One of the great things about the Christmas season is Christmas music. Not modern Christmas music, of course. I shudder at the mere thought. I’m talking about traditional Christmas carols. O Little Town has always been one of my favorites.
Also, one of the great things about YouTube is that you can type in the name of a song and get a dozen different versions, each of them wonderful in its own way.
A Christmas Carol
The Christ-child lay on Mary’s lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)
The Christ-child lay on Mary’s breast,
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)
The Christ-child lay on Mary’s heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world’s desire.)
The Christ-child stood at Mary’s knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at him.
And all the stars looked down.
– G. K. Chesterton
In the past week I’ve written posts about Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. Now it’s time to write about someone who I truly thought I’d never see again. That someone is Ron Paul.
In 2008, Ron Paul ran for President. He drummed up a lot of fanatical support among certain young people, who were convinced that he had a good shot a victory. Instead he flopped miserably in the Republican primaries. Then his followers switched to believing that he’d run as an independent. He didn’t do so. Then there was a hair-brained scheme to take over the Republican Convention and get him nominated. That didn’t work either. So by the end of the 2008 campaign, it looked as if Ron Paul’s campaign had been an utter disaster and a complete waste of time and money. While he would surely hold onto his Texas House seat, I and most others expected that we’d see no more of him at the national level.
I guess the joke’s on us. Ron Paul is back and surging in the polls. A couple polls have shown him at or near the top of the Republican field in Iowa, with caucuses just twelve days away. National polls show him third in the Republican field. So now it’s time to look at what Ron Paul truly stands for.
His platform seems to be made up of two halves. One half is courageous positions where he stands up for truth, fairness, freedom, and limited government in ways that no other candidate would consider doing. The other half is sheer madness, causing one to wonder whether he’s not only insane but violently insane.
In the first category are his positions on the Iraq War (the only ‘Pub to vote against it in 2003), torture (completely opposed), indefinite detention without parole (opposed), the War on Drugs (seemingly willing to scale it back significantly), and corporate subsidies (ready to eliminate all of them). These positions are commendable, and we’re not likely to see any serious candidate advancing them any time soon.
In the second category are many troubling things. For example, Ron Paul is the only member of Congress to oppose the Civil Rights Act. He has taken other positions that hint at racism, such as being the lone vote against a Medal of Honor for Rosa Parks. This is in line with the notorious series of racist newsletters that he put his name on in the 80’s and 90’s, then defended, then decided that he had no association with. Next comes his paranoid ranting about Mexico, including bogus claims that the US and Mexican governments are seeking to merge the two nations and build a “NAFTA Superhighway” and so forth. All of this is pure baloney, but Paul sticks to it like a leech. Lastly but not least is his economic policies, which center around abolishing the Federal Reserve and recreating the gold standard. While I proudly hate economics, I’m smart enough to know that such a move would be suicidal to our way of life.
So that’s Ron Paul in a nutshell: fifty percent brave and truthful, fifty percent off his rocker. A typical supporter will focus on the first half of what the man says while ignoring the second half. But ignoring the second half would be foolish. We cannot ignore malignant, violent insanity just because the person in question has a few positions that we like. So much for Ron Paul.
Following hard on the deaths of Christopher Hitchens and Kim Jong Il comes the death of someone who we do have good reason to mourn: Vaclav Havel. Yet I’d bet that many Americans and others have no clue who Havel was. Havel was not a communist dictator, nor a British ex-pat journalist who spent his life defending and promoting communist dictators. Instead he was an activist against communist dictators. He was a native of Czechoslovakia and became an activist against Soviet Rule during the 70’s and 80’s. He did time in prison and later fled to the United States, while his writings continued to inspire others to stand up to Soviet tyranny, and after freedom came to eastern Europe he returned to Prague and became President of his country.
In a perfect world, Havel would be acknowledged worldwide as one of humanity’s great heroes. He would, at the very least, be listed alongside Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and others who sacrificed tremendously while leading movements for freedom. His essay The Power of the Powerless would join King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail among the 20th century’s greatest writings on freedom and activism. Instead he is sorely neglected by the press and intellectual classes. The reason is not hard to ferret out. Havel was an activist against Soviet communism, something that many in the American ruling class supported in the 70’s and a few still have fond feelings for today. (Christopher Hitchens, incidentally, was among those.) Consequently most folks won’t pour too much effusive praise on Havel.
Humanity has lost a true hero and friend, and God has gained a man truly worthy of Heaven.
Following fast on the deaths of Moammar Gaddafi and Christopher Hitchens comes the news of the passing of someone who truly will not be missed. According to this report from the Los Angeles Times, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has kicked the bucket. Goodbye.
I woke up this morning and logged onto the internet and the first news I encountered was the death of Christopher Hitchens. Newspapers, magazines, and websites are overflowing with obituaries for him, and they will be for the next few days. All of them will mention that he was a headstrong atheist who proudly attacked religious believers with whatever insults came into his head. They will also praise him for his intellectual skill, principles, and writing talent. None, at least among the ones that I’ve written, will mention that he spent almost his whole life promoting communism.
When I was a child, my family subscribed to The Nation. From its pages, along with a few other sources and some assists from family members, I picked up the fact that communism was a pretty good system. That Lenin and Trotsky and Castro were decent fellows, that Stalin may have had a few flaws, but that Che Guevara was awesome. It was quite a surprise to learn, over the course of my college and graduate school years, that this was all false, and that all these men along with countless other communist dictators were actually brutal mass murderers. But that’s the truth.
Here’s another truth: Christopher Hitch was the number one proponent of communism in the USA for decades and he was durn proud of it. In his book Koba the Dread, Martin Amis mentions the odd truth that it American society it’s unacceptable to say anything nice about Hiter and the Nazis, but quite all right to praise Lenin and the Soviet communists. Exhibit A for this strange phenomenon is Christopher Hitchens. He spent many years at The Nation rolling out support for the Soviet Union as well as Red China and communist regimes all over the world. He obviously knew full well that these regimes were responsible for killing tens of millions of innocent people, yet he celebrated and promoted them anyway. He also viciously lashed out at anyone who supported peace and freedom anywhere. While the people of Poland struggled valiantly for freedom against the Soviet oppressors, Hitchens savagely attacked them for being Catholic, and he had nothing but insults for Pope John Paul II, the world’s leading freedom fighter. After communism fell apart, he ended up jumping to the neo-conservative’s flagship magazine, The Weekly Standard, where he helped drum up support for a war in Iraq that’s killed over a million civilians. It would seems that the only principle Hitchens clung to throughout his life was to always support whoever was doing the most mass slaughter.
We are, of course, ordered by Jesus to love and pray for our enemies. I will pray for Mr. Hitchens but I won’t feel all that much sympathy. That’s more reserved for the millions of people who were killed, tortured, or imprisoned by the regimes that he proudly supported.
A Child of the Snows
There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.
Never we know but in sleet and in snow,
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth
And the heart of the earth a star.
And at night we win to the ancient inn
Where the child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet
At the inn at the end of the world.
The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown,
The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.
– G. K. Chesterton
5 Novels, as you might guess, contains five novels. My last post dealt with the second one, Slaves of Spiegel. The first one, Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, is very different. To be sure, both deal with teenage boys in working-class New Jersey towns who, along with a close friend, have an adventure with space aliens. That’s where the similarites end, however.
Slaves of Spiegel is really and extended short story built around one funny concept. Alan Mendelsohn is a novel in truth, 250 pages long. It is a coming-of-age story, beginning with cliche of a boy who moves to a new school where he doesn’t fit it, but then befriends the school’s other loner. Things come to a head when, while they’re out of school for different and equally hilarious reasons, they explore a dusty used bookshop downtown and come away with a book that’s supposed to teach them how to read minds. It does … sort of. To say anything more about it would be to deprive you of the pleasure of reading it yourself.
One thing I will note, which puts Alan Mendelsohn at odds with typical science fiction writing. In many science fiction novels, particularly the dumb ones, there’s a character who dispenses perfect wisdom. The most famous and obvious example is the novels of Robert Heinlein. Almost every one has some old dude who lectures the younger characters about politics, philosophy, ethics, history, and so forth, always dispensing wisdom in small and witty bursts. It’s no secret that these characters all represented Heinlein himself, and that he used them to fantasize about having everyone else worship his superior intelligence. Thus no one should be surprised when the younger characters in a Heinlein novel give the elderly dude their complete trust and turn out the better for it. A similar pattern can be seen in lots of other crap novels such as those of Terry Goodkind and Robert Newcomb.
In Alan Mendelsohn there is no elderly character to offer perfect wisdom to the two young protagonists. There are parents, but they are ineffective and get little screen time. Then there’s a parade of other adults, each of them bizarre and slightly suspicious in hiw own way. None of these characters comes onstage stamped with the label “good guy” or “bad guy”. Rather, it’s up to the two boys to figure out who is trustworthy and who isn’t and who lies somewhere in the middle. Just like real life.
I’ve recently returned to an author that I haven’t encountered for quite a while, via this book:
Daniel Manus Pinkwater (Is that a great name for an author or what?) writes nominal children’s books. Like most of today’s children’s books, his are better than typical adults’ books. Pinkwater’s books are all science fiction novels. The main character is nearly always a young boy who has a bizarre adventure with something extremely out-of-the-ordinary. Slaves of Spiegel, the second novel in this collection, is no exception.
It begins on the planet Spiegel, where the race of fat men are holding a junk food feast to celebrate their successful plundering of the universe. They have collected the fattiest, greasiest, and most sugary confections from every planet and galaxy and brought them back to Spiegel to celebrate. But in the middle of the feast, their king Sargon becomes suddenly dissatisfied. Instead of simply hogging potato pancakes, he wants to search the universe for the most satisfying junk food. Thus begins a series of events that will lead to The Magic Moscow, a fast food stand in Hoboken, New Jersey, being abducted along with its chef Steve and his young assistant.
Slaves of Spiegel is a sequel to Fat Men from Space and maintains the wry wit of the first book. It also continues Pinkwater’s fine tradition of sending up science fiction cliches. Science fiction is full of planets or societies serving as wish-fulfillment vehicles, ranging from Heinlein’s libertarian utopias to Clarke’s sorta’ Hindu mystical fulfillment in Childhood’s End to Jack Vance’s nature preserve planet in Araminta Station to scores of others, some of them quite frightening. The planet Spiegel is very much in that tradition, complete with an all-powerful king and a fleet of starships and so forth. But as Pinkwater points out, the wish that most folks spend more time wanting fulfilled is for lots and lots of good-tasting food. Fat Men from Space and Slaves of Spiegel are thus likely to remain timely and relevant for longer than the fantasy utopias of from the supposed greats of sci fi.
With the topic of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism erupting on my blog and elsewhere, it seemed worthwhile to ask G. K. Chesterton whether he had any thoughts on the topic. He did, not surprisingly. (Is there any topic on which Chesterton didn’t have thoughts?) Here they are.
THERE is inevitably something comic (comic in the broad and vulgar style which all men ought to appreciate in its place) about the panic aroused by the presence of the Mormons and their supposed polygamous campaign in this country.
It calls up the absurd image of an enormous omnibus, packed inside with captive English ladies, with an Elder on the box, controlling his horses with the same patriarchal gravity as his wives, and another Elder as conductor calling out “Higher up,” with an exalted and allegorical intonation. And there is something highly fantastic to the ordinary healthy mind in the idea of any precaution being proposed; in the idea of locking the Duchess in the boudoir and the governess in the nursery, lest they should make a dash for Utah, and become the ninety-third Mrs. Abraham Nye, or the hundredth Mrs. Hiram Boke.
But these frankly vulgar jokes, like most vulgar jokes, cover a popular prejudice which is but the bristly hide of a living principle. Elder Ward, recently speaking at Nottingham, strongly protested against these rumours, and asserted absolutely that polygamy had never been practised with the consent of the Mormon Church since 1890. I think it only just that this disclaimer should be circulated; but though it is most probably sincere, I do not find it very soothing. The year 1890 is not very long ago, and a society that could have practised so recently a custom so alien to Christendom must surely have a moral attitude which might be repellent to use in many other respects. Moreover, the phrase about the consent of the Church (if correctly reported) has a little the air of an official repudiating responsibility for unofficial excesses. It sounds almost as if Mr. Abraham Nye might, on his own account, come into church with a hundred and fourteen wives, but people were supposed not to notice them. It might amount to little more than this, that the Chief Elder may allow the hundred and fourteen wives to walk down the street like a girls’ school, but he is not officially expected to take off his hat to each of them in turn. Seriously speaking, however, I have little doubt that Elder Ward speaks the substantial truth, and that polygamy is dying, or has died, among the Mormons. My reason for thinking this is simple; it is that polygamy always tends to die out. Even in the east I believe that, counting heads, it is by this time the exception rather than the rule. Like slavery, it is always being started, because of its obvious conveniences. It has only one small inconvenience, which is that it is intolerable.
Our real error in such a case is that we do not know or care about the creed itself, from which a people’s customs, good or bad, will necessarily flow. We talk much about “respecting” this or that person’s religion; but the way to respect a religion is to treat it as a religion: to ask what are its tenets and what are their consequences. But modern tolerance is deafer than intolerance. The old religious authorities, at least, defined a heresy before they condemned it, and read a book before they burned it. But we are always saying to a Mormon or a Moslem–”Never mind about your religion, come to my arms.” To which he naturally replies–”But I do mind about my religion, and I advise you to mind your eye.”
About half the history now taught in schools and colleges is made windy and barren by this narrow notion of leaving out the theological theories. The wars and Parliaments of the Puritans made absolutely no sense if we leave out the fact that Calvinism appeared to them to be the absolute metaphysical truth, unanswerable, unreplaceable, and the only thing worth having in the world. The Crusades and dynastic quarrels of the Norman and Angevin Kings make absolutely no sense if we leave out the fact that these men (with all their vices) were enthusiastic for the doctrine, discipline, and endowment of Catholicism. Yet I have read a history of the Puritans by a modern Nonconformist in which the name of Calvin was not even mentioned, which is like writing a history of the Jews without mentioning either Abraham or Moses. And I have never read any popular or educational history of England that gave the slightest hint of the motives in the human mind that covered England with abbeys and Palestine with banners. Historians seem to have completely forgotten the two facts– first, that men act from ideas; and second, that it might, therefore, be as well to discover which ideas. The medievals did not believe primarily in “chivalry,” but in Catholicism, as producing chivalry among other things. The Puritans did not believe primarily in “righteousness,” but in Calvinism, as producing righteousness among other things. It was the creed that held the coarse or cunning men of the world at both epochs. William the Conqueror was in some ways a cynical and brutal soldier, but he did attach importance to the fact that the Church upheld his enterprise; that Harold had sworn falsely on the bones of saints, and that the banner above his own lances had been blessed by the Pope. Cromwell was in some ways a cynical and brutal soldier; but he did attach importance to the fact that he had gained assurance from on high in the Calvinistic scheme; that the Bible seemed to support him– in short, the most important moment in his own life, for him, was not when Charles I lost his head, but when Oliver Cromwell did not lose his soul. If you leave these things out of the story, you are leaving out the story itself. If William Rufus was only a red-haired man who liked hunting, why did he force Anselm’s head under a mitre, instead of forcing his head under a headsman’s axe? If John Bunyan only cared for “righteousness,” why was he in terror of being damned, when he knew he was rationally righteous? We shall never make anything of moral and religious movements in history until we begin to look at their theory as well as their practice. For their practice (as in the case of the Mormons) is often so unfamiliar and frantic that it is quite unintelligible without their theory.
I have not the space, even if I had the knowledge, to describe the fundamental theories of Mormonism about the universe. But they are extraordinarily interesting; and a proper understanding of them would certainly enable us to see daylight through the more perplexing or menacing customs of this community; and therefore to judge how far polygamy was in their scheme a permanent and self-renewing principle or (as is quite probably) a personal and unscrupulous accident. The basic Mormon belief is one that comes out of the morning of the earth, from the most primitive and even infantile attitude. Their chief dogma is that God is material, not that He was materialized once, as all Christians believe; nor that He is materialized specially, as all Catholics believe; but that He was materially embodied from all time; that He has a local habitation as well as a name. Under the influence of this barbaric but violently vivid conception, these people crossed a great desert with their guns and oxen, patiently, persistently, and courageously, as if they were following a vast and visible giant who was striding across the plains. In other words this strange sect, by soaking itself solely in the Hebrew Scriptures, had really managed to reproduce the atmosphere of those Scriptures as they are felt by Hebrews rather than by Christians. A number of dull, earnest, ignorant, black-coated men with chimney-pot hats, chin beards or mutton-chop whiskers, managed to reproduce in their own souls the richness and the peril of an ancient Oriental experience. If we think from this end we may possibly guess how it was that they added polygamy.
– G. K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity
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