Children: If you are not prepared to raise them, don’t have them. If you do not enjoy them, don’t have them. If you are not ready to love them, don’t have them. You are much better off living without them.
Love is finding yourself in another person. Loneliness is the inability to do this. The deepest, most destructive and pathetic form of loneliness is atheism. Atheism is the inability to find yourself in anything but the material. I do not despise atheists; I pity them.
It is important to have animals near us. They are pure, innocent and without guile. They neither deceive nor do they have pretensions. They remind us how we should live. For this, we should love and respect them; and it follows, of course, that we must not abuse, torture, kill and eat them.
The Founders were right: Government is the greatest threat to personal liberty. Unless we do something radical and soon, we will have no personal liberty left – at least, none worth defending.
A friend recently said that the challenge we face is whether democracy can survive with deficits. I think he is correct. Excessive government spending – and the chronic inability of politicians to resist it – is undermining our democracy.
A recent poll indicates that the majority of Americans believe that the nation is in decline. They are correct; it is. I believe that this fact not only does not trouble the current administration; but, worse, that some members of the administration actually welcome it. They do not see America as an exceptional nation, in fact, they attack and deride the idea. Our decline suits their ideology and their world view; they prefer that America be one among many, rather than first among many.
It is absolutely essential for the future well-being of the nation that the present administration be defeated at the next election.
We have reached the point in our slide toward collectivism and centralized authority where the very suggestion that we should revert to our founding principles, that government should play the smallest possible role in the affairs of the citizens and that its power must be carefully proscribed, and to Lincoln’s dictum that the government should do nothing that the people can do better for themelves, is met with puzzlement, derision and bemusement. Yet doing so is the only way to resolve the current debt crisis, and to preserve our liberties and our birthright as Americans.
As Chekhov said: Above all, do good. As Tolstoy said: Kindness can be added to anything. Look for truth, not in a church or in religion or in vague metaphysics, but deep within yourself. For it resides there, as surely as you embody a spirit that breathes love and yearns for eternity.
The human soul is a being in exile. For a few moments, it inhabits a body, experiences the joys and sorrows of the world, finds love, suffers loss, learns, wonders, despairs, and deepens its nature thereby. But always it longs to return to that timeless essence of which it is a mirror. Remember: You are not sad or happy, not full or empty, not alone, fearful, nor doomed to die – You are eternal.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Life and Death Redux
Somerset Maugham wrote in his memoirs that the idea of reincarnation was the only meaningful solution he had ever found to the problem of evil, suffering and death. (Now, since it is possible to argue that death is the ultimate form of evil and suffering, we may shortcut that formulation to speak solely of death.) In other words, death becomes a problem only if we assume that any individual life is a unique event, with a beginning, middle and end, implacable and unrepeatable.
That life is a continuum from conception to death would seem to be a given. (This, by the way, is the ultimate argument against abortion: The continuum of life stretches from conception to death. That continuum does not begin at birth nor at some arbitrary point in gestation. The process of life and living and dying begins where it begins: at conception. It is a continuum unbroken though not unbreakable, and to argue otherwise for personal or political purposes is pernicious.) To put the matter more simply: Death becomes a problem when we believe that we live only once.
As Maugham pointed out, the idea of reincarnation provides a solution to this problem since it posits that individual life is not a unique event, confined to a single nexus of space and time; but, rather, that it is a part of a chain of being that stretches throughout time and space, offering the soul (which transcends time and space) the opportunity to free itself from death. Thus, any given life is groundwork, as it were, for the soul's self-liberation.
There are three components to this proposition: life, the soul and liberation. In contrast to this, the Western or Christian point of view offers life, death and salvation. The difference is critical, since reincarnation removes death as a problem if not as a fact. If one lives and dies and never lives again, then the idea of salvation is all one has to sustain hope. But no matter how we conceive of salvation, it still leaves us with the problem of death. All those who have gone before and died, whether saved or not, are simply gone once and forever. They may live in our hearts and memories, and we may believe they are in some sort of paradise, but the fact remains that they are dead, and will not live again until the purported resurrection of the body at the end of time.
The Western view thus makes us the victims or slaves of time, wholly at its mercy, unable to liberate ourselves from it. And what becomes of space? The Christians do not say. Time, they tell us, will end at the Second Coming of Christ, but what of space? Herein has always lain a contradiction, for if the resurrection of the body which they posit occurs at the end of time, it must nonetheless occur in space. And there can be no space in the absence of time. The resurrection of the body is a silly, pointless and meaningless idea, and it fails utterly to solve the problem of death. In fact, it serves merely to place death at center stage - the focal point of the relation between life and salvation. To put it another way: The Christian view of life makes life impossible without death, for salvation is impossible without death. Death thus becomes the determining factor, as crucial as it is final. For that which must follow death in this schema is not life at all, but some contradictory, mutant form of life, a fantasy that exists in space but out of time.
The Western, Christian, view of life, death and salvation does not solve the problem of evil, suffering and death. And there is a further contradiction: As Tolstoy pointed out, Christianity is unique among the world's religions in insisting that the individual can do nothing to achieve his own salvation. Instead, Christianity posits that Christ accomplished this through his suffering, death and resurrection, and so, all that we can do is to make ourselves worthy of a salvation which Christ has already achieved for us. Far from liberating the individual from the problem of death, this view makes him entirely helpless in the matter of his own survival of death. It shifts the responsibility for salvation from the individual to Christ and, conveniently, to the church which he is said to have founded. Believe and you shall be saved, the church says; or, in other words, Refuse to believe and you shall die. Thus not only does this approach make us slaves to death, it also makes us slaves to the church, wholly dependent upon it for our salvation.
And so the alternative, as Maugham realized, lies in the idea that we do not possess one, unique lifetime, but that our lives are part of a much longer chain of being stretching through time and space, and offering us the possibility, through greater spiritual insight and self-realization, of liberating ourselves from them. In this view, it is the soul which lives, and the soul which experiences evil, suffering and death through consciousness as a means of self-liberation. Evil, suffering and death thus take on a positive, teaching role (as it were) in human experience, neither malign by nature nor neutral in effect. They are cast as opportunities for self-liberation through understanding, spiritual struggle and growing enlightenment.
This latter is key, for it is essential to self-liberation that one profit by the experience of evil, suffering and death (as well as that of rebirth, joy and hope) to work out one's own salvation. This idea, that the responsibility and opportunity for salvation lies with the individual, is potentially terribly liberating, and does offer a solution to the problem of death. For it posits that salvation lies, not with some misty, dependent relation to a church, but rather with the education and realization of the soul. Because the soul survives any particular death, it says, it may survive death entirely, by using death as a means to rebirth and, so, to the re-experience of life and the attainment of enlightenment.
One implication of this idea which does not exist in Christianity is that of the relation of love and life. If one believes that death is the unique end to the unique event of life, and that salvation is its goal, then it follows that one must despise one's life and hope for that which follows life. We can enjoy life, of course; but, ultimately, life has no intrinsic purpose beyond the experience of becoming worthy of something which lies outside of life; namely, salvation. And so Christianity teaches us to despise life (certainly in Catholic school I was taught to do so), and to prefer and cherish and hope for that which lies beyond life.
Reincarnation, on the other hand, implies that one should embrace and love life fully since any given life is part of the process of liberation from the cycle of suffering and death and rebirth. Life, instead of the trial and transit toward salvation which Christianity posits, becomes a hope for freedom and a celebration of the endurance of the soul. In this view, we are continually moving towards self-realization and self-liberation as we move through the process of life, death and rebirth; understanding and accepting the role of death as a transitional experience, rather than dreading it as an end point from which there is no hope of return. In other words, Christianity makes us fear death and despise life, while reincarnation offers us a means to understand death, and to love life.
Now, I think it should be needless to argue that the Christian view of life, death and salvation is utterly inadequate to offer a solution to the problem of death. This should be evident on its face. There is no heaven - that is a primitive child's fairy tale which every thinking person ought to have shrugged off by adulthood. There is no celestial reunion of the long deceased, resurrected at the end of time by a triumphant Christ, and invited to bask in eternal bliss (at least, those who have not been condemned to eternal torment for sins committed in their paltry few years on earth). This is nonsense, and no thinking person can entertain the idea seriously, let alone take solace from it.
But, on the other hand, reincarnation contains within it, if not absurdity, at least a conundrum. One part of this conundrum lies in the question of the relation of one consciousness to another in the chain of life, death and rebirth. Can the soul be said to be individuated, at least to the extent that it can recognize itself from one life to the next? To believe this suggests that the soul retains consciousness, and I am not convinced that this is so. Consciousness, it seems to me, is the product of the soul's interaction with organic life, heightened to its grandest extent in man. But does the individual soul carry this consciousness with it after death? And does the concept of "the individual soul" even have any meaning?
Yet if the soul does not retain consciousness after death, how is it to profit from successive rebirths? Would not death break the chain of consciousness, forcing the individual to begin the process of learning and the movement toward enlightenment over again with each rebirth? How, then, is enlightenment ever to be achieved, and liberation of the soul realized? Yet, if consciousness, or some part or form of it, remains with the soul after death, why then are we born, as it were, clean slates? And how, exactly, does consciousness remain with the soul in the absence of a corporeal substrate, such as the central nervous system and brain? Is not consciousness the product of corporeal incarnation of spirit, and, thus, must it not cease to be when that incarnation ceases?
The second part of the conundrum is more subtle, pernicious and dismaying. What impressed Maugham about the idea of reincarnation was that it alone, in his experience and thought, offered a solution to the problem of death. That solution, it seems to me, appealed to him because it was so rational; in other words, because it was an intellectual solution. Reincarnation makes sense of suffering and death; it gives us a way to understand them; it puts them into perspective. But is it the truth? For we know from our experience that that which make sense is not always true. May reincarnation merely be a forlorn hope in the presence of death; yet another grasping at straws?
Here one is tempted to ask for evidence, for proof, and indeed, there are some proponents of reincarnation who try to offer this. They point to the possibility of the knowledge of the existence of past lives as evidence; but I find such tenuous and tendentious recollection no more satisfying than the Christian notion of heaven. There is no proof that reincarnation is the truth, and the fact that the majority of the world's people accept it does not make it so. And so we are (or at least I am) left with the possibility that reincarnation, though it makes good sense, may not in fact be true. Rather, it appeals to us and offers solace as an intellectual proposition only.
On the other hand, the absence of evidence does not necessarily render an idea false. Before Columbus there was no hard evidence that a New World existed, but that did not mean that Europe, as a continent, was unique. And so we are thrown back on the question of belief, full in the knowledge that believing something, likewise, does not make it true. What, then, are we to do?
To abandon hope for a solution to the problem of death is to despair altogether; to submit to the idea that life has no purpose and that death is the end. And while this may, in fact, be the truth, there is no joy or meaning or solace in it. To accept death as the absolute end of life is to cancel out life itself; to render it null and void, arbitrary and pointless. Love, hope, joy, suffering and death all become empty since they are transitory and death is terminal. Nothing endures, and the soul, if it exists, disappears into some eternal ocean of its own substance. There is no individuation, no salvation, no liberation. As Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych realized to his horror: There is nothing but death, and death ought not to exist.
Can one live under these conditions? Can one survive with this suspicion? In fact, many people do, meandering through their lives as if they had meaning, while all the time suspecting that they do not. They are like skaters on the most delicate film of ice trying to blind themselves to the possibility that the depths beneath it are infested with sharks. Logic, emotion, instinct suggest that there must be an alternative; that this vast and deep experience of life must possess some purpose.
It seems to me that life itself may be the evidence that death is not the end point, not the negation of consciousness and hope and life. It is irresistible to my mind that life itself, and the consciousness which it engenders, argue for something which transcends them; that life is the problem which must be solved, not death. What is the meaning and nature of life; what is its purpose and point? What is its destiny? And so I come back to Maugham's conclusion: that rebirth, renewal and self-realization, perhaps uniquely, offer an opportunity for the soul's liberation, and for a freedom finally, from death.
That life is a continuum from conception to death would seem to be a given. (This, by the way, is the ultimate argument against abortion: The continuum of life stretches from conception to death. That continuum does not begin at birth nor at some arbitrary point in gestation. The process of life and living and dying begins where it begins: at conception. It is a continuum unbroken though not unbreakable, and to argue otherwise for personal or political purposes is pernicious.) To put the matter more simply: Death becomes a problem when we believe that we live only once.
As Maugham pointed out, the idea of reincarnation provides a solution to this problem since it posits that individual life is not a unique event, confined to a single nexus of space and time; but, rather, that it is a part of a chain of being that stretches throughout time and space, offering the soul (which transcends time and space) the opportunity to free itself from death. Thus, any given life is groundwork, as it were, for the soul's self-liberation.
There are three components to this proposition: life, the soul and liberation. In contrast to this, the Western or Christian point of view offers life, death and salvation. The difference is critical, since reincarnation removes death as a problem if not as a fact. If one lives and dies and never lives again, then the idea of salvation is all one has to sustain hope. But no matter how we conceive of salvation, it still leaves us with the problem of death. All those who have gone before and died, whether saved or not, are simply gone once and forever. They may live in our hearts and memories, and we may believe they are in some sort of paradise, but the fact remains that they are dead, and will not live again until the purported resurrection of the body at the end of time.
The Western view thus makes us the victims or slaves of time, wholly at its mercy, unable to liberate ourselves from it. And what becomes of space? The Christians do not say. Time, they tell us, will end at the Second Coming of Christ, but what of space? Herein has always lain a contradiction, for if the resurrection of the body which they posit occurs at the end of time, it must nonetheless occur in space. And there can be no space in the absence of time. The resurrection of the body is a silly, pointless and meaningless idea, and it fails utterly to solve the problem of death. In fact, it serves merely to place death at center stage - the focal point of the relation between life and salvation. To put it another way: The Christian view of life makes life impossible without death, for salvation is impossible without death. Death thus becomes the determining factor, as crucial as it is final. For that which must follow death in this schema is not life at all, but some contradictory, mutant form of life, a fantasy that exists in space but out of time.
The Western, Christian, view of life, death and salvation does not solve the problem of evil, suffering and death. And there is a further contradiction: As Tolstoy pointed out, Christianity is unique among the world's religions in insisting that the individual can do nothing to achieve his own salvation. Instead, Christianity posits that Christ accomplished this through his suffering, death and resurrection, and so, all that we can do is to make ourselves worthy of a salvation which Christ has already achieved for us. Far from liberating the individual from the problem of death, this view makes him entirely helpless in the matter of his own survival of death. It shifts the responsibility for salvation from the individual to Christ and, conveniently, to the church which he is said to have founded. Believe and you shall be saved, the church says; or, in other words, Refuse to believe and you shall die. Thus not only does this approach make us slaves to death, it also makes us slaves to the church, wholly dependent upon it for our salvation.
And so the alternative, as Maugham realized, lies in the idea that we do not possess one, unique lifetime, but that our lives are part of a much longer chain of being stretching through time and space, and offering us the possibility, through greater spiritual insight and self-realization, of liberating ourselves from them. In this view, it is the soul which lives, and the soul which experiences evil, suffering and death through consciousness as a means of self-liberation. Evil, suffering and death thus take on a positive, teaching role (as it were) in human experience, neither malign by nature nor neutral in effect. They are cast as opportunities for self-liberation through understanding, spiritual struggle and growing enlightenment.
This latter is key, for it is essential to self-liberation that one profit by the experience of evil, suffering and death (as well as that of rebirth, joy and hope) to work out one's own salvation. This idea, that the responsibility and opportunity for salvation lies with the individual, is potentially terribly liberating, and does offer a solution to the problem of death. For it posits that salvation lies, not with some misty, dependent relation to a church, but rather with the education and realization of the soul. Because the soul survives any particular death, it says, it may survive death entirely, by using death as a means to rebirth and, so, to the re-experience of life and the attainment of enlightenment.
One implication of this idea which does not exist in Christianity is that of the relation of love and life. If one believes that death is the unique end to the unique event of life, and that salvation is its goal, then it follows that one must despise one's life and hope for that which follows life. We can enjoy life, of course; but, ultimately, life has no intrinsic purpose beyond the experience of becoming worthy of something which lies outside of life; namely, salvation. And so Christianity teaches us to despise life (certainly in Catholic school I was taught to do so), and to prefer and cherish and hope for that which lies beyond life.
Reincarnation, on the other hand, implies that one should embrace and love life fully since any given life is part of the process of liberation from the cycle of suffering and death and rebirth. Life, instead of the trial and transit toward salvation which Christianity posits, becomes a hope for freedom and a celebration of the endurance of the soul. In this view, we are continually moving towards self-realization and self-liberation as we move through the process of life, death and rebirth; understanding and accepting the role of death as a transitional experience, rather than dreading it as an end point from which there is no hope of return. In other words, Christianity makes us fear death and despise life, while reincarnation offers us a means to understand death, and to love life.
Now, I think it should be needless to argue that the Christian view of life, death and salvation is utterly inadequate to offer a solution to the problem of death. This should be evident on its face. There is no heaven - that is a primitive child's fairy tale which every thinking person ought to have shrugged off by adulthood. There is no celestial reunion of the long deceased, resurrected at the end of time by a triumphant Christ, and invited to bask in eternal bliss (at least, those who have not been condemned to eternal torment for sins committed in their paltry few years on earth). This is nonsense, and no thinking person can entertain the idea seriously, let alone take solace from it.
But, on the other hand, reincarnation contains within it, if not absurdity, at least a conundrum. One part of this conundrum lies in the question of the relation of one consciousness to another in the chain of life, death and rebirth. Can the soul be said to be individuated, at least to the extent that it can recognize itself from one life to the next? To believe this suggests that the soul retains consciousness, and I am not convinced that this is so. Consciousness, it seems to me, is the product of the soul's interaction with organic life, heightened to its grandest extent in man. But does the individual soul carry this consciousness with it after death? And does the concept of "the individual soul" even have any meaning?
Yet if the soul does not retain consciousness after death, how is it to profit from successive rebirths? Would not death break the chain of consciousness, forcing the individual to begin the process of learning and the movement toward enlightenment over again with each rebirth? How, then, is enlightenment ever to be achieved, and liberation of the soul realized? Yet, if consciousness, or some part or form of it, remains with the soul after death, why then are we born, as it were, clean slates? And how, exactly, does consciousness remain with the soul in the absence of a corporeal substrate, such as the central nervous system and brain? Is not consciousness the product of corporeal incarnation of spirit, and, thus, must it not cease to be when that incarnation ceases?
The second part of the conundrum is more subtle, pernicious and dismaying. What impressed Maugham about the idea of reincarnation was that it alone, in his experience and thought, offered a solution to the problem of death. That solution, it seems to me, appealed to him because it was so rational; in other words, because it was an intellectual solution. Reincarnation makes sense of suffering and death; it gives us a way to understand them; it puts them into perspective. But is it the truth? For we know from our experience that that which make sense is not always true. May reincarnation merely be a forlorn hope in the presence of death; yet another grasping at straws?
Here one is tempted to ask for evidence, for proof, and indeed, there are some proponents of reincarnation who try to offer this. They point to the possibility of the knowledge of the existence of past lives as evidence; but I find such tenuous and tendentious recollection no more satisfying than the Christian notion of heaven. There is no proof that reincarnation is the truth, and the fact that the majority of the world's people accept it does not make it so. And so we are (or at least I am) left with the possibility that reincarnation, though it makes good sense, may not in fact be true. Rather, it appeals to us and offers solace as an intellectual proposition only.
On the other hand, the absence of evidence does not necessarily render an idea false. Before Columbus there was no hard evidence that a New World existed, but that did not mean that Europe, as a continent, was unique. And so we are thrown back on the question of belief, full in the knowledge that believing something, likewise, does not make it true. What, then, are we to do?
To abandon hope for a solution to the problem of death is to despair altogether; to submit to the idea that life has no purpose and that death is the end. And while this may, in fact, be the truth, there is no joy or meaning or solace in it. To accept death as the absolute end of life is to cancel out life itself; to render it null and void, arbitrary and pointless. Love, hope, joy, suffering and death all become empty since they are transitory and death is terminal. Nothing endures, and the soul, if it exists, disappears into some eternal ocean of its own substance. There is no individuation, no salvation, no liberation. As Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych realized to his horror: There is nothing but death, and death ought not to exist.
Can one live under these conditions? Can one survive with this suspicion? In fact, many people do, meandering through their lives as if they had meaning, while all the time suspecting that they do not. They are like skaters on the most delicate film of ice trying to blind themselves to the possibility that the depths beneath it are infested with sharks. Logic, emotion, instinct suggest that there must be an alternative; that this vast and deep experience of life must possess some purpose.
It seems to me that life itself may be the evidence that death is not the end point, not the negation of consciousness and hope and life. It is irresistible to my mind that life itself, and the consciousness which it engenders, argue for something which transcends them; that life is the problem which must be solved, not death. What is the meaning and nature of life; what is its purpose and point? What is its destiny? And so I come back to Maugham's conclusion: that rebirth, renewal and self-realization, perhaps uniquely, offer an opportunity for the soul's liberation, and for a freedom finally, from death.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Tree, Weiner, Sarah and Donne
Here are some thoughts in passing on matters of the moment...
Tree of Life
The three film directors working today whose work I most admire are Ang Lee, Peter Weir and Terrence Malick. Recently I saw Malick's new film, Tree of Life, and I found it breathtakingly beautiful and brilliant. It is not a film for everyone; you must have a certain level of film culture in order to understand its intent and appreciate its execution. This is a film about the tragedy and travails of a Waco, Texas, family in the 1950s that includes dinosaurs and the Big Bang. In short, it is an art film, the kind of film I watched when I was in film school; the kind of film that is rarely if ever made these days. But it is a masterpiece, and when it was over, I was speechless.
Malick is a visionary, a poetic filmmaker who reminds us that film is essentially a visual medium. He never hesitates to stop a film cold and demand that we look at an image, indeed, meditate on it. His cinema is almost mystical in its quest to find the most profound meaning in the most mundane image - a bird in flight, a young woman in love in flight, a child's imagination in flight. Tree of Life is a magnificent visual poem about life and hope and love; the kind of film which only a visionary of Malick's talent and integrity could have conceived and accomplished. Credit must also be given to Bill Pohlad of River Road Films for having had the courage and independence to bring this work of art to the screen.
Weiner's Dilemma
I do not share the incipient delight of most conservatives at the auto-destruction of Congressman Anthony Weiner, though I do welcome his imminent departure from the political scene. The embarrassment caused by him to his constituents and to his family, and the deepening sense of cynicism which his arrogant stupidity must engender, are not a cause for celebration. I have long felt that Congressman Weiner, in his hubris, self-righteous elitism and nasty-minded behavior represented a threat to the nation. We now see that they represent a threat to himself.
Weiner's smug, bullying far-left politics are, in my view, dangerous to the Republic. Weiner, and those like him on the left, despise the United States and the values upon which it was founded, and seek nothing more ardently than to transform it into their elitist concept of a socialist oligarchy over which they alone will have control. He has not learned the lesson of history, that those who erode democracy in favor of centralized control in the name of ideology become the first victims of the concomitant loss of liberty. While I take no joy in the manner of his demise, I do welcome his disappearance. If he is capable of feeling shame about his own misbehavior, and compassion for those whom he has injured by it, he will resign.
Palin Obsession
Why is the mainstream media so obsessed with Sarah Palin? I heard a report recently that even they now admit that their absorption with her is excessive, and like addicts, they are trying to wean (or Weiner) themselves from it. That the media is shamefully biased toward the left is indisputable; but the unceasing reportage on everything to do with Governor Palin, her family and her aspirations is, quite frankly, bewildering to me. She does not hold public office and does not appear to be seeking to hold public office, yet the leftist press covers her as if she were the Empress of America gone berserk.
Now let me be clear: I am not a fan of Governor Palin. Though I find her generally sincere, in my view she has turned herself into a joke, and I earnestly hope that she does not enter the presidential race. But for the press to demand the release of thousands of her emails as governor, and to send dozens of reporters to Alaska to comb through them looking for scandal or dirt, for the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post to ask its readers to help them to sift through the massive release and report back to them, goes far beyond any normal interest in a former public servant. In fact, it strikes me as a new low in journalistic standards.
I can only imagine that the self-important poohbahs of the press hate Sarah Palin, and that they hate her because they fear her. Yet given her lack of official standing, surely this fear is irrational. But the fact is that she speaks to average Americans with an earnestness and a plainness which the mainstream press have long since eschewed in their elitist righteousness, and in their firm conviction that they own the news in America, and only they have a right to shape public opinion. Sarah Palin, for all her missteps and shortcomings, threatens their ossifying grip on opinion in our society, and they cannot forgive or forget her for it.
Bin Laden
In much the same spirit in which I wrote about Anthony Weiner, I felt no need to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden. In fact, I found the spectacle of people cheering in the streets at the news troubling. It reminded me of reports I had seen of Palestinians dancing publicly in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. Both demonstrations, I thought, were inappropriate to the point of being repulsive. As the poet, John Donne, said: Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
I learned the news of bin Laden's death with a feeling of relief, and a rather grim sense that justice had at last been done. He was a murderer, a lunatic, a religious fanatic. He made a sham of the faith he claimed to propound, and, as all cowards do, he sent young, brainwashed followers out to die, while he remained in safety. His death was the inevitable end of a despicable despot.
That said, I continue to be troubled by the official reports of the circumstances surrounding it. At first the Administration claimed he had been killed in the course of a fierce and protracted gun battle, and only after having refused to surrender and having lunged for a weapon. As the hours and days went by, all that changed. There was no gun battle, evidently no attempt to take him into custody, and no resistance on his part. It seems in the end of it that he was simply shot to death, unarmed, in front of one of his wives. The public lack of will to learn the truth in this killing is understandable given the subject of the story; nonetheless, I believe that history demands it.
If, as it now appears, the raiders simply burst in on bin Laden with orders to kill him, then the President has violated American law. I refer, of course, to the Presidential directive issued by Jimmy Carter prohibiting the United States from engaging in the assassination of any foreign leader. As far as I know, no one in the media or the political establishment has raised this question. We would, I suppose, prefer just to forget the matter. But my reading of history tells me that such matters reawaken eventually and at great cost. Perhaps, rather than boast of the event, we ought to be examining it soberly and, as bin Laden never would have done, in the light of reason and the law. That is the best way to put his lethal legacy behind us.
Tree of Life
The three film directors working today whose work I most admire are Ang Lee, Peter Weir and Terrence Malick. Recently I saw Malick's new film, Tree of Life, and I found it breathtakingly beautiful and brilliant. It is not a film for everyone; you must have a certain level of film culture in order to understand its intent and appreciate its execution. This is a film about the tragedy and travails of a Waco, Texas, family in the 1950s that includes dinosaurs and the Big Bang. In short, it is an art film, the kind of film I watched when I was in film school; the kind of film that is rarely if ever made these days. But it is a masterpiece, and when it was over, I was speechless.
Malick is a visionary, a poetic filmmaker who reminds us that film is essentially a visual medium. He never hesitates to stop a film cold and demand that we look at an image, indeed, meditate on it. His cinema is almost mystical in its quest to find the most profound meaning in the most mundane image - a bird in flight, a young woman in love in flight, a child's imagination in flight. Tree of Life is a magnificent visual poem about life and hope and love; the kind of film which only a visionary of Malick's talent and integrity could have conceived and accomplished. Credit must also be given to Bill Pohlad of River Road Films for having had the courage and independence to bring this work of art to the screen.
Weiner's Dilemma
I do not share the incipient delight of most conservatives at the auto-destruction of Congressman Anthony Weiner, though I do welcome his imminent departure from the political scene. The embarrassment caused by him to his constituents and to his family, and the deepening sense of cynicism which his arrogant stupidity must engender, are not a cause for celebration. I have long felt that Congressman Weiner, in his hubris, self-righteous elitism and nasty-minded behavior represented a threat to the nation. We now see that they represent a threat to himself.
Weiner's smug, bullying far-left politics are, in my view, dangerous to the Republic. Weiner, and those like him on the left, despise the United States and the values upon which it was founded, and seek nothing more ardently than to transform it into their elitist concept of a socialist oligarchy over which they alone will have control. He has not learned the lesson of history, that those who erode democracy in favor of centralized control in the name of ideology become the first victims of the concomitant loss of liberty. While I take no joy in the manner of his demise, I do welcome his disappearance. If he is capable of feeling shame about his own misbehavior, and compassion for those whom he has injured by it, he will resign.
Palin Obsession
Why is the mainstream media so obsessed with Sarah Palin? I heard a report recently that even they now admit that their absorption with her is excessive, and like addicts, they are trying to wean (or Weiner) themselves from it. That the media is shamefully biased toward the left is indisputable; but the unceasing reportage on everything to do with Governor Palin, her family and her aspirations is, quite frankly, bewildering to me. She does not hold public office and does not appear to be seeking to hold public office, yet the leftist press covers her as if she were the Empress of America gone berserk.
Now let me be clear: I am not a fan of Governor Palin. Though I find her generally sincere, in my view she has turned herself into a joke, and I earnestly hope that she does not enter the presidential race. But for the press to demand the release of thousands of her emails as governor, and to send dozens of reporters to Alaska to comb through them looking for scandal or dirt, for the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post to ask its readers to help them to sift through the massive release and report back to them, goes far beyond any normal interest in a former public servant. In fact, it strikes me as a new low in journalistic standards.
I can only imagine that the self-important poohbahs of the press hate Sarah Palin, and that they hate her because they fear her. Yet given her lack of official standing, surely this fear is irrational. But the fact is that she speaks to average Americans with an earnestness and a plainness which the mainstream press have long since eschewed in their elitist righteousness, and in their firm conviction that they own the news in America, and only they have a right to shape public opinion. Sarah Palin, for all her missteps and shortcomings, threatens their ossifying grip on opinion in our society, and they cannot forgive or forget her for it.
Bin Laden
In much the same spirit in which I wrote about Anthony Weiner, I felt no need to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden. In fact, I found the spectacle of people cheering in the streets at the news troubling. It reminded me of reports I had seen of Palestinians dancing publicly in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. Both demonstrations, I thought, were inappropriate to the point of being repulsive. As the poet, John Donne, said: Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
I learned the news of bin Laden's death with a feeling of relief, and a rather grim sense that justice had at last been done. He was a murderer, a lunatic, a religious fanatic. He made a sham of the faith he claimed to propound, and, as all cowards do, he sent young, brainwashed followers out to die, while he remained in safety. His death was the inevitable end of a despicable despot.
That said, I continue to be troubled by the official reports of the circumstances surrounding it. At first the Administration claimed he had been killed in the course of a fierce and protracted gun battle, and only after having refused to surrender and having lunged for a weapon. As the hours and days went by, all that changed. There was no gun battle, evidently no attempt to take him into custody, and no resistance on his part. It seems in the end of it that he was simply shot to death, unarmed, in front of one of his wives. The public lack of will to learn the truth in this killing is understandable given the subject of the story; nonetheless, I believe that history demands it.
If, as it now appears, the raiders simply burst in on bin Laden with orders to kill him, then the President has violated American law. I refer, of course, to the Presidential directive issued by Jimmy Carter prohibiting the United States from engaging in the assassination of any foreign leader. As far as I know, no one in the media or the political establishment has raised this question. We would, I suppose, prefer just to forget the matter. But my reading of history tells me that such matters reawaken eventually and at great cost. Perhaps, rather than boast of the event, we ought to be examining it soberly and, as bin Laden never would have done, in the light of reason and the law. That is the best way to put his lethal legacy behind us.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Envy
Over dinner with my older son tonight, to celebrate our respective birthdays (they are three days apart), I listened with barely concealed delight as he told me about the books he has been reading lately. They are all the books I could not induce him to read when he was younger: Maugham, Waugh, Tolstoy (of course), Dostoevsky, Joyce, Hemingway, and to my great satisfaction, Babel. I think Isaac Babel was the most talented of the post-revolutionary Russian writers, and therefore, the most tragic. A brilliant young Jewish intellectual, he served, incongruously, with the Red Cavalry in the Russian civil war (though he did not know how to ride a horse), participating in the invasion of Poland, which gave rise to his greatest work, the cycle of short stories entitled "The Red Cavalry."
I based my own book, "Lt. Ramsey's War," structurally on "The Red Cavalry," which is a work I admire very much. It is wonderfully made, expressive, moving, and profound. My son said that he had done a bit of research on Babel prior to reading him, and was dismayed to learn that he had been arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and finally executed in the Soviet camps. But that was inevitable. The Bolsheviks could not tolerate so lyrical and liberated a soul. They killed, tortured or silenced all of the great talents of the Soviet era, including Mandelshtam, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Tarkovsky and, perhaps most touchingly of all, Yuri Olesha.
Olesha, who is little known or read these days, was, after Babel, I think, the most talented of the Soviet writers. A chubby, spectacled little man, he was essentially a romantic of the 19th century who found himself in the nightmare world of communist Russia. His greatest work and his only novel is entitled "Envy," because he saw the new world, and the new "Soviet Man" who was to inherit it, and he knew he could never be part of that. That was what he was envious of: a new generation of super-men of the communist state, with their steely eyes and sledge hammers who served the state slavishly -- lived, labored, sacrificed and died in its service.
They were creatures of the new collective government, these New Men, its minions, its mice who ran its tortured labyrinth their entire lives, ceding to it their freedom, their individuality, their very souls. They gave their children to state orphanages to be raised in the principles of Marx and Lenin, married when they were told whom they were told, and devoted their lives to the greater good of the communist populace. They were, in short, the ants of Dostoevsky's ant hill, that massive, inhuman, impersonal collective of which he warned the Russian people in the 1870s. Fortunately he did not live long enough to see it come into murderous reality.
As I thought of Olesha, that timid, tender soul who also tried to warn the Russian people of the cliff over which they were rushing, and whose brilliant promise was cut short when he was warned by the secret police to write no longer, I could not help but think (forgive me) of our own nation in our own time. And so I feel moved to warn my fellow Americans, as Olesha did his fellow Russians, that we are in the process, very gradual but unmistakable, of selling our souls to the government. In return for what? "Free" health care, cheap prescription drugs, entitlements, and a phony sense of fairness.
My fear is that our children may be the last generation of what the world would recognize as Americans -- those unique people who created their own government, constructed their own nation, lived their own lives, possessed their own souls and died in the certain knowledge that their children would be better off for their having done so. Like Olesha, I envy those who came before me in my land, and I fear and despise those who are usurping it in the name of greater social justice, greater collective good, greater dependence on a government which even now has swollen to proportions that can absorb us all.
We must resist. We must reinvent ourselves. We must restore our nation to what its Founders intended: a land of opportunity, where great accomplishment is possible because great risk is inevitable. We must be free to fail even if that means some of us fail miserably. The goal of this nation was the greatest good for the greatest number, not a mediocre level of satisfaction and security for everyone at the expense of liberty and individuality. America was meant to be, as Jack Kennedy said, the last, best hope of mankind. We must not barter that hope away for a phony fairness and a false promise of security from cradle to grave. In short, we must once again begin behaving like Americans.
I based my own book, "Lt. Ramsey's War," structurally on "The Red Cavalry," which is a work I admire very much. It is wonderfully made, expressive, moving, and profound. My son said that he had done a bit of research on Babel prior to reading him, and was dismayed to learn that he had been arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and finally executed in the Soviet camps. But that was inevitable. The Bolsheviks could not tolerate so lyrical and liberated a soul. They killed, tortured or silenced all of the great talents of the Soviet era, including Mandelshtam, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Tarkovsky and, perhaps most touchingly of all, Yuri Olesha.
Olesha, who is little known or read these days, was, after Babel, I think, the most talented of the Soviet writers. A chubby, spectacled little man, he was essentially a romantic of the 19th century who found himself in the nightmare world of communist Russia. His greatest work and his only novel is entitled "Envy," because he saw the new world, and the new "Soviet Man" who was to inherit it, and he knew he could never be part of that. That was what he was envious of: a new generation of super-men of the communist state, with their steely eyes and sledge hammers who served the state slavishly -- lived, labored, sacrificed and died in its service.
They were creatures of the new collective government, these New Men, its minions, its mice who ran its tortured labyrinth their entire lives, ceding to it their freedom, their individuality, their very souls. They gave their children to state orphanages to be raised in the principles of Marx and Lenin, married when they were told whom they were told, and devoted their lives to the greater good of the communist populace. They were, in short, the ants of Dostoevsky's ant hill, that massive, inhuman, impersonal collective of which he warned the Russian people in the 1870s. Fortunately he did not live long enough to see it come into murderous reality.
As I thought of Olesha, that timid, tender soul who also tried to warn the Russian people of the cliff over which they were rushing, and whose brilliant promise was cut short when he was warned by the secret police to write no longer, I could not help but think (forgive me) of our own nation in our own time. And so I feel moved to warn my fellow Americans, as Olesha did his fellow Russians, that we are in the process, very gradual but unmistakable, of selling our souls to the government. In return for what? "Free" health care, cheap prescription drugs, entitlements, and a phony sense of fairness.
My fear is that our children may be the last generation of what the world would recognize as Americans -- those unique people who created their own government, constructed their own nation, lived their own lives, possessed their own souls and died in the certain knowledge that their children would be better off for their having done so. Like Olesha, I envy those who came before me in my land, and I fear and despise those who are usurping it in the name of greater social justice, greater collective good, greater dependence on a government which even now has swollen to proportions that can absorb us all.
We must resist. We must reinvent ourselves. We must restore our nation to what its Founders intended: a land of opportunity, where great accomplishment is possible because great risk is inevitable. We must be free to fail even if that means some of us fail miserably. The goal of this nation was the greatest good for the greatest number, not a mediocre level of satisfaction and security for everyone at the expense of liberty and individuality. America was meant to be, as Jack Kennedy said, the last, best hope of mankind. We must not barter that hope away for a phony fairness and a false promise of security from cradle to grave. In short, we must once again begin behaving like Americans.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
One-offs
I have been listening a good deal lately to the Cesar Franck violin sonata, which I have enjoyed for many years. It is, in some ways, perfect. That is, for at least one time in his career, Franck got everything right. The first two movements, taken together, are huge for such a small form, filled with colors and textures, and possessing great strength. The third movement is wonderfully inventive and modern-feeling, while the finale contains one of my favorite themes in all of music, beautifully crafted and balanced, irresistible in its lyrical delicacy and expressiveness. It is a great work of musical art.
This led me to reflect on other composers who got it right at least once. Bizet is an example, with 'Carmen.' It is a wildly successful opera, and stands almost alone in his body of work for its achievement. Everything is right; it is dramatic, entertaining, and contains some of the most famous melodies in all of music. Now, I admit that Bizet wrote one very good symphony (when he was 17 I learned recently), which among other things contains a wonderful oboe solo; and the suite from l' Arlesienne remains popular, but 'Carmen' stands apart as a magnificent anomaly.
I find as I get older that I appreciate more the work of Jean Sibelius, whom I now regard as one of the best composers of the twentieth century (I think Prokoviev is the best), and I listen more often now to his music. He was an enormously talented man, but, I think, he was limited by the fact that he rarely transcended the confines of his national character. Much of his music sounds vaguely like a Finlandic winter to me, although his work, especially the symphonies, contain themes of great beauty and power. The problem is that the listener has to wade through so much turgid and tedious development to get to them; rather like trekking across the tundra to reach a few wonderful resorts.
The exception in Sibelius is the Violin Concerto, which, like the Franck sonata, is perfect. In that one work, everything comes together, everything is right. The piece has all that a great violin concerto should have: a big, powerful first movement, a lyrical, moving second, and a wonderful, exuberant thrill ride of a third. I love the Sibelius Violin Concerto, indeed, it is one of my favorite pieces of music, and it represents, to me, the best example of a composer getting it all right at least once in his career.
Vivaldi wrote a large number of pieces, some of which are wonderful, many of which are virtually indistinguishable from one another, but in the Four Seasons, he created one of the icons of Western music. Carl Orff was an important musicologist and pedagogue, but he is primarily remembered for one work, the oratorio Carmina Burana, which is absolutely brilliant. Biber's great accomplishment is the Mystery Sonatas (the pasacaglia from which inspired Bach's great Chaconne in D minor for solo violin, my favorite piece of music), and Guillaume de Machaut is remembered for his Messe de Notre Dame, which is one of the jewels of the pre-Renaissance.
There are other examples that I could cite, but the larger point is that such unique outbursts of brilliance serve to remind us of those composers who got it right over and over, year after year, in masterpiece after masterpiece. Bach is the greatest example of this. The sheer of volume of his masterworks is almost incomprehensible. That one man could produce works of such genius over so long a period defies imagination. Mozart is another, and Beethoven, too, of course. Brahms produced a very large body of masterful works during his lifetime, as did Schubert, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, and, to a lesser extent, Prokoviev and Ravel. For such composers, 'getting it right' was the norm, and the occasional misses were the exception.
All this leads me, in turn, to reflect that there are two modes, if you will, of genius: sustained and punctual. Some artists are capable of moments of genius, while a few, a very few, seem to dwell in genius as a nearly permanent condition. Where, I wonder, in our own time, are the latter kind of artist? I don't see any. Perhaps some of you can suggest them.
This led me to reflect on other composers who got it right at least once. Bizet is an example, with 'Carmen.' It is a wildly successful opera, and stands almost alone in his body of work for its achievement. Everything is right; it is dramatic, entertaining, and contains some of the most famous melodies in all of music. Now, I admit that Bizet wrote one very good symphony (when he was 17 I learned recently), which among other things contains a wonderful oboe solo; and the suite from l' Arlesienne remains popular, but 'Carmen' stands apart as a magnificent anomaly.
I find as I get older that I appreciate more the work of Jean Sibelius, whom I now regard as one of the best composers of the twentieth century (I think Prokoviev is the best), and I listen more often now to his music. He was an enormously talented man, but, I think, he was limited by the fact that he rarely transcended the confines of his national character. Much of his music sounds vaguely like a Finlandic winter to me, although his work, especially the symphonies, contain themes of great beauty and power. The problem is that the listener has to wade through so much turgid and tedious development to get to them; rather like trekking across the tundra to reach a few wonderful resorts.
The exception in Sibelius is the Violin Concerto, which, like the Franck sonata, is perfect. In that one work, everything comes together, everything is right. The piece has all that a great violin concerto should have: a big, powerful first movement, a lyrical, moving second, and a wonderful, exuberant thrill ride of a third. I love the Sibelius Violin Concerto, indeed, it is one of my favorite pieces of music, and it represents, to me, the best example of a composer getting it all right at least once in his career.
Vivaldi wrote a large number of pieces, some of which are wonderful, many of which are virtually indistinguishable from one another, but in the Four Seasons, he created one of the icons of Western music. Carl Orff was an important musicologist and pedagogue, but he is primarily remembered for one work, the oratorio Carmina Burana, which is absolutely brilliant. Biber's great accomplishment is the Mystery Sonatas (the pasacaglia from which inspired Bach's great Chaconne in D minor for solo violin, my favorite piece of music), and Guillaume de Machaut is remembered for his Messe de Notre Dame, which is one of the jewels of the pre-Renaissance.
There are other examples that I could cite, but the larger point is that such unique outbursts of brilliance serve to remind us of those composers who got it right over and over, year after year, in masterpiece after masterpiece. Bach is the greatest example of this. The sheer of volume of his masterworks is almost incomprehensible. That one man could produce works of such genius over so long a period defies imagination. Mozart is another, and Beethoven, too, of course. Brahms produced a very large body of masterful works during his lifetime, as did Schubert, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, and, to a lesser extent, Prokoviev and Ravel. For such composers, 'getting it right' was the norm, and the occasional misses were the exception.
All this leads me, in turn, to reflect that there are two modes, if you will, of genius: sustained and punctual. Some artists are capable of moments of genius, while a few, a very few, seem to dwell in genius as a nearly permanent condition. Where, I wonder, in our own time, are the latter kind of artist? I don't see any. Perhaps some of you can suggest them.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Posting Redux
I have been absent for a while because I have been struggling with illness, work, and depression, but I shall make an effort to resume posting.
Someone asked recently why I was silent during "the most deplorable period in American history." While I do not think this period is our most deplorable - I would have chosen the period immediately preceding the Civil War for that distinction - I remain deeply concerned about the current condition and the future of the nation. I heard recently that the International Monetary Fund had informed the European Economic Union, by way of warning, that the United States has "no viable plan" to deal with its debt, and that China would overtake us as the world's leading economy within five years. I fear this is true, and it means, among many other things, that we are witnessing our nation's deterioration into a second-rate power, and that we will leave our children and grandchildren a country less prosperous and dynamic than the one we inherited. The great irony of course is that China is succeeding by adopting the methods which we are abandoning as we seek to become more like the nation that China no longer wishes to be - centralized, collectivist, socialist.
This is a sad state of affairs, and I feel that I must take a bit of the blame for it, since I was a leader in a generation of youth that believed that government was the solution to the nation's inequalities, and that socialism was the cure for its economic injustices. And while I think we were right insofar as the Civil Rights struggle and the campaign to end the war in Vietnam were concerned, we were wrong in just about every other regard. Nonetheless, through our strident activism, we left a legacy of the growth of government and the corresponding diminution of individual liberty, and of reliance on the power of government as a first and not as a final resort.
We now see the effects of that philosophy: More Americans are dependent on government assistance than ever before - fully 20 percent by some estimates - and government is the single biggest employer in the nation; the tax code in its baroque illogic punishes achievement, enterprise, and the desire to excel, while making it impossible for the middle class to accumulate wealth; our health care system is being collectivized and nationalized under a bureaucracy infamous for waste, incompetence and indifference; the public education system, which is the prisoner of the teachers unions and their servile cronies in the Democratic Party, is a disgrace (I heard yesterday that 47 percent of the people of Detroit are illiterate!); the nation's infrastructure is decaying at an alarming rate; and mediocrity and cynical self-interest have become the chief virtues of our political system.
It is no wonder that we are in the dire condition in which we find ourselves. And all this in pursuit of a phony ideal of fairness which exists only in the minds of the left-wing elite, and which they use government to impose on the rest of us whether we agree or not. Has it not become amply clear that this "fairness" is always purchased at the price of freedom? And while we, in my generation of youths, fought for fairness in race relations, we never intended, indeed, never even imagined, that that goal would one day be so inflated and distorted as to result in such atrocities as the government rationed health care and the death panels of the new health care law. For if everyone is guaranteed the freedom to live by the government, under the liberals' fairness doctrine, we must all also accept the responsibility to die when the government decides that our lives are no longer of any value. That is the ultimate form of leftist fairness: The right to life, liberty and happiness, so long as the government bureaucracy decides it makes actuarial sense for us to possess it.
The Constitution is being stood on its head by the left, for whom Cuba is a better model of fairness than America. Now the rights which the Founders declared came only from God are depicted as coming from government, in which God no longer plays a part. The left in this country has succeeded finally in doing what the Bolsheviks did from the start: secularize the nation's public life, substituting their own ambitions, values, and power for that primary source of power from which all rights flow. It is the collectivist inevitability of which Trotsky, of all people, warned - the substitution of central power for popular sovereignty - and, excuse me my friends, but President Obama is the convenient stooge of that ideology.
The left has now succeeded in realizing the socialist vision which we, as twenty-year-olds in the '70s intoxicated ourselves with, and the result is that our system is poorer, more unfair, less dynamic and productive, less innovative and entrepreneurial, more unequal, more destructive of the human spirit, and makes far less sense politically, socially, and economically than did the one against which we were struggling. My generation has won, and I apologize for it.
Someone asked recently why I was silent during "the most deplorable period in American history." While I do not think this period is our most deplorable - I would have chosen the period immediately preceding the Civil War for that distinction - I remain deeply concerned about the current condition and the future of the nation. I heard recently that the International Monetary Fund had informed the European Economic Union, by way of warning, that the United States has "no viable plan" to deal with its debt, and that China would overtake us as the world's leading economy within five years. I fear this is true, and it means, among many other things, that we are witnessing our nation's deterioration into a second-rate power, and that we will leave our children and grandchildren a country less prosperous and dynamic than the one we inherited. The great irony of course is that China is succeeding by adopting the methods which we are abandoning as we seek to become more like the nation that China no longer wishes to be - centralized, collectivist, socialist.
This is a sad state of affairs, and I feel that I must take a bit of the blame for it, since I was a leader in a generation of youth that believed that government was the solution to the nation's inequalities, and that socialism was the cure for its economic injustices. And while I think we were right insofar as the Civil Rights struggle and the campaign to end the war in Vietnam were concerned, we were wrong in just about every other regard. Nonetheless, through our strident activism, we left a legacy of the growth of government and the corresponding diminution of individual liberty, and of reliance on the power of government as a first and not as a final resort.
We now see the effects of that philosophy: More Americans are dependent on government assistance than ever before - fully 20 percent by some estimates - and government is the single biggest employer in the nation; the tax code in its baroque illogic punishes achievement, enterprise, and the desire to excel, while making it impossible for the middle class to accumulate wealth; our health care system is being collectivized and nationalized under a bureaucracy infamous for waste, incompetence and indifference; the public education system, which is the prisoner of the teachers unions and their servile cronies in the Democratic Party, is a disgrace (I heard yesterday that 47 percent of the people of Detroit are illiterate!); the nation's infrastructure is decaying at an alarming rate; and mediocrity and cynical self-interest have become the chief virtues of our political system.
It is no wonder that we are in the dire condition in which we find ourselves. And all this in pursuit of a phony ideal of fairness which exists only in the minds of the left-wing elite, and which they use government to impose on the rest of us whether we agree or not. Has it not become amply clear that this "fairness" is always purchased at the price of freedom? And while we, in my generation of youths, fought for fairness in race relations, we never intended, indeed, never even imagined, that that goal would one day be so inflated and distorted as to result in such atrocities as the government rationed health care and the death panels of the new health care law. For if everyone is guaranteed the freedom to live by the government, under the liberals' fairness doctrine, we must all also accept the responsibility to die when the government decides that our lives are no longer of any value. That is the ultimate form of leftist fairness: The right to life, liberty and happiness, so long as the government bureaucracy decides it makes actuarial sense for us to possess it.
The Constitution is being stood on its head by the left, for whom Cuba is a better model of fairness than America. Now the rights which the Founders declared came only from God are depicted as coming from government, in which God no longer plays a part. The left in this country has succeeded finally in doing what the Bolsheviks did from the start: secularize the nation's public life, substituting their own ambitions, values, and power for that primary source of power from which all rights flow. It is the collectivist inevitability of which Trotsky, of all people, warned - the substitution of central power for popular sovereignty - and, excuse me my friends, but President Obama is the convenient stooge of that ideology.
The left has now succeeded in realizing the socialist vision which we, as twenty-year-olds in the '70s intoxicated ourselves with, and the result is that our system is poorer, more unfair, less dynamic and productive, less innovative and entrepreneurial, more unequal, more destructive of the human spirit, and makes far less sense politically, socially, and economically than did the one against which we were struggling. My generation has won, and I apologize for it.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
The Lie Lives On
Two friends have sent me links to an article that appeared in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer which reports that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has suspended twenty-one priests for the sexual molestation of children. This after the cardinal had stated that there were no guilty priests currently in the ministry in that diocese. The suspension is said to be the largest thus far in the priest sexual abuse scandal.
The report simply confirms what I and others have known for some time; namely, that the lies, the cover-up and the systematic protection of pedophiles among the Catholic clergy continue. Cardinal Rigali now brands himself as an active co-conspirator, having first attempted to deny the existence of these monsters, then having covered up for them, and only now having admitted to their crimes. As I have said before: If Rigali admits to twenty-one, then there are twenty-one more whom he has not yet exposed, and twenty-one more of whom he is not yet aware. The pattern is disgustingly consistent and predictable. The Catholic Church remains a conspiracy against the innocence of children, and the 'penitential Mass' which Rigali promises makes no difference, and only adds to the mounting hypocrisy.
Recently I wrote a screenplay on the subject of priest sexual abuse of children, and in the course of it, I found myself meditating on the extent of the clergy's criminal culpability. The Church continues to insist that the number of priest pedophiles is tiny, and their crimes, the rare exceptions. This is simply a lie, as the figures show. But there is a further lie beyond this numerical one. The character in my screenplay, a convicted priest molester, asserts that all of the Catholic clergy are guilty. His lawyer responds, surely, not all. To which the priest replies that those who did not commit the crimes covered them up, and those who did not cover them up knew about them, and those who did not know about them did not want to know. Priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, all are guilty.
I surprised myself when I wrote those lines, but upon reflection, I realize the truth of them. Catholic priests live in close-knit communities, sharing the same residence, the same meals, the same free time, the same common rooms. They eat together, pray together, play cards and talk and drive and get drunk together. In short, they live together, just as intimately and casually as does any family. Is it conceivable that in such a community, child rapists could exist unknown to the others? Ask yourself: When a community of priests finds a man suddenly transferred into its midst bearing with him the stench of scandal, watches his interactions with the boys of the parish, notes his behavior, his interests, his associations, and then sees him transferred out again just as suddenly, is it possible that they have no idea why?
To put it another way: Could you have a child rapist living in your home for months or years without knowing or at least suspecting what he was? Yet every rectory, every residence was a family, and in each and every one, pedophiles lived and prayed and ate and played and got drunk with the other priests. Those who did not commit the crimes covered them up, and those who did not cover them up knew about them and those who did not know about them did not want to know.
This last group is nearly the worst. They are moral cowards, accomplices to the molestations every bit as much as if they had lured the boys in or drugged them or held them down. Their stench almost equals that of the rapists, because they forfeited their vocation, their manliness, their morality, their humanity and their souls in turning their backs on what they knew or suspected was happening. They cannot hide behind their ignorance since their ignorance was willful. They left the innocent to their molesters, and now they claim they knew nothing. They are, in effect, like the Germans who claimed they knew nothing about the trains, about the camps, about the ovens. And, if Dante is correct, the hottest places in hell are reserved for them.
When will the scandal end? When the Church as it is currently constituted ends. When will the slate be wiped clean? For all the penitential Masses in the world, it will remain smudged with the tears and the tortured memories of violated children until the Church is cleansed of its clergy. To my mind, the only hope for the future of the Roman Church lies where it began: with the spirit of the Gospels in which Jesus said that if anyone violates a child it would be better for him that a stone were tied around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. All of the guilty lot of the Catholic clergy must be submerged beneath their collective guilt, they must be exposed, punished and repudiated by the faithful, if the Church is ever to emerge again pure and cleansed, and reclaim its right to minister to innocents.
The report simply confirms what I and others have known for some time; namely, that the lies, the cover-up and the systematic protection of pedophiles among the Catholic clergy continue. Cardinal Rigali now brands himself as an active co-conspirator, having first attempted to deny the existence of these monsters, then having covered up for them, and only now having admitted to their crimes. As I have said before: If Rigali admits to twenty-one, then there are twenty-one more whom he has not yet exposed, and twenty-one more of whom he is not yet aware. The pattern is disgustingly consistent and predictable. The Catholic Church remains a conspiracy against the innocence of children, and the 'penitential Mass' which Rigali promises makes no difference, and only adds to the mounting hypocrisy.
Recently I wrote a screenplay on the subject of priest sexual abuse of children, and in the course of it, I found myself meditating on the extent of the clergy's criminal culpability. The Church continues to insist that the number of priest pedophiles is tiny, and their crimes, the rare exceptions. This is simply a lie, as the figures show. But there is a further lie beyond this numerical one. The character in my screenplay, a convicted priest molester, asserts that all of the Catholic clergy are guilty. His lawyer responds, surely, not all. To which the priest replies that those who did not commit the crimes covered them up, and those who did not cover them up knew about them, and those who did not know about them did not want to know. Priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, all are guilty.
I surprised myself when I wrote those lines, but upon reflection, I realize the truth of them. Catholic priests live in close-knit communities, sharing the same residence, the same meals, the same free time, the same common rooms. They eat together, pray together, play cards and talk and drive and get drunk together. In short, they live together, just as intimately and casually as does any family. Is it conceivable that in such a community, child rapists could exist unknown to the others? Ask yourself: When a community of priests finds a man suddenly transferred into its midst bearing with him the stench of scandal, watches his interactions with the boys of the parish, notes his behavior, his interests, his associations, and then sees him transferred out again just as suddenly, is it possible that they have no idea why?
To put it another way: Could you have a child rapist living in your home for months or years without knowing or at least suspecting what he was? Yet every rectory, every residence was a family, and in each and every one, pedophiles lived and prayed and ate and played and got drunk with the other priests. Those who did not commit the crimes covered them up, and those who did not cover them up knew about them and those who did not know about them did not want to know.
This last group is nearly the worst. They are moral cowards, accomplices to the molestations every bit as much as if they had lured the boys in or drugged them or held them down. Their stench almost equals that of the rapists, because they forfeited their vocation, their manliness, their morality, their humanity and their souls in turning their backs on what they knew or suspected was happening. They cannot hide behind their ignorance since their ignorance was willful. They left the innocent to their molesters, and now they claim they knew nothing. They are, in effect, like the Germans who claimed they knew nothing about the trains, about the camps, about the ovens. And, if Dante is correct, the hottest places in hell are reserved for them.
When will the scandal end? When the Church as it is currently constituted ends. When will the slate be wiped clean? For all the penitential Masses in the world, it will remain smudged with the tears and the tortured memories of violated children until the Church is cleansed of its clergy. To my mind, the only hope for the future of the Roman Church lies where it began: with the spirit of the Gospels in which Jesus said that if anyone violates a child it would be better for him that a stone were tied around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. All of the guilty lot of the Catholic clergy must be submerged beneath their collective guilt, they must be exposed, punished and repudiated by the faithful, if the Church is ever to emerge again pure and cleansed, and reclaim its right to minister to innocents.
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