Rod Dreher's Blog, page 628

So That Was A Thing That Happened

So, this is a thing that just happened.

We were coming out of the restaurant in the town where my family, Mike Leming, and the three Leming girls had taken my mother for her birthday celebration. We heard a series of loud crashes just up the street. All ten of us were on the sidewalk, with our view of the conflagration obscured by the two SUVs parked at the curb. Before any of us could move, we saw a metal waste bin and a metal bench flying through the air (both of them had been bolted to the concrete), and a pickup come to a halt in front of the bank across the street. The driver, a middle-aged man, sat slumped in the driver’s seat, rocking back and forth, either drunk as hell or having a seizure. Or so we thought.

Turns out he had swerved onto the sidewalk on the other side of the street, about 50 yards away, and on his route, had taken out two trees, part of a low brick wall, a post, and the aforementioned metallic objects.

As luck would have it, a cop was passing him going in the opposite direction as it happened, and was able to come help at once. Mike, who is an EMT, went over to help too. The guy was in shock, and his doors were locked. The cop called an ambulance. Finally the driver came around, and unlocked the doors. Mike opened the door and did whatever EMTs do, but he didn’t dare move the driver. When the ambulance finally arrived, Mike left and returned to us. As he turned to cross the street toward us, blood began dripping out of the cab of the truck.

“He shot himself,” Mike said. “The inside of the truck is covered with blood. The gun is on the floor.”

What happened was this. The man told Mike and the police officer that he had been out shooting his weapon, and was headed home. The gun was sitting on the seat next to him. It slid off the seat and discharged, shooting him in the lower left leg. He began to black out, and lost control of his vehicle. The man expressed to them terror that he had hit somebody (he had not, thank God).

As we stood there talking with Mike about it, Nora turned green, started to tremble, and began to black out. Julie caught her at the last second. When we got her to the car, she quickly recovered. She told us that looking at the man’s blood pooling on the street caused her to feel faint.

Gun safety is important, folks. Also, to be on the safe side, don’t leave the house, ever. It’ll be better that way.

I took the photo above from the car window as we were leaving the scene. It was much more destructive than the image above indicates. On the far right of the frame is where he swerved onto the sidewalk. You can see the corner of the brick wall he took out. He continued for 40 or so more yards. Say a prayer for him. His Christmas is not going to be very much fun.

UPDATE: Sitting here thinking about this freak turn of events, I find it chilling to be reminded how fragile our lives are, how at any moment everything could change. Nobody expects a driver to shoot himself in the leg and take out half a city block with his car on Christmas Eve in a peaceful small town. But it happened.

An English Benedict Option

I don’t think of the Benedict Option as being a single thing. Rather, it is an approach to living an authentically Christian life in the post-Christian West, a life that must be well-rooted in Christian tradition, with particular attention to our practices, and to monastic spirituality. As I’ve said, the Ben Op will necessarily be experimental and varied, adapted to local conditions. The goal is to find new ways (usually by rediscovering very old ones) to pray, to worship, and to serve as small-o orthodox Christians, in community, in a time and in places that are alien, and sometimes hostile, to orthodox forms of Christianity.

For some — like, for example, the Catholic agrarians near Clear Creek Abbey in rural eastern Oklahoma — that means something as radical as moving out to the country. For most of us, though, such a radical move will not be possible, and may not be desirable. What can we do where we are? As I travel around talking to folks about the Ben Op, I sense among some people a desire to do something, but a strong sense of discouragement that whatever they undertake will fall short of some ideal. I disagree, emphatically! It is better to do something, and see where it goes, than to talk ourselves out of doing anything out of fear that it won’t be radical enough.

I’ve recently learned of a Benedict Option initiative in London that I’m thrilled to tell you about. It’s called the Community of Nazareth, and it’s a project of two English Benedictines and a lay Catholic named Christian Kendall-Daw. Read about its founding this autumn here.

From the Community’s “about us” page:

The Community of Nazareth is a spirituality forum inspired by the Rule of Saint Benedict and the wisdom of the Desert Mothers and Fathers. Our mission is expressed most fully in the ‘Benedict Option’ and the remembrance of ‘permanent things’.

We meet regularly at Ealing Abbey and other monasteries, bringing together people interested in developing their knowledge and practise of ancient wisdom. The forum includes monks, priests, religious, oblates, local parishioners, members of other local churches and traditions. People are also welcome to join and attend via social media.

Why “Community of Nazareth”? Says the Community:

The reason for choosing the name Nazareth is summed up in something Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, wrote in 1977:

‘The Church cannot grow or prosper if we let it ignore that its roots are hidden in the atmosphere of Nazareth. At the moment when sentimentalism around Nazareth was flourishing, the true mystery of Nazareth was discovered in a new way, in its deepest sense, without his contemporaries noticing by Charles de Foucauld. There, in a living meditation on Jesus, a new way was opened thereby for the Church. It was for the Church a rediscovery of poverty. Nazareth has a permanent message for the Church. The New Alliance does not start in the Temple, nor on the Holy Mountain, but in the little home of the Virgin, in the house of the worker, in one of the forgotten places of the ‘Galilee of peasants’, from where nobody expected anything good. It is only by starting out from there that the Church can have a new beginning and be healed. It can never provide a true response to the revolt of our century against the power of the wealthy, if at its own heart, Nazareth is not a reality, which is lived.’

This is especially interesting to me because yesterday, I listened to the podcast of the hourlong Schmemann lecture that eminent church historian Peter Brown delivered at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary — a talk recommended here the other day by Prof. Bill Tighe. In it, Brown talks about the Emperor Constantine, the church historian and bishop Eusebius, and what the future of Christianity looked like to them in the early fourth century. The chief point is that neither the first Christian emperor nor the bishop imagined that the entire empire would be Christianized. According to Brown, the most important thing that had been achieved was that the Church was now visible, and anyone who wanted to could be a Christian. Brown:

What [Eusebius] wanted was the “exaltation” of the church. His mental furniture did not include the idea of anything as grand as the eventual creation of a majoritarian Christianity through the Christianization of the Roman empire.

By “exaltation,” Brown means that Eusebius believed that all history after Christ was like the aftershock of a massive spiritual earthquake that had leveled the temples of the demon gods. The victory over the tyranny of the stars had been won; the “visibilization” of the Church was a sign of that victory, and it was sufficient that anyone who wished to share in it could come to the Church and join the community. For Eusebius, the Church was the point at which the meeting of heaven and earth, of immaterial and material, was most intense — in Brown’s words, “the charged pairing of invisible and visible, and the direct flow of the one into the other.”

For believers, it still is. The churches, monasteries, and holy places are not just forums for the recapitulation of memory and the upbuilding of morality, but forums where, if we are properly disposed, we can partake of the spiritual force unleashed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this post-Christian time, and especially in the spiritual desert of secularized cities and countries, it is vital that these outposts survive and thrive; the false gods of the 21st century are as powerful as any Roman deity ever was, and the liberation from captivity to them is ever-present in the Church.

The Benedict Option — and thanks to the Community of Nazareth for mentioning it (“Internationally there is interest in what is known as the Benedict Option, this movement has wide-reaching theological and philosophical implications and is of great interest to our forum”) — is about reconnecting to the spiritual thought, prayer, and practice of the ancient church, especially monastics, and bringing them to bear in the lives of Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox laypeople. It is far more powerful and durable than ersatz attempts to be “relevant,” and this is something I want people to discover. It is our common heritage as Christians, and as far as I can tell, the Nazarenes proceed in that ecumenical spirit. I am grateful to the Community of Nazareth for coming together to offer this to Londoners. Look here for some of the things they have planned in 2016. Today, I’m going to offer one of my daily prayer ropes (like an Orthodox rosary) for the Community’s success.

There is hope! And we friends of St. Benedict have a lot to learn from each other, wherever we are in this world. If you are Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, and interested in the Benedict Option, why not get together with like-minded Christians, and start something like this? News on the book, by the way: we’re looking at a Spring 2017 publication date. But don’t sit around waiting for it, okay? Get up, let’s go!

What’s Cooking For Christmas?

NPR had a neat story yesterday about a visit with an English culinary historian, who talked about what the English would have eaten for Christmas dinner centuries ago.  NPR’s Robert Smith reports from beside historian Ivan Day’s 19th-century oven:

SMITH: This is the noisy contraption that will cook Ivan’s Christmas beef. He likes to try out the old recipes he finds. Some of them, he says, are lost gems. Others are just never going to come back. There was this one Christmas breakfast standard.

DAY: And it was a sweet haggis, called a hacken (ph) or a hack pudding – made of oatmeal, mutton, currants, raisins, spices, grated apples, boiled usually in a sheep’s stomach.

SMITH: Yeah, it doesn’t quite feel the same having kids rush downstairs to unwrap their haggis in the morning.

DAY: (Laughter) But they probably enjoyed it.

SMITH: These things were treats not because they were delicious but because they were rare, like the sweet mince pie that Ivan is starting to make.

Candied orange peel and lemons, raisins, nutmeg. Then in goes the sheep – the old recipes always included mutton.

When some of us see stuff like this – fruitcake, mince pies – we think for the love of God, why? But in ancient cold rainy Britain, you have to imagine this was like filling a crust with every exotic item from around the world – sugar, spices, citrus – this was like gold. And a mince pie like this…

DAY: It’s the culinary equivalent of having a Maserati because they’re so expensive. You’re showing off.

Day puts food like this in historical context:

SMITH: You have to taste it, Ivan Day says, the way the ancient Brits would have. After hundreds of days straight of eating bread and bacon, they would’ve bit into his meaty, sugary spiciness and thought…

DAY: It was a moment of sunshine in a dreary year of grayness.

Read, or listen, to the whole thing. I strongly advise clicking on the link, if only to see the beautiful antique sugar molds from Day’s kitchen. Plus, Day has a robust, growly voice that goes very well with the hissing joint of beef roasting in that ancient oven.

We’re keeping it fairly simple here for Christmas. My mom and the Leming girls are coming over (Mike Leming has to work at the fire station on Christmas Day). We’ll be having smoked turkey and ham; Martha Stewart’s mac and cheese (for young and unadventurous palates, of which there are more than one in this bunch); savory twice-baked sweet potatoes; savory roasted apples, onions, and shallots; Julie’s spicy pear fig chutney, which she made from this summer’s pears and figs; balsamic roasted carrots; baked potatoes with bay leaves; garlicky crumb-coated broccoli; and yeast rolls. The Leming girls are bringing Ruthie’s most beloved dessert, rum cake. Hannah works for Francis Ford Coppola’s Inglenook winery out in Napa, and she brought home some bottles of his 2011 cast Cabernet, which we’ll have with the meal. It’s too broad-shouldered for turkey, but so much of this meal is heavy, wintry food that we should be fine.

I never do Views From Your Table anymore, but as a Christmas treat, I’d love to post some on the day after Christmas. Send me what you have. Remember, don’t just take a photo of your table and the food on it, but include the context, e.g., what’s going on around the table. Just please don’t include anybody’s face; to protect people’s privacy, I won’t publish photos with identifiable faces in them. E-mail your pics to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com

 

A Christmas Eve Scorcher

Look, I know there are worst things in the world going on, but can I tell you how dispiriting it is to open the back door just after daylight to let the dog out for his morning constitutional and to be hit with a wave of warm, muggy air? On Christmas Eve! It’s much cooler in my house than it is outside, because we’ve been running the *^%$# air conditioner!

It’s going to be 82 degrees today, and Accuweather says it’s going to feel like 88. This crap, all the way through the weekend. That handsome pile of firewood on the back porch shall remain unmolested this holiday.

Bah, humbug, or, as we say in my part of the world, “Bah, mudbug.”

Are Christians To Blame for EU Migrant Crisis?

Thank you all for your patience with my approving comments today. I’ve spent the day in New Orleans with my son Lucas. We went to the World War II museum, then Christmas shopping. I can approve comments from my iPhone, but it’s clunky, and I wanted to pay more attention to my son.

The most interesting comment I saw on this blog today was the following remark by a German reader, on the Roger Scruton post thread. Excerpt:

Read Scruton’s lecture, not convinced at all by it. Anybody who thinks more Christianity could help stem the current tide of mostly Islamic mass migration doesn’t understand what’s going on. At least here in Germany the “refugee” influx is justified explicitly in Christian terms by politicians of all stripes, from the Christian Democrats to the Greens and even the Linke (the successors of the East German communists). Bishops and other church leaders make explicitly pro-Islamic statements of the sort “Islamic culture will be enriching” and even try to downplay reports of Muslim asylum seekers bullying Christian ones. For me the lesson is clear…Christianity is part of the problem, not of the solution. Whatever happens, the part played by Christian elites in the mess we’re in now won’t be forgotten or forgiven.

This is a disturbing thing to hear, but if true, then we Americans — and American Christians — need to hear it. I’d like to hear from other European readers, Christian and non-Christian, about this issue. Is German Reader (who is not a Christian) correct? Please elaborate.

UPDATE: Please, readers, in your comments, stick to the topic at hand. It’s distracting from the point of the discussion here to blame Western wars for the migrant crisis. You could also blame climate change for the Syrian war (and you would have a point, as has been reported). All those things are factors, but not what I’m interested in talking about on this thread. Stay focused on the role of Christians in shaping European government policies and public opinion regarding migrants.

Lessons From Europe’s Decline

Here’s a lecture Roger Scruton gave to the Heritage Foundation in October, called “The Future of European Civilization: Lessons For America.” The link will take you to both video of the lecture, and a transcript. Most of it I agree with, some of it not. All of it is interesting. I’m going to excerpt parts that particularly stood out to me.

In the lecture, Scruton makes much of the de-Christianization of Europe. Excerpts:

The big questions in my mind are these: To what extent is the loss of our traditional religion and the culture that grew from it responsible for our weakness in the face of these threats, and what could we conceivably do now to remedy the defect?

Those questions are difficult even to discuss. The EU institutions have made a point of removing all references to the Christian religion and its moral legacy from official documents, on the view that such things will constitute discrimination in favor of one group of Europeans over another. Cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights and also the European Court of Justice (the court charged with the application and enforcement of the treaties) are pushing for continent-wide laws permitting gay marriage, easy divorce, and abortion on demand, as well as laws banning the crucifix from public places and curtailing the teaching of the Christian religion in schools.

These initiatives have their parallels here in America, and in the same way that liberal activists have used the Supreme Court to overrule the religion-based decisions of state legislatures, secularists and Islamists are using the European courts to impose their vision on the nation-states of Europe.

More:

This de-Christianizing of Europe is being pursued also through the European Parliament and its Fundamental Rights Agency, charged with the advocacy of human rights at all legislative levels. The Fundamental Rights Agency is led by activists in the cause of “gender equality” and LGBT rights and is inherently hostile to the traditional family and to the religion-based morality that shaped it. It is now pressing for the recognition of abortion as a human right—presumably a right of the mother rather than the child. It is active in promoting the “gender agenda” wherever this can be brought into play and is staffed largely by people who have spent their lives as busybodies and who have never done what my parents would have called an honest job of work.

It is true, of course, that activists gather always at the top and try to push society in the direction that they favor, but their getting to the top is not independent of the fact that they are allowed to get to the top, and the people who allow them are those whom they wish to control. In any case, whatever the cause, there is no doubt as to the effect. Europe is rapidly jettisoning its Christian heritage and has found nothing to put in the place of it save the religion of “human rights.”

I call this a religion because it is designed expressly to fill the hole in people’s worldview that is left when religion is taken away. The notion of a human right purports to offer the ground for moral opinions, for legal precepts, for policies designed to establish order in places where people are in competition and conflict. However, it is itself without foundations. If you ask what religion commands or forbids, you usually get a clear answer in terms of God’s revealed law or the Magisterium of the church. If you ask what rights are human or natural or fundamental, you get a different answer depending on whom you ask, and nobody seems to agree with anyone else regarding the procedure for resolving conflicts.

Consider the dispute over marriage. Is it a right or not? If so, what does it permit? Does it grant a right to marry a partner of the same sex? And if yes, does it therefore permit incestuous marriage too? The arguments are endless, and nobody knows how to settle them.

Things are made more complex still by the inclusion, in all European provisions, of “non-discrimination” as a human right. When offering a benefit, a contract of employment, a place in a college, or a bed in a hospital, you are commanded not to discriminate on grounds of…there then follows a list derived from the victims of recent history: race, ethnic group, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and whatever is next to be discovered. But all coherent societies are based on discrimination: A society is an “in-group,” however large and however hospitable to newcomers.

The result is a society that cannot, in the end, be coherent:

We are witnessing, in effect, the removal of the old religion that provided foundations to the moral and legal inheritance of Europe and its replacement with a quasi-religion that is inherently foundationless. Nobody knows how to settle the question whether this or that privilege, freedom, or claim is a “human right,” and the European Court of Human Rights is now overwhelmed by a backlog of cases in which just about every piece of legislation passed by national parliaments in recent times is at stake.

Scruton indicates that there may be a kind of Benedict Option emerging in Europe:

This development has led, however, to a sudden burst of Christian nostalgia—not only among the older generation, but among young people too. There are evangelical movements in the cities which reach out to the young and attempt to include them in a purified Christian vision. This new evangelism is not opposed to the official “rights” culture but carves out a private space within it—a space where, taking advantage of the permissions granted by the secular order, the old discipline can be adopted as a personal cross.

This privatized Christianity can be found in surprising places. One of them is worth mentioning, since it concerns the art form that more than any other expresses the “Faustian” spirit of Europe as Spengler discerned it: namely, music.

Following the example of Messiaen in France, a new generation of composers has emerged eager to compose liturgical and spiritual music, usually quite difficult music that will be heard only in the concert hall, but nevertheless music with the old message, written in defiance of the secular culture. Notable in Britain is Sir James MacMillan, whose knighthood, recently bestowed, is a sign that this way of reviving Christian values does not offend the powers that be. MacMillan is a Catholic Scot; his predecessor as the voice of Christian music in Britain, Sir John Tavener, was a Greek Orthodox Englishman; and MacMillan’s most important rival for the ear of Christians in Britain is John Rutter, who is an Anglican, wedded to the old harmless, half-believing rites of our national church.

I mention these people because they exemplify a phenomenon that can be encountered all across Europe, which is the search for the old God of the continent in the sacred buildings, liturgies, and music of our various churches, even and especially among people who don’t set foot in a church on a Sunday for fear of being trapped into prayer.

Christianity is not, of course, meant to be a “privatized religion,” but that may be the only way it can survive in this current situation. Scruton sees other signs of hope in Europe:

For there to be a successful turnaround in confronting these two external threats [Islamic extremism and a revival of hostility with Russia], however, there must also be a rebirth of national sentiment and local attachments. So far, the foundationless ideology of rights has wiped away the emotions that would be needed if people are to be resolute in defense of their shared assets. We see at every level the retreat from confrontation, the embarrassed refusal to affirm our patrimony or its legitimate claim for sacrifice. The only first-person plural that is officially allowed is that of Europe itself, though it is a “we” that few people now understand and which has in any case been bowdlerized by the political elite.

But we also see, here and there, the signs of social and cultural renewal. During the 19th century, many Europeans thought they could compensate for the decline of the Christian faith by attaching themselves to ideologies: socialism, nationalism, communism, Marxism. The rights panacea is the latest of these, but we know or ought to know that it does not work. It is only by reconnecting with our true inheritance that we can develop the kind of first-person plural that will enable us to stand together against the growing threats to us.

I mentioned the encouraging examples set by English composers in recent years. I could mention the movement of Catholic youth in Italy around the Rimini meetings established by Father Giussani. I could mention the reaction in France—confused as yet and unfocused—to the recent Islamist atrocities. I could mention the extraordinary rebirth of representational painting around the work of Odd Nerdrum in Norway and the emergence in Britain of poets, such as Ruth Padel, John Burnside, and Don Paterson, who speak directly to both young and old in a language that also recuperates our past.

Seems like a thin list, but I will happily take good news where I find it.

Is this decline and fragmentation to be our future in America? I would bet so, but Scruton says no, not if we can hold on to our sense of national unity. He doesn’t believe that it’s threatened. I’m not sure about that. What do you think?

Here’s the entire lecture. It may seem that I’ve overquoted, but it’s lengthy, and there’s plenty more that I didn’t touch. And you may wish to read Scruton’s latest piece from National Review, about classical music and conservatism. Excerpt:

The real reason people are conservatives has little or nothing to do with economics, even if they are aware that economic prosperity is a good thing, and necessary for the support of other things that they value. The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment. They have made a lifelong distinction between the things that nourish and the things that threaten their security and peace of mind.

In my writings I have made a point of emphasizing this. Conservatism, for me, is the philosophy and the politics of attachment. Its starting point is a loved way of life, and the institutions and settlements that have grown from it. Standing against conservatism has been another state of mind altogether, which sometimes masks itself as love, but always love for the ideal, the nonexistent, the “yet to be,” in the cause of which we are invited to pull down and destroy the things that are. Radical politics is merciless toward the actual, especially when the actual enshrines the old way of life, the old institutions, and the old hierarchies that have arisen from our attachments.

Conservatives hold on to things not only because they are attached to them, but also because they do not see the sense in radical change, until someone has told them what it will lead to. You criticize the traditional family? Then tell us about the alternative, and please give us the details: Tell us how children grow up in this new arrangement, how they find security, love, and satisfaction, how they acquire the sense of responsibility, how they live with others, how they reproduce and how they die.

That’s why people should be conservative, but I don’t think that’s why elite Republicans are conservative, and I question to what extent younger Americans who call themselves conservative would agree with Scruton (though I certainly do). The GOP is the party of right-wing liberals. America is a liberal, individualistic country. It’s in our DNA. It is unusual that we Americans would be more resilient in holding on to our faith than Europe has been, but Deo gratias, we have. Will we continue to, though? That is the great question that will be answered, one way or another, over the next 30 years.

 

Texas Pastor vs. Bomb Threat

Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas, north of Dallas, was one of two area churches to receive a written bomb threat, warning of explosions there on Christmas eve. Its longtime pastor Tommy Nelson responded to his congregation like so:

Y’all,

Take a knee.

You’ve probably heard by this time if you watch the news that we have had our first gen-u-ine bomb threat.   It came in the mail Monday afternoon from a gen-u-ine super villian.  Wouldn’t you know, it came 24 hours after I had boasted of our fair city’s apathy versus Dallas’s tirades.

Anyway, though this letter was not from Lex Luthor, The Joker or even The Penguin, we still must take all threats seriously and we shall.  We shall have Christmas Eve as always but you will notice more folks at the entrances with more eyes.  People write such threats for two reasons.  A hatred toward what you stand for and a desire to disrupt through “terror” (hence the moniker), and also for the delight of their 15 minutes.  Someone is no doubt up early this morning watching Fox 4 and chortling over their “beautiful wickedness” (c.f. Wicked Witch of the West).

We don’t yield to fear. We are Christians.  We rejoice to be counted “worthy to suffer for His name’s sake.” Death and evil are conquered for us and our God sits supremely on the throne.  If it breathes we do not fear it.  But like Nehemiah in Nehemiah 4 we will build with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other, with others on the watch.  We shall be vigilant until evil loses heart.  But stop the work? Who do men think we are?  “Should a man such as I flee?!”

So, nothing changes.  Come on if you planned to do so.  But, make things simple by not bringing a backpack, a package, or some big bulky anything, lest a choir member frisk you or strip search you. Nothing kills the Christmas spirit quicker.

Be praying that God be glorified. See ya.

Tommy

Can’t say it often enough: God bless Texas.

The Left’s Anti-White Racism

That’s the way the left-wing website Salon.com presents a racist column by an elderly white male leftist named Frank Joyce. A sample from the column:

The future of life on the planet depends on bringing the 500-year rampage of the white man to a halt. For five centuries his ever more destructive weaponry has become far too common. His widespread and better systems of exploiting other humans and nature dominate the globe.

The time for replacing white supremacy with new values is now. And just as some whites played a part in ending slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow segregation, and South African apartheid, there is surely a role whites can play in restraining other whites in this era. Beneath the sound and fury generated by GOP presidential candidates, Fox News, website trolls, police unions and others, white people are becoming aware as never before of past and present racism.

Blah blah blah.

I know, I know, it’s Salon.com. But you know what? This kind of thing is a big deal, and should not be shrugged off. Can you think of another web publication of its status in this country that could explicitly demonize others by race and gender, and say that “the future of life on the planet” depends on restraining them?

According to QuantCast, Salon.com reaches 11 million people monthly. (The webzine claims over 17 million.) That’s four times the readership of Slate.com, according to the same company. Though the data for National Review’s website is “not quantified,” according to QuantCast, it estimates NR’s reach to be 3.7 million unique visitors monthly — about one-third of Salon’s.

Now, if National Review ran a headline saying, “Black men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it,” NR would be denounced as the resurrection of Der Stürmer. What if it ran a headline promoting a story that argued, “Gay men must be stopped: The very future of mankind depends on it”? What kind of reaction do you think that would draw from the public? Hell, NR fired John Derbyshire in 2012 for something racially provocative he wrote on another website.

And yet there will be no pressure on Salon.com to disavow this Frank Joyce column, and no expectation that they would do so. There’s a double standard in our media and academic culture for this kind of racist garbage. Do I think most liberals share Frank Joyce’s opinion? No, I guess I don’t. But I do think most liberals are not all that bothered by it being stated and promoted on a very popular left-wing website. We have come to accept it as standard leftist discourse.

There are few things more dull than a left-vs-right tu quoque contest when things like this come up. What chaps me about this is the comment that a reader of this blog named Deep South Populist made in pointing out this Salon piece:

It is plainly obvious these people want war.

I don’t know that they want it, but that’s exactly what they’re going to get, because they are calling it up with rhetoric like that. I would remind Salon.com of the widely-reported study from last month reporting that middle-aged working-class white men are dying in record numbers, and by their own hand (suicide, drugs, or drink). The day may come when they decide to turn their anger away from themselves, and on to others. We will be lucky if they only restrict it to the ballot box.

If, God forbid, that day comes, limousine leftists like the people who run Salon.com are going to bear some of the responsibility for it. This kind of racist cant is never acceptable in the public square, but you ought not be surprised by it when it comes from a fringe publication or website. Salon.com is very much not fringe, and liberals should not pretend it is. The left should ask itself if it really wants to see the country torn apart by racial violence. That is exactly what Salon.com and its fellow travelers are courting.

Tweeting about the asinine food protests at Oberlin, Freddie de Boer wrote:

If you’re a committed leftist, you need to start to criticize this kind of self-parody, because it’s killing us. https://t.co/WnNEIlRF0R

— Fredrik deBoer (@freddiedeboer) December 19, 2015

He’s right. He subsequently tweeted:

The point is to build a mass left wing movement. The point is to win. The point is to build a mass left wing movement. The point is to win. — Fredrik deBoer (@freddiedeboer) December 19, 2015

I am not interested in whether or not there is a mass left-wing movement that can win, except in the sense that I don’t want there to be one that does. The left ought to consider whether it is helpful to its causes to promote the cranky opinions of an aging Boomer who wishes to declare war on white men when so many of them have their backs against the wall.

According to the US Census, 77.4 percent of Americans today are white. Statistically, a bit fewer than half of them are males. That’s about one in three Americans that Frank Joyce and Salon.com are calling to be suppressed. Mind you, not all white males think alike (some of them, like Frank Joyce, are self-hating lunatics), but many white women are married to white males, and have white males for fathers, brothers, and sons. Do they really want to join a movement that demonizes them because of their race and gender?

The peaceable transition of America from majority white to minority white — which at this point cannot be stopped — is going to be a delicate matter, one that requires wisdom, compassion, and forbearance on all sides. Articles like this from Salon must seem like all in a day’s work from deep inside the San Francisco bubble, where Salon is headquartered. But this kind of thing gets noticed out here in flyover country, among us bitter clingers. We see — or we ought to see, and remember — that this is the kind of discourse that goes on without much objection among the left, particularly in academic settings. If the left allows itself to say these things publicly without reproof, it sends a signal about what it will do in positions of power. We know what the cultural left does on campuses, where it dominates. Do white males really want to acquiesce in their own marginalization and suppression? The defeated white males on campuses might have had all the fight leached out of them, and many members of the white working class may be too depressed, drunk, or strung out to resist.

But that’s not all white men. Yesterday, a reader who identifies himself as a white, male, Southern atheist yellow-dog Democrat who hates Republicans wrote to explain why he has become a Trump supporter. He said he has two degrees, and his job prospects are poor. He has quit believing in institutions, and is voting out of anger and despair. I would love for Frank Joyce or a Salon editor to get in that man’s face and tell him why he’s the problem with the world, because he’s white and male.

One day — maybe not this election cycle, but one not far off — somebody’s going to come along who speaks to them and for them: for the weak, the marginalized, the broken, as well as ordinary white males like the new Trump supporter, and their wives, sisters, and daughters. (There’s a reason why former far-left constituencies in France are now voting National Front.) And we had all better hope he’s a good and decent man, one who speaks to the better angels of their nature, channeling their anger and despair to constructive ends. Anybody want to bet that he will be a good guy? I wouldn’t take that bet. I pray that I’m wrong, but I wouldn’t take that bet. Would you?

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. My point is, the kind of talk Salon trafficks in for clickbait are calling up demons that will be difficult to control or exorcise. If Salon and its fellow travelers in left-liberal media don’t want to license racist triumphalist rhetoric on the right — and in turn, racist triumphalist actions — they had better start policing their own appalling loudmouths. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to get hurt.

‘What Would They Know In Common?’

A reader writes:

In the Gelernter post you wrote this:

“What is a Dark Age? It is a time of mass amnesia.”

I am trying to start a Latin program at my little Catholic school. It has met with the usual concerns about practicality, elitism, etc. You are familiar with all that, so I won’t rehash it.

Rather, a few months ago I was describing the program to our elementary teachers, who had their questions. I mentioned that it would be pretty simple at first. The kids would learn the Our Father in Latin, and they would learn to sing Dona Nobis Pacem.

Well, a teacher in her 50s said, “Hey, I remember they sang that on an episode of MASH.”

Odd thing to remember, but when I got home I looked it up and sure enough, there was a Christmas episode in 1978 called “Dear Sis.” The frame is that Fr. Mulcahey begins to doubt his usefulness and expresses his anxieties in a letter to his sister. What role can religion play in such a depraved world! Of course the padre proves his mettle, and at the end the entire MASH unit shows their appreciation by singing Dona Nobis Pacem [“Grant Us Peace” — RD]. 

It’s amazing in many ways. Most important, it’s not just the surgeons or the officers signing. It’s the orderlies and the grunts and the nurses. So… in 1978 it was completely believable to a television audience that in the early 1950s, the average US draftee would know enough Latin to sing Dona Nobis Pacem from memory. Not just Catholic ones. Not just well-educated ones. All of them.

Keep in mind that my dad was in Korea. As a draftee.

You know what? He could have sung that song when he was 18. They were right about that.

Fast forward to 1991. I was a freshman at Yale University, 18 years old. At that time, it would have been UNTHINKABLE to assume that I would know any Latin. At all. I knew a few kids from super-elite prep schools who knew Latin, but they were weirdos.

What happened? An average guy who graduated HS and was drafted into the Army in 1950 somehow had more access to that kind of education than his 18 year old Yale-bound son would have 41 years later.

I am not sure if that’s the kind of amnesia you mean. But it really strikes me as odd.

Even now, Latin is seen as a hugely elitist subject in many circles. Only the academically advanced can grasp it. It’s too hard.

My dad learned it.

Imagine if there was TV show based on, say, the war in Iraq. And a scene showed a bunch of grunts singing a song in Latin. It would be so incredible that it would never make it past the cutting room floor. Why would all those people know Latin?

What WOULD they know in common?

What, indeed?

A Boat Ride With Me

Via Classical Art Memes (some of which are NSFW).