Rod Dreher: December 2008 Archives

Patrick Deneen waxes philosophical on the final hours of this fateful year. Excerpt:

When the history is written, it seems likely that not only will 2008 go down as the year when the fissures of the American way of life were made plain, but it will be understood to be the date when the beginning of the end of the American empire was made manifest. No empire of significant power falls in a day or a year, but in stages, like the slow motion internal degradation of a rotting building.

Historians will write with amazement and wonder at the madness that had swept the land, such that even (or especially) the best and the brightest believed that something - a great deal, in fact - could be had for nothing. In the course of a few months this year we went collectively from feeling wealthy and insulated from any great harms, to discovering that our entire edifice was built on a foundation of unsustainable risk. The last bit of breaking news of the year was the revelation of a massive Ponzi scheme, a bit of financial chicanery by which newer "investors" are fleeced in order to line the pockets of older "investors." The massive scheme hatched by Bernie Madoff - not now on impoverished little widows and orphans, but the power elite of America and even the world - was a smaller morality tale of the entire American financial system, one that had been all along premised upon impoverishing the young and the unborn for the sake of the living and soon dead.

Stories will be told about this year, with amazement that humans could have attempted to organize a society around a belief in the utter efficacy of self interest. This philosophy appeared to work for a time, and was well-designed to do so by virtue of the presumed existence of two phenomena that it neither created nor replenished. What allowed this philosophy of the Enlightenment - so-called - to succeed for a time were two gigantic reservoirs that the philosophy fundamentally held in contempt, yet nevertheless assumed to exist and even to persist: a long prehistoric accumulation of material and moral inheritances.

Wonder what Alasdair MacIntyre's doing for New Year's Eve...

Now this is good stuff -- painful to read, far more painful to write, but fearless self-analysis and examination of conscience. Excerpt:

2009 is the year I turn thirty years old. Such milestones contain a foreboding magnetism: they tend to draw all memories toward it, recasting them and judging them from a new perspective. So many illusions have failed this past year; for myself, this last year (although I admit, I still tend to think in academic years), a few may have deflated as well. If thirty is the onset of adulthood for many of us today, its vantage point allows the look past at one's twenties, a dissolute time if there is one. Although I still suspect that a lot of other people get it figured out by the time their twenties are over: many of my friends are married, have several children, have established career paths. This may be a peculiar characteristic of the conservative Catholic subculture. I have the impression that some of our peers in the world are not so settled.

That doesn't help me of course, knowing what I know. I don't mean to sound pompous--I mean that in the truest sense, and even more, in the sense of ignorance being bliss. When you know, indubitably, that we are called to sainthood, to love God above all for his own sake, who alone satisfies; that this requires in all us earthly sinful souls a long commitment to detachment; that most of what the world proposes as blessed and worthy is the opposite of what is in fact the case, and that real life, real blessedness is only found in mercy, poverty, purity, meekness, humility, persecution; that death will soon enough come, and surely will equalize all our vanities and accomplishments, for this earthly life is only a moment compared to eternity with, or without, God; finally, that what is most real and worthwhile, is love, not power, the gift of self, not acquisition for the self, peace, not violence.

Far from a collection of abstractions, these truths of the faith, if you will, are revealed in the concrete events and vicissitudes of real life--and especially, it seems, the failures--year in and year out. This collapse of the stock market and economic recession probably allowed many a chance to glimpse the ephemeral nature of stuff, money, the security of wealth. For myself though, I've never had much money. I've been in a great bit of debt since college (compared to most people I presume), but no matter what my occupation or state, I've been able to spend a good bit and enjoy many leisurely activities and pursuits. I'm not talking Gstaad or Ibiza, yachting or four star restaurants, but things like road trips, eating out, living as a student in Europe, taking vacations to national parks, having books, a computer, clothes, other nice things. The last year and a half I had a kind of financial epiphany, realized my profligate ways, and have since assiduously applied myself to saving, building my credit, investing, planning, what have you. It probably sounds unbelievable, but I think I saw a lot of the downturn coming, and watched it all with a kind of detached, amused interest. I don't have much, so I didn't suffer much. Time is on my side, and I have a secure job, cheap rent, and a paid used car, and only my largish student loan payment, so I don't sweat too much.

What I have anguished about is more my inability to put in practice those truths mentioned above. As I draw closer to my thirtieth birthday, increasingly I find myself looking back on my twenties with sadness, regret, even disgust. That may sound harsh, but again, when you know what I know, the only possible conclusion is the latter.

Instead of growing in holiness, I seemed to peak, spiritually speaking, at college, and have managed to do most of the things I swore I would never do in the years hence. In fact, I distinctly remember being at college and thinking, I don't want to be struggling with this or that in ten years, I want to be this person having accomplished all these great things by this time. And what happened? Evil got easier and easier. Good became harder and harder. And instead of a progressive ascent up the mystical mountain, at times I find myself, almost thirty, wondering where God went, starting to forget even what he sounded like, what intimacy with him felt like. Some have told me this experience is not all that uncommon for people my age, precipitating a kind of second conversion, a conversion to grace. I remain dubious (or perhaps just jaded).

Read the whole thing.

Alberto Gonzales, as we know and love him:

Alberto Gonzales, who has kept a low profile since resigning as attorney general nearly 16 months ago, said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration.

Mr. Gonzales has been portrayed by critics both as unqualified for his position and instrumental in laying the groundwork for the administration's "war on terror." He was pilloried by Congress in a manner not usually directed toward cabinet officials.

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?" he said during an interview Tuesday, offering his most extensive comments since leaving government.

During a lunch meeting two blocks from the White House, where he served under his longtime friend, President George W. Bush, Mr. Gonzales said that "for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

Un-freaking-believable, this guy. By this point, I pity Gonzales too, though not for the same reasons Gonzales pities Gonzales.

Nat Hentoff, the atheist left-wing pro-lifer, civil libertarian and jazz critic who has been a shining star at the Village Voice since 1958, got his walking papers today. Verily, that's the end of an era, and the departure of a good man. No doubt there will be many at the Voice and among its readership who will be pleased to see him leave. Here, in a 1992 column, he explains why:

Not too long ago, he was a pro-lifer. He wrote and spoke about the right to life and attacked advocates of abortion rights. "There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life," he would say. "That was the premise to slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation, because that was private and therefore outside of your right to be concerned." He told the story of how he himself had almost been aborted. A physician had advised his mother to let him go, but she wouldn't. Don't let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn't a human being, he warned: "That's how the whites dehumanized us, by calling us niggers. The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify that which they wanted to do--and not even feel like they'd done anything wrong."

But as Jesse Jackson decided to run for president in 1984, his fiery pro-life rhetoric suddenly subsided. If being black was a political obstacle, being black and pro-life would raise the odds much too high. Jackson understood that it is hard to be a pro-lifer if you want the support of the left--or just have friends on the left. The lockstep liberal orthodoxy on abortion is pro-choice, as Bill Clinton's election showed and his presidency will reinforce. Dissenters are not tolerated.

Nearly ten years ago I declared myself a pro-lifer. A Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer. Immediately, three women editors at The Village Voice, my New York base, stopped speaking to me. Not long after, I was invited to speak on this startling heresy at Nazareth College in Rochester (long since a secular institution). Two weeks before the lecture, it was canceled. The women on the lecture committee, I was told by the embarrassed professor who had asked me to come, had decided that there was a limit to the kind of speech the students could safely hear, and I was outside that limit. I was told, however, that I could come the next year to give a different talk. Even the women would very much like me to speak about one of my specialties, censorship in America. I went and was delighted to talk about censorship at Nazareth.

At the Voice, some of my colleagues in the editorial department wondered, I was told, when I had converted to Catholicism--the only explanation they could think of for my apostasy. (Once I received a note from someone deep in the ranks of the classified department. She too was pro-life, but would I please keep her secret? Life would be unbearable if anyone knew.)

Read the rest of the column after the jump.

Well, well, well, it's going to be awfully hard for the apologists for Hamas to explain how it's our Christian duty to pity the poor Islamists after this news:

The Hamas parliament in the Gaza Strip voted in favor of a law allowing courts to mete out sentences in the spirit of Islam, the London-based Arab daily Al Hayat reported Wednesday.

According to the bill, approved in its second reading and awaiting a third reading before the approval of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, as the Palestinian constitution demands, courts will be able to condemn offenders to a plethora of violent punitive measures in line with Sharia Law.

Such punishments include whipping, severing hands, crucifixion and hanging. The bill reserves death sentences to people who negotiate with a foreign government "against Palestinian interests" and engage in any activity that can "hurt Palestinian morale."

According to the report, any Palestinian caught drinking or selling wine would suffer 40 lashes at the whipping post if the bill passes. Thieves caught red-handed would lose their right hand.

These people are theocratic monsters. Islamism is a cancer. As you must be aware, under Islamic law, Christians living under sharia must accept official second-class citizen status, and pay the jizya, or tax, for the privilege of living as dhimmis. And what value do you think free speech will have in a society in which the theocrats running the state reserve the right to execute anyone who does anything they judge to "hurt Palestinian morale"?

Hamas are bloodthirsty barbarians, plain and simple. No person reading this blog would suffer to live under Hamas rule for a single day. And if that kind of government, a government that openly states its goal is the extermination of all the Jews in Palestine, were sitting on our border firing rockets into our country, do you think for one second we'd put up with it?

I don't believe it's America's business to fight Islamism wherever it exists. If Muslims want to live like that, that's their business -- though God help the Christians, Jews, Bahais and secularists who have to suffer their yoke. But when Muslims choose an Islamist government whose program includes the murder and expulsion of most inhabitants of a neighboring state, and that government sends rockets against the people of the neighboring state, why on earth would we mind seeing these Islamists destroyed?