Defiant Chastity

When popular culture is relentlessly permissive and debauched, the only true rebellion is to exhibit self-denial and fearsome wholesomeness. In spite of these undeniable contemporary circumstances, most kids today still choose to “rebel” by being utterly conformist in mindset and behavior; they show their supposed “individuality” and freedom from society’s constraints, that is, by doing exactly what the culture instructs them to do. Inter alia, they wear tight-fitting clothes, get pierced in various unseemly bodily regions, and consent to have their lower backs plastered with tacky tattoos; they drink, take drugs, and engage in numerous, random sexual encounters called “hook-ups.”

Perhaps such behavior was provocative at one time, in the pricklier clime of a more conservative Zeitgeist. Today, however, it is truly yawn-worthy, more of the same ol’ same ol’. To use the parlance of the times, it is simply “lame,” and not in the least bold, to engage in such ubiquitous activities. There is nothing exciting about these presumed “transgressions” anymore. The only truly transgress-ive act is one that rejects the notion of such pathetic faux-defiance with steely contempt, which opts instead for that which the sheep-like majority now commonly shuns as “reactionary.” Put succinctly, licentiousness is now utterly boring and bourgeois, while chastity is the sexy new taboo.

Given this fact, why have we yet to see a lustily defiant alternative culture of chastity emerge? Much as this trend begs to be born, it still remains largely unseen in today’s sea of tiresomely depraved bawdiness. There is, of course, the “contemporary Christian” scene, but it is an all-too-brittle and toothless cultural phenomenon, marked more by absence than anything else; it is, more often than not, a supremely sanitized aesthetic affair; relentlessly and determinedly bland, cleansed of bad words and racy content, the fare favored by this crowd is usually harmless, shorn of all rough edges. But the choice to reject the idols of the age, and to embrace what is traditionally known as “virtue” ought not be construed as a mere retreat into the safety and security of the goody-good-hood. The decision to pursue virtue and eschew vice is, in fact, the exact opposite of this depiction. One does not truly court danger until one opts to scorn the principalities and powers of the times, along with the debased hedonism these authorities relentlessly champion as the essence of “cool.”

We live, after all, in a time when it is often more debilitating to one’s reputation to be labeled a “virgin” than a “slut,” where to exhibit undue “intolerance” for sexual immorality is a far worse crime than indulging in such behavior, where a “prig” is denounced to an infinitely greater extent than a confirmed rake. Surely, then, deciding to be chaste takes courage and gumption, as well as self-discipline. When a young person refrains from premarital sex, an activity his body aches to take part in, he in effect doubles his calamity; not only does his society throw the alluring prospect in his face constantly, but he also invites the ridicule of his peers, who think him a “freak” and a “loser.” If he responds that he thinks it best to remain chaste until marriage, he is in return held in contempt as “prudish” and “judgmental.”

Being willing to countenance all of these epithets automatically thrown his way—to hang a defy one’s own hormones, as well as one’s peers and rulers simultaneously, takes a special kind of nonconforming spirit. The extent of gleeful defiance necessary for such an endeavor could almost be called “punk” in a way. And indeed, there is one subspecies of the burgeoning punk scene called “straight edge,” which makes clean living—no booze, no drugs, no sex—a kind of mandatory creed. But it’s one thing to subscribe to a fad, and quite another to positively embrace a way of life.

Both the contemporary Christians and the punked-out straight-edgers, then, fail to hit the mark. The former have an overarching transcendental mindset, which is greatly needed, but their approach to engaging the culture is altogether too wimpy, smiley, and hippy-dippyish; they are easily dismissed as lightweights. The straight-edge adherents, for their part, bring a needed sharp and pointed aesthetic to defend their creed of choice, but they generally lack a metaphysical orientation for all of their behavioral prescriptions.

What is needed is a movement which combines the spiritual rootedness of the contemporary Christian milieu with the hard-nosed approach of the straight-edge scene. But just where can we find such practitioners of idealistic Realpolitik? In my second installment of this treatise, I will explore an intriguing possibility, one that has taken shape in the last few years and whose momentum still appears to be gathering.

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At present, the so-called “melting pot” of America has a less than salubrious effect upon the moral well-being of succeeding generations of new citizens. For in the human stew of this pot, the scum has most assuredly risen to the top. The stately and conservative Old World traditions, meanwhile, are consistently evaporated into nothingness under the boil of supposed “progress.”

If many immigrants to the United States are drawn to the economic opportunities and political freedoms promised by this nation whose very existence rests on the premise of “liberty,” they soon find their children under the spell of a very different kind of “American dream”—one with an unsavory hip-hop soundtrack and a pornographic storyline. In this debased cultural environment, boys learn to be groping, grubby, hedonistic “pimps” and “playas,” and girls learn to be angry, agendized *feministas* and brazen whores, if not both. In just a generation or so, the values of restraint and modesty disappear under the blast of the New World’s relentless insistence upon an end to “repression.”

Thus “Americanization” is almost synonymous with “moral erosion.” In most cases, the trajectory of the second and third generation immigrant family is one of increasingly relaxed sexual morals, with greater and greater tolerance of immodest dressing, premarital sex, cohabitation, and other formerly forbidden habits and activities.

Does chastity stand a chance, when such wholesaling bulldozing of traditional notions of restraint is so ubiquitous? Strangely enough, it does, at least among one particular, and rapidly growing, demographic: Mormons.

Among the Latter Day Saints, the capital of whose empire is located in Salt Lake City, Utah and whose presence is strongly felt across much of the American West, an authentically alternative youth culture has taken shape, one whose moral teachings are vigorous, uncompromising, and unchanging. Great emphasis is laid on self-discipline and sacrifice, especially among young men who choose to go across the world on two-year missions for the sake of the Church. What is more, marriage very often occurs among college-aged men and women; the bonds of matrimony are strengthened by the pillars of faith (Mormons hold marriage to be an eternal covenant), and the practical effects of such a custom are also beneficial—as in days of yore, being wed early helps to cut down on incidences of unchastity among youth who might be tempted to fornicate if they remained single, while societal pressure from a conservative culture helps to discourage those who wait to marry from indulging in such still-verboten acts.

Many outsiders to the Mormon world are inclined to view such young believers as a monolithic cadre of brainwashed cult-like followers with weak wills and closed minds. There are a couple of retorts that it is entirely appropriate to make in response to such assertions. First of all, are the irreligious or religiously-indifferent youth of the majority culture who follow the whims of the Zeitgeist without question “brainwashed”? Why declare the chaste “brainwashed” while the unchaste are somehow viewed as sublimely “free”? Perhaps everyone is indoctrinated to one degree or another; what matters is the fitness and overall correctness of the doctrine which shapes us.

But the other way to refute such charges of brainwashed conformism among young Mormons is to point to the diversity of creative expression that has emerged from Mormon artists in recent years.

Consider the cinematic comedy sensation Napoleon Dynamite (2004), written and directed by LDS filmmaker Jared Hess. This wonderfully quirky film is populated by oddballs whose sensibilities and fashion sense seem frozen in time from some indeterminate era of the recent past, yet paradoxically enough the movie also radiates a smart, conspicuously contemporary vibe. While indeed squeaky-clean (no sex, no violence, no cussing), Napoleon Dynamite never feels antiseptic, after the manner of many a contemporary Christian movie that has made a feeble stab at crossover success in recent years.

Or examine the musical oeuvre of Killers frontman and songwriter Brendon Flowers, an observant Mormon. The subjects of his songs often tread on “edgy” territory (“Jenny Was a Friend of Mine” is a first-person account from the point of view of a murderer, while “Andy, You’re a Star” appears to revolve around the speaker’s gay crush on a classmate), yet the final note is one of attempted renunciation of sin and aching hope for redemption, presented with a moral seriousness that one seldom finds among contemporary pop musicians. The same may be said of all-LDS Utah new wave band Neon Trees, whose lyrics in their new debut album “Habits” reflect a repentance for past transgressions as well as the ever-present temptation to commit new ones, all within the context of an acknowledged ethical framework, with a full awareness of consequences. Again, this sensibility forms a marked contrast to the barely-sentient, debauched, bump-and-grind presentation we most often find in top-40 radio songs today, while also avoiding the opposite extreme of dippy, ridiculously cheery, airbrushed, bland, morally simplistic fare that mars much of the “Christian” music subgenre.

Lest the reader misunderstand: I am not Mormon, and I’m certainly not advocating a mass conversion to the LDS creed as crucial to any kind of moral resurgence among youth. But I certainly think that the example of Mormondom as a vigorous culture with a transcendent vision which advocates a sexual morality greatly at odds with the free-for-all of mainstream culture represents a model worthy of being followed, regardless of one’s personal beliefs.

Indeed, if a hearty culture of chastity and temperance is to re-emergence, it will likely have to take the form of what Catholic author Peter Kreeft has provocatively called an “ecumenical jihad,” uniting moral conservatives of all faith traditions, including atheists and agnostics, against the blight of permissiveness which reigns in America and the West generally today. What is required to put this dream into action is both deep-seated conviction and full-throated defiance, both ardent faith and blatant chutzpah. Both qualities are badly needed to challenge the prevailing pernicious cultural trends and initiate a true moral renaissance .

Regal Radical Chic

While the multiple Oscar-nominated film The King’s Speech may be called a passably entertaining period piece, it is far from being a great movie. The fact that this film has won such overwhelmingly effusive plaudits from the Academy and critical establishment does, however, raise a fascinating question: Can a filmmaker, by referencing every acceptable cinematic “meme” and dishing out all the requisite thematic “tropes,” succeed at manipulating supposedly educated and erudite people into thinking that his film is far better than it actually is?

Put differently, can a mediocre and forgettable flick come to be regarded as “excellent” if it tells the chattering class exactly what it wants to hear and shows it just what it aches to see?

Apparently, the answer is “yes,” as always, which shouldn’t overly surprise us. The chattering class, for all of their chatter, are after all just like every other group of people; they have their own pet hobbyhorses and obsessions; they delight in certain types of settings and story arcs; they enthuse over specific actors and directors; their collective heart swells, as if on cue, at the passionate oration of particularly treasured sentiments.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that their aesthetic barometer is always wrong. The fact that The King’s Speech is sheer, unadulterated Anglophile porn by no means makes it bad; that it provides exquisite bait for the SWPL-set doesn’t mean that it’s disposable trash that ought to be reflexively shunned by white nationalists, pre-conciliar Catholics, home schoolers, paleo-libertarians, and other defiant dissidents on the alternative Right. In fact, the film is largely inoffensive, especially compared to other Zeitgeist-affirming heartwarmers and thrillers of recent years. It is nowhere near as obnoxious as, for example, last year’s Avatar, which successfully sold deracinated Western self-hatred to the drooling masses, who lapped up the cool 3-D special effects and awesome space battles and swallowed the accompanying poisonous propaganda with nary a choke or a sputter of protest. It is even slightly less offputting than The Last Station, the recent art-house biopic bore which tore all of the teeth out of Leo Tolstoy’s uncompromisingly ascetic, nonconformist thought, making him a cuddly and unthreatening old dullard who didn’t really mean all the wild and crazy things he said.

Still, while not quite a Two Hour Hate-fest of relentlessly “correct” thought-indoctrination, The King’s Speech does feature that combination always reliably loved and appreciated by our cultural cognoscenti: costumes and set pieces from the exotic, unfamiliar past presented in tandem with the advocacy of “safe” values from the dreadfully ubiquitous present.

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Like 2006’s The Queen, this most critically fawned-over of new films take decided aim at the already much-assailed stiff-upper-lip mentality of stodgy old royalists, siding with a patently modern-day “better ‘out’ than ‘in’” kind of attitude.  Like The Queen, The King’s Speech is not-so-subtly anti-hierarchy and pro-social equality, as well as being anti-repression and pro-emotionalism; it equates the unabashed use of profanity, for example, with a worthy liberation of spirit, even as it assails traditional ritual and formalism as an unavoidably bogus indulgence in pomposity.

Thus, while it doesn’t touch on racism, sexism, “homophobia,” or any of the other truly tiresome and egregiously fetishized hobbyhorses perpetually flogged by the ideological rulers of our age, The King’s Speech is nevertheless fully in lockstep with the Zeitgeist’s consistently selective deconstructionism: if a way of thinking is old, it ought to be challenged, and all of its surely abundant shortcomings exposed; if a mode of thought is modern, on the other hand, the truth of its premises are considered self-evident, and resisting it makes you a stick-in-the-mud at best, a villain at worst.

The film is, of course, “based on a true story,” a pronouncement which discerning moviegoers know to take with several grains, if not an entire shaker, of salt. The plot concerns the Duke of York (Colin Firth), the soon-to-be King George, and his struggles with a humiliating and debilitating stammer, making every public speaking appearance an ordeal for everyone involved. His unlikely (meaning highly predictable) savior turns out to be Lionel Louge (Geoffrey Rush), an avidly uncouth Australian-born speech specialist with (again predictably) unorthodox methods; indeed, his treatment includes a psychotherapeutic component, whereby a client relates the traumas of his past to his present speaking difficulties. The Duke, we soon find— much to our utter lack of surprise (we all know the script, don’t we?)—was treated unkindly by his family, whose emotional distance and frequent verbal abuse and mockery apparently traumatized him and provoked his speech problems when he was a boy.

For reasons never given, Lionel is completely opposed to such social conventions as calling people by their titles. He insists on calling the Duke/King “Bertie,” much to the latter’s initial chagrin; later, however, His Highness begins to come around; we are to think him commendable for losing his stuffiness and bearing with this wisdom-filled eccentric commoner (who later, we find, doesn’t even have a license to practice his trade). In a crucial scene, when the king-to-be is stressed out about his upcoming coronation ceremony, Lionel helps him get over his fear by mocking the event and calling it “rubbish, rubbish, rubbish”; he then enrages “Bertie” by brazenly sitting on the throne for a moment, a clear breach of protocol. But this is a part of Lionel’s plan to help his high-and-mighty charge get over his consternation; after weathering an angry tirade from the flummoxed royal, he then kindly takes to his feet and tells Bertie, “You’re the bravest man I know—you’ll make a fine King.” The king is mollified; he has had his Janov-like emotional outburst, gotten his rage out of his system, and is now ready to carry on with his kingly duties.

The relationship between the two men is thus analogous to the teacher-mentor pairing we have seen many times before at the movies. The teacher is, but of course, a “cool” kind of guy who breaks the rules and lets it all hang out; the mentor, on the other hand, is a stuffy, repressed character who learns, under the tutelage of his enlightened and free-spirited master, to cut loose and have a little fun. (Just once I’d like to see a movie about a “fun,” uncouth guy who learns to act dignified under the direction of a prim-and-proper teacher, but I’m not holding my breath…)

Again, The King’s Speech, for all of its dutiful recitation of post-‘60s clichés, is not an offensive film per se. It’s more of a dully predictable film about a supposedly exciting, allegedly UNpredictable character, one who’s unpredictable, as I have shown, in all of the predictable ways. Yet being told what we already “know”—about the badness of repression and tradition and the goodness of unorthodoxy and freethinking—is somehow meant to make for bracing cinematic fare. So the chattering class continues to titillate itself by flaunting its utterly boring, completely unsexy “kinks” before a progressively more mind-numbed and brainwashed world. And the Academy, as always, rewards such spectacle with fanfare and praise . . .  and ever-more flatulent spectacle.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Darren Aronofksy's remarkable new movie Black Swan is a companion piece to his equally striking 2009 offering, The Wrestler. The two films take place in settings that could not possibly be more different, yet each tells essentially the same story, a story that is undeniably relevant to our age and culture.

In both, the protagonist is an artist fanatically attached to his craft, to the exclusion of all else in life, even his own well-being. The bulked-up, over-the-hill professional wrestler portrayed by Mickey Rourke can't fathom giving up the career that once brought him stardom and acclaim, even though it's led to his physical deterioration, late middle-age decrepitude, and severe heart problems. Meanwhile, the outwardly frail, inwardly driven and emotionally obsessive Broadway ballerina played by Natalie Portman dances on the very edge of mental collapse, her behavior increasingly erratic, marked by bouts of frightening hallucinations and episodes of queasy self-abuse.

Rourke's character parks his trailer among the down-home Red State denizens of the pro-wrestling circuit, while Portman's dwells with the Blue State New York cultural cognoscenti, but Aronofsky evinces no chauvinism for one society over the other, and both films are utterly bereft of any taint of condescension. The setting, while meticulously detailed and enjoyably authentic, is merely backdrop, however; the real story concerns the central character's willful self-destruction for the sake of his art.

Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (2008)

Depressing as such a premise may sound, it is worth noting that the tragic denouement in both movies is paradoxically shot through with an exquisite jolt of exhilaration and triumph. The hero's determination to achieve artistic perfection at the cost of his health and sanity may expose him as spectacularly imprudent, but it inspires us just the same. There is indeed a grand romanticism to such gestures, one that temporarily shakes us out of our postmodern spiritual torpor and moves us to admiration.

One thinks of Hamlet's self-disgust at his own inaction, leading him to indict the couch potato mentality particularly endemic to so many in our age:

What is a man

If his chief and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.

Aronofsky's doomed wrestler and fated ballerina may be depraved idolaters, suffering as they do for no great purpose beyond personal fame and glory, but by damn, they are at least willing to suffer for something. They throw themselves with crazy abandon into their roles, ultimately not caring that the consequences for their monomania will be grave indeed.

Both movies caused me to think of Yukio Mishima's excruciatingly brilliant short story "Patriotism," in which a young, right-wing revolutionary attempts to restore what he regards as Japan's lost imperial majesty. He fails in his task, then commits seppuku--an act the narrative describes in horrifying detail--as a final gesture of fidelity to his cause.

Yukio Mishima during coup attempt, 1970

To be sure, Mishima's hero is a step above Aronofsky's single-minded protagonists, since he seeks not his own glory, but rather that of his nation. Still, there is an undeniable whiff of desperation about his self-inflicted ritual disembowelment. This brave man seeks, and finds, honor in death, but not transcendence; such can only be gained by dying for TRUTH, as opposed to mere aesthetics or ideology.

While such deaths as these are in a sense noble and tragic, they do not amount to martyrdom. To be a martyr, one must be willing to give one's life for faith. And in order to die for faith, one must first live for it. Which isn't easy to do in the midst of a culture that sees hedonism as healthy and self-denial as neurotic.

Yet one suspects that even Aronofsky--by all accounts a secular Jew--sees through to the heart of the dilemma. In The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's stripper girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) enthuses over his numerous bruises, and remarks how they remind her of this kick-ass movie she saw called The Passion of the Christ, which featured in its preface a line from the Bible: "By his wounds we were healed."

It is unclear whether or not Tomei's character knows the significance of the words she speaks, but Aronofsky is clearly using Mel Gibson's controversial classic (whose gory and ballsy aesthetic he clearly appreciates) to underscore the difference between true, redemptive and transcendent suffering inspired by faith, and its counterfeit, whereby one sacrifices one's flesh for no real purpose. While the latter may show guts and inspire pathos, its resonance is ultimately only negative and nihilistic; it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

We can, and should, do better. Let us struggle to lead good lives, and when the time comes, to die good deaths, never betraying what we ardently believe to be true.

Ten Shocking Predictions

1. I predict that the dispossesed majority in America will NOT revolt in 2011.

2. I predict that the dominant paradigm will NOT be subverted in 2011.

3. I predict that a formerly virginal young female star will attempt to shock the world by unveiling a sexy new image in 2011.

4. I predict that Glen Beck will predict the imminent collapse of America in 2011, but will use vague enough language to be able to backtrack when America remains just as repugnantly existent as ever come December 31, 2011.

5. I predict that Republican hacks will make jokes about Obama's teleprompter and Biden's hair plugs in 2011, and will crack themselves up in the process.

6. I predict that Democrat hacks will make jokes about Sarah Palin's alleged lack of intelligence in 2011, and will crack themselves up in the process.

7. I predict that someone famous will get in trouble for making allegedy racist or homophobic statements in some public or private venue in 2011, and will be forced to offer a humiliated apology for his supposed verbal malefactions. I further predict that said malefactions will NOT be forgiven by representatives of the dominant paradigm (which, by the way, will NOT be subverted) until he does further work to begin the "healing process," which he will immediately do forthwith, and that after he does them forthwith, the representatives of the dominant paragigm will CONTINUE to withhold forgiveness indefinitely.

8. I predict that powerful evangelical churches will pimp for Israel in 2011.

9. I predict that NPR will pimp for gay acceptance in 2011. 

10. I predict that a lot of drearily predictable things will happen in 2011.

Happy New Year!

The Abolition of Christmas

A concerted effort is currently being made by some cultural dissidents to expose the wide-ranging campaign undertaken by our betters to expunge all aspects of Christ from the holiday of Christmas, and what's more, to eradicate all aspects of Christmas from the gift-exchanging season of late December. In fact, this "war on Christmas" has been ranging for decades, epitomized in the numerous instances of newly renamed "holiday trees," corporate-mandated salutations of "happy holidays" or "season's greetings" instead of "merry Christmas," and forced removals of manger scenes from public places.

It is quite true, as Samuel Francis has recently pointed out, that the campaign against Christmas is a mere skirmish in the more widespread war against the West. Christmas is, after all, a Christian holy day, and Christianity is the spiritual foundation upon which Western civilization was built; hostility toward unabashed celebration of the birth of Christ does indeed spring from a hatred of all things Occidental. But it is a bit more complicated, and more bizarrely perverse, than that. For the war against the West is largely being waged by ... Westerners.

We are hastening our own demise by embracing the idea that it's tacky to believe in Christmas, or, at least, to be too open about about our religion in public, in front of "those who might believe differently." But it isn't representatives of opposing religions who are spearheading this movement against Christianity. Instead, it is mostly nominal Christians — that is to say, Christian Westerners who have lost the faith of their fathers but occasionally step into a church to witness a relative's funeral or a friend's wedding — who want to remove the baby Jesus from the proverbial inn and banish him to the proverbial manger.

For those folk, their very cultural identity (white, Western, and at least historically Christian) is a source of no pride but only endless embarrassment; they will do whatever they can to distance themselves from their heritage. Ironically, in so doing they are only embracing what it means to be a white, Western, nominal Christian in the post-modern 21st-century Western world. In their very diffidence and opportunistic self-loathing (opportunistic, since being anti-white, anti-Western, and anti-Christian is the only way to exhibit oneself as a "respectable" person these days, if one is white, Western, and of Christian heritage), they increasingly embody the debased, degenerated disposition of their own kind. They personify the suicide of the West.

One aspect of the anti-Christmas movement, however, hasn't yet received much attention. To understand what motivates the negative attitude toward commemorating the birth of Christ (an attitude which, of course, disingenuously disguises itself as mere scrupulous regard for "pluralism"), we must both know what Christmas is "all about," and what, by contrast, our culture is increasingly "all about."

Boiled down to its essence, Christmas is "about" the birth of a baby. A most extraordinary baby, it is true; a baby who is God, no less. A baby whose conception came not of an earthly father. In spite of his divine lineage, however, Jesus as an infant appears to have no special powers. He is just as helpless as any other newborn. He is dependent on his mother for sustenance, and, being born in a stable with "no crib for his bed," as one children's Christmas hymn notes, he must have protection from the elements or else he will perish. Another hymn, recently written, movingly speaks of Jesus as "a child" who "shivers in the cold." These descriptions, based on Gospel accounts, do not sound much like a child whose true identity is the Only Begotten Son of the all-powerful Creator of the universe. If Christmas is true, if Christ was God, then one grasps that there must exist a subtle, more profound reality behind the obvious.

The birth of Christ, the incarnation of God as man, is held by Christians to reinforce the dignity and value of every living human soul, living and dead, born and unborn. Contra the pagans, who saw some lives as of great value but others as expendable and lacking in worth, the Church held to the doctrine that all human life is sacred, being created in the image and likeness of God. In a divine irony, the doctrine that sided with the weak and defenseless against the strong and powerful eventually won the day. The God who was born outside among farm animals and who died as a common criminal in a particularly excruciating and humiliating form of Roman capital punishment managed somehow to vanquish the wide pantheon of Roman gods, who, had they actually existed, would never have dreamed of either coming into being or perishing in so lowly — so human — a manner. Against all odds, the mighty Empire of Rome fell to the baby who shivered in the cold at birth and writhed on a cross at death.

Today, in the post-modern, post-Christian West, we have slipped back into paganism. As King Herod slaughtered thousands of children in an effort to prevent the emergence of the Jewish Messiah, so today millions of babies are martyred by "choice." Within such a cultural trajectory, it isn't hard to grasp why so many in the West today want to abort, as it were, the celebration of the birth of God. For the baby Christ, so fragile in Mary's womb and hardly less so upon his emergence moments later wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger, reminds us of that which we would rather forget: every incarnated human being is conceived by divine intervention. The lives God has given to us are not ours to dispose of at our convenience. Father forgive us, for we know not what we do.

Suicide of the West

Dennis Mangan recently discussed in these vitual pages a new study which claims that Middle Eastern suicide bombers are more sad sacks than wild-eyed fanatics, driven towards their explosive final act not by Allah-ardor but simple world-weariness and clinical depression.

I'm sure that much will be said about these findings, and debates will be held about whether or not they bear up under scrutiny. What I find worth noting, however, is the extent to which post-modern Western notions inform and undergird all such attempts to understand a manifestation of a foreign, and in some ways pre-modern culture--one whose fundamental values diverge radically from ours.

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In my novel Considering Suicide, the narrator contemplates the enemy in America's so-called "war on terror," an enemy with a new face, finding most notorious and recognizable expression in the anonymous, militant jihadi, who aims to die in a spectacular attack against the infidel and thus become a holy martyr. How do we comprehend such a phenomenon in the secular, hedonistic Western world, where death is most often viewed as an enormous calamity to be avoided for as long as one possibly can?

The lazy way to attempt to process such an unfamiliar mindset is to insist that, deep down, the representative of the foreign culture in question really wants exactly the same things we want--to assert that we and he are essentially the same, extraneous external differences aside--moreover, to declare that his claims to be different from ux are mere pretentious drivel and humbug. Thus, the Suicide narrator observes:

Westerners snort that these "human bombs" do what they do out of base desire. After all, a martyr's death is to be rewarded with the flesh of seventy beautiful virigns in the next life. It is easy to mock, lest we forget what is plainly significant: these fellows actually BELIEVE in the next life. If their understanding of Heaven seems risibly simplistic, they are still willing to die for it. They have faith.

Young men in the West, meanwhile, caught up though they may be in a crass, hyper-sexualized culture, nevertheless know one thing that, in contemporary parlance, "sucks" worse than not "getting some": namely,
having to die:

Palestinian adolescents may foolishly seek carnal delights in the next life, but we (Westerners) demand our pleasures in the here and now. Actually dying in order to get laid would be asking too much, even for the horniest of our teenage boys.

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Of course, all men are carnal and sensually-inclined to an extent, and everyone possesses an inborn fear of death. But the effort to circumscribe the profile of the suicide bomber, rendering him either some sort of deferred hedonist (who aims to sow his righteously martyred oats in the next life with a bevy of dark-eyed virgins), or a morbid-minded depressive (who rushes into the arms of death due to a pathological aversion to the troubles of existence), simply won't wash. Such reductive categorizations wrongly assume the mores of the contemporary West to be universally normative. But if all men are driven to have sex and shun death by nature, it is nevertheless also true that culture is immensely powerful in either mitigating or amplifying these ever-present drives.

We live in a culture in which scantily-clad or naked women are commonly flaunted on billboards, magazine covers, and television screens; in which tight jeans, bikinis, and miniskirts are common public female apparel. Our culture indulges, where it doesn't actively encourage, teenage sexuality and premarital cohabitation; our public schools hand out condoms to sixth graders; our ruling class presses us to view religiously-informed sexual restraint as a malignant and dangerous condition, requring psychological intervention.

A culture with values like these without question will produce a very different type of man than a culture which requires women to wear veils, forbids sexually explicit material in all media, and fiercely denounces sexual intercourse outside of wedlock, under penalty of death.

Likewise, a secular culture which sees religious doctrine as largely irrelevant, a "whatever works for you" proposition where flexible principles are the only "must"; which views "living the good life" (however defined) as the highest possible good, while shunning talk of death as depressing, will in all probability NOT churn out a generation of men willing to blow themselves to smithereens, not even for the posthumous reward of getting to carnally enjoy seventy Mylie Cyrus or Taylor Swift clones for all eternity.

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Western perspectives on Islamic self-immolators are almost hopelessly soaked in the very "ethnocentrism" so commonly assailed by Frankfurt-school trained Western anthropologists: we can only understand such people in the light of our own cultural assumptions. The fact that the conductors of such studies are in most cases politically aligned with just such anthropologists and other left-wing academic types helps to underscore the curious position of the post-modern, contemporary West.

For the contemporary West's most prominent and politically powerful spokesmen are liberals, the sort of people who do little but relentlessly apologize for the historical crimes--both real and imagined--of Western civilization, while at the same time endlessly glorifying primitive, Third World and non-Western cultures as superior, more humane, more authentic, and more aesthetically pleasing than anything forged by the brutal and genocidal White man, that despicable cancer of the planet.

Of course, reflexively scorning the "white, male, patriarchal, heterosexist" West may help this lot feel good about themselves and reinforce their endless affinity for hearty self-congratulation, but it also renders them utterly unable to counter the numerous patently Illiberal ideologies, such as radical Islam, which are on the rise across the globe, threatening Western liberalism's long-term hegemony.

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Awash in debased sensuality, stricken with spiritual anemia, and occupied by an intelligensia which smugly loathes its own culture's philosophical foundations, the West lurches grimly towards collapse. In the "war on terror," the "terrorists" will almost certainly win eventually, because they alone are possessed of a simultaneous willingness to control the lusts of their loins and a determination to fly to their deaths when necessary.

Perhaps the typical suicide bomber is indeed a "brainwashed" indvidual, as is often alleged. Could the same not be said of the typical young Western male of today, who has been trained to esteem alcohol, parties, and "pussy," and who gives himself over to this lifestyle with enthusiastic abandon? To whom more likely belongs the future: the inheritors of the legacy of Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, or the worshippers of Steve Stifler and Van Wilder?

Rubber Souls

The ideology of sexual liberation continues to be the abiding obsession of high-profile opinion shapers in the post-modern Western world. Indeed, in the mindset of today's ruling class, the drive to undermine traditional notions of libidinal restraint trumps all other agendas, including such familiar standards as the avid celebration of "diversity" and the fierce fomentation of white self-hatred. If, as the saying goes, the Puritan's greatest abiding fear was that somebody, somewhere was having a good time, our contemporary societal elite's most visceral apprehension stems from the notion that somebody, somewhere may be learning to be-- horror of horrors--sexually repressed.

Thus, for example, we commonly see this group express furious, feral hatred against the idea of abstinence-only education in schools. Children must learn about condoms and birth control pills, these "experts" who wish to usurp our parental authority sternly inform us; after all, they say, teenagers are going to have sex anyway, so it's best they do it "safely," and avoid getting pregnant or catching a nasty disease. Yet this entire line of pseudo-reasoning is profoundly disengenuous. We certainly never hear it said: "Kids, we think it's best for you not to use racist, sexist, or homophobic language, but if you do choose to talk that way, at least wear protective equipment to prevent injury to yourselves should anyone get offended and try to hurt you... And by the way, though we'd rather you refrain from smoking cigarettes, or bullying your classmates, or polluting the environment, or doing other types of things that we abhor... hey, it's your life; we know you're all strong-willed adolescents, so at least don't be TOTALLY irresponsible when you decide to do these terrible things we know we can't possibly stop you from doing..."

Assuredly, on these and other matters, the contemporary cultural opinion shaper is undaunted by the realization that his efforts to reform young people's behavior won't always succeed, that in fact there will remain many teenagers who continue to use racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs; who go on smoking cigarettes, bullying nerds, polluting Mother Earth, and committing all sorts of other unspeakable atrocities, no matter how often the opinion shaper and his cohorts exhort them to do otherwise. Yet knowing that his impassioned crusades against these behaviors won't be entirely effective doesn't stop the crusader of this stripe from trying to bring about such changes in today's youth; in fact, the unlikelihood of creating a significantly better world fires him with pride at the noble heights of his own ideals. In fact, he luxuriates in his status as an enlightened person, a member of what Thomas Sowell called the "annointed" crowd.

"You might say I'm a dreamer," he may tell you with a smug, wan smile, quoting his favorite song, "but I'm not the only one..."

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Yet this same lot of ardent crusaders becomes suddenly and unaccountably pragmatic when it comes to the notion of trying to stop teens from having sex. Abstinence and chastity are dismissed as "unrealistic" concepts; kids are going to do what they want, no matter what anybody tells them, etc. What most of those who raise this objection will not admit is that their seeming pragmatism on this matter is a ruse;  they don't oppose abstinence-only education for reasons of expediency, but on principle. That is to say, they are opposed to chastity and supportive of permissiveness.

They don't want a return to the mores of "the 1950s" or "the Victorian age" (these two distinct time periods have grown to be the main epocal scapegoats flogged by the permissive-ists for some reason, although traditional sexual morality in fact held sway in many other eras of the past as well). They want the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and '70s to rage on, and not be arrested or reversed.

And mostly, they have gotten their way. While the more lurid manifestations of the new permissiveness that cropped up in the early days of the sexual revolution have vanished ("key parties" like the one depcited in Ang Lee's horrifying movie "The Ice Age," group orgies, "swinger" couples, and the like), they have been replaced by less grotesque but far more significant behaviors. Hardly anyone waits until marriage to have sexual intercourse anymore; serial fornication and "hook-ups" are common events among young people, causing little discernable guilt or pangs of conscience; moreover, the practice of cohabitation is barely even looked at askance these days. Yet for all that, and much more, the permissive-ists still seem to live in constant fear of a coming sanctimonious crackdown, ushered in by all those mean and scheming Religious Right-types. And among this feared and hated group, none is more loathed than the Roman Catholic Church, with its celibate all-male priesthood, its inflexible moral laws, and its still-widespread power and relevance in an increasingly secularized West.

Thus, when Pope Benedict recently remarked to a Vatican reporter, in an offhand way, that in certain particularly egregious cases of debauched sexual behavior, use of a condom may make a grievous sin slightly less deplorable, it was bound to be misconstrued. News outlets across the Western world represented Benedict's extreme hypothetical scenario as representing a "stunning reversal" on the Church's teaching on contraceptives.

In fact, as anyone with a brain and powers of discernment can comprehend, it was no such thing: neither a "reversal" of any doctrine, nor particularly "stunning." But one's tendency towards hyperbole shifts into overdrive when one confronts an enemy one doesn't understand, an enemy that one clearly perceives as formidable. And the fact that so many promoters of permissiveness are so anxious to find a chink in the Holy Father's armor ought to give one pause.

Flawed as the contemporary post-Vatican II church may be, its leader still makes our cultural Marxist rulers sweat, quake in their birkenstocks, and foam at the mouth like rabid poodles. That's no mean feat. All of us who wish to prevent the "suicide of the West" should say a prayer, or at least think good thoughts, on behalf of this two thousand year old institution which still holds certain "outmoded" standards unashamedly against a depraved, ruthless Zeitgeist whose corrosive influence threatens us all.

The Bishop and the Tribe

Put yourself, for a moment, in the position where Bishop Eddie Long -- that sharp-dressing, jewelry-flashing, Rolls-driving Servant of de Lawd who presides over New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, an Atlanta, Georgia Black megachurch -- claims to find himself.

You're a pastor of a church body with a massive congregation, one very influential in your community. You are respected, admired, even in many cases idolized, as a true man of God. But you did not enter your life's calling for the adulation; you are in fact completely sincere in your piety. The last thing you'd ever want to do is cause scandal for your flock. If any indiscretion on your part were discovered, the resultant damage to your own reputation would concern you significantly less than the disillusionment it might create among your parishioners.

Now imagine that several troubled teenage boys, to whom you had been giving counsel, have suddenly accused you of sexual improprieties. The claims are totally fabricated, part of a malicious plot cooked up against you by your enemies. You know you are innocent, but then clearing your own name is of far less import to you than ensuring that no Christian is led away from his faith by these scurrilous charges.

So, you show up and immediately and forthrightly DENY the charges, right?

You tell your congregation, in no uncertain terms, that it's all a pack of lies invented by some desperate people for appalling, base, vile reasons. Yet, being a man of God and a believer in compassion and forgiveness, you express pity for this gang that has arisen against you to slander your good name. They know not what they do, you insist; they are bearing false witness, and God knows what's in our hearts, they have certainly incurred his wrath, and need our prayers most of all...

Putting myself in Long's place, I, for one, would undoubtedly say these things, given that I were, indeed, an innocent man, sincere in his religious convictions. But then, as anyone could confirm, I am not Bishop Eddie Long. And he did not respond in accordance with any of my above recommendations when accused of just such improprieties two months ago.

Of course, I can't speak with any surety regarding the allegations against the "good" Bishop (I wasn't there when the alleged perverted events took place, thank God), nor about how seriously the man takes his faith -- all of his indulgences in the spurious "prosperity gospel" notwithstanding -- but I can certainly report that this pimped-out man of the cloth had no such message for his flock when he addressed them on September 26. Instead, Long's congregation got a liberal earful of defiance, defensiveness, and pastorly trash talk on that day.

While owning that the allegations have led to a "painful situation" for the church, Long resolutely declined to address the specificity of the charges themslves, under advice, he said, from his legal counsel. That is to say, Long wouldn't go on record DENYING that he seduced various wayward teenage boys under his spiritual charge.

Yet without dwelling too long on this announced strategy, perhaps mindful of the reasonable questions it might provoke from inquiring minds -- like "Why would a man who hasn't molested children feel it was in his best interest to refrain from denying that he molested children?" -- Long quickly launched into an impassioned proclamation that, whatever the truth may be about all that unfortunate child-molestation business, he certainly planned to kick some hiney and take some names in the coming weeks and months, to fight like a Biblical hero in his own defense.

"I'm not a perfect man," he admitted from the pulpit of his stadium-like chapel. "But I am not the man being portrayed on the television... That's not me, that's not me." (So what are you saying, preacher-man? How much less than "perfect" is it permissible for you to be, when it comes to an alleged predilection for young boys? How much latitude are you asking for here? You aren't Episcopalian, you know...)

And here, the alleged pederast playa-priest really got rolling, rhetorically-speaking.

"I've been accused... I'm under attack!" he declared. "I feel like David against Goliath, but I've got five rocks, and I haven't thrown one yet!"

Long then abruptly set his microphone down and determinedly stalked off of the stage, in the manner of a man setting off to do battle. And his congregation ate it up; they cheered wildly, and gave him a standing ovation.

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In fact, Long's entire speech -- weak, lame, puzzling, and altogether

unconvincing as it was -- drew numerous peals of thunderous applause at various points. And this, indeed, is the most notable aspect of the entire sordid spectacle of "Bishop-gate." Sinnin' men of the cloth are, after all, a dime a dozen, but not many can so easily motivate their flock to rally behind them and close ranks against the outside world... all the while not in the least denying ("I'm not a perfect man") that they're guilty of acts of disgusting betrayal and  perversion! Even fat-faced Jimmy Swaggart had to weep, sob, shake his jowls and blubber, "I have sinned against you!" before he could get his congregants to support him following his notable fall from grace back in the naughty eighties.

Proud Eddie Long, by contrast, will have nothing of contrition or repentance. True, he may not be "perfect," but he's still David, and his accusers are Goliath, and he's still got some rocks to throw before all's said and done... Take that, haters!

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It has been a month and a half since Bishop Long's accusers filed their charges, and in that time there don't appear to have been any significant defections among the New Birth flock. With only a few exceptions aside, the pastor's congregation seems to be squarely behind him, even as potentially humiliating legal proceedings loom in the near future. Certainly this must partly be due to Long's thoroughgoing self-assured charisma; his ability to remain unruffled and to appear unshaken is impressive, indeed. But the explanation for Long's unwavering support among his parishoners is only partly attributable to Long's electrifying and commanding personality as a spiritual leader.

In fact, "Bishopgate" is yet another manifestation of the Black community's tendency to think tribally when a prominent member of their own race is threatened with public disgrace.

We witnessed this type of response most markedly at the end of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, when black throngs hooted and hollered with joy at the annoucement of an incredible "not guilty" verdict. There was a similar feeling of solidarity with Michael Vick a few years ago during his travails following revelations that he'd tortured, abused, and killed dozens of dogs. Many, if not most, of the Blacks who stood up for Simpson and Vick surely knew that both men were guilty as sin, yet their support for each of them came as automatically, as spontaneously, and as unconditionally as their immediate, unquestioning assumption that the so-called "Jena Six" in Mississippi were denied justice, or their knee-jerk support for figures like Minister Louis Farakhan, Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Barack Obama.

Privately, between themselves, of course, Black Americans are commonly merciless with one another; black comedians and entertainers make fun of "Ebonics"-speakers all the time, and they are not in the least afraid to mock Jessie's infedelities, Al's grandstanding and silly hair, Farakhan's pretentious speech patterns, or Barack's numerous glances at the teleprompter whilst speechifying.

It's not that Black Americans can't admit their own faults, or laugh at their own kind, it's just that those damn honkies, or anyone else for that matter, better not laugh at them or highlight those same faults. A perceived attack from without, in fact, leads to a reflexive circling of the wagons, anger, defensiveness, bitter vituperation, and the drafting of wild conspiracy theories.

This mindset applies both to cases in which there is a perception that one of their own is being menaced or threatened by "the (White) Man," as with Simpson and Vick, but also in a case like that of Bishop Eddie Long, whose accusers are all young Black boys. This is harder to comprehend unless we see the matter thusly: Bishop Long, warts and all, is a visible member of “the community”; he represents "Blackness" to the world. Therefore, he must be defended, even if his accusers are telling the truth, because for Long to take a tumble would mean a diminishment of the credibility of prominent "Blackness" in the world. Public Black figures are thus privileged over their private Black victims.

This is not so unusual in itself; tribalists commonly turn on their own in order to further their tribe's perceived interests. Here we have one of the many pitfalls of tribalism, generally speaking. It is what made left-leaning socialist-sympathizing folk support Stalin's show trials and other murderous depredations in the 1930s, as well as Mao's reign of terror during the Cultural Revolution in the ‘60s; conversely, it's the kind of thinking that led right-leaning anti-Communists support or defend the lethal, criminal policies of dictators like Hilter, Mussolini, Franco, and others.

Tribalism is all about perception, not final justice. It concerns itself not so much over what's right or wrong as it does about whether one's chosen cause -- be it Black nationalism, White nationalism, Communism, Fascism, or other -- is ultimately strengthened or weakened in the process.

In the case of Bishop Eddie Long and his alleged victims, I do hope that justice ultimately prevails over tribalism. But I've got to add: I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of such an outcome. After all, the Bishop's got five rocks, and he hasn't thrown any of them yet.

Sex and Violence Traditionalism

Flannery O'Connor was an unapologetic, unreconstructed Southerner of staunchly Catholic and profoundly conservative orientation who wrote unsparingly dark, bleak, and violent stories. This disconcerted many readers, who couldn't understand why an author who believed in God and adhered to Christian precepts would so often dwell on such disagreeable subject matter.

Miss O'Connor gave reply in a 1957 essay titled "The Fiction Writer and His Country." It was precisely secular modernity's deadening effect on the individual conscience, she asserted, that necessitated her thematic emphasis on the sordid, the depraved, and the grotesque; people needed to be shocked, shaken up, and reminded of what was important. "To the hard of hearing you shout," she wrote, "and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling pictures."

O'Connor died in 1964, before the sexual revolution kicked into high gear, before the legalization of abortion, or the promotion of adolescent sexuality in public schools, or the enforced sanctification of buggery by an ascendant legal and academic elite openly hostile to traditional morality; before the preference to retain one's European-derived heritage and identity was rendered as "hate" for one's fellow man, before mass immigration and multiculturalism and the promulgation of totalitarian hate-speech laws, before the relentless shaming of whiteness, maleness, and "heterosexism" became an obligatory ritual on college campuses across the Western world.

From a conservative's perspective, things have certainly gotten worse since O'Connor's time, yet Christian social conservatives have, if anything, grown into even bigger ninnies. Witness a site like Plugged-In Online, a kind of encyclopedic collection of reviews of recent movies, TV shows, and music albums -- all of which are critiqued from an ostensibly Christian perspective. I say "ostensibly" not because I doubt the sincere religious convictions of the site's writers, but because their collective aesthetic notions leave much to be desired. Indeed, their habitual tendency is to equate sanitization with sanctification and G-rated-ness with holiness.

Peruse Plugged In's movie review pages, and you'll soon find yourself immersed in a virtual galaxy of hectoring, scolding platitudes repeated ad nasuseum. When a character in a film makes a bad choice, the incident is usually filed under the heading of "Objectionable Material." And when there is sex, violence, or profanity -- whatever the context, no matter how the viewer is meant to think about the behavior depicted -- the Plugged Inn-ers are automatically "out" on it, without deliberation or discussion.

Thus, to use a Biblical metaphor, is the wheat commonly thrown out with the chaff. Smutty, exploitative, irresponsible, and immoral junk gets lustily condemned, of course, but so does fare that, while irreverent and "adult," is actually in many ways sympathetic to traditionalism, or at the very least gives the ever-looming Zeitgeist a good, square kick in the crotch. Comedies like Juno and Knocked Up, both of which contain a scandalously pro-life message, are dismissed out of hand due to their nonstop racy and vulgar dialogue. The 40-Year Old Virgin, which, if you pay attention, actually promotes abstinence before marriage, also gets greeted with prissy exhalations of exasperation and contempt for its raucous and ribald content. Fight Club, a profound meditation on the spiritual emasculation of the modern male in a world bereft of belief or hope, is simplistically condemned for promoting violent nihilism. And on it goes...

No one would ever claim that the representative sample of movies discussed above were "family-friendly." Still, a conservative critic with even a scrap of subtlety of mind and aesthetic discernment can see that, even if they fall short in certain crucial ways, there is, indeed, much to appreciate in these films. But the good, churchgoin', God-fearin' Plugged-In folks seem almost willfully clueless to such a possibility, smarmily set as they are on maintaining their lofty perch of sanctimonious disapproval.

But even more irritating than the proclivity to reflexively dismiss and sniff at every non-Veggie Tales movie ever made, is the way the Plugged-In-style critic tends to react when challenged.

"After all (one says to him), what about the acknowledged literary greats?

Aren't Shakespeare's plays full of violence, mayhem, and sexual innuendo? Isn't Dante's vision of Hell just a bit gory and gnarly? What about all of those shocking stories from the Bible itself? Adam and Eve are naked without shame, Cain murders Abel, Lot has sex with his daughters during a drunken cave orgy, Onan spills his seed on the ground, David commits adultery with Beersheba and sends Uriah to his death, and the Isrealities wipe out just about everyone in sight over and over again... and all of that's just in the Old Testament! Yet the Bible is a holy book -- THE holy book. If it, Dante, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Homer, Milton, Poe, Joyce, O'Connor, and all the other faithful recorders of human vice, folly, perversity and corruption throughout the ages are allowed to tread in such waters, then why do you immediately look upon movies of recent years with suspicion and consternation if they deal with challenging material?"

To this, the self-satisfied Christian critic of the Plugged-In variety smiles blandly. "You're comparing Shakespeare to Pulp Fiction? I'm sorry... that just doesn't work!" While declaiming any qualitative equivalency between the Bard and Tarantino, you reply, why can't this question be asked? To this, he scoffs at first, taking the answer to be self-evident, but when you persist, he stammers that Shakespeare and everyone else who wrote a long time ago always wrote with a moral framework in mind, while contemporary writers are in almost all cases just scurrilous schlock-meisters whose only agenda is to mock all things decent. Suggest that your interlocutor is painting with the broadest of brushes and, moreover, speaking from pure ignorance, and you'll again be favored with a patronizing smirk, much like Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" character once fixed upon his guest before snarkily observing, "Well... we have our little opinions, don't we?"

Take another tack: Point out that content doesn't necessarily determine form, that even an NC-17 rated movie like Abel Ferrara's The Bad Lieutenant can be a quite moving story of faith and redemption. You may get a grudging semi-acknowledgement, followed by a hurried recapitulation of ad priori asethetic notions, which he wills to cancel out any prior ground previously ceded: "I suppose it may be argued that the message is a positive one," he'll aver, "but... when the way of relating this message is so incredibly negative it really doesn't matter what the flimmaker intended..." Again, the only way art can be legitimately Christian is if it's squeaky-clean, antiseptic, devoid of blemish or grit.

The only way to be profound, it seems, is to be boring.

There are, of course, certain exceptions to this rule, the most prominent being Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. With this film, the Plugged-Inner and all of his ilk suddenly discovered that it's permissible to shake up the audience, O'Connor-style, through the brazen, unflinching depiction of nonstop, horrifying cruelty and torture, provided the story concerns the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus.

Self-important Spielbergian historical gorefests like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan are likewise exempt from the In-Plugged scribblers' knee-jerk condemnations, due, I suppose, to their shameless pushing of buttons that send jolts into the heart of they typical American evangelical believer: 1) the conviction of the inherent goodness of the American military and the greatness of the cause of the "good war" that was WWII, and 2) the lurid depiction of persecution of Jews under Hitler, giving rise to the modern state of Israel, which (again, in the evangelical mind) can do no wrong.

But the exceptions, as always, prove the rule, and the rule, in turn, underlines an undeniable problem among “red-state” Americans today. Cultural leftists control Hollywood and most outlets of the entertainment media, at least in part due to the fact that leftists in general, at this point in history, simply see more value in the fine arts, while right-leaning Americans' tastes typically run more towards the philistine sentimentalism of country-western songs, grocery-store romance novels, and Fox News/talk radio inspired displays of drippy, mawkish patriotism.

But we shouldn't be fooled that everyone who thinks or votes along leftist lines maintains rigidly ideological standards to an obnoxious and humorless extreme. In fact, there is clearly quite a bit of dissent among the ranks of the Lefty cultural elite, as evidenced by the not infrequent, spasmodic outbursts of brazen political incorrectness indulged in by "hip" comedians like Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and others, and lapped up voraciously by their predominantly "blue-state" audiences.

It would be a grave mistake to ghettoize radical traditionalism, or to expect only the worst from our opponents at all times, just as it would be small-minded and shortsighted to maintain that art must be "safe," bland, and shorn of edges. Life is very difficult, and art should be true to life. If the cultural transformation we struggle to achieve is worthwhile, then it demands more than lip service or crass propaganda in its support.

In the coming years of struggle, hopefully more true cultural conservatives, be they of Christian affiliation or not, will plug out of the "Plugged In" mentality, and will begin to entertain more independent and adventuresome aesthetic principles. Whatever your faith, it's not a sin to be provocative; indeed, extreme times call for extreme art. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling pictures.

Joe Sobran and the Wages of "Respectability"

Self-christened advocates of cultural harmony, equality, justice, and ideological soundness have long insisted that in order to prove oneself truly tolerant one must "NEVER tolerate INtolerance."

Of course, this notion of redefining a concept as its very opposite is purposely obfuscatory. What it means, laid bare, is, "WE, your betters, decide which positions are tolerable, and which are beyond the pale. If you offend our sensibilities, we will come down on you hard. So watch your step, little man, because WE call the shots, not you."

This subterfuge is easily uncovered by all enthusiastic flouters of insufferable contemporary norms, a hearty group of heretics whose company no doubt includes most readers of this publication. It's well known by now that taking certain stances is "wrong" and “indefensible,” not because of any self-evident moral law -- as with rape or murder-- but because the opinion-molders and shapers of the age have, in a series of ex cathedra pronouncements, insisted that it be so. Thus, certain types, most notably White race-realists and critics of multiculturalism, are shunned outright as mere bigots, and an earnest attempt is made to cordon off their views from the general public.

What is less known, however, is all of the intricacies and permutations inherent in this injuction never to tolerate "intolerance." After all, it's one thing to blaspheme against the holy Zeitgeist on some matter; it's quite another to genuflect properly and dutifully recite the creed, while at the same time TOLERATING those who dissent from these mandatory dogmas. What are we to think of those who aren't "intolerant" themselves, but who tolerate "intolerance"? What do the opinion-shapers and guardians of proper discourse do with those who, while not thought-criminals themselves, refuse to cast said thought-criminals into the outer darkness?

All of this comes to mind in considering the latter stage of the career of Joe Sobran, the brilliant columnist and fearless thinker who died last Thursday. Sobran enjoyed smooth sailing for years as a writer on William F. Buckley's staff at National Review, before hitting a patch of turbulence at the time of Iraq War I in 1991, when Sobran's opposition to American intervention put him into conflict with his editor and co-workers. As everyone knows by now, an acrimonious period ensued, ending with Buckley obliquely accusing Sobran of anti-Semitism due to the latter's increasingly dim view of Israel's actions and growing contempt for its "amen corner" in the United States. When he parted ways with Buckley and NR, Sobran quite understandably felt stabbed in the back. He would later allege that he was forced out because Buckley was overly beholden to neoconservative Jews (most prominently Norman Podhoretz) who zealously backed Israel and would brook no dissent.

In the last two decades of his life, Sobran's fiercely independent mind took him in an increasingly radical direction. In time, he became a full-throttle anti-state anarchist, though he always remained a stauch social conservative, an orientation fed by his never-wavering Catholic faith. More vexing, for the sake of his reputation as a "respectable" thinker, was the fact that he more often discussed what he came to see as the enormous influence, and largely baleful effect, of Jewish power in the modern world.

Post-World War II Westerners have been trained to construe any less-than glowing portrayal of Jews as an ominous preamble to a likely commission of a large-scale hate crime, and Sobran was already on sensitive ground when he wrote the following in a 1999 column:

In intellectual life, Jews have been brilliantly subversive of the cultures of the natives they have lived amongst. Their tendencies, especially in modern times, have been radical and nihilistic. One thinks of Marx, Freud, and many other shapers of modern thought and authors of reductionist ideologies. ... Jews have generally supported Communism, socialism, liberalism, and secularism: the agenda of major Jewish groups is the de-Christianization of America... Overwhelming Jewish support for legal abortion illustrates that many Jews hate Christian morality more than they revere Jewish tradition itself.

In 2002, Sobran addressed a conference of Mark Weber's Institute for Historical Review, a group which believes that the number of Jews murdered by the Nazi regime has been vastly exaggerated. Distancing himself from advocacy of Weber's claims, Sobran nevertheless praised Weber as a decent person and a conscientious scholar. As for himself, Sobran said he remained a "Holocaust stipulator": he pleaded ignorance as to the actual merits of the case, but generally accepted the traditional, non-revisionist assessment of widespread Nazi genocidal depradations against European Jewry. (He also made clear that he stood strongly against murder of Jews, or anyone else, no matter what the circumstances.)

Sobran, then, never actually took that full, final step into total ignominy (in the hive mind of the collective Zeitgeist) by actually denying the historicity of the Shoah himself. At the same time, though, he was never appalled enough by the notion of revisionism as to sever his friendship with Weber, or to refuse to speak warmly of him, or even to shun addressing his conference of largely like-minded people.

Now that Sobran has passed, many mainstream conservative outlets of a neoconnish orientation, such as First Things, The American Spectator, and (of course) National Review, have written online eulogies that take the angle of an examination of a tragic figure, so bright, witty, and capable, who spun out of control and became a bit of a crank in his later years. Other commentators are not nearly so generous. It seems, then, that even from the nominally "conservative" point of view, the PC-jeremaid against "tolerating intolerance" still holds sway.

It's not enough, it seems, not to be a thought-criminal; you must also not be friendly with anyone deemed a thought-criminal. That person's ideological deviation must be denounced, and he must be publicly shamed.

And if you are sickened by the idea of such show-trial theatrics, this obviously means that you're ONE OF THEM. Your unwilingness to fling your friends under the bus, in fact, demonstrates not your loyalty, but your lack of principle. If you had greater dedication to the cause, presumably, you would have no such scruples.

Though I never knew Joe Sobran personally, I have had the privilege of calling him a "label mate" of sorts. (His columns appeared on Thornwalker, the same domain which publishes The Last Ditch, where I've contributed columns since 2004.) I find his refusal to be a team player with spineless "movement conservatives" quite inspiring, even as I grieve for the lonely road he's had to ride these last few years.

Joe's career has been a testament to courage, nerve, and gumption. He could tolerate not being tolerated just fine indeed. We should all aspire to be like that.

Touch Yourself -- Or Else!

I know little, and care even less, about party politics. This is partly due to the fact that the subject is a bore, but mostly because I find it appallingly, unbearably irritating to reflect upon. I readily cop to being determinedly cynical about nearly everyone who wants to win my approval to gain power over me, and this (admittedly) broad brush of all-inclusive misanthropy extends to most politicians and the mass movements they instigate or manipulate to their advantage.

Thus, I really have no idea if Christine O'Donnell -- the honey from Delaware who's currently sweetening the Delaware Tea Party's teapot, but leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of many others -- is fit for the Senate. She may well be a loopy and flaky chick who's hopelessly out of her depth, as her critics on both the Right and the Left have alleged, or at least implied.

What I do find bizarre, however, is that the primary issue O'Donnell's critics are using against her so far is her declared status as a non-masturbator.

In case you hadn't heard by now, it seems that this now 41-year old bachelorette was once featured in an MTV mini-documentary in the mid-90s, in which she spoke on behalf of a group of twentysomething evangelical Christians promoting abstinence and sexual purity. In this feature, the young O'Donnell -- a big-haired, perpetually smiling girl, swaying to contemporary praise music and exuding an oddly conspicuous sensuality -- discusses the notion of "lust in your heart," forbidden in the Gospel, and applies it towards self-stimulation, reaching certain conclusions. "You can't masturbate without lust," she half-giggles, a reasonable enough inference to draw.

Maybe it's all a bit embarrassing, and unbecoming ... but really? This testimony is Exhibit A in the case for why this woman is unfit for public office?

I mean, sure ... Congress is without question a bunch of wankers who regularly engage in a massive circle-jerk, but isn't there room for someone who's a little different in this regard? Wouldn't a change from the norm even be a bit refreshing? Couldn't we stand to have a little less pud-pulling from our elected leaders?

Prized and precious double entendres aside, exactly how is O'Donnell's attitude towards chicken-choking (at least as articulated 15 years ago) all that outrageous or troubling? If you're an avid self-starter yourself, and you frequently take matters into your own hands, so to speak, do you honestly think Senator O'Donnell will put a stop to all of your fun? Do you truly fear that she'll work to pass some kind of draconian injunction requiring all citizens to keep their palms in sight of the authorities at all times? Will she order a SWAT team to break down your bathroom door if you spend too much time in the shower?

I mean, just how paranoid are you?

We often hear about how sexually repressed Americans are, how we need to become a more "sex-positive" culture, but does the ardent crusade against this candidate for her proclivity to keep aloof from her own vagina not tend to suggest otherwise? Does it not, in fact, perhaps show that, far from being a bunch of prudish, puritanical "slut-shaming" types, we are in fact
all-too likely to castigate a non-sluttish, likely virginal woman as a freakish and dangerous fanatic?

Honestly, Miss O'Donnell's notions of the implications of "lust in one's heart" as expressed in the MTV segment in question, are part of a mainstream and perfectly consistent sexual ethic sincerely held by many Americans who subscribe to Christianity and other faiths. If her views aren't yours ... fine. But really, what of it? Why be a jerk about it? Where do you get off, anyway? There's not the rub. (Yes, the double-entendre train continues to run full-steam ... can you blame me?)

And now, to top it all off, there's this "witchcraft" business, which, according to Karl Rove and others, is a very probable deal-breaker with much of the voting public of Delaware. It seems that during her troubled teenage spiritual journey, Miss O'Donnell once flirted with the dark arts before embaracing Christianity. Please tell me, Mr. Rove -- crafty genius that you supposedly are -- how does this present a problem, exactly?

Conservative, religious voters -- Miss O'Donnell's base -- undersand that many a saint was a sinner prior to hearing the call of God and repenting. This is the standard narrative of the Prodigal Son; there are numerous characters in the Bible whose lives follow this exact same trajectory, the most famous being Paul, writer of much of the New Testament, who hunted
Christians and put them to death before seeing his vision on the road to Damascus.

In his contiunal harping on O'Donnell's Wiccan dabblings, in fact, Rove displays very little political savvy or common sense. In fact, he hardly seems to grasp the essence of the mindset of the typical evangelical Christian voter, for whom redemption stories are mother's milk. One almost suspects a pesonal vendetta is the real reason he continues to snipe impotently at his party's candidate, doing his damndest to orchestrate her demise.

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Please do not misunderstand: I most decidedly am not endorsing Miss O'Donnell's candidacy. I don't endorse candidacies as a general principle, for reasons already given. There may well be many good reasons why her election in the primary was an unmitigated calamity. It's just that her status as a non-masturbating former witch doesn't strike me as terribly
germane, in any way, to anything.

The fact that her enemies have led their attacks by calling attention to these "issues" says many more unappetizing things about the political process, and the likely proclivities of the ever-fickle voting public, than it does about Christie O'Donnell's Senate bid. It's yet more dispiriting evidence that the essence of our democracy is in truth little more than sheer wankery.

What Is to Be Done

In the aftermath of George W. Bush appointee Judge Vaughn Walker's utterly predictable decree to overturn Proposition 8 in California, conservative judicial scholars are preparing to take the fight to the Supreme level.

They are no doubt combing over the wording in the 138-page decision with magnifying glass in hand, underlining and circling words and phrases, selecting where they think Walker's argument is most vulnerable to legal critique.

Meantime, as this showdown looms, most of politically-engaged Red State America continues to do what it does best: fret, fulminate angrily, write dour letters to newspapers about the impending end of marriage, and solemnly hold up homemade magic marker-scrawled signs at Tea Party rallies.

As a paleocon duly opposed to state-sanctioned homosexual so-called "marriage", I find all of this Sturm und Drang tiresome, headache-inducing, and, well ... totally gay.

While hailed by all the usual suspects as a "landmark" decision, the revocation of Prop 8 is in truth nothing new. It follows in a long line of similar cases of brazen judicial skullduggery, the most notorious being Roe v. Wade in 1973. It is yet another instance of the ruling class insuring that its "enlightened" ideology is enacted into law, with or without the consent of the governed.

Let's face it: America has long been ruled by judicial fiat. We are now neither a nation of laws, nor of men, but one of autocratic judges, who aren't in the least afraid to wield the sweeping powers to which they have arrogated themselves. These judges are in truth but the minions of the academic and cultural elites, the tenets of whose shared, enshrined ideology are held to be self-evidently true. Among these tenets are the following first principles:

1. Traditional sexual morality is bad and oppressive and must be combated wherever it is still practiced. Those who practice these "outmoded" ideas must be ostracized from polite society and shamed as "intolerant" or "bigoted."

2. Premarital sex should be encouraged, as a means towards eroding traditional sexual morality, which teaches that sex only belongs within the bonds of matrimony. 

3. Contraception is good, and needs to be made widely available to everyone, including middle-school aged children.

4. Abortion, being a last-ditch means of contraception, ought to be allowed and funded without limit.

5. Homosexuality is good and its practitioners should be mainstreamed as much as possible, in order to further to marginalize believers in traditional sexual morality.

Hence, we see judges weighing in consistently in favor of compelling the distribution of contraceptives (whether or not the distributor feels such compulsion to be a violation of his principles), in favor of forcing hospitals and medical facilities to practice abortion (whether or not individual doctors find the procedure morally repugnant), and in favor of removing all limits to unlimited, unbridled homosexuality (all popular referendums to the contrary be damned). Quite simply, the more condoms and birth control pills, the more dead fetuses; the more buggery, the better.

And bugger you if you don't wish to abide by their edicts! Bugger you if, in fact, you find buggery the slightest bit objectionable or aesthetically displeasing... Speak your mind on this matter or a similar one, and you'll soon find yourself under fire for practicing "hate speech." You'll likely lose your job, and find yourself forced to undergo "sensitivity training" and other unspeakable humiliations and torments.

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The elites and their judicial minions have the power; they will get their way. It doesn't matter that their legal arguments are threadbare, that there it is no more ridiculous to suddenly "discover" that the Constitution mandates the recognition of gay marriage than it is to pull "abortion rights" out of some obscure privacy penumbra, as the Supreme Dictators did back in '73.

Pointing these things out makes no difference; they, not we, get to decide what the law is, and exactly what it can mean.

They are the rulers; we are the ruled. They are in control; we aren't.

In fact, they have shown themselves to be openly contemptuous of, even mocking towards, anyone with the audacity to try to stop them from achieving their goals. "Pass all the resolutions you want, suckers!" they sneer, "We'll just send our boys in black to knock 'em down and call 'em 'unconstitutional,' and it'll be back to square one for you bozos!"

Yes, they have the power, and they'll eventually get exactly what they want. So what can we do?

There are many gay-marriage activists who claim that they just want to live and let live. Once they are able to call themselves married in the eyes of the law, they're willing to leave things alone. If you don't agree with gay marriage, they'll say, that's perfectly fine with them. They don't want to harass you for holding firm to your convictions: if your beliefs are different from theirs, they can agree to disagree amicably.

And no doubt this is true for some of the current crop of activists.

However, it's naive in the extreme to deny that there aren't many more who see a gay-marriage victory as nothing but a first step, a means of gaining ground in a much larger theater of ideological war. They are salivating over the notion of suing the Catholic Church for discrimination for refusing to let men marry men or women marry women. They look forward to spying on your private email to see if you let loose with a forbidden slur sometime while joking around with a friend, so that they can find a pretext to take you down and destroy you, despicable "hater" that they know you are.

I suggest that conservatives remove themselves from the futile attempt to take over the apparatus of the state from the depraved elites who now call the shots. Let us encamp in the realm that is most important: our homes, families, institutions, places of worship and forums of intellectual exchange.

Let them have the state; let's keep them out of our hair. And from our private citadels, let's cultivate an aura of gleeful defiance. Let's resolutely decline to conform. Let's hurl hearty epithets into their teeth, shamelessly flaunt our rigidly reactionary counter-cultural customs, and laugh at their apoplectic responses to our insolent refusal to acknowledge their supremacy over us, or to be ashamed of ourselves and our beliefs.

Of course, our rulers will pretend to dismiss our activities as irrelevant, but inwardly we can be sure they will be seething. As C.S. Lewis quoted

Martin Luther in The Screwtape Letters: "The best way to drive out the Devil... is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn."

I can dig it. Can you dig it?

Hollywood's Last White Nationalist

If you're the sort who lets the fickle proclivities of film critics affect your judgment of the actual quality of movies, you've surely concluded that M. Night Shyamalan's talents have been in a state of sad and hopeless decline for nearly a decade.

The same cultural commissars who unanimously praised The Sixth Sense (1999) and generally approved of Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002) began to turn on their once-favored cinematic prodigy when The Village was released in 2004; since that pivotal turning point in elite collective taste, they have never looked back. It is as though the India-born, Philadelphia-raised director has committed some unforgivable cinematic sin against the Holy Ghost, as far as critics are concerned -- one suspects that even if he were to deliver the next Citizen Kane or Vertigo, it would still be greeted with a sour, bitter, contemptuous hate-loogie from the representative sampling of scribblers at Rotten Tomatoes, and the kind of accompanying astronomically low "rotten" score on the "tomato-meter" usually reserved for Pauly Shore or Larry the Cable Guy joints.

In point of fact, however, Shyamalan's latest, The Last Airbender, an adaptation of the popular fantasy anime series, is his first truly "bad" film. While visually stunning, Airbender features wince-inducing acting and dialogue, along with a convoluted plot and an overall pomposity of tone that even drains it of any charm it might otherwise possess. But of course, the real tempest in a teapot surrounding this big-budget summer film (which did surprisingly well in its first week of release, given the bloodsucking competition from Eclipse as well as the requisite critical bloodletting that follows any Shyalman release) is something unrelated to questions of its filmic worthiness. Rather, it concerns the "race-bending" the director daringly employed in the making of Airbender, casting young white actors in roles presumed to have been meant for Asians.

Numerous commentators have railed against Shyamalan for his alleged -- what else? -- "racism" and insensitivity. For his part, Shyamalan has somewhat petulantly argued back that as a nonwhite director, he can't truly be racist, and that his critics are the real racists for choosing to attack him in such a manner. A careful examination of Shyamalan's cinematic canon, however, renders his "nothing to see here; move along" stance on this controversy somewhat disingenuous. Even leaving the racial politics of Airbender aside, it is easy to discern a certain subversively pro-white sensibility manifesting itself throughout the entire M. Night oeuvre.

For one thing, in an age where multiculturalism is all the rage, and everyone feels pressure to show he's "down" with people of other races, Shyamalan unflinchingly sticks with white characters in predominantly white settings, in which sensitive yet stoic white heroes win the day.

Think of Bruce Willis in Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Joaquin Phoenix in Signs and The Village, or Mark Wahlberg in The Happening. Though black, Hispanic, and Asian faces are occasionally seen, the Philadelphian auteur appears utterly uninterested in bending over backwards to fill any type of racial quota in his films.

In fact, M. Night scarcely seems interested in non-whites at all. Looking over the casts of nearly all of his films, one is struck by their relentless Caucasoidian orientation. The only black character of any importance is Samuel L. Jackson's in Unbreakable, and he (it is worth noting) turns out to be the villain.  The only Hispanic of note is the exceedingly white-looking John Leguizamo in The Happening, who plays Mark Wahlberg's buddy and gets killed off halfway through. A certain loudly-squabbling North Asian mother and daughter serve as broadly comic relief in Lady in the Water, but are of little relevance to the plot; like the numerous Asian extras in The Last Airbender, they show up briefly, deliver a few lines, and then are gone.

The only non-white race that occasionally plays a significant role is Shyamalan's own: the high-caste "Aryan" Indian: dark-skinned but statuesque, lordly, and aristocratic. In Lady in the Water, Shyamalan himself appears as a man who has written a brilliant book that will soon change the course of history and usher in a reign of peace and goodwill.

(Critics pounced on this moment as instance of Shyamalan's runaway egotism on display, not suspecting that he may have simply been ironically riffing on his own reputation for narcissism, winking at the camera all the while.) In Airbender, high-caste Aryan Indians appear en masse as a race of arrogant, imperious and domineering "fire people," who aim to usurp the authority of the gods and rule the world in their place. The white characters in the movie, by contrast, seek to restore balance between the various races of the earth by doing their best to repel the nefarious, genocidal designs of the "fire kingdom."

But certainly the most blatant example of Shyamalan's partiality to whites is on display in The Village, which also happens to be his most powerful film to date. Here, the story revolves around a group of Caucasians who flee modern life and crime-filled urban settings in order to start a utopian pastoral community in the midst of a deep forest. The group even adopts traditional Victorian-era clothes and cultivates formal, old-style manners of speech in order to inculcate an atmosphere of virtue and goodness (the audience at first thinks the film is set around 120 year ago, before a "twist" reveals that it's all happening in the present).

The Village -- whose praises I have sung elsewhere -- is many things at once: a cerebral monster movie, a parable on the nature of innocence and evil, and a sensitive examination of the permissibility of extreme responses to rampant social and moral decay. But it is also, ineluctably, a generally sympathetic treatise on white separatism. The prevalence of violent crime in what the Villagers call "the towns" is relentlessly invoked throughout the movie, at times in horrifying detail; one would need to be dense indeed to escape the suggestion that this all-white group, formerly from downtown Philadelphia, set up their rural colony in part to escape victimization at the hands of urban blacks.

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 Alternative Right readers will recognize that I do not point out these aspects of M. Night Shyamalan's aesthetic tendencies to condemn him. An artist must follow his muse, chase what interests him. For whatever set of reasons, this highly talented and largely misunderstood filmmaker of Eastern heritage seems largely taken with white, Western men, women, and children, and moreover enjoys portraying such people in a sympathetic and heroic light. One is almost tempted to express gratitude that someone has such inclinations in our day and age. Yet it should not escape our irony-detector that the one person most fearlessly treading this artistic path in plain sight is non-white himself.