Stephen Roney's Blog, page 67
October 29, 2023
Vampire the Buffy Slayer
An officially “indigenous” commentator is excoriating the CBC for breaking the news that Buffy Sainte-Marie is not indigenous. This, he or she (they claim to be “two-spirit”) argues, violates the obligation of all non-Indians towards reconciliation, because it traumatizes aboriginal people.
It is not entirely clear what the CBC should have done instead; the author seems to say that aboriginals should have been given more time to digest the news.
How do you report the news more slowly? Note the meaning of the word “news.”
Leaving aside the implied assumption that Indians are helpless forest creatures unable to look after themselves or deal with the real world, necessarily, what both spirits really meant is that the CBC should have kept it secret. In other words, suppress rather than report the news.
This seems an unreasonable deman.
I think the real reason some indigenous people are upset is that the Buffy Sainte-Marie story, following so closely after the revelation that there were no mass graves at residential schools, is getting dangerously close to exposing the whole “First Nations” and “reconciliation” industry as a fraud.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
The War on Main Street
Uptown in King’s Square today, the traditional centre of Saint John, there was a demonstration of perhaps thirty people, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” Ironically, only a half-block away from a sign advertising Saint John’s historic Jewish Museum.
We need to be clear about this.
This is not a call for democratic government. Israel is a democracy. Arabs under the Israeli regime are freer than in any Arab state.
This not a call for peaceful coexistence. “From the river to the sea” rules out any two-state solution.
This has to be read as an intention that seven million Jews be either deported or killed. Rather more than Hitler put to death in the Holocaust.
And to what purpose? Why should this be to anyone’s advantage, since Israel is a democracy? Surely only out of anti-Semitism.
One upside: back when I was an undergrad and a grad student, it was common to argue that antisemitism was caused by Christianity. I think Rosemary Reuther was the author who became famous for this thesis. A fellow grad student, Jewish, insisted to me that all Christian children were taught that the Jews murdered Christ. Having attended Catholic schools and never having heard such a thing, I demurred. But she assured me I must be wrong.
Now this claim is never heard--Muslims have shown themselves to be more anti-Jewish than Christians. In fact, now Christians are scapegoated for being too pro-Jewish; as recently by friend Xerxes.
It should not be illegal to say such things as the pro-Palestinians uptown were chanting. But I am shocked and disturbed there is not more social disapproval.
Our times look more like 1930s Germany every day.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
October 28, 2023
Most on Buffy Sainte-Marie
The actual CBC documentary on Buffy Sainte-Marie has dropped. It’s even worse than reported. It looks as though, to protect her claim of aboriginal ancestry, she falsely accused her brother of abusing her sexually as a child—to shut him up about it.
The initial response of one acquaintance on Facebook—I doubt they had yet seen the documentary—was that The Fifth Estate should not have run the story, should have buried it; it is just mean. After all, the bottom line is that Sainte-Marie is immensely talented. What else matters? And it is not as if she was doing it to real natives: she was advocating for them. This is close to my own initial take: all’s fair in marketing your art.
The common response to that position is that, in accepting numerous awards, grants, media attention and advantages on the premise that she was aboriginal, she was taking away opportunities from real aboriginals.
But my counter to that is that any system that gives awards, grants, and advantages based on some unalterable characteristic, something over which you had no control, is deeply unjust and racist. Accordingly, Sainte-Marie is a freedom fighter by subverting the system. We should all declare ourselves indigenous, and restore human equality. I feel worse about her flinging accusations of being discriminated against as a Native American, when she was not.
Yet I also feel it is important that The Fifth Estate exposed the lie. Truth is an intrinsic and absolute value, and need not be justified in any way. The devil is the father of lies.
And this went beyond marketing. Donald Trump does marketing: he makes exaggerated claims, but everyone pretty much knows he is exaggerating. P.T. Barnum made exaggerated claims; but everyone really knew there were no Fiji mermaids. These are not really lies, but jokes.
Sainte-Marie definitively lied about being aboriginal. This being so, we can assume she also lied about being abused by her brother. It follows a similar pattern. Which means she was prepared to blackmail, to slander, to sustain the lie.
Once you begin to lie, you go down a dark path leading you to worse and worse acts. By exposing Sainte-Marie, The Fifth Estate has taught us all an important moral lesson.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
October 27, 2023
More on Buffy Sainte-Marie
I'll be darned.
Who Is Buffy Sainte-Marie?
Everything else, apparently, was made up.
Following ...
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.Family Values
“The Chosen” has become wildly popular among Christian TV viewers. I am not so enthusiastic.
The premise of the series is to stick closely to the gospel, but dramatize the imagined backstories of the various figures. What was Mary Magdalene’s life before she met Jesus? What was the life of Nicodemus? These are “the chosen.”
The fact that it makes this assertion, or projects this impression, of strict authenticity, makes it more egregious when it tinkers with the text. I would have more tolerance for Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
To be fair, I I am only in season one; but a recent episode covered the calling of Simon, Andrew, James and John; the first four apostles. And it is not as the gospels have it.
“The Chosen” has Jesus call on Simon and Andrew to follow him. And a discussion follows later between Simon and his wife, in which he points out how unreasonable it is for him to leave her, especially as her mother is ill. But she is adamant that he must go; he must answer the call of the Messiah; don’t worry about her.
In the case of James and John, the series has their father Zebedee insists they must go with Jesus. No need to worry; he assures them he can deal with the catch, and look after the fishing by himself from now on.
But this is not the story in the gospel:
Matthew:
While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. 19 And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”[a] 20 Immediately they left their nets and followed him. 21 And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. 22 Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
Mark:
Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. 17 And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.”[f] 18 And immediately they left their nets and followed him. 19 And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. 20 And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.
Luke:
On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, 2 and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. 4 And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” 5 And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” 6 And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. 7 They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” 9 For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, 10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.”[a] 11 And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.
John’s gospel does not include an account of the calling of the four.
In all three accounts, it is emphasized that they answered the call immediately. James and John simply abandoned their father in the boat. Simon did not go home and tell his wife. They dropped everything.
The makers of “The Chosen” obviously did not like how this violated “family values.” So they twisted the gospel to make it conform. Surely there must have been these intervening conversations? Surely it was a family decision? But this is not a fair inference; all three gospels stress “immediately.”
This is the Hallmark Christianity, the “happy happy joy joy” Christianity, the Christianity of plaster saints and pastel prayer cards that I despise. This is a false doctrine in which the name of Christianity is just co-opted to sanitize and justify whatever someone wants to do, or to support whatever powers be. There is no worse sin, for this is the sin of idolatry.
I see the same tendency in Pope Francis’s current “Synod on Synodality,” which clams to aim at a “listening” church. That is, a church that only echoes back whatever people want to hear.
Christianity is emphatically not about “family values.” When one man asks if he can bury his father before coming to follow Jesus, Jesus refuses, with the words “Let the dead bury their own dead.” James, John, Simon and Andrew are demonstrating this imperative.
The appeal to family values is akin to the appeal to patriotism: it is as often as not, as Samuel Johnson said, “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
October 26, 2023
Playing the Indian Card
A lot of famous Indians turn out not to be. Grey Owl; Iron Eyes Cody; Elizabeth Warren; Sacheen Littlefeather, the “Indian” who rejected Brando’s Oscar.
And Buffy Sainte-Marie?
A current CBC investigation points out that she cannot establish Indian ancestry. She was raised in a rather unexotic adoptive middle-class home in Maine. And they did not know who her real parents were. They might have been Sicilian, or Lebanese, or Sephardic Jews, for all anyone knows.
She looks Indian to me; but does it matter what her genetics are? She had the same upbringing, the same cultural influences, as any “white” child growing up in North America in the forties and fifties. She is ethnically simply American.
The broader point: any pretense that North American Indians, “First Nations,” have a distinct and separate culture is a romantic fantasy. “Indians” get what knowledge they have of traditional “Indian” culture the same place the rest of us get it: from movies, TV, comic book and dime novels. If they are more learned, from the accounts of missionaries.
And “Indians” have never been discriminated against. It was essential to Sainte-Marie’ career success to play the Indian card. She sold herself, in her own words, as “Pocahontas”; and the public loved it. Following in the footsteps of the performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, and the Kickapoo Medicine shows; of Grey Owl, Pauline Johnson, and many another performer in buckskin. The general public of North America loves Indians, has always loved Indians, wants to cheer for them—which is why Indian references are popular names for sports teams—and will always give them the benefit of the doubt.
That said, to be clear: Buffy Sainte-Marie deserves every bit of her fame, and more. I don’t deride her marketing tactics, any more than I scorn Elvis Presley for performing in white jumpsuits with sequins. I’m proud she is an Indian like me.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
October 25, 2023
What the Left Wants in Gaza
Friend Xerxes has apparently now expressed the official leftist position on the Gaza War. It is that we in North America are too prone to take the Jewish side, This is due to Jewish money, and the influence of the Bible. If only they had their own Holy Book.
“The root of this unequal support has to be the Bible.”
To begin with, Xerxes and the left fall here into the argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy: the idea that two opposing positions must both be valid. It is far more likely, if matters have come to blows, and, as Xerxes himself laments, no rational discussion is taking place, that no compromise or appeal to reason is possible. And this is almost always precisely because one side is in the right, and the other in the wrong. Those who know they are in the wrong are not going to listen to reason—because then they lose.
Accordingly, in all such cases we must evaluate the two positions, to see who is right. Not insist that both sides be “supported,” and supported equally—a perfect way to ensure the problem is not solved, and injustice and violence go on forever.
Moreover, if one side is right, and the other wrong, we have a moral obligation to intervene on the side of right.
Consider, for example, a man wanting to have sex with a passing woman in an alleyway; and the woman does not want to have sex. So he forces her.
A moral person does not try to support both sides. He does not negotiate a compromise; he does not watch with interest, then walk on.
So too in international affairs. Chamberlain negotiated his “compromise” between Hitler and Czechoslovakia at Munich. How did that work out?
How about Hitler and the Jews? Were both equally in the right, or in the wrong? Would a compromise have been possible, or acceptable?
If we can conclude that one side in Gaza is in the right, one should hope to see most nations line up and offer assistance. This is the swiftest way to end the violence.
Xerxes blames the Bible, and says it would all be easily solved if the Bible were abandoned, with its claim of Jewish ownership of the land.
This seems to suggest that the “compromise” he and the left prefer is the elimination of Israel, and the deportation or execution of all the Jews.
But as to it being down to the Palestinians not having their own Holy Book, of course they do: those who are not Christian have the Quran. Awkwardly, however, the Quran , like the Bible, also recognizes Moses as a prophet, Jewish residence in Palestine, and at least implicitly a Hebrew claim to the Holy Land in perpetuity.
Not that this, either Quran or Bible, need be the justification for supporting Israel. It has more to do with the right to ethnicity, the right to exist, the right to self-government, and who is the aggressor.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
No Mass Graves
Canada's reputation internationally takes another blow.
