The adolescent whine

I never got a chance to thank my mother for teaching me to write. And because she was on the "side" in the culture wars that I left behind, she came to hate me all the more, so it would have been impossible. But I really do have her to thank for it all. She may never have realised what she was doing, but as a hippie/leftie/feminis of the mid-1970 pop-psych school, she told me all the time to question the accepted wisdom, not to accept what I was told on face value, but to think things through for myself.

Ironic, wot?

Here's my thing from yesterday for LSN. I'm rather proud of it. I think she might have been too, in an odd way.

One of the Abortionist Movement's apologists says, with typical permanent-adolescent bravado,

"Well, so what if it's a human life?"

Once you have responded to “It’s a human being,” with a manufactured shrug like this, there seems nowhere else to go in the conversation. So what if abortion is genocide? So what if it serves the cause of sex trafficking? So what if it enables pedophiles and pimps? So what if it’s slaughtering entire generations of girls in India and China? So what if it’s being used by totalitarian governments to terrorise women and maintain control over their populations?

So what? I want it, and I have the power to get it; discussion over.

And this is right and good because the strong must always have power over the weak. From some dark place, the shade of Nietzsche howls his mad, tortured shriek of triumph.

There is something else I learned from my mother: that the whole Sexual Revolution/femmie/hippie/commie thing is both the work of perpetual adolescents and turns you into one. This is becoming more clear in the British Parliament, where the first generation of PAs, having been trained by their non-PA parents and schools to at least mimic adults, have since given way to the second and third who have only ever known the I-can-do-whatever-I-want culture and now can no longer even fake grownuphood.

We are now at such a pass with these people that saying, "I can just damn well kill my child if I feel like it," and no one in the ruling class any longer has the chops to do what needs to be done.



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Been thinking today, again, about what the 60s Revolution did to us.

One of the main things the 60s Revolution (for want of a better encompassing term) has brought us is the erasure of our history. History now consists only of what a particular person remembers, or thinks he remembers.

Here is an old post in the commbox from Karen:

"When literate people raise an illiterate generation, they are communicting their terror of the judgement of posterity. I think this is also related to the tendency of people like this to bear only-children, who grow into adults without siblings to check their memories against. Divorce and multiple households also destroy the continuity needed to construct a narrative about one's own early life."

My mother, who admittedly was unusually bright, studied French, German and Latin from the start of elementary school, could draw, sight read music and do calculus they way I do crosswords. And this was fairly normal for an ordinary middle class education in Britain in her time. By the time I went to school, her generation had all but abolished language and art education in schools. And the erosion continues with my young English cousin's generation not being taught basic historical facts or elementary maths. My cousin, who is every bit as bright as I was at her age, had no idea when the second world war started or why.



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How to learn stuff

When I was a kid, my report cards were always a very mixed bag. I had terrible marks in French since I had never been given any instruction in French until the fifth grade, and by that time the other kids were so far ahead of me, the teacher, quite openly, refused to try to teach me anything. I will never forget the only time she spoke to me in class on my first day in the fifth grade. She asked me to conjugate some verb. I asked her what "conjugate" meant and in response, she curled her lip and made a disgusted sound, and went on to the next kid. I spent the rest of my school years looking out the window during French classes until the day I left school. No one cared at all to teach me French, and I didn't care to be taught, so that was that. I never had the slightest intention of leaving the West Coast, and who speaks French there? We'd have been better off learning Cantonese.

And I was hopeless at maths because my mother, whose undergraduate degree was in mathematics, had tried to teach me and our lessons nearly always devolved into screaming matches ending with me bursting into tears. By the time I was sent away from the experimental Hippie Free School at the end of the fourth grade and enrolled in a Catholic parochial school, I was so terrified of maths that I was to spend the rest of my school career in a nearly perpetual state of panic and despair over the subject. (I still have nightmares about finding myself enrolled in an advanced maths class, for which I am totally unprepared and that is nearly finished by the time I attend class the first time, but upon which all my future happiness depends... horrible.)

Naturally, I was always ahead of everyone (and often the teacher) in reading, grammar, comprehension, creative writing etc. It came so naturally to me that I never thought of it as any sort of accomplishment. The only subject that counted was math, and being good at words was more or less irrelevant. It wasn't until I was in my mid-thirties that I started to realise that not everyone could write. (I still don't quite believe it.) I always figured that if you can talk you can write. Just think of what you would say and write that down.

But the one thing my report cards said consistently from the first day in school in England when I was five is that I knew a lot of stuff. I've always had an absurd amount of what they called "general knowledge". Always top marks for knowing piles of trivial nonsense. I was given my first library card when I was five and used to spend hours every week buried in the non-fiction stacks burrowing through books on any subject you can imagine. The other contributor was the set of encyclopedias, art books, biology and taxonomy texts and history books, as well as a subscription to National Geographic which was the only contribution to my life ever made by my maternal grandmother.

The other thing was documentaries. Nature shows on TV. The only TV I was ever interested in was Star Trek and nature shows. Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, National Geographic, Nova, Jacques Cousteau, Marlin Perkins, David Attenborough and even those little two minute TV spots by the National Film Board. I LOVED nature shows.

Here's a bunch more documentary sites

Watchdocumentary.com

DocumentaryHeaven

Top Documentary Films



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Gluttony of Delicacy

I'm ever so slightly worried that my new health-kick is bound to deteriorate into what Thomas called the "gluttony of delicacy". You see it all the time with the lefties, and nowadays, in some fashionable Christian back-to-the-land types. "Whole foods," locally grown, organic, pesticide-free, free range, grass-fed, wild-caught, seasonal, slow food, etc. I've written about this food-worship that is common among liberals/lefties/southpaws/hippies, and how it's a substitution for having something Real to think about.

Been talking a good deal about it with a couple of people who hang out here. We have talked about the evil Food Corp that is patenting the genetic modifications of seeds used by farmers in an attempt to get a monopoly on all food. We talk about seasonal vs. the fake, forced, year-round tomatoes thing. Italy doesn't do a lot of that. You can get tomatoes out of season here, but no one buys them. And when the season is over, which will be very soon, you can't get a carciofo for love or money.

This sort of picky-sticky, I-only-eat-the-whites-of-the-egg, kind of food obsessiveness, the sort that produces all that "vegan" nonsense, is certainly a decidedly 1st Worldian phenomenon. The other day, I felt a twinge of weirdness when I got all enthusiastic about having found a source of un-pasteurised milk in the City and bought two litres with the intention of making my own yogurt. What's next? Am I going to start seeing French films? If I start talking about my "wellness," please shoot me.

Food-obsession is also, I'm told, a common hold-over for people who have had troubles in the past with eating disorders and depression. It's only too easy to slide back into it, hardly noticing, using the excuse "It's about my health". I remember only too well the little tendrils of temptation, the little semi-conscious suggestions my Evil Brain starts making when I latch on to some food-related thought process.

Anyway, I'm making the yogurt tonight and if it works, I'll give a recipe.

I've also been having a great time lately with an electric vegetable juicer. It's like a kind of super-blender, that shreds the veg into a fine pulp and centrifuges out the juice. I've been experimenting with carrots, oranges and strawberries, all of which are abundant right now at the farmers' markets. A pair of friends of mine got one for their wedding and the other day I went over for a visit, and was given a glass of this utterly heavenly elixir, carrot/orange/strawb. and I knew I HAD to have one.

Fortunately, there is quite a good little kitchen appliance store in S. Mar. that is very well priced. So, for two weeks or so, I've been nearly living on the COS juice and yogurt, since I don't have much time to cook, and I'm practically glowing. I certainly think I'm getting way more vitamins and things this way than I would otherwise, and completely unadulterated. I juiced 25 carrots and about ten of the really huge oranges that are out there, and then stuck the results into the blender with about 600g of fresh strawberries.

It made about a gallon of juice, which I froze in yogurt tubs and have been drinking all week. Actually I think a better word would be "guzzling," if it didn't sound unladylike. The juicer leaves a LOT of pulp, and I felt bad about throwing out all that food, so I started straining it through cheesecloth and got at least a few more cups of juice out of it. The freezing tends to make the pulp separate, so when you take it out of the tub, just run it for a few seconds in the blender in "high" and it's all frothy and lovely again. I'm thinking of trying to use the carrot pulp for carrot soup; I still hate to throw it out.

The juice is actually quite filling too, and if I'm not careful a few glasses of it in the morning will leave me with no room for the yogurt. The lift it gives me lasts well into the day and I'm not getting hungry until one or two pm, from starting the days at 6:30.

I went to a little do on Friday night here in town, was a bit late because of work, but when I got there, everyone said they have never seen me looking so well. One said I looked like I was sort of sparking. I don't know whether to put it down to the vitamins, the nixing of sugar and grains from my diet, the juice, or prayer, or maybe a combination of the lot, but I was told I was kind of glowing in the dark. I thanked my two friends for introducing me to the magic juice machine.

I don't really understand entirely what's going on, in fact. I was told many times that it would be at least six months after The Surgery that I would start feeling better. I shouldn't expect to be back to full functioning, feeling entirely myself, for as much as a year. Well, it's been four months now, and though I get suddenly very tired about 8 pm most nights, too tired to function or think, the rest of the time I feel wonderful.

Anyway, get a juicer. It's amazing.

And stop eating sugar.



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He said she said

As I said elsewhere this morning, there is one problem with consciously dedicating yourself to the pursuit of The Real. Eventually you get to the point where you look around the modern world and realise it has gone totally bonko-screaming-nuts.

As Kathy pointed out, newspapers used to have to at least pretend to be about reality. Now they go along with this bizarre mass delusion that your "gender" (the correct word is "sex", though the strangely puritanical world of pansexualism doesn't like to use that word) can be changed by cutting off your bits and dosing yourself up with drugs. Now, they have to call a man who's had his bits cut off "her" and "she". Why? Did anyone tell them to? I wonder who that might have been. And why the newspapers didn't just laugh and give them the number of a reputable shrink.

What the hell happened in 1973 to make the entire medical establishment go insane?

Even this guy, who was there at the time, doesn't seem to know.

When the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Where did they get the idea that our sexual identity (“gender” was the term they preferred) as men or women was in the category of things that could be changed?

...

The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing; they spoke about how they found themselves able to give vent to their natural inclinations for peace, domesticity, and gentleness—but their large hands, prominent Adam’s apples, and thick facial features were incongruous (and would become more so as they aged). Women psychiatrists whom I sent to talk with them would intuitively see through the disguise and the exaggerated postures. “Gals know gals,” one said to me, “and that’s a guy.”

Did absolutely no one pay attention in grade ten biology class? Did everyone else miss the bit where we were told that your sex is determined at the moment when the two sets of genes from mummy and daddy meshed together? Oh yes, of course. If we acknowledged that, we would have to admit that you are who you are from that moment too, which would force millions more public funding to be spent by the abortion industry convincing the world that it's OK to murder inconvenient people.

There is not one part of this story that does not make me cringe in horror and sadness:

- the man who divorced and became mentally ill, who was encouraged to embrace his delusions by the trendy medical establishment to the point of allowing them to cut his parts off and poison him with hormones. Who then changed his mind and found himself mutilated and deformed and unable to have children;

- the girl who hated herself so much she could not eat and almost died;

- the fact that no one in their lives has cautioned them about their decision because now the only thing anyone is allowed to say to anyone else, no matter what bat-sh__ crazy thing they want to do, is "I'll support you whatever decision you make".

I don't know, maybe it's not totally hopeless...

He is currently seeking funding for a documentary titled The Sex Change Delusion[Good luck with that...].

"Based on my own experiences, I believe sex-change operations should not be allowed, and certainly not on the NHS.

"People who think they are a woman trapped in a male body are, in my opinion, completely deluded. I certainly was. I needed counselling, not a sex-change operation.

"In many ways I see myself a victim of the medical profession. Even with the glamour of Samantha Kane and the £100,000 I spent on myself, I had people shouting abuse at me and builders throwing stones at me from rooftops," he says.

"I became a woman. [No, you didn't. That's why construction workers threw things at you in the streets.] It didn’t work for me. [It doesn't work for anyone.] I changed my mind. It’s only a fool that doesn’t change their mind when they know they are wrong. It took tremendous courage to say: “No, sorry, I will change back.”

If only he could, the poor fellow. But judging from the little delicate tap-dance the two of them performed around the details of their "sex life," it seems that the newly reconstructed bits don't do what they're supposed to do. (I note that the Catholic Church would not be able to recognise this man's marriage, since permanent impotence makes it impossible for a man to contract a valid marriage.)

Boy catastrophically screwed up person meets girl other catastrophically screwed up person. I do actually hope they'll be OK, but really, what are the odds?

It's pretty easy for us shake our heads when looking at cases of this cultural insanity that are so outrageous that they attract the attention of the Daily Mail. But we all grew up in the midst of this sexually revolutionised world. Nearly all the kids I went to school with had divorced parents by the time I was twelve. Everyone has been spoonfed these ideas since the early 1970s. We're all brainwashed with it.

How can any of us expect to make happy marriages? How can we have a society that will work when nearly everyone is the walking wounded?



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Yep, that was them...

I can't believe how SPOT on this is.

I write a lot here about how I was raised by a pack of weird hippies my mother got hooked up with in the 70s, but truthfully, I had more or less forgotten what they are really like.

It looks as if they're still out there.



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Giant Forehead smack!

I TOTALLY forgot about Earth Hour.

Dang.

I was all ready to douse a tree in gasoline and set it on fire and everything.

Italians don't really do environmentalism. It's kind of an Anglo obsession. Italians are too busy having a great time buying new cell phones to go along with the cynical, self-loathing luddism we so love to indulge in. Or maybe it's just that they aren't yet "sophisticated" enough to start feigning hatred for the wealth, comforts and conveniences we Anglos love to complain about. It's not that long since Italy was basically an agrarian peasant society, so, you know, they're still having fun with all this cool new digital stuff and aren't yet cool enough themselves to pretend they hate it.

Blazing Cat Fur reports that the PC festival of white/western self-loathing is starting to pale a bit, even close to its sources in Tranna.

I wonder how much "earth" was saved by Japan not having basically any electricity, indoor plumbing or infrastructure these days. Someone, maybe Obama, should send them a little thank you note for their contribution to saving the environment by sleeping outdoors in plastic shelters in March and eating tinned food scrounged from the wreckage of their homes, cooked over campfires made of the debris of civilisation.

A model for us all...


Update: Dang, I see Ezra has already made that point.

Mine was funnier though.



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Space hippies are evil

Even Gene Roddenberry knew it.



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How to get married

I've recently come to the conclusion (ok, it wasn't recently, but I've recently had it hammered into my skull like the tent peg that went into the head of that guy in the Bible) that "dating" is stupid.

It's stupid and destructive. It damages kids, teenagers (I could cite the stats, but we all know, don't we...we remember), it damages people who would just plain like to get married and stop all this idiot messing about. It damages people who fail in the 'dating game'.

In fact, the term 'dating game' is pretty appropriate. It's playing games with your heart and with your future.

And it's vulgar. Quite frankly, it's undignified and should be rejected on those grounds alone.

So where does that leave those of us who would like to be married but find the 'dating game' repellant? I think we are in a pickle. The old rules, and the structures are pretty much eradicated. It used to involve families, and other interested parties. But we don't have those anymore. In fact, the tidal wave of divorce, that hit the West Coast just about at the time my mother was getting into her encounter group lifestyle in the early 70s, has made it extremely difficult for people even to believe that getting married, let alone staying that way, is even possible.

When I was going into grade five, I had come out of a hippie 'free school' ("Sundance"... I kid you not) and my mother noticed that I didn't know anything. The hippies were so busy encouraging us to express ourselves that they forgot to teach me the times tables. (Thank God I already knew how to read, and lose myself in a book). When she panicked and realised I needed to be sent to a real school, I asked to go to a Catholic school. It was rather a new environment, I'll tell you. I went from a place where nearly all the kids came from single-parent "families" to one where nearly all the kids came from normal homes, two parents and one house in which they had lived all their lives. (I didn't exactly fit in...)

I think that was about 1975.

By the time I left St. Pat's and went into junior high, three years later, nearly all the kids' parents were divorced.

It happened that fast.

Is it any wonder most of the people I knew, out there in the secular world, before I managed to climb out of the mire, regarded marriage as some kind of sick joke? The idea that people get married and stay married, that they take it seriously like in the Olden Days, would make most of my old acquaintances laugh. No one even knows how to do it these days. I mean, apart from the whole "getting together" and "having a relationship" stuff, what else is there to do?

The Jews have an idea. I have one Jewish friend: Rabbi Yehuda Levin. He lives in New York and has nine kids. He's a pretty young guy, by modern standards, to have kids who are old enough to get married, but the last time he was in Rome, he told me he had to get back to New York to arrange his son's wedding. He asked me, as he has done every time we've met since the first time nearly ten years ago, when I was getting married. It's a big thing for Jews, I guess, and they still know how to do it, because their social system hasn't been blasted to smithereens by the Asteroid.

And they also think "dating" is stupid. Spiritually and morally dangerous.

Traditional Jews lead a modest social life. Teenagers don't date or go to parties, and boys and girls don't spend time with each other socially. While we're growing up, we don't get into emotional entanglements worrying about how popular we are, or who is more popular, or who we're going to go out with.

None of that happens at all in our community because we think it's unfair. It's not nice, and it doesn't do any good. The result is that when we're ready to get married, we're not playing any games. It's not a popularity contest and we're not trying to impress anyone.

When we're ready to get married, we go about it honestly and sincerely. We don't marry the wrong person because we might have been trying to impress somebody or compete with someone. All that is eliminated. We find somebody to marry, we get married, and the marriages last. Divorces happen, but rarely.

We start to date when we're old enough and serious enough to think about being married. When we do go out, it's with someone who has the same values we do. Usually, we come from families who know each other, or we have a mutual friend who thinks we're compatible and introduces us.

...

After we are introduced, we spend time together, and we consider marriage. We want to get to know what's on the other person's mind, what kind of life they want to live, what kind of life they have lived, things that have to do with being married. We wouldn't go to a movie because we want to get to know each other, not a movie. We don't want to waste time doing a lot of activities; we prefer to spend the time talking. We're not looking for a thrill; we're looking to get married.

It's a good system, and a considerate system. It takes into account that people have feelings.

For example, in our tradition, while a man and woman are dating and thinking about marriage, the dating is kept completely secret. They don't talk about it and they don't go where people are going to see them. If it doesn't work out, nobody knows. [And there are no breaks in the social sphere everyone has to continue living in...good idea.]

If it were public, people would wonder, "Why didn't you marry him? Is something wrong with him?" Or, "How come he didn't marry you? Is something wrong with you?" This way is more discreet.

If it works out, everyone is thrilled. If it doesn't work out, no one knows and no one gets hurt.

This seems like a pretty sensible system. It assumes that everyone has the same goal and works in a compassionate way to helping people attain the goal.

So, where's ours? What are we doing about this as Catholics? As "Trads"?

I had thought that in the Trad community there was more or less consensus on the "dating is for marriage" thing. I had assumed that the people who called themselves Trad Catholics had, more or less, the goal of living like normal, sane, grown-up people. That they rejected, along with the idiocies of NewChurch, the parallel rubbish in the secular world of "dating" and courtship.

Nope. Turns out not.



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Yikes! Seattle!

I hope the poor guy knows how to sleep with one eye open.

I can imagine the Weird Sisters are firing up their cauldrons as we speak.



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Hey, stupid hippie priests!

This is why nobody likes you

This week, we had a visiting priest (visiting his mom and sister in the parish, so a regular contributor to our liturgical disaster) I think I mentioned. He's had his head shoved up his ass since the 1970's and doesn't seem to realize what a sissy he sounds like constantly calling us "folks" as he editorializes every bit of the mass and tries to make it relevant. Also, he inserts the phrase "and then he said" into the words of institution, as in, "He took the cup blah blah blah, and then he said, do this in memory of me". I call it Story Time with Father Goofy. I hate him and wish bad things on him.

~

So I'm like, 'Dude!..."

Someone else has noticed, using the Laws of Rational Thought, that the loss of facility with language is related to the loss of the ability to think clearly.

Loss of language among the younger population -- that is to say, the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought -- is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders. The ubiquitous confusion between "there" and "their" may still be considered a quaint and negligible fluke that nearly creates a new orthographic norm; the inability to express lucid arguments must not.

The loss of the distinction (which I have suddenly started seeing everywhere, and in places where I really should never see it at all) between "there," "their" and "they're" is not just a language-snob problem. I don't know if any research could possibly be done to support my observation, but I have seen lately a terrible slump in the quality of writing, even by fairly intelligent people who claim to have attended decent schools.

Some time ago, I posted this that seems to have received some praise in various places.

(Aside: I received a very kind email a couple of weeks ago from a nice chap who asked me for a link. I have to say, and it should be noted by others, that I don't approve of link-fishing. If you have something that is of any quality it will be discovered and its merits will promote it for you. If you go around the web asking for links like a Romanian gypsy begging on the train, you are much more likely to get from me what they get. Which isn't money. But Edward seems like a nice chap, so here, just this once. I'm probably going soft.)

I see that Daniel Mitsui, whose website and work I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically endorse, has quoted me:

Nietzsche said, I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar. If only Nietzsche had lived long enough to see the 1970's and the new education he would have rejoiced at the final triumph of the human will over God...

The Restoration is not only a matter of politics, or even education qua education. It is an essential re-construction of ruined thought. Imagine Western Civilization not as a set of... precious cultural artifacts like the Mass or the Divine Office or legally indissoluble natural marriage or even any philosophical school. Imagine that it is a larger thing than that; it is a framework for our thought, our creative efforts. Imagine that it is the structure that makes something like Chartres or Salisbury Cathedral possible. The container for the idea of Chartres, without which no Chartres could be conceived.

I remember in Narnia, the worst, most horrible fate that the Talking Beasts could imagine was to lose language. To revert to being an ordinary dumb animal, to no longer have the spark of Divine Knowledge that Aslan had given them at the creation of their world.

I know I have written about this before, but I keep coming back to that scene in Prince Caspian when the children and Trumpkin are attacked in the forest by a bear. For a moment, Susan is filled with the horrible thought, "What if he is a Talking Bear, gone wild, who has reverted to the ways of dumb bears." For a dangerous moment she hesitates to fire for fear that she would be killing one of her subjects. When the bear is dead, Lucy, ever thoughtful, says to Susan, "What if, back home, the same thing had happened to men. That however much they may look like ordinary men on the outside, they had really gone wild inside." Susan tells Lucy not to think such horrible thoughts.

I think these horrible thoughts all the time. I think maybe it is what my mother was referring to when she wrote to me once of "the pain you seem to feel all the time."

Probably. It could be that these horrible thoughts have caught up with me, and this could be why I seem never to be able to be happy.

Here I am, typing this on my laptop, sitting in the midst of a glorious, fragrant, singing July day in Italy, 300 yards from the beach, on the balcony of my lovely apartment, surrounded by wonderful friends, employed in good work, in good health and safe. All these gifts, and yet my hope and faith barely clinging on.

I don't know. Maybe I've always been able to see that the facade of the world hides a cultural rot and despair that is only now starting to become visible to others. I remember even as a child, in the hippie-dippy 70s, knowing that the world was not what it seemed. That people were not as well as they pretended to be. That things were falling apart. Or, maybe I should say, being deliberately torn apart. I've always been an instinctual conservative.

I'm going into Rome today, just to hang out a bit. Maybe look at some monuments or art or something. It's important to try to remember that the world keeps going. People keep living and doing things, even when the barbarians are at the gates. Civilisations go up, civilisations go down. True things remain.

Maybe we should have a pop quiz for regular O's P readers. I wish Blogger would set up a thing where, instead of a word verification, you had to complete a literacy verification quiz before commenting.

What are the differences, for example, between the following?

Lay and lie.

Fewer and less.

Who and whom.

Flew and flown.

There, their, and they're.



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What is it with liberals and food, anyway?

Kathy asks,

What IS it with liberals and their stomachs?

..."It's a happy invasion for most people in this country," Clift proclaimed. "[W]e love the diversity of food."

I sent her an email,

...actually there is an answer to this question.

philosophically, the large grouping of ideologies that we usually call "liberalism" for brevity's sake, all come from the same root: radical materialism. They don't admit of anything higher than the material world. Their "ideals" all have to do with the material world; the causes they champion are strictly relegated to material ends. They deny any meaning or relevance of any transcendent value, and it tends to impoverish their minds and souls.

This was one of John Muggeridge's themes in our conversations. He held that most 'liberals' are obsessed with things that strike us normal people as very petty and transient. He also said they tend to develop food fetishes. John's father, he said, never got over his weird insistences about the way his food was cooked and what sort of food he ate, even long after he had more or less converted from liberalism to reality.

While I lived with John, we had a family friend from way back, in fact Anne's school friend from Newfoundland, come to stay for a while. I didn't get much contact in those days with the liberals and hippies in Toronto, being somewhat shielded by the Oratory and my work, and this woman, though she was very like the hippies and lefties and feminists I grew up around, struck me as extremely odd. She lived in a strange little world of her own in which very petty things took up a great deal of her attention. For example, she insisted on buying organic eggs, of which she would only eat the whites. The yolks, she said, were "contaminated".

They're materialists, so they have to make up things to become obsessed with that, while remaining strictly within the material realm, can be imbued with a counterfeit, substitute significance.

One of these is food. The other is sex.

'"Theological Woodstock"

Heh. That's a good one.

Feminism: deadly social disease

Yay! I'm not the only person in the world who thinks that feminism is an evil social disease.

Why I loathe feminism... and believe it will ultimately destroy the family

ERIN PIZZEY set up the world's first refuge for battered women in 1971 - and went on to establish an international movement for victims of domestic violence.

...Having escaped the brutality of the war, we were introduced to a new brand domestic cruelty.

Indeed, my mother's explosive temper and abusive behaviour shaped the person I later became like no other event in my life.

Thirty years later, when feminism exploded onto the scene, I was often mistaken for a supporter of the movement. But I have never been a feminist, because, having experienced my mother's violence, I always knew that women can be as vicious and irresponsible as men.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the movement, which proclaimed that all men are potential rapists and batterers, was based on a lie that, if allowed to flourish, would result in the complete destruction of family life.

...

Feminism, I realised, was a lie. Women and men are both capable of extraordinary cruelty. Indeed, the only thing a child really needs - two biological parents under one roof - was being undermined by the very ideology which claimed to speak up for women's rights.

This country is now on the brink of serious moral collapse. We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women.

Harriet Harman's insidious and manipulative philosophy that women are always victims and men always oppressors can only continue this unspeakable cycle of violence. And it's our children who will suffer.

Hey, let's start a sharing meme:

"Why I hate feminism: a personal revelation that I've never written before."

I'll go first.

People often comment to me about how much I hate feminism. How much I have consciously rejected its tenets and proposals, its invidious temptations, its poisonous suggestions. Sometimes the violence of my loathing for it spills over into my writing. People have noted how sometimes I seem almost racked with hatred for it, with an anger that seems far beyond any merely intellectual rejection of a repellent and evil ideology. I've been told that I sometimes seem like those people who fled Soviet countries and spent their lives in a dedicated campaign against communism. There is a kind of fury that motivates me that other people who also may reject feminism don't have.

Well, I'll tell you why.

I hate feminism, and leftism and hippie-ism (if there is such a thing) and the collective new ideology that seems to have no name but has taken over the world since the 1970s because it destroyed my mother's life and her ability to fend for herself by turning her into a professional victim, rendering her incapable of normal human relationships and robbing me of the one person in the world I loved the most.

That ideology, whatever it's name is, corroded her personality and fed upon her innocence until there was nothing left of her. It enslaved her will and her intellect for forty years and reduced her in the end to a kind of shell of a person. It poisoned her and crippled her emotional and intellectual and spiritual life and left her in the end, to die alone and penniless in a government-sponsored cancer paliative care home. It turned her into a wraith.

My mum was raised in England after the war and was trained and educated in the traditional middle class manner for girls to prepare her for a normal life as a wife and mother. She could cook, sew, knit, crochet, she knew all about gardening, she could draw and play the piano and make any domestic thing needed. She was also sweet tempered and had a great empathy and love for little innocent things like small children and little animals. She was a great cat lover and was great with dogs too. She was a gentle person, and very feminine in the old-fashioned way that was normal before feminism got its evil hooks into everyone's minds.

And she was brilliant. She learned eight languages, taught herself music theory in her 40s and did calculus problems the way other people do the crossword. I've got her CV and it is a thick binder of qualifications from the Canadian government certification for French, to 1st class engineering tickets, to grade 10 piano, to her undergrad mathematics degree.

When she fell into it in the 1970s, feminism and the trendy pop-psychology theories that eventually were to congeal into the festering clot that we call the New Age movement, began to unravel everything that had created her personality and to leave nothing behind but chaos and psychopathology. It taught her (and this was partly the work of the RCIA programme in the Catholic Church in Victoria at that time,) that everything she had been raised to know and do was worthless and wrong, that everything she had been taught to expect was bad and that she would only be happy in the work force after years of university.

She went to university, did degrees in mathematics and biology, studied languages and then became an engineer. None of this ever made her happy. She spent years being told that all her problems came from her evil patriarchal upbringing. She tried to throw it all off, adopted the fashionable vulgar manners and ideas of the time, that conflicted starkly with her gentle and kindly and commonsensical polite upbringing. She started to lose the sense of who she was. Feminism kept trying to provide her with a new identity that never fit her. She continued to be unhappy as her personality eroded away.

When she did finally get married, the conflict continued. Graham wanted a wife and loved her for what she really was. Feminism told her that wasn't good enough, so she left him to go to engineering school. She became more miserable after the divorce and hated being an engineer. When Graham died she lost all interest in anything, left her job, retreated into fantasy and delusion, became addicted to various conspiracy theories and psychotropic medication and finally died of cancer, having alienated herself from the Faith which she had been told was too patriarchal, and the rest of her family who hardly knew who she was. Before she died, my uncle in England begged her to come there and be at peace. She refused.

A year before she died, I sent her a last letter pleading with her to give up what we both knew was her addiction to falsehoods, fantasies and emotional evasions and to devote herself to the Real. She never replied.

My mother's vast confusion in life was characterised by the perpetual name changes. In her life, she had six surnames, only two of which came from marriages, the rest were the result of her desperate lifelong search for an identity. She spent her whole life fighting her nature, her upbringing and what she knew was true with a deep natural conviction, to keep trying to embrace an alien and logically contradictory false creed.

When I read this article about the incredibly fast destruction of the IHM nuns in Los Angeles by unleashing the demonic doctrines of Carl Rogers, I know in close personal intimate detail exactly what happened. I watched it being done to my mother with her "dream workshops" and "encounter groups" and "realness training" and "gestalt therapy" and the endless navel-gazing rubbish she brought home and tried to foist on me. By the time I was nine I had learned to make up plausible sounding stuff to tell her about my inner life, stuff that fit the trendy pop-psych template, to keep it all out. It was just instinct, but even then I knew enough to hate and fear it.

My violent rejection of it all, like the body's rejection of poison by vomiting, was painful and alienating like a deprogramming, and took decades. But it has resulted in the end in my desperate (and sometimes fragile) white-knuckle grip on The Real, that ultimately led me into the Faith-That-Is-About-The-Real. No matter how hard and unforgiving it can be, no matter how many times I have failed to live it in daily life, it is the only thing that can make meaning in a life and a world that would otherwise look like an absurdity.

When I see these anti-nuns going to their risible conferences and issuing their media releases, I would laugh if I didn't know from personal experience how truly deadly these apparently childish theories can be. If only they were really childish, children would reject them as idiotic.

As I believe I've said before, it's all a big laugh, these ridiculous old ladies, until someone loses her soul.

Finally, some vestigial instinct for self-preservation prompted my mother to ask for a priest to see her before she died, and that priest told me she recieved the sacraments, so something of The Real remained in her even at the very end.

But her life and death have taught me a grim lesson: things don't always work out in the end. Sometimes there is just failure and tragedy and no kindly or wholesome resolution.

Feminism has taught me these things.



OK,

someone else's turn now.

Yeah, so? What's your point?

Just doing a quick little thing about Michael Novak's piece on the incredible bluders of L'Osservatore Romano (and I use the word "blunder" here in an attempt to be charitable).

He writes,

For the pro-abortion forces here [in the US], “reason” and “right” and “sensible” mean supporting abortion. Anything else is unreasonable, against women’s rights, and lacking in all sense. One highly placed appointee of President Obama even compares the condition of a woman who wants an abortion to that of the slave woman in America prior to 1863 — caught in a kind of mandatory, unwilling servitude.

But I hasten to point out that this position is widely accepted in the Catholic left as well. It is, in fact, the foundation of feminism as this pernicious social disease was first described by Friedrich Engels.

He describes the "Monogamous Family" that we first find

"in all its severity among the Greeks. While the position of the goddesses in their mythology, as Marx points out, brings before us an earlier period when the position of women was freer and more respected, in the heroic age we find the woman already being humiliated by the domination of the man...

...

Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other; it announces a struggle between the sexes unknown throughout the whole previous prehistoric period.

Marriage and motherhood is regarded by the feminists (Marxists) as a form of slavery. This obviously led to the idea that the only way to be free was to be free of children. To have the right, as did the Greek and Roman fathers of old, to kill them as they would rid themselves of unwanted property. Women have to have the right to kill or they are back to being slaves to men and to the degrading and dehumanizing drudgery of motherhood.

This was drilled into me from my earliest age, as the child of a feminist of the 1970s. As with most of my contemporaries on the West Coast, my mother, perhaps little guessing what sort of logical feedback loop it might create, instilled in me the notion that the worst form of slavery, one that inevitably trapped a woman into a lifetime of misery and poverty, is to be a mother.

It is simply taken as read on the left. And the suggestion that motherhood is a good thing for women is looked upon as a piece of lunacy. Or as the work of propagandists for the oppressors.

Legal abortion, therefore, is simply part and parcel of the success of the feminist movement. Emancipation means legally sanctioned murder as a "human right".

Why is anyone surprised by this?

Actually, I think they're evil

"Additionally, conservatives tend to think liberals are merely stupid or emotional, while liberals tend to view conservatives as evil -- and liberals use that belief to justify lying about conservatives."

On the grounds that it is simply not possible for anyone who is not actually retarded to be that stupid.

Besides, I knew a lot of hippies in early life (whence came the evolutionary form of modern "liberals" as understood in US politics), and they were not nice people. Not at all.

The whole point of the hippie movement, and its later manifestations, was to abolish morality. What happens when you decide not to follow the "archaic" moral law as it has always been understood? You become evil. That's what "immoral" means.

Later you go crazy, but that's a post for a different day.

"...liberals lie incessantly. That's not to say that there aren't conservative liars or truthful liberals; there are, but for liberals, lying is the rule, not the exception."

Here's your first clew that being "liberal" means more or less the same thing as being evil.

Another is their odd propensity for stealing. It seems weird at first, but I remember John Muggeridge once commenting that liberals are always thieves.

The origin of "liberals" as we understand the term in current western politics, is communism. One of the many ways in which communism differs from Christendom is in its concept of property. Christian thought holds that people can and should own things and that there is such a thing as rights of property. Commies think that no one should own anything.

Commies think they believe in a "stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general."

I say this is what they think they believe, but this is a bit like saying that a person can believe in a logical contradiction. Logical contradictions describe nothing real, neither anything material nor anything abstract. People who tell you that they believe everyone should own everything, are saying nothing real. They are as suspect as the people who say that there is no such thing as objective truth. Their assertion disappears in a puff of logic.

In reality what they believe is that no one else should own anything they want and can't afford. (Leftiness is evil, probably, because it is founded on the sin of envy.) Anyway, being people who believe there is no such thing as a moral absolute like "don't take other people's stuff", they absolve themselves of the necessity of abiding by what they like to pretend are merely "society's rules" about property, and will often just help themselves.

I knew a kid raised by hippies in high school (it was Victoria in the 80s; everyone in my school was raised by hippies) who was a professional thief. He used to talk about "liberating" bicycles and gas from other people's gas tanks. He grew up to become an English professor at a Canadian university.

Last Mass

As I arrived, the congregation was finshing the Gloria, and so I missed the twenty minutes of chattering and socialising that the Council, apparently, said should replace the introit.

I listened to the readings.

Then listened to the homily, about how the people who work for peace should be like Desmond Tutu and Mahatma Ghandi. I'm afraid I missed the end part because of the noise of my teeth grinding together.

Then we had the warm friendly intercessions about peace. And how the love of God has nothing to do with Ruuuuules, and we pray that all the peaceful people who work for peace will feel the nice warm peace of God...

Then I left.

Because I thought it unwise to allow the nice lady who takes up the collection (last week fifty pounds for CAFOD ! ) to be killed by the daggers coming from my eyes.

I shall not miss Fr. Birkenstock, Fr. Fluffhead, Fr. Marshmallow or Fr. Cottoncandy.

Not at all.

Unsatirisable

The world has become so weird that many are saying that it is close to impossible to satirise it. As Diogenes often likes to say, "satirists draw swords; fall on them".

People have asked me recently how I can possibly, as a "good Catholic" (good grief!) enjoy popular entertainment. It's appalling. Shocking. Degenerate. Blasphemous. Wicked.

Low.

I'm afraid my response has been the text equivalent of an indifferent shrug.

I have often thought that possibly one reason the awfulness of pop culture does not bother me is that we have gone so far now that it is impossible to be outraged. All the pan-sexual goings on now elicit merely a shrug. From me, little more than irritation at the willful stupidity.

Perhaps it is more difficult to shock me because of what I do for a living. Honestly, what's left to be shocked about? I used to get shocked by the stuff I wrote about, but that was years ago. I even got upset about it once in a while (I recall the day I discovered human/animal hybrids particularly). I used to write here about the phenomenon of "nice evil" that I discovered along the way. But it just doesn't seem like news now.

How much more evil can we do and not even notice that it is evil? How much more indifferent can we become?

I think there really are no limits, in fact. Not after the 20th century. So there really isn't much point in getting one's knickers in a twist over it.

I went to some event once at the University of Toronto. There was a discount at the door for students. I guess I don't look my age because the lady at the door said, "what faculty?" I replied without hesitation, "Human Evil Studies"...and she let me pass without a murmur.

It may also be because I was raised right down in the bottom of the cess pit of hippiedom when it was ascendant in the early 70s. I was surrounded by rather nasty womyn who insisted that only by "sharing" every thought, fantasy, day dream and nightmare could we graduate to being "real".

Aficionados of the movement, or people who were in it, will recall fondly the fashion for pseudo-psychological "workshops" in which we were encouraged to share our deepest longings, fears and resentments, normally against our parents. My mum came home weekly from dream workshops, primal scream "therapy" and Gestalt sessions in which she learned to talk about her feelings, mostly to me.

But that was not enough. The benefit had to be shared, naturally, and I was informed that I was not sufficiently "open" about my feelings. I was told all about "Games People Play" and badgered not to hold back. I should "let it all out" and share.

She had no idea.

All of this pop-psych wonderland was soon to merge with occultism to form the New Age movement. Whence we arrived at the the eternal wisdom, "I'm not religious, but I am spiritual." All of a sudden, everyone was dangling crystals over candles and asking the four directions to be freed of negative chakras.

After that, what's left to satirise?

But hey, who am I to put a damper on initiative? If you think you can do it, fire away.

Jeff, in his own way, agrees.

It is impossible to be irreverent when the world no longer believes in reverence. It is impossible to tell an “edgy” joke when the edge has moved before you finish telling it. It is impossible push the envelope when there are no boundaries that envelop. Our entertainment and humor is degenerating fast because there is no stable context for it. In fact, today’s humor is often forced to establish a context - usually a caricature consisting of a “repressed”, conservative, religious milieu that most people have never experienced - for some protagonist to violate. Increasingly, however, Political Correctness has taken the place of Christianity, and some of the new comedians apply their irreverence to PC dogma, although it changes so fast it’s hard to keep up with, forcing the violators to anticipate the next move and push the envelope still further. An obvious problem with this is that PC is itself a caricature of its host, Christian morality, and it is not uncommon for the two to overlap in places. What offends against PC, often enough, offends even more egregiously against its predecessor.

How then shall we live?

I've been involved in an interesting discussion in the last couple of days, which can be viewed here and here and in which it was my great pleasure to play the role of "gadfly".

It is one I enjoy enormously. There is little that bores and exasperates me faster than the usual inbox fare of these big Professional Catholic sites where someone writes an article that is meant to provoke discussion and receives a chorus of: "Great post Steve!" "Wow Steve! I've never heard it put that way before..." "I wish I were as eloquent as you are Steve, because you've really said what I've been thinking..."

Nnnggg..!

Yes, and who really cares what you've been thinking, since it is clear you have nothing interesting to say about it.

It is commbox love-ins like these that makes the gadfly in me break out of his cocoon and make a beeline straight for any exposed flesh. Given that no one in our times has been taught how to have a friendly disagreement, I find it is quite a simple matter to make things more interesting. The plodding earnestness of the New Orthodox Catholics is just too easy a target, too juicy a bit of meat, to leave alone. The fact that they, mired as they are in their own private version of political correctness, can't abide the slightest dissent and have no sense of proportion or humour, really only adds to the fun.

(Long Aside: There was, of course, simply no way at all that I could have resisted the temptation of saying What I Really Think about breastfeeding in public. It's a fairly straightforward syllogism: I hate hippies and all of their pomps and works. Hippies started the whole "lets expose our private parts in public to shock our parents and then demand that society change its attitude towards our 'natural and beautiful' body parts" movement that I remember so well from childhood. One of the major themes of the early hippies was the demand to breastfeed in public. The hippies have, through these apparently small discrete incursions, destroyed nearly the entirety of the Christian social agreement that once sustained Western Civilisation. Therefore, I think women need to keep their clothes on in public in order to preserve Christendom. So when I saw a cluster of admiring NOCs congratulating Steve on how wonderfully he had come to the defense of the practise, using exactly the same rhetoric I remember only too well from the furry-armpitted, fright-haired harridans of my earliest memories ... well, it was just too much to expect me to resist. I was certain Steve wouldn't mind.

I will grant, perhaps, the excuse that most of the NOCs are too young to remember the hippie movement themselves, and were for the most part raised in safe middle class neighbourhoods in which they had no direct exposure to the filthy hippies and their Crusade for Indecency. It is perhaps somewhat understandable that they would not realise they were dutifully reciting and defending the hippie doctrines that have slithered quietly into every aspect of our lives and destroyed Western Civilisation. But take it from me who remembers well life on the hippie West Coast in the early 1970s and her mother's grubby, patchouli-doused friends talking about their plans: the determination to force the rest of the world to accept the "beautiful and natural" phenomenon of breastfeeding in public is a manifestation of the feminist hippie movement slithering into Christianity and I won't have it.

Also, breastfeeding involves bodily fluids. Anything that involves bodily fluids needs to be kept out of public view.)

Now, wait. What was I talking about?

Oh yes, the discussion at Steve's Inside Catholic column. Jeff Culbreath is someone whose blogging I have enjoyed for some years now and with whom I've discussed many of these kinds of issues in a list we used to belong to. I would say that most of the writing by Catholics, especially traditionalist Catholics, that I find interesting and important is focused on this question of how to live, knowing what we know, in a world that knows nothing of it.

I make light of it and poke my stick into the hornets' nest because the question is an important one that needs to be taken seriously. It can't be left to the mutual admiration societies that cluster into commboxes. Steve and I and a few others have been working on this, almost as the main background theme of all our writing in the last five years. Some of us believe that it is counter productive, not to mention more or less impossible, to remove oneself off to the woods or the country to attempt to re-create a Catholic utopia where all the ladies wear long skirts and all the kids can converse in Latin.

Others disagree.

But the bigger question is one that remains.

Just how do we live as Catholics in a situation like the one we have? What is the proper "balance" of living in but not of the world? How much of the world, and which particular bits, can we take in? What must we reject and of what may we say, "yes, this is part of the human endeavour of which I am naturally a part"?

How do we get the proper perspective on a culture in which we are ourselves completely steeped, to which we owe the very shape of our thoughts?

This raises other questions. Can we have friends "in the world"? Non-Catholic friends? Can we hope for the salvation of our non-Catholic loved-ones?

Do we set ourselves up as arbiters of who qualifies for membership in the Elect? If so, according to what criteria and by whose authority?

Does it matter that we are, while being systematically forced out of public life in the secular world, at the same time deliberately withdrawing ourselves from it? Is this exclusion and withdrawal a bad thing or a good thing? Should we fight it or help it?

There are all sorts of solutions, some better than others, but none The Right solution. Many retreat. Many give up the struggle. Many join groups that help them withdraw, like the SSPX. Some go out of their way to live near a place where there is some safety and the protection of something like a monastery or an Oratory. Some just try to go it alone.

Catholics in general, and traditionalist Catholics in particular, have a habit of looking to the past for precedent to figure out a way to cobble together a method of dealing with the problem.

Is there a precedent for our current situation? I think not an exact one. As someone said, although we are indeed returning to a variation on pre-Christian paganism, complete with child sacrifice, lawlessness and philosophical fatalism, there is a vast difference between a virgin and a divorcee. A Christendom that has spurned Christ in her maturity is not the same bride that was wooed in her innocence.

So, how are we to see our times? How are we to interact with our non-Catholic, paganised neighbours? Do we approach them with disdain? Do we not approach them at all?

Is it possible for a Christian to make use of the things of the pagan world that are, through the working of the Natural Law, still under the headship of Christ, though He is unknown?

Can we read Truman Capote? Do we dare laugh at the bawdy jokes on Boston Legal, or empathise with the moral struggles of Alan Shore? Can we see goodness in films and music that is not specifically Christian?

Did the early Christians read the Classical writers?

Augustine derided the pagan entertainments of his youth, but was he entirely right? (Terribly daring, I know, to question so venerable a Doctor).

The fact is, I do not know the answers to these questions. But I believe this is the essence of our task, having been stuck in these almost inconceivably dreadful times.

I'm a child of this civilisation. I'm even a child of the hippie generation, and I'm sure am also unconsciously greatly influenced by that movement. I want to know the world, not reject it. The world is full of human beings, and there is nothing so interesting and wonderful to a misanthrope like me as human beings.

I can't help it. I love the world.

And I understand that it was not entirely repugnant to the Father either.