scenes, he was transforming the foundation from a standard-issue rich person’s philanthropy into a charity that allowed a rich man to be philanthropic for free.

Experts on charity said they had rarely seen anything like it.

“Our common understanding of charity is you give something of yourself to help somebody else. It’s not something that you raise money from one side to spend it on the other,” said Leslie Lenkowsky, the former head of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and a professor studying philanthropy at Indiana University.

By that definition, was Trump engaging in charity?

No, Lenkowsky said.

“It’s a deal,” he said, an arrangement worked out for maximum benefit at minimum sacrifice.

Being generous with somebody else’s money. Maybe he is ready for government service after all.

Read the whole thing. The Trump Foundation is a scam, and a scam keeping in character with how Donald Trump runs his moneymaking schemes.

The American people are going to have to choose this fall between two extremely untrustworthy candidates. No matter which of these two wins, just think of him or her trying to unite the nation in a serious crisis. Can’t be done. I wouldn’t trust a thing either of them said.