Rod Dreher's Blog, page 538

How Sick Is Hillary?

No doubt about it, Hillary Clinton’s fainting episode in NYC today is big, big news. It was not that hot in the city today. The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, who last week dismissed talk that her Labor Day coughing fit meant anything, nails why:

Coughing, I wrote, is simply not evidence enough of any sort of major illness that Clinton is assumed to be hiding. Neither, of course, is feeling “overheated.” But those two things happening within six days of each other to a candidate who is 68 years old makes talk of Clinton’s health no longer just the stuff of conspiracy theorists.

Whereas Clinton and her campaign could laugh off questions about her health before today, the “overheating” episode makes it almost impossible for them to do so. Not only has it come at a time when there was growing chatter — with very little evidence — that her health was a problem but it also happened at a 9/11 memorial event — an incredibly high-profile moment with lots and lots of cameras and reporters around.

Her campaign may well try to dismiss this story as nothing more than an isolated incident, meaning nothing. (Democrats were already pushing the story of George W. Bush fainting in 2002 after choking on a pretzel, via Twitter.)

But the issue is that Clinton kept reporters totally in the dark for 90 minutes after her abrupt departure from the 9/11 memorial service for a health-related matter. No reporter was allowed to follow her. (Clinton has resisted a protective pool for coverage because Donald Trump refuses to participate in one.) This is, yet again, the Clinton campaign asking everyone to just trust it. She got overheated! But she’s fine now!

Trust a Clinton? That’s a big ask under normal circumstances, and these are not normal circumstances. Look, I feel sorry for both candidates. They’re old people, and the campaign schedule they follow is grueling. It would be hard on anybody. But the presidency is also grueling, and now there is reason to wonder if Clinton is up to it.

Donald Trump got a lot out of referring to Jeb Bush as “low energy.” Just you wait now.

See it happen here:

UPDATE: Noah172 posts this fascinating close-up video showing a small metal object falling out of Mrs. Clinton’s pants leg as she staggers getting into the van. Doctors, is this a thing?:

UPDATE.2: Scott Adams:

If humans were rational creatures, the time and place of Clinton’s “overheating” wouldn’t matter at all. But when it comes to American psychology, there is no more powerful symbol of terrorism and fear than 9-11 . When a would-be Commander-in-Chief withers – literally – in front of our most emotional reminder of an attack on the homeland, we feel unsafe. And safety is our first priority.

Hillary Clinton just became unelectable.

The mainstream media might not interpret today’s events as a big deal. After all, it was only a little episode of overheating. And they will continue covering the play-by-play action until election day. But unless Trump actually does shoot someone on 5th Avenue, he’s running unopposed.

UPDATE.3: From a physician:

I am in internist in a large metro area.

It is my job to make diagnoses often with just my eyes and nose and ears alone – this is especially true in the geriatric community.

It is with great consternation that I have seen and read physician evaluations of Mrs. Clinton in the news media. You should never make diagnoses like that without having the patient right in front of you.

Furthermore – some of the videos that have been put forward to support these claims have just been looney-tunes.

All that being said – I am deeply concerned about this video.

Mrs. Clinton clearly suffered a syncopal episode while getting into that van today. The “overheating” excuse is just ridiculous – a normal healthy individual would never do that type of thing in 80 degree weather unless they had just completed a marathon or something profoundly strenuous. That just does not occur. That immediately puts the lie to the “overheated” excuse that her campaign came up with.

Well you say – could it have been a fainting spell? Possible – but in my 30 years experience as a physician, “fainting spells” or vasovagal episodes do not usually require 4 or 5 people to throw someone in a van. Furthermore – in that type of event the person almost always slinks straight down or backwards – NOT FORWARDS. Mrs. Clinton very clearly is going forward.

I see the metal object in that video – I haven’t a clue what that could be – nothing in my experience as a physician looks quite like that – could it have been an inkpen? Regardless – the far far more telling issue that you can clearly see in that video around the time the metal is dropped is Mrs. Clinton’s right foot. It was clearly being dragged along the street with the anterior portion down on the concrete. I am certain this is how the shoe came off. The comportment of this foot could only mean one thing – her brain or her spinal cord was offline – if ever so fleeting – during that moment. Her right foot was acutely flaccid. There are but a few things that can cause this type of issue:

BRAIN or Spinal Cord TRAUMA – no way this happened

An overdose of powerful sedatives or general anesthesia – again – this seems to not be the case

A seizure – not likely – this type of thing usually occurs in the post-ictal phase after a tonic-clonic seizure – and people who are having this type of thing – DO NOT WALK TO A VAN.

A Stroke or TIA – It is possible but not likely – given her interview on the street just an hour later. It would have had to have been a very very fast TIA or transient ischemic attack to recover this quickly – the recovery on this is usually hours or days.

The most likely diagnosis – in my mind – an acute cardiac arrhythmia – either ventricular tachycardia – or more likely atrial fibrillation with a rapid ventricular response. A FIB with RVR is very very commonly associated with people feeling flushed or overheated – for quite extended periods of time – dizziness and nausea are also possible. When they exert themselves – it is not unusual at all for them to have complete syncope like she appeared to do today. If not afib with RVR – it is possible there could have been some other supraventricular tachycardia – there are several different types.

(A side note – this is NOT without precedent in modern American presidential history – If you will recall the incident where George H W Bush stood up and vomited all over the Prime Minister of Japan at a state dinner. That incident was precipitated by exactly this – AFIB with RVR.)

Why am I gravely concerned about this diagnosis?

In my experience as a physician – this can happen at any time – however – it typically and often happens at times of great stress. Cardiac arrhthymias can be very easy to control – or very difficult to control. However – this has often meant “retirement” for my business executive patients down the years – the syncopal events can simply happen at very inopportune times and cause all kinds of havoc for the person and his/her company. This is NOT the type of thing that I would want my President to have during a very stressful time.

My fear is that it is fully known what is wrong with her – and this is being hidden from the American public.

By the way – the diagnosis of “pneumonia” being put forth by her physician – Dr. Bardack – is just simply imbecile. A patient who would have this kind of event with pneumonia – would NOT be up and walking around an hour later. If this type of thing happens during pneumonia or any other infection, the patient is almost always suffering from sepsis – and not up and walking. Again – this is imbecile. Third year medical students know better than this.

By the way – as an internist – I have been very very concerned about the reporting of the physicians covering Trump and Clinton. There is something clearly mentally wrong with Trump’s personal physician. I am not sure what is wrong with that guy – but something clearly ails him. The scrutiny there was deserved and as of yet has not been answered even remotely by the Trump campaign. For the life of me – I do not know why there has not been equal attention on Dr. Bardack – Mrs. Clinton’s physician. It has been known for a few weeks to internists in America connected to social media THAT Dr. BARDACK IS NOT BOARD-CERTIFIED by the American Board of Internal Medicine. If you look at the website for the American Board of Internal Medicine – and look her up – abim.org – you will find that SHE IS NOT BOARD-CERTIFIED. Why would Mrs. Clinton release a medical statement from a non-Board Certified physician? I have been puzzled by the fact that the national press has made such a deal about the failings of Trump’s physician (rightly so) – but chirping crickets about the obvious board issues with Dr. Bardack. Any ideas about that?

UPDATE.4:

1979

UPDATE.5: Another update from the internist:

A few clarifying points to my earlier post –

First of all – let us talk about walking pneumonia.

I have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton may have been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday. That is entirely possible. 70 year olds have pneumonia all the time. My point is that pneumonia in and of itself – WOULD NEVER make someone do what happened today. I am fully aware of walking pneumonia – and indeed – by definition – it is “walking”. It is a type of pneumonia caused by very specific organism(s) that are much different than those types that will put you in the hospital. The point being – walking pneumonia will produce ill symptoms – often a cough and overall malaise – but will never ever cause a syncope like episode. Pneumonia or reaction to antibiotics simply do not produce what happened today in the absence of many other grave symptoms – and believe me people would not be walking through a parking lot with these symptoms.

I want to clarify the cardiac arrhythmia issue as well. AFIB with RVR is but one of many types of rhythm problems that could be going on – it is by far the most common therefore the most likely. This is what happens when people have afib: the atria – the top chambers of the heart – are beating in total chaos. Normally – your AV node protects the bottom part – ventricles – or pumping chambers from being exposed to the chaos. You can go for long times months even years without any problems at all. However, ever so often the AV node fails in its protection – the chaos from above is transported to the ventricles below and suddenly the bottom of the heart is beating 150, 160 whatever. Just think how you feel after 15 minutes on a treadmill. Running hard. Heart rate of 150 – light-headed and short of breath. Now imagine that you get off the treadmill – and your heart just keeps right on going at 150. In about 10 minutes you will begin to feel very bad. This is manifested in different ways by different people. Shortness of breath is very common. The feeling of being flushed or hot is very common. Nausea and vomiting are very very common. But your heart will not slow down. After several minutes of this – even the most simple exertion like walking – can lead to such low blood pressure that you will have syncope (pass out). That is why AFIB with RVR is so high on the differential diagnosis of the tape I saw today.

Something else of concern that has been running through my mind since I saw that tape is yet another diagnosis that I neglected to put in the initial discussion. This is EXACTLY how people will react if they have an implantable defibrillator and it fires. This would be the same as having the big paddles put on you in the ER – and shocked. Over the past 20 years or so – we have been putting “paddles” directly into patients chest that fire and shock them whenever the computer that is attached to them perceives there is a problem. These patients would already have a diagnosis of a cardiac rhythm problem. One of two things in my experience happens. 1) The rhythm problem comes out of nowhere – and the patient is shocked. They would seem to drop to the ground instantly 2) Often, the rhythm problem is lurking for several minutes before the shock occurs. It all depends on the diagnosis and the settings of the device. But the patient will often feel very very weak and tired, dizzy, hot and light-headed in the seconds/minutes before the device fires. When it does fire however – most of the time – the patient goes down temporarily – just like Mrs. Clinton did today.

Will someone ask her please if she has a defibrillator in her chest? This may or may not be so – but do you want someone who can be shocked like that in charge of the country in a crisis?

I want to for personal reasons address concerns about my ethics in some of the above comments.

I agree – no diagnosis should ever be made without the patient being right in front of you. And many of the tapes and videos used in the past month about Mrs. Clinton’s health have been “out there”. I am not making a diagnosis on her – I am offering up medical facts about what could have caused something like this to occur. Common things occur commonly. This video today is clearly not from the lunatic fringe like some of the others I have seen this past few weeks. I am gravely concerned about this after what I saw today – and I wholeheartedly believe the voters need to know the whole story – whatever that may be – and what the campaign is telling and putting forth makes little sense medically speaking. As is so often in politics – it is the lies and confusion put forward to cover things up – that gets people in trouble.

I like most of America am absolutely dismayed with the choices we have this year for President. This video today did not help decrease my concern about this election.

Another question I have – and about this I need to be perfectly clear. Had I seen that video on any of my patients – and believe me – having things caught on video is actually very common in medicine today – my very very first reaction would be GET THAT PATIENT TO THE ER – I AM MEETING YOU THERE. Why on earth was Mrs. Clinton not rushed to the hospital???? — That issue alone brings up all sorts of concerning thoughts in my mind..

And about her personal physician – Dr. Raback. In my haste – to get the previous comment done – and typing quickly – I did not fully convey her status with the Board of Internal Medicine. (This is really in the deep woods) If you care to do some research about this issue – Board Certification and its maintenance is HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL among internists now. (Please see drwes.blogspot.com for full details). She is listed as CERTIFIED – but NOT PARTICIPATING in MAINTENANCE. That means that she has made the decision not to maintain her certification. She passed her initial exams and was certified at some point in the past – but is not participating in maintaining this going forward. At some point – this will put her at great risk of being dropped from insurance panels, etc. This is a huge thorn in the side of the internal medicine community at this point. The whole thing is a total mess. It is an example of government regulation gone horribly awry. But the fact of the matter is that she is not participating in her continued certification – There are those in internal medicine who would think that to be not a good thing.

Just a few clarifying points.

I am not a journalist. I am a physician.

I am most certainly not trying to make a diagnosis – I am certainly not going on TV and making an expert opinion on this. That is foolishness. Just trying to present how a trained internist would think through and process this video today. I am just trying to do my duty to make sure people are aware that this looks far far worse than what is being put out for public consumption.

Solange Knowles: Race-Baiting Diva

So, Beyonce’s sister Solange was at the Kraftwerk concert in New Orleans too, and managed to turn her own rude and inconsiderate behavior into a racial incident. Check out this series of tweets:

Let me tell you about why black girls / women are so angry….

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

I took my son, his friend, and my husband to see Kraftwerk in New Orleans…

Was very excited to dance and enjoy a band I love.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

We are 4 of about 20 black concert goers out 1500 here.

4 out of maaaybbe 20 out of 1500.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

We walk in, and one of my favorite songs, Machine, is on. I’m excited to tell my son about how hip hop sampled Kraftwerk. We are dancing.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

4 older white women yell to me from behind, “Sit down now” . I tell them I’m dancing at a concert. They yell, “u need to sit down now”…

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

We are at an ELECTRONIC and DANCE music concert and you are telling…not asking me…to sit down. In front of my child.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

They proceed to throw something at my back….

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

Now the old me……

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

But in this moment, I’m just going to share my experience…

So that maybe someone will understand, why many of us don’t feel safe…

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

…in many white spaces…

We don’t “bring the drama”….

Fix yourself.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

She posted another tweet characterizing this as a racist attack, but I’m not going to post that here because she dropped the f-bomb. She also reports that the object thrown at her was a lime wedge (she says “a lime,” but clearly meant lime wedge, because the theater served mixed drinks during the show, ergo the only limes in the house were wedges). You can read more of her tweets in the People magazine story about Solange confront white power at the Edmund Pettus Bridge Kraftwerk show.

This is aggravating and even kind of depressing. I was at that same show, at the Orpheum Theater, though seated in in the balcony. I paid about $75 a seat for our two seats. The orchestra level seats were a lot more expensive. Being on the floor, if the person seated in front of you stands up, you won’t be able to see.

Judging from these tweets, it never seemed to occur to Solange Knowles, a privileged multimillionaire who made her money in the group Destiny’s Child, that people who pay $150+ for orchestra-level seats at a concert in a theater have a right to see the damn concert. When she tells her two million Twitter followers that she was simply “dancing at a concert,” she neglects to say that this was a show in a Beaux Arts theater, and there was no way to dance without making it difficult if not impossible for the people behind you to see the show. Nope, she believes she should be able to stand up and dance no matter whose view she obstructs — and if you object, and happen to have white skin, you are a racist who made her feel “unsafe.” She showed no courtesy to the people behind her, but apparently felt that she had a right to behave like a jerk to them, and to call them racist for having the audacity to tell her to do like everybody else was doing, and sit down.

Nobody should have thrown a lime at her, or at anybody else. They should have asked an usher to make her sit down or leave. But look, I was there, and I saw that crowd. The only way that audience could have been less safe is if they had been on walkers or had been kindergartners. I was amazed by how much older the crowd was than I expected. I’m 49, and I’d say most people there were around my age. I saw some younger, and I saw more than a few who were significantly older. This was not an unsafe crowd in any sense of the word. 

From my seat in the balcony, I noticed someone on the front row dancing in at least part of the show. I remember thinking that it must be awful to be sitting behind her. Was it Solange Knowles? I dunno. I wouldn’t know her if she bit me on the nose, and I could only see a woman’s shoulder-length head of hair bobbing in silhouette.

Conclusion: Solange Knowles is a race-baiting diva. The reaction she got at the show on Friday night had nothing to do with her blackness, and everything to do with her rudeness. But because she characterized herself as a martyr to white oppression on Twitter, suffering on behalf of all black women everywhere, it got picked up by People, by E!Online and other outlets. Don’t you believe it.

She got this slam in at Louisiana:

And last thing…
I see folks saying "Well u live in Louisiana"….but I say I live in a city w THE most incredible, beautiful black. folk.

— solange knowles (@solangeknowles) September 10, 2016

Well, she does, but I bet most of them, like most other people in New Orleans of all races, are a lot more polite and less entitled than Solange Knowles apparently is.

Deplorable Me, Deplorable Thee

Perhaps you heard that Madame Clinton, who supped recently with Lady Rothschild at a $100,000 a plate dinner before jetting off to Hollywood for another high-dollar fundraiser at Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel’s house, went to a celebrity-packed LGBT Hillary fundraiser last night, this one in New York City and featuring Barbra Streisand, and had this to say about Trump supporters:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? [Laughter/applause]. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

Well, yes, there are people like that among the Trumpkins. No question about it. But half of Trump’s supporters? Given that he is polling almost as well as Hillary herself is, well, really? She later apologized for saying “half,” but the damage has been done.

As a friend e-mailed:

She screwed up and said what she really thinks. Full blown. Me and you, who don’t want schlongs in the shower room with our daughters? Same as the KKK. Deplorable!

I believe this is true. She was talking to a bunch of fellow liberals, and she let fly. Today she apologized, saying that she only regrets using the word “half.” Me, I don’t take umbrage on behalf of Trump, who has said horrible things about the kind of people who support Hillary. But I do firmly believe that in her basket of deplorables she puts traditional Christians, thinking us “homophobic.” In fact, I would love to hear her talk about what, exactly, are the factors she considers in whether or not someone is a “homophobe,” a “xenophobe,” an “Islamophobe,” a “racist,” or a “sexist.”

For example, is it possible to hold any traditional Christian beliefs about human sexuality and not be considered homophobic by Hillary Clinton? Is there any position on immigration to the right of her own that people can hold without being judged mentally ill or morally deficient by her? How about on Islam? Let’s hear it.

Because what I hear when I listen to her words is that Hillary Clinton thinks anybody who disagrees with her on race, women’s issues, LGBT issues, and the rest, is wicked. Here’s what she said immediately after the quoted remarks above:

“But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

There is truth in that: people who don’t care about Trump’s beliefs on race, gay issues, and the rest, but who just want change. Notice, though, that she’s doing much the same thing candidate Obama did in 2008 with his “bitter clingers” remark before a group of San Francisco liberals at a fundraiser:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Like Obama, Clinton accuses Trump supporters of a kind of false consciousness. For Obama, they don’t really believe all that social-conservative, Second-Amendment crap; they’re just mad because of their economic decline. What Hillary said is close to this, in that she separated out as pitiful but redeemable the Trump supporters who are only backing him out of economic desperation from the “basket of deplorables” — presumably everyone else.

Now, if she’s only talking about the bona fide racists, anti-Semites, and others who have associated themselves with Trump’s campaign, I’ve got no argument with her. I think, though, that she sees no real difference between the truly nasties and those who are to the right of her on these issues (whose number includes people like me, who are not Trump supporters).

It’s worth reminding Clinton that her side has some pretty deplorable people in it too, such as these people who beat up Trump supporters on the streets of San Jose back in June:

JUST IN: Trump supporters being attacked, assaulted by protestors outside Trump rally in San Jose – @Jacobnbc https://t.co/l7Lrhd7b9a

— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) June 3, 2016

Look, Hillary’s insulting remarks don’t make Trump’s own insulting remarks about particular groups any less demeaning. What those remarks will do to some people on the fence about Trump, though, is to make them understand precisely how a Clinton administration would regard them: as “deplorable” and perhaps “irredeemable”.

Clinton has one political skill that Trump conspicuously lacks: self-control. It failed her last night with the gay crowd in New York, and she let her real feelings out. A conservative Catholic friend was telling me the other day that after Mitt Romney made his notorious “47 percent” remark at a private fundraiser in 2012, that tipped him (my friend) into not voting for him (he didn’t vote Obama either). Recalling why that was so damaging to Romney’s campaign, Chris Cillizza wrote:

The conventional wisdom is that “47 percent” hurt so much because it played directly into the stereotype of Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy that President Obama and his campaign were playing up. And, that’s true.

But, there’s more there when it comes to why the comments were so incredibly damaging. The truly terrible thing for Romney was that the remarks not only came directly out of Romney’s mouth but were also documented on video.

Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark was captured on video too, and plays directly into the stereotype of Hillary Clinton as an arrogant, bossypants liberal elitist. And it confirms another stereotype: that the Left doesn’t simply consider its opponents wrong, but also terrified and hate-filled, and therefore irrational and evil. You can’t reason with people like that, you know; you just have to use the power of the state to roll over them.

Which, I believe, is exactly what President Hillary Clinton and her judges will attempt to do.

When the debate comes around later this month, I really do hope one of the moderators asks Madame Clinton if not wanting your children to have to put up with transgenders changing with them in the school locker room makes you a homophobe worthy of being cast into the basket of deplorables. Where is the line, for Clinton, between honest disagreement on the issues she brought up, and hate?

UPDATE: And in blog comment sections too:

So there are three kinds of people in America, if Twitter is a guide:
1. Trump can do no wrong.
2. Hillary can do no wrong.
3. Sane people.

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) September 10, 2016

The Germanest Thing Ever

Kraftwerk performs “Autobahn” at the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans

Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn. Look at that image: four elderly Dieters called Kraftwerk singing and playing their hit “Autobahn” in concert. Is it not the Germanest thing ever?

I went to their show in New Orleans last night with my son Matt. He turns 17 later this month, and asked for tickets as his birthday present. Techno music is not my thing, but Matthew is my thing, so I took him. Techno music is still not my thing, but I had more fun than I expected to have.

It helped that we had dinner before the show at Domenica, in the Roosevelt Hotel, across the street from the theater. Matt had pizza. I had campanelle in white bolognese sauce, and thought I had died and gone to heaven.

On the way into the concert, the ushers handed out disposable 3D glasses, which were necessary to get the full effect of the show’s visuals. I knew a little about Kraftwerk’s sound, but never got into their music. They were big in the ’70s and ’80s, but it still surprised me that most people in the crowd were as old or older than I. And they were so into the show. It delighted me that people were so appreciative in their applause. Matt said the group played many of its greatest hits. These are songs lots of these folks grew up on.

The group is not really a band. It’s four guys who stand on stage, each behind a synthesizer. They took the stage wearing some kind of glowing futuristic spandex-looking suits, which in at least the singer’s case could not hide his old man’s belly (as a middle-aged man with a belly, I found this endearing). When the first song started, and the 3D graphics began to fly around the room, I felt like I was in TRON (well, TRÖN) or something.

I can’t tell you much about the music, except that it was loud, and the effect of the whole show was a complete nerdgasm. I swear I saw Comic Book Guy in the crowd. There was such a sweet naivete to the music, and to the sense of the show itself. “That music is completely devoid of irony,” Matt said on the walk back to the car, and he was right. It’s like the soundtrack for a happy fairy tale about the future. It is completely and deliberately inhuman, which is probably why I don’t like it that much (that, and it all kind of sounds the same), but it’s not anti-human, and  I can see why people love it. It was a pleasure to be there with Matt and all those other people who adored those Germans, all of whom smiled sweetly as they took individual bows at show’s end.

Are you a Kraftwerk fan? If so, tell us why you love them. I’m interested.

 

Uncle Chuckie Time

Mr. Charles Cosimano, ladies and gentlemen, on the evils of censorship, according to the principles of Cosimanian Orthodoxy. You’re welcome.

Reactionaries In Our Time

The anonymous “Flight 93 Election” essay on the Claremont Review of Books site has gotten a lot of traction. I wrote about it earlier in the week, but it says something about my own pessimism that I didn’t notice that it was all that radical. In fact, it sounds like an especially articulate version of what conservatives I know who dislike Trump tell themselves to justify their planned vote for him.

I am not one of those people. I don’t at all agree with the writer’s claim that conservatives are obliged to vote for Trump to save the Republic. I’m not voting for Trump (or Clinton) because I see them both as evidence for and agents of our decay. I agree with Yuval Levin here:

There are certainly arguments out there about what people wish Trump might be or mean, but very few of them (as their proponents are generally willing to acknowledge), have all that much to do with the actual Donald Trump. They are mostly about voters and issues that deserve a hearing or problems that have been too long ignored, or a sense (borne of a radical failure of imagination, it seems to me) that our politics should just be blown up since things could hardly get much worse. Some serious people have pointed to very real value in the sheer disruption of Trump having gotten this far, but they are at a loss to then justify actually making him president for four years. Conversations with Trump voters about the prospect of a President Trump generally conclude in the hope that he might be surrounded by people who will restrain his instincts or direct his energies—which isn’t exactly a vote of confidence.

It’s hard to ignore the hideous character failings at the core of the man, and for this purpose maybe especially his fundamental infidelity toward all who rely on his word, which makes it hard to take seriously any assurances. He has sometimes shown himself capable of sticking to script or obeying the teleprompter, and when he does that he raises the possibility that he may be containable. But when Trump is given a chance to reveal something of himself, he without fail reveals a terrifying emptiness. The idea that such a man would be improved by being handed immense power simply refuses to be believed. Even wishful thinking supercharged by a justified dread of what a Hillary Clinton administration could do to the American republic can only go so far—certainly far enough not to vote for her, but for this voter not nearly far enough to vote for him. Neither major-party option in this election is worthy of affirmation, and no amount of wishing it were otherwise is likely to change that. All we can do, it seems to me, is hope and work for a Congress able and inclined to counterbalance a dangerous executive.

That’s my view. Damon Linker is chilled by the Flight 93 essay. Excerpt from his column:

For all the talk of conservatism in the essay, there is really nothing significantly conservative about it. Oh sure, it lists a series of positions that are typically embraced by conservative writers. But when it comes to the crucial question of judgment, prudence, practical wisdom — of how one who affirms these conservative views should act in present political circumstances — it is a shockingly radical document.

Or rather, it’s a reactionary one — not in the watery sense that it opposes what progressives lazily presume to be the inevitable drift of history. It’s reactionary in the precise sense delineated in Mark Lilla’s just-published book The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction. Like all reactionary thinkers, Decius Mus identifies a past golden age (America before progressivism) and a historical fissure after which steep and perhaps irreversible decline set in (the establishment of the administrative state) — and also like other reactionaries, he has come to believe that only a new historical rupture, a sundering of the status quo, has any hope of altering the apocalyptic course of history.

After Trump, the deluge.

I happen to be reading Lilla’s book too, and it’s obvious that the Benedict Option project is a neoreactionary one (I’ve never denied that, and it doesn’t bother me if people call it that). There is, however, a significant difference between it and Lilla’s definition of reactionary, which Linker mentions above.

It’s this: I don’t believe there was ever a Golden Age. St. Augustine, in his City Of God, written after the Sack of Rome in 410, cautioned his readers to remember that the human condition (from a Christian point of view) is exile, and that any peace we have in the earthly city is “the peace of Babylon” — this, referencing the Hebrew exile there. It is true that I start our descent into our particular civilizational fragmentation in the West (I accept Bauman’s “liquid modernity” as accurately descriptive of our time) with the loss of metaphysical realism in the High Middle Ages. But it would be absurd to claim that the West was living in anything remotely resembling a paradise. Nobody who read Dante, and has the slightest clue about the political and ecclesial corruption and decline from which the Commedia grew, can believe that Thomism preserved Europe from decadence.

The thing is, Dante’s vision for repairing the fragmentation of his medieval society depended entirely on the Thomistic vision. You don’t have to be a Scholastic to see the wisdom in Dante’s approach. The (radically oversimplified) gist of it is that society’s brokenness, and all that flows from it, stems from choosing the Self over God, who is real, and whose laws are really existing things.

Dante was too wise and too Christian to think that it is possible to restore Paradise on earth. In Canto XXVIII of Purgatorio, after he has passed into the outskirts of the Garden of Eden, Dante meets a woman on the other side of the river, named Matelda. The exiled poet uses this meeting to reflect on the nature of poetic memory and nostalgia. From a post I did on that canto:

If the fallen world has corrupted our own imagination, as Matelda indicates, then isn’t it the case that the incorrupt world can at times cause us to read the world falsely, through our hopes? Matelda speaks of the longing of the poets for a Golden Age as being an ancestral memory of Eden — that is, a lost world that can never be fully regained in mortality. I’m thinking that my own nostalgic bent, and my deep and abiding longing for Home, comes from this. Reading and thinking about Canto 28, I’m thinking about how I need to recalibrate my own inner vision. The point is not to become cynical, but rather to educate one’s hope, tempering it with a sense of what is possible in this fallen world, versus what is only really achievable in heaven. To be sure, we can, through grace and by conforming our wills to Christ’s, incarnate heaven in our own hearts and lives to a certain degree; that’s what Dante’s entire pilgrimage is about.

But we will not fully realize the Kingdom of Heaven in this life, and we must be careful about how we allow the images and stories we admit into our imagination to frame our expectations. As I wrote the other day, on Canto XXVII, realizing earlier in my life that I had accepted a false icon of womanhood, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and turning away from it, was instrumental in the purgation of false images from my own moral imagination, and the purification of my heart. It seems to me that the purification of images is not only about casting out false images and replacing them with true ones, but also to regard the true ones rightly. With regard to the Church, and with regard to matters of family and homecoming, I have been guilty of what Flannery O’Connor warned about: “To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.”

What I seek in the Benedict Option is not the recreation of a non-existent Golden Age, but rather a recovery of the metaphysical vision the premodern Christians had, a vision that would give them the resources to resist and repair the kind of fragmentation through which we are living — a fragmentation that, among other things, is leading to the demise of Christianity in the West.

Any political and social peace we find in this world is, as Augustine says, the peace of Babylon, not the peace of Paradise. If I’m a neoreactionary, then I’m a neoreactionary who doesn’t want to return to a prelapsarian era, and who doesn’t even see that as possible, but rather one who wants to create communities within which it is possible to live in greater harmony with God (which is to say, with Reality), and with each other. Also, because I am a convinced Christian, I can never reconcile myself with the racists of the Alt-Right, and don’t want to. I know they, like good Nietzscheans, think Christianity is for patsies. OK, fine. I believe it is the Truth, and that truth condemns racism. This is not a point I am willing to argue here, so don’t even try. I do want to make the distinction that there are different kinds of neoreaction. Though I do not think he is a man of faith, I would prefer to be identified with the disposition of Prof. Peter King, author of a wonderful book called The Anti-Modern Condition, and who has written:

Conservatives are people who wish to protect things. They recognise what is valuable in their culture and their daily lives and work to sustain these. This is not about principles, but is a matter of reaction. It is a disposition based on vigilance and on an awareness of the dangers posed by others who wish to sacrifice the present for a future only they can imagine. When you come across those with such principles, sit them down and buy them a drink. It will keep them off their feet and off our backs.

The Benedict Option is about we orthodox Christians protecting what we have against those who wish to strip it all away from us. The neoreactionaries hate the Cathedral and its secularist clerisy, and I’m with them on that. But I affirm the cathedral, in the Christian sense.

Vote Trump, or vote Clinton. It won’t make much difference to the kind of things people like me value. Both are deadly, though in somewhat different ways. I’m not shocked, or chilled, by the Flight 93 essay, but I’m not remotely persuaded by it either, except in its contention that we are at a critical moment in the life of the Republic. But I don’t have the sense that its author and I understand the nature of the decay or the cure for it in the same way.

American Blasphemy Laws

We are supposed to be horrified that Russia is punishing Ruslan Sokolovsky, a 21-year-old atheist provocateur, for entering a church while prayers were going on, playing Pokemon Go in open and intentional violation of the law, then posting a blasphemous YouTube video of it (here, subtitled). If you look at the clip, he acknowledges that it’s against the law to hunt Pokemon in churches, but he says that’s a stupid law, and he’s going to break it.

Which he does. And he doesn’t get caught, because it looks like he’s just using his smartphone. It wasn’t until he posted this to the Internet to mock the church and authorities that he got in trouble. As one Russian priest put it, “Here we are speaking about an obvious violation of sacred places that religious people consider more valuable than life.” Even so, the local Metropolitan (Archbishop) said last week that he would like to try to get Sokolovsky out of prison, and have him come work with church charities, helping the disabled, elderly, and children. “Maybe it would help him take another look at life,” the Metropolitan said.

The latest news is that a judge released Sokolovsky to house arrest for two months. Maybe that will be the end of it. Personally, I have no problem with the state punishing him for going into a church (or mosque, synagogue temple), doing something the church views as desecration of its holy place, then broadcasting his deed. I do have a problem with the Russian law as it stands, which appears far too broad, such that it covers even street protest. In my view, the Duma should amend the law to make it as narrowly tailored as possible. Still, in principle, I support the idea of a blasphemy law in the Russian context. In the Muslim world, especially Pakistan, blasphemy laws are used to persecute Christians and other non-Muslims, simply for existing. In general, I think, blasphemy laws are a bad idea. But again, given what Russia and Russian Christians (and all religious believers there) endured under Bolshevism — millions murdered — I do not, in principle, object to the concept of a blasphemy law there. There is no plausible need for one in America, and I would oppose the establishment of one here.

The point I made yesterday when I blogged about it is that Westerners who are outraged by the very idea of this law ignore Russian history — specifically, the Soviet-era government persecution of Christianity that resulted in millions of deaths, exile to the gulag, destruction of churches, and the like. It’s like American free-speech fundamentalists who don’t understand why Germany has laws forbidding pro-Nazi speech. I would not want those laws in the United States, but then, we have a very different history here.

So many American liberals are bent out of shape about what Russia is doing here that they fail to notice that we have our own blasphemy laws. Look at this, from Eugene Volokh:

 

From the official Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination’s Gender Identity Guidance, just released last week:

Even a church could be seen as a place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public.

Now, churches hold events “open to the general public” all the time — it’s often how they seek new converts. And even church “secular events,” which I take it means events that don’t involve overt worship, are generally viewed by the church as part of its ministry, and certainly as a means of the church modeling what it believes to be religiously sound behavior.

More:

Under Massachusetts law, refusing to use a transgender person’s preferred pronoun would be punishable discrimination. (At least this is true of “he” or “she” — I saw nothing in the document about “ze” and other newly made-up pronouns.) The Massachusetts document I linked to makes that clear in the employment context, and it also makes clear that the antidiscrimination law rules apply to places of public accommodations (including churches, in “secular events” “open to the public”) just as much as to employment.

Indeed, a church might be liable even for statements by its congregants (and not just its volunteers, who are acting as agents) that are critical of transgender people. Tolerating such remarks is generally seen as allowing a “hostile environment,” and therefore “harassment.” Indeed, the statement I linked to specifically encourages people to “prohibit derogatory comments or jokes about transgender persons from employees, clients, vendors and any others, and promptly investigate and discipline persons who engage in discriminatory conduct” (emphasis added). But that’s not just encouragement; it simply reflects hostile work environment harassment law, which has long required employers to restrict derogatory speech by clients, to prevent “hostile environments.” See 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11. The same logic applies for places of public accommodation, which Massachusetts says can include churches.

Notice this too:

Under G.L. c. 272, § 92A, the law provides that a place of public accommodation may not distribute, publish or display an advertisement, notice, or sign intended to discriminate against or actually discriminating against persons of any gender identity.

Better not be a sign on the church bulletin board that offends a transgender who wanders in, or there will be trouble. Ah, the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, where if your church holds a fundraising fish fry during Lent, it invites the jackboot of the state onto its neck if a deacon criticizes transgenderism. In Russia, Sokolovsky had to enter a church, intentionally violate its sanctity (and the law), and broadcast to his 300,000 YouTube followers what he had done, for the state to come down on him. In Massachusetts, if a transgender enters into a church to intentionally provoke it because she doesn’t like the church’s stand on LGBT issues, and someone there makes a statement that offends here, she can count on the state coming down on the church.

Volokh, a law professor, says that the Massachusetts law should make it clear that “this is where these rules are headed, at least in places like Massachusetts but likely elsewhere as well.”

But see, Russia has a blasphemy law. America doesn’t.

Check out this Briefing from the US Commission on Civil Rights, which addresses reconciling anti-discrimination law with religious liberty (PDF). You will not be surprised to learn that a majority of the commission has little respect for religious liberty. Here is a statement appended to the report by Martin Castro, its chairman:

The phrases “religious liberty” and “religious freedom” will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance. Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion over other religions, or a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others. However, today, as in the past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws. We now see “religious liberty” arguments sneaking their way back into our political and constitutional discourse (just like the concept of “state rights”) in an effort to undermine the rights of some Americans. This generation of Americans must stand up and speak out to ensure that religion never again be twisted to deny others the full promise of America.

Castro was appointed commission chair by Obama. Previously, Castro served on the Illinois “Human Rights Commission,” a phrase that strikes fear into the heart of every non-liberal Canadian.

Here’s what the full report says about forcing Catholic hospitals to perform abortions:

In October 2015, the ACLU of Michigan sued Trinity Health Corporation. Trinity, a public funding recipient, is a large Catholic health system. It allegedly “requires that all of its facilities abide by the Ethical and Religious Directives promulgated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops”which

prohibit a pre-viability pregnancy termination, even when there is little or no chance that the fetus will survive, and the life or health of a pregnant woman is at risk. They also direct health care providers not to inform patients about alternatives inconsistent with those directives even when those alternatives are the best option for the patient’s health.

The refusal to provide reproductive health services such as medically necessary abortions or tubal ligations violates the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. As noted below, Members of Congress recently wrote to the Attorney General regarding the 2007 DOJ OLC memorandum addressing RFRA exemptions referred to instances in which it is being used to argue for the supremacy of religious exemptions over access to reproductive health care. One can only hope that Congress cannot have intended RFRA to justify suffering and to endanger human life.

According to the majority opinion of the US Commission of Civil Rights, Catholic hospitals must be made to perform medical procedures that the Catholic churches teachers are tantamount to homicide.

If you read the report, there can be no doubt that a majority of the federal Civil Rights Commission would have no problem with the State of Massachusetts going after churches there. Massachusetts churches who haven’t joined Team #LoveWins™ had better not hold a church supper open to the public, or they risk punishment for violating Massachusetts’ blasphemy law.

Dissenting commission member Peter Kirsanow succinctly summed up the clash of worldviews here:

The tension between religious liberty and nondiscrimination principles appears most acute when religious liberty and sexual liberty conflict. There are at least two ways of conceptualizing the conflict. The first is as a conflict between two rights-the right to be served without discrimination based on one’s sexual orientation, and the right to manifest one’s religious beliefs by choosing whom to serve. The second is whether religious believers should receive exemptions from neutral laws of general applicability. But the conflict goes deeper. It is a conflict between two worldviews, both held with the intensity generally associated with religious belief.

The first, which is secularism, holds an individual’s unfettered sexual self-expression as a preeminent concern because it is an aspect of their self creation. This interest in the individual is now construed as a positive responsibility to ensure that everyone has the ability to engage in sexual conduct without cost or consequence, whether in money, unwanted children, or hurt feelings. An individual’s sexual behavior is considered an act of self-creation and something that goes to the deepest level of their identity.  Criticism of an individual’s behavior is considered an attack on the dignity of the person. Naturally, this worldview is at odds with many aspects of traditional morality grounded in sexual restraint.

The second worldview holds that individuals are not their own judge, but rather are subject to divine law and divine judgment. The morality of a person’s conduct does not ultimately depend upon whether he thinks it is right, or whether it accords with his desires, but whether it conforms to divine law. Moral standards of behavior are external to a person, not internal. Therefore, even though people, including religious believers, fall short of these standards, they do not have the authority to change the standards. Furthermore, it is a sin to assist another person in breaking the moral law, or to applaud breaking the moral law. In a predominantly Judeo-Christian society, this worldview is most closely reflected in the Ten Commandments. Although believers realize that they break the Ten Commandments both through what Christians often call “sins of omission” and “sins of commission,” they are not free to change “Thou shalt not bear false witness” to something more congenial. Instead, they are told to repent of their sin and to try to avoid repeating it.

This is the nub of the conflict between the proponents of nondiscrimination norms and proponents of constitutionally-protected religious liberty.

More:

A version of this approach seems to have been adopted by political and cultural elites. This of course tips the scales in their favor. Defining public reason as encompassing only “presently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense, and the methods and conclusions of science when these are not controversial” while explicitly excluding reasons based in religion means that what seems like “common sense” to the secular and what seems like “common sense” to the religious can be two very different things. Yet only the former is regarded as legitimate in public debates. For example, a devout Christian may regard it as “common sense” that marriage is between a man and a woman, in large part because that is the pattern laid out in the Bible. A secularist may consider it “common sense” that marriage is between two people who share a deep emotional attachment, and point to the benefits of having someone to care for you in illness, etc. And indeed, as mentioned above, secularism has its own commandments and shibboleths, though it is rarely viewed that way by its adherents. Yet only one of these two versions of “common sense” is regarded as legitimate by our political system, even if the former would be persuasive to a large number of people. In some cases, courts have even implied that because some people favored a particular policy for religious reasons, the entire enterprise is tainted by animus and thus is unconstitutional. In fact, there are really two clashing moralities in play, especially in regard to same-sex marriage, but the courts choose one over another while pretending to be neutral. It is permissible for a pro-same-sex marriage campaign to be animated by the belief that same-sex marriage is morally good, but it is impermissible for a pro-traditional marriage campaign to be animated by the belief that same-sex marriage is morally wrong.

Secular liberalism is a religion that tells itself it isn’t a religion. This is why its adherents don’t believe that their blasphemy laws are blasphemy laws, though that’s exactly how the laws function. It’s all about what — and who — you consider sacred. In Russia, among other things, they consider God and the Church sacred. In America, among other things, we consider gays and transgenders sacred.

UPDATE: Andrew T. Walker says old-fashioned liberals need to reign in the gay-rights Jacobins among them. Excerpt:

Consider the Human Rights Campaign. As the leader of the gay rights movement in America, HRC can control and frame the debate and rhetoric surrounding LGBT rights—especially in the most elite sectors of American culture, from where it draws its strength and support. There has been absolutely zero magnanimity coming from HRC or Chad Griffin, the organization’s president. The Human Rights Campaign has become a primary incubator for communicating the distortions that the media happily laps up concerning religious liberty.

In its worst forms, HRC creates campaigns that insinuate that anyone dissenting on sexuality is guilty of criminal behavior. Furthermore, Griffin’s Twitter timeline is filled with harsh caricaturing toward institutions or persons that believe in biblically orthodox sexual ethics. In the way that Griffin frames the discussion, there is no goodwill. Everyone who isn’t with him is against him.

This is very significant, because Griffin is arguably the most successful political tactician in America concerning gay rights. His inability to see that there are people of goodwill on opposites of the sexuality debate (even President Obama has said as much) is telling, and has disastrous consequences for the future of American discourse.

Then we also must consider the rhetoric from self-professed “progressive Christians” on LGBT rights. For them, LGBT rights has become, fundamentally, a matter of justice. Not only justice, but a form of justice that calls on the Old Testament prophets for their authority and indignation.

Where justice is at stake, like secular progressives these Christian social justice warriors are adopting the posture that any disagreement on LGBT sexual ethics equals directly harming LGBT people. Consider the words of Brandan Robertson, a young LGBT Christian activist.

When real lives are on the line, there is no longer room for "dialogue". We must speak loudly, act boldly, and refuse to mince words.

— Brandan Robertson (@BrandanJR) September 2, 2016

You Have To Admire The Logic

Via Stephens County Jail

Sadly, Love Did Not Win this time:

A woman and her daughter are facing incest charges after authorities learned the pair were legally married in Oklahoma this year, and that the mother had married her son a few years earlier.

The motivation behind the March marriage was unclear Wednesday, when 43-year-old Patricia Ann Spann and her daughter, 25-year-old Misty Velvet Dawn Spann, made initial appearances in Stephens County district court. Under Oklahoma law, marrying a close relative is considered incest whether or not a sexual relationship exists.

Neither woman had an attorney listed in court documents. No publicly listed phone number could be found for their home in Duncan, about 80 miles southwest of Oklahoma City.

The story goes on to say that diversity-celebrating Patricia Ann Spann was previously married to her son.

A writer for a liberal website in Oklahoma City doesn’t see what the big deal is:

Listen, incest isn’t my thing. Like most people, I think it’s gross and disgusting. I’ve never forgiven the Lannisters for it, and I’m very worried Jon Snow and Sansa hook up in Season 7. That being said, I also like to be consistent on issues. If two legal aged-adults love each other and want to get married, why can’t they? As long as they don’t hurt anyone else, who really cares? It’s their life, their body and their eyes that are going to see all the strange looks the next time they share a banana split at Braum’s. Plus, as Gandhi once said, “Incest is better than no cest.”

As they say in Jack Chick Comics, “Haw, haw, haw!” But the Oklahoma reader who sent this item to me makes a good point:

I don’t see this being another watershed moment in the Sexual Revolution. After all, it’s poor women in Oklahoma, not tortured Los Angeles celebrities or distinguished East Coast college students.

That being said, it’s been on my mind ever since because the two prime arguments against incest are inbreeding and taboo. The former doesn’t apply in this case, while the latter fails the “just because it’s gross doesn’t mean it’s wrong” test. I guess you could argue that incest should be barred on the grounds that sexual tension is destructive to the family unit. But consenting adults’ rights to sexual identity and expression are nearly unassailable anymore.

Again, this isn’t going down in history alongside sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. These women will not be on magazine covers or award shows. I’ll even go out on a limb and uncharitably assume drugs, childhood traumas, and/or mental illness is at play. But this is still another straw on the camel’s back.

If only these redneck perverts were celebrities or on the gender studies faculty at Smith, just think of the plaudits.

Pilgrims Vs. Tourists

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has been helpful to me in understanding why things are falling apart, and what might feasibly be done about it — this, as part of writing The Benedict Option. Bauman is known for his idea of “liquid modernity,” a theory that says the rate of change has become so accelerated in the contemporary world that no customs or institutions have time to solidify. It changes our perception of time, and our sense of moving through life.

Last night I read an essay of his called “From Pilgrim To Tourist” (PDF), in which he talks about how until fairly recently, Western man experienced his journey through life as a pilgrim. Christianity taught him that we are all wayfarers here in our earthly exile, but headed toward heaven or hell, based on decisions we make and things we do in our own life’s pilgrimage. And we are on pilgrimage together. Or were.

Experiencing life as a pilgrimage implied a couple of things: 1) that you had a destination, and 2) that the destination made it possible to measure the distance you have traveled. The pilgrim new that he could only be truly satisfied when he reached the destination, but the process of the journey formed the pilgrim’s identity. (W.H. Auden’s great pilgrimage poem Atlantis shows how this works.) Bauman says that if life is a pilgrimage, it makes sense to choose one’s destination early, because you can be fairly confident that the road ahead will be straight, or at least will be headed in the right direction, no matter how many twists and turns it involves. Bauman:

Delay of gratification, much as the momentary frustration it begot, was an energizing factor and the source of identity-building zeal in so far as it was coupled with the trust in the linearity and cumulativeness of time. The foremost strategy of life as pilgrimage, of life as identity-building, was ‘saving for the future,’ but saving for the future made sense as strategy only in so far as one could be sure that the future would reward the savings with interest and the bonus once accrued will not be withdrawn, that the savings will not be devalued before the bonus-distribution date or declared invalid currency; that what is seen today as capital will be seen the same way tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Pilgrims had a stake in the solidity of the world they walked; in a kind of world in which one can tell life as a continuous story, a ‘sense-making’ story, such a story makes each event the effect of the event before and the cause of the event after, each age a station on the road pointing towards fulfilment. The world of pilgrim — of identity-builders — must be orderly, determined, predictable, ensured; but above all, it must be a kind of world in which footprints are engraved for good, so that the trace and the record of past travels are kept and preserved. A world in which travelling may indeed be a pilgrimage. A world hospitable to the pilgrims.

Postmodernity — “liquid modernity” — is our condition today. Bauman doesn’t mention God, but it’s clear that losing God (that is, the God of the Bible, and with Him the eschatology that is the culmination of the Christian narrative) is at the bottom of the rapid fragmentation that has become liquid modernity. I don’t think it’s a matter of us losing God, then the world speeding up and fragmenting, or the world speeding up and fragmenting, causing us to lose the sense of the eternal and unchanging God. In truth, I think the process goes back and forth. In any case, here we are. Bauman again:

 It soon transpired that the real problem is not how to build identity, but how to preserve it; whatever you may build in the sand is unlikely to be a castle. In a desert-like world it takes no great effort to blaze a trail — the difficulty is how to recognize it as a trail after a while. How to distinguish a forward march from going in circles, from eternal return? It becomes virtually impossible to patch the trodden stretches of sand into an itinerary — let alone into a plan for a lifelong journey.

Time ceases to be experienced like a river, says Bauman, but is rather nothing more than a series of ponds and pools — episodes that have no real connection to each other. The “horror” (Bauman’s word) of the new situation is that you can’t count on the work you do today counting for anything tomorrow. The only way to manage life successfully under these conditions is to avoid long-term commitments:

To refuse to be ‘fixed’ one way or the other. Not to get tied to the place. Not to wed one’s life to one vocation only. Not to swear consistency and loyalty to anything and anybody. Not to control the future, but to refuse to mortgage it: to take care that the consequences of the game do not outlive the game itself, and to renounce responsibility for such as do. To forbid the past to bear on the present. In short, to cut the present off at both ends, to sever the present from history, to abolish time in any other form but a flat collection or an arbitrary sequence of present moments; a continuous present. 

Once disassembled and no more a vector, time no longer structures the space. On the ground, there is no more ‘forward’ and ‘backward’; it is just the ability not to stand still that counts. Fitness — the capacity to move swiftly where the action is and be ready to take in experiences as they come — takes precedence over health, that idea of the standard of normalcy and of keeping that standard stable and unscathed. All delay, including ‘delay of gratification,’ loses its meaning: there is no arrow-like time left to measure it.

And so the snag is no longer how to discover, invent, construct, assemble (even buy) an identity, but how to prevent it from sticking. Well constructed and durable identity turns from an asset into a liability. The hub of postmodern life strategy is not identity-building, but avoidance of fixation. [Emphasis mine — RD]

It is crucially important to remember that this is not merely the result of ideas having consequences. This is also about consequences shaping ideas. That is, the structure of our economy under globalist capitalism creates this social and psychological instability:

What possible purpose could the strategy of pilgrim-style ‘progress’ serve in this world of ours? In this world, not only have jobs-for-life disappeared, but trades and professions which have acquired the confusing habit of appearing from nowhere and vanishing without notice can hardly be lived as Weberian ‘vocations’ — and to rub salt into the wound, the demand for the skills needed to practise such professions seldom lasts as long as the time needed to acquire them. Jobs are no longer protected, and most certainly no better than the stability of places where they are practised; whenever the word ‘rationalization’ is pronounced, one knows for sure that the disappearance of further jobs and that all diligent work of construction may prove to be in vain; its allurement is the fact of not being bound by past trials, being never irrevocably defeated, always ‘keeping the options open’. The horror and the allurement alike make life-as-pilgrimage hardly feasible as a strategy and unlikely to be chosen as one. Not by many, anyway. And not with a great chance of success.

He continues:

No consistent and cohesive life strategy emerges from the experience which can be gathered in such a world — none remotely reminiscent of the sense of purpose and the rugged determination of the pilgrimage. Nothing emerges from that experience but certain, mostly negative, rules of the thumb: do not plan your trips too long — the shorter the trip, the greater the chance of completing it; do not get emotionally attached to people you meet at the stopover — the less you care about them, the less it will cost you to move on; do not commit yourself too strongly to people, places, causes — you cannot know how long they will last or how long you will count them worthy of your commitment; do not think of your current resources as of capital — savings lose value fast, and the once-vaunted ‘cultural capital’ tends to turn in no time into cultural liability. Above all, do not delay gratification, if you can help it. Whatever you are after, try to get it now, you cannot know whether the gratification you seek today will still be gratifying tomorrow.

Sounds familiar, right? Seen in this conceptual framework, the concept of genderfluidity makes sense. I’m certainly not defending it; I think it’s insane. But you can see how growing up under the condition of liquid modernity, where the pilgrimage trail markers have been submerged, would incentivize radical experimentation, causing human identity to fragment and liquify. On the spiritual front, the Protean pseudo-faith called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the religious expression of liquid modernity.

Bauman says that liquid modernity has rendered the identity of “pilgrim” obsolete We are now “tourists,” people who flit from place to place, on a whim, consuming what pleasures we can find there without making any commitment to the place. Moving on when we get bored or things get tough. Truman Capote, in a beautiful piece of writing from 1948, captured the tourist’s perspective as beautifully as it possibly can be done:

In London a young artist said to me, “How wonderful it must be for an American traveling in Europe the first time; you can never be a part of it, so none of the pain is yours, you will never have to endure it — yes, for you there is only the beauty.”

Not understanding what he meant, I resented this; but later, after some months in France and Italy, I saw that he was right: I was not a part of Europe, I never would be. Safe, I could leave when I wanted to, and for me there was only the honeyed, hallowed air of beauty. But it was not so wonderful as the young man had imagined: it was desperate to feel that one could never be a part of moments so moving, that always one would be isolated from this landscape and these people; and then gradually I realized I did not have to be a part of it: rather, it could be a part of me. The sudden garden, opera night, wild children snatching flowers and running up a darkening street, a wreath for the dead and nuns in noon light, music from the piazza, a Paris pianola and fireworks on La Grande Nuit, the heart-shaking surprise of mountain visions and water views (lakes like green wine in the chalice of volcanoes, the Mediterranean flickering at the bottoms of cliffs), forsaken far-off towers falling in twilight and candles igniting the jeweled corpse of St. Zeno of Verona — all a part of me, elements for the making of my own perspective.

There is an element of pilgrimage in this. Seeing the aesthetic wonders of Europe does change his perspective, and helps to create his identity. But Capote has no skin in the game. Because he avoids the pain — because he is free to leave when it comes time to suffer — he is at his core a tourist, not a pilgrim. The willingness to suffer for the sake of the destination is what makes the difference, I think.

It has not escaped my notice that Bauman’s “tourist” is the kind of person St. Benedict, in his Rule, describes as the worst kind of monk: one who moves from monastery to monastery, guided only by his whims. This kind of monk (he calls them “gyrovagues”) cannot make any progress in the spiritual life, and are a danger to those who wish to do so. They are dilettantes, restless aesthetes, and to be avoided. Benedict writes:

These spend their whole lives tramping from province to province, staying as guests in different monasteries for three or four days at a time. Always on the move, with no stability, they indulge their own wills, succumb to the allurements of gluttony, and are in every way worse than the Sarabaites. Of the miserable conduct of all such, it is better to be silent than to speak.

What would it look like to have an entire culture, indeed a civilization, defined by gyrovaguery? If it were wealthy and technologically sophisticated, it would look like our own.

For a believing Christian, to allow oneself to be formed by gyrovaguery — to become a tourist instead of a pilgrim — is to lose the story that tells us who we are, where we are headed, and what we must do to get there. The world calls this liberation. We must call it slavery, and resist it.

 

 

 

Why Make Russia Our Enemy?

Here’s an extraordinary essay by Peter Hitchens, who covered Russia from Moscow during the Cold War for a British newspaper, writing about how the West is behaving stupidly in its hostile approach to the Kremlin. Hitchens focuses on the staggering suffering the Russian people have endured from past invasions, and from 75 years of Communism. Excerpts:

A few miles away, near the turbulent Taganka Theatre [in Moscow], is a small park, with trees and a pond. A friend of mine, Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times, remarked in the early 1990s on how the grass grew badly there and the trees were stunted. Only as the pace of reform quickened did he discover why. Men and women still living nearby came forward to recall what they had seen there as children in 1937, in the early summer mornings, as they hid in the foliage of the trees. Silent men had dug great pits in the park. Unmarked vans had arrived, and more silent men, wearing long rubber aprons, had flung corpses into the pits, dozens of them, bloody from the execution chamber. The pits had been filled and covered over. And the children, when they climbed down from the trees and hurried home, were ordered by their frightened parents never to speak of what they had seen—at school, with friends, in shops, anywhere. Nor did they, for more than fifty years.

This, remember, was in the very center of the capital city of a great empire. Florid symbols of a new civilization stood all around. Officially there was a liberal constitution, there were law courts, things that called themselves newspapers, and supposed deliberative assemblies. Yet within sight, sound, and stink of these things men and women were murdered by the agents of the state, perhaps because they had told an unwise joke about the regime, perhaps for no reason at all. This was the culmination of a process that had begun with some of the world’s cleverest and most idealistic young men and women setting out a program for utopia. Those lucky enough never to have known the accompanying fear and uncertainty can hardly begin to understand the cynicism and darkness of the lives of normal people in such countries, or of the liberation they felt when the last traces of the Communist Party were scrubbed away.

More:

Nobody who has seen these things could possibly compare the old Soviet Union with the new Russia. The trouble is, almost nobody has seen them. Nor, it seems, has anyone noticed the withdrawal of Moscow’s power from 700,000 square miles of territory which it once held down with boots and tanks and secret policemen. Somehow or other this unprecedented peaceful withdrawal of a power undefeated in war is being portrayed as “expansionism.” Nobody who understands history, geography, or, come to that, arithmetic can possibly accept this portrayal. There is much to criticize in Russia’s foreign policy, especially if one is a Ukrainian nationalist, but the repossession of Crimea does not signal a revival of the Warsaw Pact. It is instead a limited and minor action in the context of this conquered and reconquered stretch of soil, the ugly but unexceptional act of a regional power.

Here I risk being classified as an apologist for Vladimir Putin. I am not. I view him as a sinister tyrant. The rule of law is more or less absent under his rule. He operates a cunning and cynical policy toward the press. Criticism of the government is perfectly possible in small-circulation magazines and obscure radio stations, but quashed whenever it threatens the state and its controlled media. Several of the most serious allegations against Putin—alleged murders of journalists and politicians—have not been proven. Yet crimes like the death in prison (from horrible neglect) of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor who charged Russian officials with corruption, can be traced directly to Putin’s government, and are appalling enough by themselves.

But this is not really the point. Western diplomats, politicians, and media are highly selective about tyranny. Boris Yeltsin’s state was not much superior to Vladimir Putin’s. Yeltsin used tanks to shell his own parliament. He waged a barbaric war in Chechnya. He blatantly rigged his own re-election with the aid of foreign cash. He practically sold the entire country. Russians, accustomed to corruption as a way of life, gasped at its extent under Yeltsin’s rule. Yet he was counted a friend of the West, and went largely uncriticized. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who locks up many more journalists than does Mr. Putin, who kills his own people when they demonstrate against him, and who has described democracy as a tram which you ride as far as you can get on it before getting off, has for many years enjoyed the warm endorsement of the West. His country’s illegal occupation of northern Cyprus, which has many parallels to Russia’s occupation of Crimea, goes unpunished. Turkey remains a member of NATO, wooed by the E.U.

And:

Perhaps we would understand Russia’s situation better if we imagined that NATO has been dissolved and that the Confederate States and the territories conquered in the Mexican-American War have declared independence. The U.S. retains a precarious hold on the naval station at San Diego, sharing it with the Mexican Navy on an expensive lease that Mexico regularly threatens to cancel. Americans still living in San Diego are compelled to adopt Spanish names on their drivers’ licenses, and movie theaters are instructed to show films only in Spanish. Schools teach anti-American history. Quebec has seceded from Canada, and is being wooed by a Russo-Chinese economic union, with a pact including military and political clauses. Russian politicians are in the streets of Montreal, urging on a violent anti-American mob, which eventually succeeds in overthrowing Quebec’s pro-American president and replacing him with a pro-Russian one—violating Quebec’s constitution in the process. This brings military forces aligned with Russia right up to the border with New York, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

In such a case, I cannot see the U.S. sitting about doing nothing, especially if it had repeatedly warned in major diplomatic forums against this expansion of Russian power on its frontiers, and been repeatedly ignored over fifteen years or so. If a Marxist takeover in Grenada was considered good enough reason for military action, what would these circumstances provoke?

Read the whole thing.  It’s really good.

I read that piece on the same day that news broke about a young Russian atheist provocateur who got himself arrested by playing Pokemon Go inside a large Orthodox church in Yekaterinburg, his hometown. Excerpt:

This summer, Russian television broadcasters warned Pokémon Go enthusiasts that they could face three years in prison, per blasphemy laws, for playing the game in church. This disturbed [Ruslan] Sokolovsky, who wondered in a video uploaded this August: “Who can ever be offended by you walking around a church with your smartphone? Why the f‑‑k would they lock you up for that?”

He decided to investigate by playing Pokémon Go at a local Orthodox cathedral, because, in his words, “Why not?”

The video (warning: contains profanity) shows Sokolovsky playing the game on his phone in front of lit church candles, while prayers can be heard in the background. His video’s soundtrack alternated between Orthodox music and the Pokémon theme song. At the end of the clip, Sokolovsky concluded that the venture was successful because nobody “disturbed” him, though he failed to catch “the rarest Pokémon that you could find there — Jesus.”

“They say it [sic] doesn’t even exist,” Sokolovsky shrugged, “so I’m not really surprised.”

They say he faces up to five years in prison. I find that excessive, but I don’t feel sorry for this jackass. His fellow atheists committed mass murder of and terror against Orthodox Christians when they were in power during the Bolshevik tyranny. Excerpt:

Lenin outlined that the entire issue of the church valuable campaign could be used as a pretext in the public eye to attack the church and kill clergy.[53]

The sixth sector of the OGPU, led by Yevgeny Tuchkov, began aggressively arresting and executing bishops, priests, and devout worshipers, such asMetropolitan Veniamin in Petrograd in 1922 for refusing to accede to the demand to hand in church valuables (including sacred relics). Archbishop Andronik of Perm, who worked as a missionary in Japan, who was shot after being forced to dig his own grave.[54] Bishop Germogen of Tobolsk, who voluntarily accompanied the czar into exile, was strapped to the paddle wheel of a steamboat and mangled by the rotating blades. .[54]

In 1922, the Solovki Camp of Special Purpose, the first Russian concentration camp and a former Orthodox monastery, was established in the Solovki Islands in the White Sea.[55] In the years 1917–1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested; 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad.[56] Father Pavel Florensky, exiled in 1928 and executed in 1937, was one of the New-martyrs of this particular period.

In the first five years after the Bolshevik revolution, an English journalist estimated that 28 bishops and 1,215 priests were executed.[57][58] Recently released evidence indicates over 8,000 were killed in 1922 during the conflict over church valuables.[57]

Specialized anti-religious publications began in 1922, including Yemelyan Yaroslavsky’s Bezbozhnik, which later formed the basis for the League of the Militant Godless.

More from the annals of Militant Soviet Godlessness:

The Orthodox church suffered terribly in the 1930s, and many of its members were killed or sent to labor camps. Between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox churches in the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to fewer than 500. The watershed year was 1929, when Soviet policy put much new legislation in place that formed the basis for the harsh anti-religious persecution in the 1930s.

… During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot.[76] Many thousands of victims of persecution became recognized in a special canon of saints known as the “new martyrs and confessors of Russia”.

… Official Soviet figures reported that up to one third of urban and two thirds of rural population still held religious beliefs by 1937. However, the anti-religious campaign of the past decade and the terror tactics of the militantly atheist regime, had effectively eliminated all public expressions of religion and communal gatherings of believers outside of the walls of the few churches that still held services.[78] This was accomplished in a country that only a few decades earlier had had a deeply Christian public life and culture that had developed for almost a thousand years.

This was not merely a feature of Leninist and Stalinist times. It went on and on, until the end of the USSR. If you don’t know anything of this history, read the Wikipedia entry for just a taste of it. 

And there’s more. The church where Sokolovsky performed his blasphemous act, despite being warned not to, is a new one. It was built over Ipatiev House, the site of the execution, by atheist Bolsheviks, of Tsar Nicholas II and his family.  This is from the account of the event left behind by the executioner:

Having gone down to the room (At the entrance to the room, on the right there was a very wide window), I ordered them to stand along the wall. Obviously, at that moment they did not imagine what awaited them. [Tsaritsa] Alexandra Feodrovna said “There are not even chairs here.” Nicholas was carrying Alexei [the Tsarevich, the boy prince]. He stood in the room with him in his arms. Then I ordered a couple of chairs. On one of them, to the right of the entrance, almost in the corner, Alexandra Feodrovna sat down. The daughters and Demidova stood next to her, to the left of the entrance. Beside them Alexei was seated in the armchair. Behind him Dr. Botkin, the cook and the others stood. Nicholas stood opposite Alexei. At the same time I ordered the men to go down and to be ready in their places when the command was given. Nicholas had put Alexei on the chair and stood in such a way, that he shielded him. Alexei sat in the left corner from the entrance, and so far as I can remember, I said to Nicholas approximately this: His royal and close relatives inside the country and abroad were trying to save him, but the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies resolved to shoot them. He asked “What?” and turned toward Alexei. At that moment I shot him and killed him outright. He did not get time to face us to get an answer. At that moment disorganized, not orderly firing began. The room was small, but everybody could come in and carry out the shooting according to the set order. But many shot through the doorway. Bullets began to ricochet because the wall was brick. Moreover, the firing intensified when the victims shouts arose. I managed to stop the firing but with great difficulty.

A bullet, fired by somebody in the back, hummed near my head and grazed either the palm or finger (I do not remember) of somebody. When the firing stopped, it turned out that the daughters, Alexandra Feodrovna and, it seems, Demidova and Alexei too, were alive. I think they had fallen from fear or maybe intentionally, and so they were alive. Then we proceeded to finish the shooting. (Previously I had suggested shooting at the heart to avoid a lot of blood). Alexei remained sitting petrified. I killed him. They shot the daughters but did not kill them. Then Yermakov resorted to a bayonet, but that did not work either. Finally they killed them by shooting them in the head. Only in the forest did I finally discover the reason why it had been so hard to kill the daughters and Alexandra Feodrovna.

These murders, including the murder of innocent children, happened on the site where the church now sits in their memory. The Romanovs were only the most prominent of many millions of Russian Orthodox Christians murdered by atheism in power, and the site of their execution is considered sacred by believers — so much so that a church was built upon it. It was this church, and this sacred history, this precious treasure saved, miraculously, from the all-consuming fire of Bolshevism, that young Sokolovsky traduced to make a point to his 300,000 YouTube followers.

I’m sure Sokolovsky’s case is about to make him a free speech martyr in the liberal West, which either does not know about the historical background to his defilement of that Church, or does not care. The West doesn’t know its history and is losing its religion, considering both a hindrance to the free exercise of individual will. Russia, having lived through the terror of militant state atheism, does. Good for Russia.

UPDATE: Let me put it like this: if some alt-right joker played Pokemon Go at the Auschwitz site just to get a rise out of people, how would you feel about Polish authorities jailing him?

UPDATE.2: Since so many of you asked, I would not give this guy five years. I would not give him five weeks. I would give him five days, max. What I’m praising Russia for is defending its sacred spaces. It would be fine with me if the local priest or bishop asked the state to waive the charges, and they did so. It’s the principle. Note well that he did what he did knowing full well that he was breaking the law.