Rod Dreher's Blog, page 625

Zakaria Tips Elites’ Hand

The reader Deep South Populist and I disagree deeply on matters of race in America, and as a rule, I’m not going to post comments going forward that use the inflammatory (versus illuminating) term “white genocide” to describe the travails of the white working class. When they start talking about a Final Solution for Dan and Roseanne Connor, then we’ll start talking about white genocide on this blog.

Nevertheless, I like it that DSP participates here because he draws my attention to things that I might not otherwise see — like this column by Fareed Zakaria about Trump and the decline of the white working class. Here is its conclusion:

“You have been the veterans of creative suffering,” Martin Luther King Jr. told African Americans in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963: “Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.” Writing in 1960,King explained the issue in personal terms: “As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways that I could respond to my situation: either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. . . . So like the Apostle Paul I can now humbly yet proudly say, ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ ” The Hispanic and immigrant experiences in the United States are different, of course. But again, few in these groups have believed that their place in society is assured. Minorities, by definition, are on the margins. They do not assume that the system is set up for them. They try hard and hope to succeed, but they do not expect it as the norm.

The United States is going through a great power shift. Working-class whites don’t think of themselves as an elite group. But, in a sense, they have been, certainly compared with blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and most immigrants. They were central to America’s economy, its society, indeed its very identity. They are not anymore. Donald Trump has promised that he will change this and make them win again. But he can’t. No one can. And deep down, they know it.

Couple things here. In the broader column, Zakaria makes a fair and necessary point about the ability to suffer, and having faith in suffering’s redemptive value. It’s true for all people, everywhere. Zakaria is surely right that the unusually high rate of suicide and drinking and drugging to death among the white working class today has to do with the painful gulf between the life they expected and the life they have. As a group, they are clearly not dealing well with the deep structural changes in American life. There is no question that they — like every human being — are going to have to learn to suffer without being spiritually defeated, as King embodied. Popular American Christianity is generally not prepared for that, it seems to me. I wonder if the spirit of creative suffering extolled by King, and exemplified in the Civil Rights generation and those who came before them, can be said to exist anywhere in America today.

The last paragraph, though, strikes me as filled with elite contempt for the white working class. I might be reading too much into it, but there is within it an air of, “You people are finally getting what you deserve, so don’t expect us to feel sorry for you.” White working-class males really are the only permissible group for elites of all races to hate. Try reading that final paragraph as if the “they” were some other put-upon demographic. For example:

The United States is going through a great power shift. Blacks don’t think of themselves as an elite group. But, in a sense, they have been, given that we have had a generation of racial preferences to address lingering inequality from the era of segregation. From the time they were brought here in chains, black Americans were central to America’s economy, its society, indeed its very identity. They are not anymore. The breakdown of the black family, disproportionate incarceration rates, the passing on of intergenerational poverty, and other factors have left many black Americans behind. And the increased Latinization of America, as well as the rising numbers of Asians, means that the America of the future will not be defined by the white vs. black conflict. Blacks will just be one minority among others, and increasingly those who run the country will feel no special responsibility to African-Americans, because their ancestors did not participate in black oppression.

No one can stop this dynamic. And deep down, African-Americans know it.

Is there truth in this paragraph? Yes, some, and maybe more than some. But would a star in the Washington Establishment pantheon like Fareed Zakaria be comfortable looking at the intense suffering in black America and saying, basically, “Too bad for you people; history is passing you by”? Because that’s the impression I take from his column about the white working class and its enthusiasm for Trump.

Writers typically don’t write their headlines, so you can’t blame Zakaria for the headline on his: “America’s Self-Destructive Whites”. Still, it accurately reflects the content of his column. And don’t misunderstand me, there is a measurable spirit of self-destruction in the white working class community, which occasioned the Zakaria column in the first place. I wrote about it a couple of months ago in the “Why Trump Matters” post, based on the findings that white working class people, especially men, are suffering from a collapse of their mental and physical health. And I also wrote back then, citing social science research from Brad Wilcox and others, that there is a religious aspect to this phenomenon:

So, if Wilcox et al. are right, the black and Hispanic working classes are better able to weather economic adversity and family setbacks because they are more closely tied in to their churches. Their faith gives them resilience that whites more or less do not have, because of the way we whites believe. I believe that as holding to traditional Christianity begins to cost the white middle class something serious, we are going to see a mass apostasy. We whites had better get busy learning from the black and Hispanic church if we are going to make it.

Now, there is one more aspect to white working-class despair: dispossession. It does not take a sociologist to grasp that the tectonic social changes in American life since the 1960s have been at the very least disorienting to whites. The point to grasp here is not that we shouldn’t have had those changes; many of them were just and necessary, others, not so much. The point to grasp is that the experience of those changes may have been psychologically traumatic to certain whites who expected the world to work in a different way — a way that favored them.

Perhaps there is a comparison to be made with Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union — which was, of course, a vastly more severe phenomenon, but I think there may be some comparison to be made, re: a people who assumed that the world was a certain way, and woke up rudely to the fact that it was not. Add to that the fact that among elites in our culture — especially academic and media elites — white working-class people are the bungholes of the universe, and, well, here we are.

Now, everything I wrote is consonant with what Zakaria wrote, and it doesn’t become untrue because it is unpleasant to consider. What bothers me is the way elites in American culture in general regard the suffering of white working-class males, versus minorities. In truth, it’s not an either-or game, meaning it’s not that we either care about the suffering of the white working class or we care about the suffering of minorities. But it certainly seems to work out that way in the way the elites talk about the issue — especially a globalist like Zakaria, whose last paragraph strikes me as polite gloating.

 

 

The people who support Donald Trump know what the Fareed Zakarias of the globalist establishment (both liberals and conservatives) think of them. They get it. Me, I’m certain that Trump is not a solution to the working class’s problems, or to anybody’s problems, but it is perfectly obvious why people would want to believe that he is. The Democratic Party has invited #BlackLivesMatter activists to be part of its presidential campaign efforts. You know where the #WhiteWorkingClassLivesMatter activists can be found? At Donald Trump rallies.

UPDATE: Reader AMHixson comments:

I live and work in metro D.C. and, through my job, have intermittently interacted with this slice of the elite for a decade. In my experience, it’s less overt contempt for the white working-class than it is fatalistic indifference.

IMO, the taproot of this indifference is their globalist worldview. It never occurs to most of them that the American elite, even in elected government positions, should privilege the interests of Americans over the interests of others. Nation-states are a quaint, obsolete concept from the 20th century and today, in their view, are really just managerial districts of the global economy. Free trade and globalization have elevated hundreds of millions in the developing world into material modernity and are therefore a net good, and, if working- and middle-class Americans have lost ground as a price of that good, them’s the breaks. The global market is like the weather, unstoppable and inevitable, and so any attempt to reverse Middle America’s fate is a fool’s errand that will just make things even worse for them.

What’s telling to me is how many of them, despite being born and raised in the U.S., have seen more of Europe, Australia, Asia, and in some cases Africa than they have of their own country. Their mental map of America consists of the coasts, Chicago, and DFW Airport with everything else being “here there be dragons”.

UPDATE.2: Reader Richard writes:

Rod I saw this article in the Post this morning, but I did not come away with the impression that Zakaria was dismissing the white working class with contempt, or with the sense that “sorry, guys, but you’ve had this coming”.

Conceding in advance that the conclusion of this typical 750 word op ed is inelegantly written, I offer this interpretation. Describing the white working class as an “elite” is a poor choice of words, but to the extent that members of this group once enjoyed a way of life that has largely been sucked away by globalization and credentializing of various jobs, the term is apt. Part of my growing up was in Michigan, and I worked summers at auto industry parts depots as a “summer replacement” hire. I learned a great deal from the (mostly) men alongside whom I worked. Many of them were stereotypical high school graduates, with a three year enlisted stint in the armed forces – people who had made it past their 90 day threshold to the prospect of a 30 year career drawing a good wage as a member of the UAW. They owned homes, often owned a cabin on a lake “up North” with a boat on a trailer. They coached their kids teams, and many of them spoke with pride about sons or daughters who had graduated high school and who were enrolled in one of Michigan’s universities. Some were incredibly well read. Some pursued further education on their own. Some were Vietnam vets. The point is that as the 60’s faded into the 70’s, a high school degree, a good work ethic, fidelity to one’s spouse, care for one’s children, and avoidance of poor life choices had enabled them to live that good life some conservatives elsewhere like to talk up (“graduate”, “get a job”, “get married before you have a baby”) – that, and to see their children aspire to better. That was a way of life that was the envy of most of the world.

We all know what went wrong. The cars they assembled were inferior – or became so – in many ways. Union-management relationships were sclerotic, and entrenched high labor costs placed a whole industry at a disadvantage. But the good ones – and the great majority of those I met were good people – lived lives for which they were grateful. And if they weren’t descendants of slaves, etc., etc., a considerable number of them were immigrants or the children of immigrants, from the ruins of post war Europe, or from the shtetls of Appalachia. People like the folks I worked with many summers ago in Livonia, Michigan, once did their part in making this country run, to echo a song lyric from the 30’s.

And, no, in Gated Community America, they are no longer central to the nation’s economy or identity. Demagogues like Trump offer them political bread and circuses. Other Republicans, on a quadrennial cycle, tease them with social issue pretensions.

I think you and I and others agree that The Donald is a BS artist. But Zakaria’s concluding paragraph, phrased as a question, still hangs in the air. And I sure don’t have an answer.

Let me state again here what I’ve said in the comments boxes: I may be reading something into Zakaria’s column that is not there, or that he did not intend. In which case, bad on me. Hearing this kind of requiem for the white working class coming from a member of the globalist elite inclines me to believe his tone is “sucks to be you,” but perhaps I am being uncharitable.

Diabolized America

The term “diabolic” refers in common usage to evil that rises to the level of the demonic, but the term’s roots mean “to tear apart.” This post from Jonathan Haidt identifies a dynamic that is tearing America apart. It’s Haidt’s answer to a question asking what scientific news from 2015 is likely to stay news. Excerpts:

If you were on a selection committee tasked with choosing someone to hire (or to admit to your university, or to receive a prize in your field), and it came down to two candidates who were equally qualified on objective measures, which candidate would you be most likely to choose?

__A) The one who shared your race

__B) The one who shared your gender

__C) The one who shared your religion

__D) The one who shared your political party or ideology

The correct answer, for most Americans, is now D. It is surely good news that prejudice based on race, gender, and religion are way down in recent decades. But it is very bad news—for America, for the world, and for science—that cross-partisan hostility is way up.

My nomination for “news that will stay news” is a paper by political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, titled “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization.” Iyengar and Westwood report four studies (all using nationally representative samples) in which they gave Americans various ways to reveal both cross-partisan and cross-racial prejudice, and in all cases cross-partisan prejudice was larger.

He continues:

This is extremely bad news for America because it is very hard to have an effective democracy without compromise. But rising cross-partisan hostility means that Americans increasingly see the other side not just as wrong but as evil, as a threat to the very existence of the nation, according to Pew Research. Americans can expect rising polarization, nastiness, paralysis, and governmental dysfunction for a long time to come.

This is a warning for the rest of the world because some of the trends that have driven America to this point are occurring in many other countries, including: rising education and individualism (which make people more ideological), rising immigration and ethnic diversity (which reduces social capital and trust), and stagnant economic growth (which puts people into a zero-sum mindset).

This is extremely bad news for science and universities because universities are usually associated with the left. In the United States, universities have moved rapidly left since 1990, when the left-right ratio of professors across all departments was less than two to one. By 2004, the left-right ratio was roughly five to one, and it is still climbing. In the social sciences and humanities it is far higher. Because this political purification is happening at a time of rising cross-partisan hostility, we can expect increasing hostility from Republican legislators toward universities and the things they desire, including research funding and freedom from federal and state control.

Read the whole thing. 

If “dia + bollein” = “to tear apart,” and “sym + bollein” = “to bring together,” can you think of what acts of symbollein could begin to reweave the national tapestry? Or are we destined to continue to unwind, because the forces that led to our disunity are impossible to contain?

 

View From Your Birthday Table

Starhill, Louisiana

Today, January 3, was my wife Julie’s birthday. Nora, seen above, made her a cake, and frosted it. She picked out the recipe, and decided that the cake itself needed to be green, because that’s Mama’s favorite color, and so should the cream cheese icing. Then she decided that because purple is Mama’s second-favorite color, she should pipe the word “MAMA” in purple icing. So she did.

We have cava with it, and then Lucas and Nora performed REM’s “Nightswimming,” which is Julie’s and my song. (Our 18th wedding anniversary was on December 30, but Julie was out of town; this was their present.) We’re watching Downton Abbey now, and drinking pink cava. Life is good.

Nora just informs me that today is also J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday. So now you know.

Turmoil in Moscow

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin (Valerij Ledenev/Flickr)

Ever heard of Father Vsevolod Chaplin? He is — or was, until very recently — the chief spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church. He’s an intense guy, it would seem. Last year, he published a dystopian novella under a pseudonym:

Suddenly, the plot of “Machaut” — which describes the apocalyptic destruction of 2043 Moscow at the hands of Islamists, Ukrainians, and gays — seems less like the ravings of a lonely keyboard warrior and more like a well-informed window on what scares the Kremlin most.

“‘The press secretary to the president of the Moscow Confederation and Assembly of Revolution Leaders, Tasho Pim, has warned that people who fail to comply with the new ban on intolerant thinking will be subject to involuntary euthanasia,'” a news report announces in the opening scene, followed shortly by an ad for a “happiness generator” called the HaHaHa 25.0. (The full text of the novella is available here.)

What follows is a chaotic world Chaplin himself characterizes as a “liberal hell” — vegan breakfasts, dreadlocked African legionnaires, “intergender” ad executives who go by the personal pronoun “it,” and, considering the author, a curiously detailed hookup involving graphic language and a “sex-generation belt.”

Sounds like America under the second Hillary administration. Ha ha! I keed.

Anyway, Fr. Chaplin’s ecclesiastical career came to a screeching halt recently. More:

Father Vsevolod Chaplin, who, since 2009, had been head of the church’s department for cooperation with society, was relieved of his duties on Thursday. Chaplin had called for the church and the Russian government to take a more active role in east Ukraine, and recently referred to the Russian military intervention in Syria as a holy war. However, he had criticised the current Russian political elite for corruption.

“Everything started a year ago, as I disagreed in principle with our Ukraine position. We should have not waited but worked to make sure our authorities heard the voices of people who think themselves Russian,” Chaplin told the newspaper RBK on Friday. Chaplin said Russia’s current political leaders were an “immoral elite who are stopping the country from developing”.

The Interfax news agency has more:

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, who was dismissed from the post of the Synodal Department on Church and Society Liaison by the Synod’s decision on Thursday, said he links his dismissal to differences with Patriarch Kirill.

“I have been trying to tell his Holiness that the tone in the relations with the state that the Church tends to take is wrong, we should be more critical about the immoral and unjust actions by the authorities, we should be more direct when speaking to society, we should in no case suck up to structures that challenge Orthodox faith so clearly as the current administration of Ukraine. We should generally prophesize, not think every time as to who will think and say what, and we should not be afraid of getting into a conflict with those who have power in this world,” Father Vsevolod told Interfax-Religion.

The second area in which Father Vsevolod has major differences with Patriarch Kirill is the current church administration. “Many decisions are made unsystematically, without consultations with the relevant synodal establishments, in the lobby, in haste. One can’t do that. A system that works in this way is sure to make mistakes,” the priest said. He also said he has warned people about that many times, but was not heard.

He criticized the Putinist civil order:

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, deputy head of the World Russian People’s Assembly, believes the absence of ideological freedom and a broad public debate may cause a catastrophe in Russia by 2017.

“Some people believe that public debate should be minimized, that what is going on in people’s minds, in the sphere of communication between people should be ignored and in that way we can calmly live to 2017 or 2018. Dear ladies and gentlemen, it’s not going to happen,” Father Vsevolod told a press conference in Moscow on Friday.

“The conservatism, which is trying to cleanse the sphere of ideas, close the key issues to the present and future of the country and the world, people who think and act in this way commit political suicide – they will be gone,” he said.

Curiouser and curiouser…

Justice Scalia in Louisiana

I drove down to Metairie, in the New Orleans suburbs, with Ryan Booth today to hear Justice Antonin Scalia talk about religious liberty. It turned out to be an unusually great day, not because of Scalia’s speech (which was short, with no Q&A, given that Scalia’s plane had been late, and he had a luncheon to get to), but because of the people I met while we were all waiting for him to show. More on that tomorrow. I want to talk here about what Scalia said.

Here’s the Times-Picayune‘s report on the talk.  It’s a fair and accurate rendering of what he said. Excerpt:

The Constitution’s First Amendment protects the free practice of religion and forbids the government from playing favorites among the various sects, Scalia said, but that doesn’t mean the government can’t favor religion over nonreligion.

That was never the case historically, he said. It didn’t become the law of the land until the 60s, Scalia said, when he said activist judges attempted to resolve the question of government support of religion by imposing their own abstract rule rather than simply observing common practice.

If people want strict prohibition against government endorsement of religion, let them vote on it, he said. “Don’t cram it down the throats of an American people that has always honored God on the pretext that the Constitution requires it.”

I took notes on the talk, and want to add a few things.

Scalia began by quoting Robert F. Kennedy, who said, “Some men see things as they are and say, why. I dream things that never were, and say, why not.”

 

Scalia said that of all the religion clause (the Establishment clause, and the Free Exercise clause) cases from which he’s dissented over his years on the court, the one that upset him the most (“by which I mean the one that strayed farthest from the proper methodology”) was Texas Monthly vs. Bullock (1989).  The case had to do with the fact that the State of Texas exempted religious publications from the state sales tax.

“The case was decided by a mechanical application of the Lemon Test, not by long-accepted practices of the American people,” he said.

The Lemon Test says that a law violates the Establishment Clause if it favors religion over secularism — not one church or denomination over another, but religion over non-religion, said Scalia.

 

“That is the so-called ‘neutrality principle’ on which the Court continues to pronounce,” he cracked.

I say “cracked” because he was characteristically (and appropriately, if you ask me) irascible when he said it, but the point is a massively important one, because the same principle guided the Court majority in, say, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), which upheld a California law that, in the view of Scalia and other dissenters, unfairly burdened religious groups on campus. I deeply, passionately wish Justice Scalia had talked about how this “neutrality principle” is likely to affect religious liberty in the future, but perhaps it would have been too risky for him to speculate, given that he may have cases involving it coming before him.

 

Scalia recalled being in Rome on 9/11, getting ready to attend a legal conference. He watched the coverage on TV as he was unpacking, and heard President Bush end his televised address to the nation that night by asking God’s blessing on America, as is customary for American presidents.

 

The next morning, the justice continued, he saw jurists from other countries, and one of them said he wishes that the leader of his country could publicly ask God’s blessing at a time of national crisis. But it was forbidden there, as it is in more than one European country.

 

“This is what the French call laicisme. The principle of secularism,” said Scalia. “Fortunately for us, England was never conquered by Napoleon, so we never had that principle. There are some who would like to impose this on the United States, and I don’t have a problem with that as long as it is done democratically. Don’t cram it down the throats of an American people that has always honored God on the pretext that the Constitution requires it.”

 

Scalia said that judges today always favor abstract principles over the lived experiences and customs of the American people. He said that sometimes the customs have to change (that is, be changed by Court ruling) because of the abstract principle, but the presumption should be that the abstract principles must yield before lived experience and customs. Scalia told a story about what he called “The Shakespeare Principle” as elucidated by a priest who taught him in high school (“In those days, Jesuits could be tough and crusty,” he wisecracked, an implied swipe at what’s become of the order.)

“One of my classmates — I remember his name, Antonelli — volunteered some criticism of Hamlet. Very sophomoric, of course. Fr. Matthews looked at him with a steely glaze, and said to him in his Boston accent, ‘Mister, when you read Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s not on trial, you are.’ I have always thought that a very good principle useful in many areas of life, including the law. What Shakespeare is to high school students, a society’s long-established traditions are to the jurist. He does not judge them; he is judged by them.”

 

He concluded his talk by recalling RFK’s quote, saying it originally came from Shaw’s relatively obscure play, Back to Methuselah — and RFK misinterpreted its meaning. Said Scalia:

“Shaw’s line … goes as follows: “You see things and you say, ‘Why; but I dream things that never were and say, Why not?” Shaw had the good sense to know that this motto is tempting, but not really a sound guide to human action. You see, in the play, the lines are attributed to a serpent, and addressed to a woman named Eve.”

With that, he smiled, walked off the stage, and went to lunch.

I hope Scalia, il Magnifico, lives to be a hundred and ten, and dies on the bench, fighting.

 

 

 

 

 

Robertson Davies & Dreams

Eugene Ivanov/Shutterstock

This time of year never fails to put me in mind of Robertson Davies and his marvelous Deptford Trilogy of novels, which I first read between Christmas and Epiphany, 1993-94. If I didn’t have an Everest of books on my desk needing to be read for the Ben Op project, I would pull my tattered Deptford off the shelf (I have a volume in which all three are bound as one) and plunge into it for old times’ sake. There’s something so satisfyingly wintry about Davies, at least to me.

One reason those three novels mean so much to me is that they introduced me to the idea of Jungian dream analysis, and synchronicity. Without going into too much detail, the three weeks over which I read those novels were taken up with travel in Norway. The second of the trilogy, The Manticore, is entirely about a character’s experience in Jungian analysis, and the third, World of Wonders, focus on a character present in all three books, a magician named Magnus Eisengrim. I began book three five minutes before my train pulled into the station at Lillehammer. I stepped off the train and walked to the nearby hotel in which I was booked, thinking about the character’s magnificent name.

The hotel clerk gave me the room key, and I trudged up the stairs to my room. I was just getting over the flu, and was exhausted. When I stood in front of the door of my room, I froze. The rooms in the small hotel had all been named for kings of Norway — and I had been assigned the “Magnus” room! Overcome by the need to sleep, I fell onto my bed and began dozing. Then I had the first of three intensely symbolic dreams, all of which had to do with central problems in my own life. As I wrote about all this in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming:

A couple of days after Christmas, I flew into snowy Oslo. My friend Trude met me at the airport. After a few days with her and her boyfriend, I set out by train for Lillehammer. I had noticed several strange and seemingly meaningful coincidences happening during my stay with Trude – the kind of things the psychiatrist Carl Jung called “synchronicities.” I remembered having read somewhere that Jung advised his patients who reported synchronicities to pay attention to their dreams during this time. Maybe that’s a good idea, I thought.

 

During the first night in Lillehammer, I had the first of three highly symbolic dreams. I dreamed I was an adolescent, and standing with my father next to the pond. We were arguing about something fiercely. I don’t know what it was, but it became too intense for me to take, and I ran into a nearby grove of trees.

 

The second dream came to me in Trondheim. In it, I peered out of the grove. My father had gone, and I saw a swan and her cygnets floating near the water’s edge. As I stepped out of the grove and approached them, I could see that it wasn’t a swan at all, but a white-robed priest baptizing white-robed children.

 

The third dream happened in Bergen. In it, I was swimming in the middle of the pond, wearing all my clothes. Paw, Mam, Ruthie, Mike, and Hannah stood on the bank, calling to me to come back. I thought that was odd; don’t they know I’m just fine? Then the St. Michael the Archangel medal I wore around my neck floated to the surface, caught a ray of sun, and a large fish swallowed it.

 

By then, synchronicities were popping around me like firecrackers. It was eerie. Something was happening. Not knowing what else to do, I sat at the desk in my hotel room and wrote a long letter to Michael, a devoutly Catholic friend in Washington who knew something about Jungian dream interpretation. In the letter, I told him the dreams, asked him what they meant, and advised him to write me in Louisiana, because I would be home soon.

 

When I arrived back in Starhill, my mother gave me a stack of mail. In it was a letter from Michael. I tore it open and read. Michael, who knew nothing of my family history or the emotional dynamic between my father and me, said that the first dream symbolized a clash with my father, and my need to run away. The second dream, he said, disclosed that my coming to a mature religious faith, as I had done in Washington, had drawn me out into the world, away from a place of fear. And the third dream was God’s call to me to leave my family. They won’t understand why you’re going to do it, Michael said, but the dream is telling you that this is what you need to do.

 

Three dreams. My past. My present. My future. What Michael wrote made sense. Could this be the direction I had been praying for?

 

Also in that stack of mail was a letter from the managing editor of The Washington Times, my old employer. They were creating a position for a culture beat reporter, she said; would I be interested in returning to the paper? Please let me know by the last Friday in January, she said.

 

The easy thing to do, the most rational thing to do, would be to call the editor and say, “Yes! How soon do you want me?” But that wasn’t my way. No, I had been so taken by the strange dreams and synchronicities that I was sure God was going to send me an unmistakable sign confirming that I should return to DC. I had three weeks in which to make up my mind about the job. I prayed my rosary and waited on God.

 

During this time, I heard an awful tale about the parish’s Rosedown Plantation, one of Louisiana’s most beautiful antebellum houses and gardens – a story that had the town buzzing. The new owner of Rosedown, an investor from Dallas, had announced plans to make a housing development out of a large portion of the 2,000 acres attached to the big house. As part of his scheme, he ordered the congregation of the Rosedown Baptist Church to leave the premises. Folks were scandalized.

 

The Rosedown Baptist Church congregation had been present continuously on the plantation since the slaves were first evangelized in the early 19th century. The current congregation was composed mostly of ancestors of the original slave families who founded it. Their modest brick church on the plantation grounds’ edge was not historically significant, but the congregation was. Besides, it was their church. They did not, however, own the land on which it sat.

 

The congregation was small, it was poor, and it had no one to help them. Like everyone else in St. Francisville, I was outraged. I started making phone calls. A few days later, the Baton Rouge Advocate published on its front page my freelance story reporting on the controversy. A local movement to save the church grew. Days later, CNN sent a crew to town to report on the congregation’s fight. The New York Times did a story. There were rumors that Oprah Winfrey was coming to town with her program.

 

Finally, the beleaguered plantation owner relented. The church was saved. My mother and father told me how proud they were of what I had done for the cause. They saw how passionate I was about this story, and how much good I could do with my journalism.

 

“Son,” said Paw, “if you want to go back to Washington, go with our blessing.”

 

The easy thing to do, the rational thing to do, would be to take my parents’ blessing as the sign from God I was waiting for. But that wasn’t my way. I still had a few days before I had to let The Washington Times know of my decision. Maybe God had something else to show me.

 

On Friday morning, I was at home at Weyanoke, and received my college friend Kim, up from Baton Rouge for a weekend in the country. She was going through a tough divorce, and needed to get away from things. We sat in the kitchen, lingering over lunch, talking about how hard things were, and where God was in all this.

 

“Oh, Kim, look,” I said, pointing to the clock. “I have to make a phone call to Washington. End of business today is the deadline for this job offer, and they’re an hour ahead on the East coast.”

 

“Are you going to take it?” she asked.

 

“Yeah,” I said. “I was hoping for a sign from God, but I didn’t get one. I think it’s the right thing to do, though.”

 

I excused myself and went into the hallway where the phone was. I called Washington, accepted the job, and told them I’d report in two weeks. So it was done. I was going back. I nearly wept with relief.

 

I took my rosary, slipped into the nearby downstairs bedroom, and shut the doors so Kim wouldn’t see me. I sat on a chair next to the four-poster antique bed, and began to pray the rosary. But first, a word with the Blessed Mother.

 

“Mary,” I said, “I didn’t get the sign I was hoping for, but I know you were praying for me all along. I know God helped me make this decision through your prayers. I want to offer this rosary in thanksgiving. And, you see how much Kim is suffering; please hold her hand through this divorce.”

 

I began to say my beads. When I rubbed the bead between my right thumb and forefinger, starting the second decade, the room, which had been gloomy in the overcast January gray, suddenly filled with sunlight – and the aroma of roses. What was this? I slowed my prayers to a crawl, and began inhaling in deep drafts through my nose. This cold bedroom, in the dead of winter, smelled like a rose garden in full bloom. I eked out the prayers of those ten beads, savoring the intense rose aroma for as long as I could, the said the Glory Be, ending the decade. At that moment, the clouds returned, and the rose scent faded away.

 

I hurried through the last three decades of the rosary, then searched the bedroom for clues. There were no flowers in that room. There was no perfume, no scented soap. There was nothing that could have produced what just happened.

 

Finally, after I had made the decision, I had my sign.

 

Kim wasn’t in the house when I emerged. In a daze, I went upstairs to make up the beds. As I pulled the covers up over my bed, I heard the thwack of the screen door downstairs, and the padding of Kim’s feet up the stairs. She hurried through the door holding her right hand out, palm up, her eyes wide.

 

“Smell this!” she said.

 

Her hand smelled like roses.

 

“Did you put perfume on?”

 

“No.”

 

“Did you wash your hand with soap?”

 

“No! I was just outside walking around. When I came in, I came up the stairs to get something out of my room. I rubbed my nose, and for some reason, my hand smells like roses.”

 

I swallowed hard.

 

“Oh my God, this is amazing,” I said. “I was downstairs a few minutes ago praying the rosary. In the middle of it, the room filled with sunlight and the aroma of roses. There’s no way to explain it. There’s nothing in that room that smells of roses.

 

“Kim, here’s the thing: when I started my prayer, I asked the Virgin Mary to hold your hand through this trial you’re going through.”

 

Her jaw dropped. The rose scent vanished.

I went back to Washington, confident that I had done the right thing. I learned to pay attention to synchronicities after that, and to dreams. The same kind of thing happened to me in the three weeks leading up to the day I met my wife in 1996. I have learned from experience to take these things seriously — even as I keep what I regard as a healthy distance from Jung, whose occultism at times unnerves me. And it all started with reading Robertson Davies.

One thing that brought all this particularly to mind on this lazy, cold New Year’s Day was a dream a couple of days that someone I know well shared with me, because he was so rattled by it, and asked my help in understanding it.

In the dream, says my friend, he was standing at a block party on Capitol Hill, in Washington. It was a golden day, late in the afternoon, and everyone was happy and content. He said it was a Republican crowd, and he, not being Republican, felt vaguely uncomfortable around them. But everybody was very nice, and my friend said he was trying to fit in.

Suddenly, a large hawk swooped down over the crowd. It was pursued by three black vultures. Everybody stopped what they were doing to observe the drama in the sky. My friend said that everybody was excited by it, and said that the hawk was clearly leading the three vultures into some sort of trap, where it would kill them. “You don’t get it!” my friend screamed in the dream. “Those things are going to kill the hawk!”

The vultures forced the hawk down on the next block, behind an alley. My friend ran to help the hawk fight the vultures. When he arrived, he saw that the three black birds had killed the hawk, split its head open, and were eating its brains.

My friend (who does not live in DC) wanted to know what I thought this dream meant. It was super-creepy, to be sure, but I didn’t know what to tell him. I asked if there had been any synchronicities leading up to this. He said no. I am mystified. It may be just a dream … but after my own experience, I am reluctant to dismiss any dream as “just a dream.”

Any Robertson Davies fans out there in this blog’s readership? Anybody had any meaningful experiences with dreams and synchronicities that they’d care to share? Just trying to shake things up around here, and keep it eclectic…

Who Are the Barbarians?

Peggy Noonan looks into the political crystal ball, and is not encouraged:

We could see a great party split in two. That, I think, is what I’m seeing among the Republicans, a slow-motion break. The question is whether it will play out over the next few cycles or turn abrupt and fiery in this one. Some in Washington speak giddily of the prospect, wondering aloud if the new party’s logo should be a lion or a gazelle. But America’s two-party system has reigned almost since its beginning, and it has kept us from much woe. It has provided stability, reliability and, yes, progress. The breaking or splintering of one of those parties would be an epochal event. Ross Perot in the 1990s was a one-off; the party soon enough healed back into one. Mr. Trump may be a one-off, but the divisions he’s revealed—on how on-the-ground and unprotected people feel about illegal immigration, on the deeper and more dangerous implications of political correctness, on a host of economic and cultural issues—will not, I suspect, be resolved so easily.

If the GOP breaks it will be bitter. The establishment thinks they are saving the party from the vandals—from Trumpian know-nothingism. But Republicans on the ground think those in the establishment were the vandals, with their open borders, donor-class interests and social liberalism.

The distance between the top of the party and the bottom has been growing for years, at least since 2008. The bonds between the two have stretched and stretched, and this year they began to snap. That’s the story of the year, that the snapping became obvious. Mr. Trump and the Trumps of the future are the result, not the cause. The establishment does not see this. They think it’s about him. It’s about them.

If Donald Trump is the strong form of right-wing populism, I’m not sure what strong form it would take on the left. Damon Linker points out an essential truth about Trumpism:

When Frum and Galston and Obama and Sanders suggest that Trump’s success is fueled by the economic decline of the white working class, I find myself nodding along. But it’s important to realize that Trump’s supporters don’t appear to see it that way — or at least not so straightforwardly.

Yes, they seem drawn to Trump because of his hyperbolic talk of a national crisis that has left the American dream “dead.” But there is no evidence at all that they think the proper response is to propose some additional child tax credits and new regulatory tweaks.

Yes, but it’s also true that the culture that made sense to them has frayed, and has been frayed by the same economic forces that Damon et alia identify. It is true that a mob will always be looking for a scapegoat to avoid having to examine its own faults that led to its fate, and that is partly what’s happening here. But I disagree with Damon that the Trump supporters’ cultural populism is nothing more than a manifestation of false consciousness. Seems to me that far too many analysts err in believing that everything is about material concerns, deep down. As has been pointed out before, one reason so many in the white working class are the strongest exponents of religious conservatism, despite the moral chaos of their own lives, could well be that they are all too aware of how terrifying life is when you are poor or struggling, and you are unbuffered by cultural structures that make sense of your life.

Anyway, what would left-wing cultural populism look like in America, if it became a thing? I think #BlackLivesMatter is something like it, though that movement is not nearly as strong among Democrats as Trumpism, whatever that is, among Republicans. This came up so fast among Republicans, this Trump movement, that if I were a Democratic Party insider, I would not rest easy knowing that my party’s fortunes depended on a machine politician like Hillary as president. On the other hand, the popular culture is so heavily defined by left-wing culture that it’s hard to imagine any kind of natural cultural opposition to the Establishment’s view arising on the left.

Whoever is elected president this year has to govern a country under a lot of strain. I have a jaundiced view, and will always find the dark cloud within the silver lining, but still, I find it hard to imagine either Hillary or any Republican, with the possible exception of Marco Rubio, being the kind of president that unites people, even nominally.

UPDATE: Rusty Reno articulates very well the source of much right-wing populism: the “diversity” sham as a veneer for elites to justify their mode of rule. Excerpts:

“Diversity” is one of the pillars supporting the legitimacy of our ruling class. (The other is technocratic competence or “merit.”) In our present situation, the President of Yale justifies his power by appealing to his competence—and to his commitment to “diversity.” The same goes for CEOs of major corporations, heads of major philanthropies, and most political leaders. “Diversity” serves to block accusations that the control of power (and wealth) is an inside game that favors insiders. No, says the ideology of “inclusion,” we hold power, yes, but we do so with a self-sacrificial commitment to use it to empower others.

Moreover, “diversity” is also a bludgeon with which to beat up on any challengers to today’s elite. Republicans? They’re the “white party,” which is another way of saying a party of prejudiced, racist xenophobes. To lack “diversity” disqualifies one automatically. This is a very handy tool with which to dismiss competition for power, especially when you can define “diversity” as you wish, which is what our establishment does.

More:

Populism Left and Right, here and in Europe, senses that multiculturalism serves as an ideology to justify the transformation of American, French, or German elites into global elites. And they’re rebelling, rightly to my mind. Ordinary people rightly see that they’ll be sold out if that’s what needed to promote whatever form of global “diversity” the One Percent sees as necessary to buttress its right to rule.

Our Late Antique-ish 2016

I’ve been reading the Princeton historian Peter Brown’s short book, The World of Late Antiquity, and came across a passage that seemed oddly contemporary:

The senators of the fifth century cannot be accused of having failed to participate in the political life of the empire. Far from it: they simply annexed the governmental machine to their own style of life, which had regarded politics with studied hesitation, and administration as an opportunity to look after one’s friends. Amateurism, the victory of vested interests, narrow horizons — these are the ugly hallmarks of the aristocratic government of the western empire in the early fifth century.

Um…

But it was, at least, their own Roman empire. No group of Romans ever idealized Rome as enthusiastically as did the senatorial poets and speechmakers of the later fourth and early fifth centuries. The myth of Rome that was to haunt medieval and Renaissance men — Roma aeterna, Rome conceived of as the natural climax of civilization, destined to continue for ever — was not created by the men of the classical Roman empire: it was a direct legacy of the heady patriotism of the late fourth-century Latin world.

But this patriotism, Brown continues, only divided the Roman world. The pagans were the loudest patriots, and they believed the roots of Rome’s greatness were found in its pagan past. Christians rejected this, saying that Rome enjoyed divine favor because the bodies of Saint Peter and Saint Paul were buried there. Even something that should have united Rome — agreement on its greatness under heaven — served to divide, because its biggest factions could not agree on the nature of its greatness.

This reminds me of our own country, except that our loudest patriots are conservative Christians. Does America’s strength lie in the fidelity of its people to the God of the Bible, and our unity as people bound by a constitution that holds all as equal under the law? Or does America’s greatness lie in its secularity, and its diversity, which, according to this view, makes us stronger?

But it also reminds me of contemporary Europe. The leadership elites in western Europe, and perhaps a majority of its people, believe that Europe’s greatness is entirely a matter of secularism and status as standard-bearer of a universal civilization based on human rights. A minority believes that it is because of Europe’s (now-discarded) Christian past and national particularities.

Brown says that the internal division and weakness in Roman society, and its rigid rejection of outsiders, left it vulnerable to the barbarian invasions from the north:

As a result, the barbarian tribes entered a society that was not strong enough to hold them at bay, but not flexible enough to ‘lead their conquerors captive’ by absorbing them into Roman life.

This is the significance of the so-called ‘barbarian invasions’ of the early fifth century. These invasions were not perpetual, destructive raids; still less were they organized campaigns of conquest. Rather, they were a ‘gold rush’ of immigrants from the underdeveloped countries of the north into the rich lands of the Mediterranean.

Does this not sound a lot like Europe 2016, with reference to the migrants from the Middle East and Africa? Europe is not strong enough to halt the gold rush of immigrants (it is even considered racist by the elites to mention certain sources of these new invasions), but it also has not been flexible enough to absorb generations of outsiders into European life (whence the banlieues and ghettos).

Late in the book, Brown talks about the sea change that had overtaken popular culture by the end of the transition period away from Antiquity to the Medieval period:

The new, popular culture of the late sixth century was ‘medieval’ in the true sense: it ran on new lines, it exploited new energies, it marked the emergence of a new, non-classical sensibility. The upper-class culture of the Late Antique world had been exclusively literary. The book and the spoken word were the only forms of culture that interested the educated man: no Late Antique bishop, for instance, so much as hints that the churches in which he preached were being set with revolutionary mosaics. By the sixth century, the literary tradition had piled up as an imposing legacy from the past. …

The written word had withdrawn into a shell. Music was the new idiom of the sixth century. Theological controversy hinged on the refrains of devotional chants. The Byzantine liturgy developed its dramatic form. Previously the Cross was shown in Late Antique art as a distant symbol — as a Roman trophy of victory or as a remote, star-studded sign in the sky of a mosaic vault; it was now charged with the body of the Crucified, through the pathos of the Good Friday dirges of Syria.

And, besides music — the icon. The visual image, the stylized portrait, was a concentrated and potent symbol that spoke directly to the man in the street. For the average man had lost touch with the erudite, literary symbolism that had encrusted the public empire. When an emperor placed the traditional, classical winged ‘genius’ of Constantinople on his coins in 570, the provincials were shocked: they thought he had become a pagan; what they wanted on their coins was the simple, charged emblem of the Cross.

Last night, a couple of us here were watching the ball drop in Times Square. Just before midnight, a British singer I, being encrusted, have never heard of (just looked her up: Jessie J) led the million or so revelers in a performance of that most sacred of contemporary hymns, the Te Deum of our time: John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

John Lennon, who controversially said in 1966:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first— rock ‘n roll, or Christianity.

In the 50 years — yes, it’s now a half century — since Lennon made that statement, has he not been proven more right than wrong, at least as far as the West goes? Think about what has happened over the last century regarding the decline of the culture of the written word, and the ascendancy of music and visual culture, and how that has affected the place of Christianity in the Western imagination.

We live in interesting times. Happy New Year.

The Dante Quilt

From www.pleasantviewschoolhouse.blogspot.com

You have to see this.  Anna, a mom and reader of How Dante Can Save Your Life created (along with her daughter) a one of a kind gift for her 22-year-old son Felix: a quilt version of Dante’s Inferno. More:

Clara and I designed and made this for Felix’ Christmas present. First you have to know how much Felix loves Dante. He’s even teaching himself Italian so he can read it in the original.

Brace yourself for perhaps the world’s first rendition of The Inferno as a log cabin quilt.

It’s called Dark Wood–the place where the story of The Inferno begins.

Follow the link for more photos of this amazing quilt.

The University of McDonalds

Olivia Legaspi is a Haverford undergraduate who spent some time working the front counter at McDonalds to help pay for her very expensive education. It taught her something about the value of hard work and humility, versus the privilege Haverford inculcates into its students. Excerpts:

During Customs week, in PAF sessions, and in everyday discourse here at Haverford, we are taught to ask for help when we feel we need it, speak up when we feel uncomfortable, and prioritize our own well being over most other things. At McDonald’s, acting in this way could have cost me my job, a job I needed to afford college. There, I, as an individual, was insignificant: The most important thing was that the customer walks away satisfied, and it didn’t matter what I had to go through to make that happen. There is something ironic about this: In order to do what was necessary to be a Haverford student, I had to act in [an] un-Haverford-like way.

Meaning she had to put others first, even when it was hard to do, and when it was unfair. Legaspi had to put up with a lot of crap.

And from that, I grew; I learned to take care of myself in ways that didn’t inconvenience anyone, draw unnecessary attention to myself, or interfere with the structures in place and the work which had to be done. McDonald’s was not a “safe space” for me, and that was how it should be; I was a small part of a big picture, and my feelings had no business influencing said big picture.

Those of us who need to work in order to support ourselves and pay tuition cannot afford to internalize the soft, self-centered mindset presented by our peers and customs folk at Haverford — had I gone to a manager and complained that I become anxious when the restaurant is busy or that hearing complaints from customers made me nervous, the manager would have concluded that this was simply not the right job for me. I would have gone home, and I would have been unable to pay the student contribution from summer work that is built into my financial aid package.

 

Read the whole thing.  Sounds like the University of McDonalds taught Legaspi a lesson as valuable as anything she’ll learn at Haverford. Wise young woman, that Olivia Legaspi, who concludes: “We must remember that putting oneself first is the essence of privilege, and that, in order to grow, we must leave this selfish mindset behind.”

Via Rusty Reno, who adds:

We should cultivate communities of care that uplift rather than run [down], that encourage rather than discourage. Moreover, it entirely fitting that student life at Haverford isn’t like a McDonald’s workplace. But Legaspi is surely right remind her fellow students to avoid taking such an environment for granted, or worse to think its something they’re entitled to. In most of the affairs of life (including education, finally), it’s not about me—and it shouldn’t be.