A Game of Thrones was first a fantasy novel by American writer George R.R. Martin, published in 1996 as the first book in the series A Song of Ice and Fire. Five of a projected seven titles have appeared, the last being Dances with Dragons in 2011. It was last year as well that Game of Thrones became an HBO television series based on the books. The second season, which began on April 1, continues to follow the feuds of the seven or so great houses of Westeros, hostilities that are distracting them from greater, supernatural threats emerging in the north and east.

The drama includes hundreds of speaking characters, plotlines that twist and fray, and a point of view that varies from chapter to chapter. Only in a handful of literary precursors, Chinese classics and Old Norse–Icelandic family sagas among them, can one find casts of characters whose popularity matched their ponderousness.

Even though Martin’s fantasy epic has fewer people, his postmodern narrative countervails, generating dimensions of perspective and relativism whose complexity has clearly absorbed audiences.

For A Song of Ice and Fire, complexity is both a hallmark and a buzzword. In an interview on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship daily interview program Q recently, Martin endorsed the description of HBO’s Game of Thrones as “The Sopranoes in Middle-earth,” and that his intention with A Song of Ice and Fire is “to take epic fantasy, which I love, and combine it with some of the gritty realism and ambiguous morality of, I think, the best historical fiction, with layers of complexity, and real human characters, sexuality, violence, all of that good stuff.”

The obvious implication is that fantasy lacks such depth and complexity, which much of it might. The launching pad for the discussion, however, was a specific brand of fantasy—that of J.R.R. Tolkien, a writer whom the Q fill-in host, Brent Bambury, suggested that Martin might indeed outstrip. Bambury repeated the claim of Time magazine, that Martin is the American Tolkien. But made it even more provocative: “Many feel it’s an accurate comparison. Others say no, it’s not accurate, because he [Martin]’s better.” Though Martin went on to spend a good deal of time recalling his reading of The Lord of the Rings as a young man, maintaining that “the books had a profound effect on me,” he did not demur.

Juxtaposition with Tolkien is unavoidable with fantasy. With a genre that all but reckons history based on the publication of the three Lord of the Rings books from 1954-55, even authors whose works predate those of Tolkien—William Morris, E.R. Eddison, and Robert E. Howard, for example—are compared to him. The shadow of the Oxford professor stretches from horizon to horizon; trying to present a brand of fantasy outside his standard is like trying to conceive of an undiscovered color, much to the frustration of some. British novelist China Miéville, for example, once called Tolkien “a wen on the arse of fantasy literature.”

With Martin’s Game of Thrones, however, the tone of the comparison has become much more confident than usual, due perhaps to the television adaptation and its wide audience.

For many fans, Game of Thrones is more appealing than The Lord of the Rings because it is more realistic. What this means in posthumanist modern-speak is that its moral shades are gray. Principles wither in the face of politics. Great men are secretly weak, small men are secretly great, and every face is, to borrow a line from poet Ted Hughes, “slightly filthy with erotic mystery”.

When asked why this ambiguity and complexity are important to his moral universe, Martin answered, “I think it’s real. […] If you read the biographies of great men […], you will see they’re all gray.” Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth, with their clear dichotomy of good and evil, are increasingly considered to be at best Christian fantasy; at worst, the very sort of stock fantasy to which they are kernel and root.

More realistic, really?

The idea that one fantasy fiction can be deemed more realistic—essentially, more non-fictional—than the other, deserves contemplation. With science fiction, at least, we have the categories of hard and soft, depending on the sort of technology at the heart of the story. Consider, for example, elements in Martin’s Game of Thrones which Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings lacks. A Game of Thrones begins with a slaughter, followed by a beheading scene. The Lord of the Rings begins with plans for a birthday party, followed by the birthday party itself. Beheading, in fact, constitutes the single most gruesome detail of Tolkien’s many scenes of war, when the forces of Sauron use a catapult to throw the heads of Gondorian soldiers over the walls of Minas Tirith. In A Game of Thrones, atrocity is unflinching; even dead children are shown in all their red ruin.

And then there is the other matter of the flesh. The only sexual innuendo to speak of in The Lord of the Rings lies in Gandalf’s accusation—easily missed—that the Rohirrim turncoat Gríma Wormtongue wished to have the maiden Éowyn for himself. That’s it.

Meanwhile, sexuality in A Game of Thrones is so graphic and unsettling, that it is difficult to give examples without breaching decorum. The television series — far is even spicier than the novels — seems to be competing with Starz Entertainment’s Spartacus series, essentially portraying hardcore pornography using softcore acting protocols.

In one scene of Game of Thrones, the bride of an arranged marriage recruits the help of—and practices on—a female prostitute in an endeavor to convince her barbarian husband to actually face her during their frequent (and largely unwanted) intercourse. The girl, Daenerys Targaryen, is played in the television series by a 24-year-old actress. We know from the novel, however, that she is supposed to be thirteen years old.

A poetic comparison furnishes another commentary on the claim of realism: in Game of Thrones, British actor Sean Bean’s noble character Eddard Stark dies in an effort to save himself by lying publicly. Despite violating his honor to preserve the image of the incestuous ruling family, he is executed by them. In The Lord of the Rings films, Sean Bean’s noble character Boromir dies in an effort to redeem himself after having tried to steal the One Ring to save his people.

Finally, there’s the fact that The Lord of the Rings has a conclusion. A Song of Ice and Fire, as yet, does not, and if series like J.J. Abrams’s Lost have taught viewers anything, it is that their expectations for a continuing story can be gauged and manipulated by writers and producers as shrewdly as by political campaigners. An open ending may be more like reality, but there’s no such thing as a book without an end. Even Michael Ende’s Neverending Story had to contradict itself eventually.

There can be no doubt that Martin and Tolkien provide different experiences. The more modern publication delves much deeper into the personal psychology of its characters, while the other provides much more historical depth. To claim, however, that one imaginary world is more realistic than the other is to beg a standard that simply cannot assert itself. As Northrop Frye considered in his Anatomy of Criticism, as inhabitants of the real world, everything we imagine ourselves to understand—whether fiction or nonfiction—must have some basis in our own experience. Something entirely apart from that experience would be incomprehensible to us—untranslatable, as it were.

In deciding matters of realism, then, we must ask ourselves how deeply our experience goes with the criteria we invoke, and from there decide whether our decision is valid. Some may realize, for example, that they have attended more birthday parties than beheadings in their lifetime.

With Game of Thrones, as with a great many current television programs and films whose realism is measured by their grittiness, the spotlights are constantly on the shadows. It should come as no surprise that cockroaches scatter. To claim, however, that their matters of murder, deceit, rape, and worse somehow impart greater credibility to a fantasy world than do their existing moral counterparts—this makes Game of Thrones not just theater, but a thermometer.

This article was originally published on MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons Licence.

Zombie voodoo pirates. Time-traveling Mossad agents. Djinn in the Cold War. The dark fantasy novels of Catholic author Tim Powers can seem like pure high-concept, and his newest book—a sequel to The Stress of Her Regard, a.k.a. What If the Romantic Poets Were Sort of Vampires?–has the same instant audience appeal. Christina Rossetti fights vampires! A hard-luck ex-prostitute who’s too stoic for her own good might finally find happiness with an animal-loving loner! Tough women, sensitive men, London by gaslight, sinister rituals, and even Boadicea back from the dead: Hide Me Among the Graves seems custom-designed for a cold, rainy weekend curled up under a comforter with the cats. 

And yet this thrilling, compassionate book is much more than its concept. Powers excels at a fantasy of salvage: a human-scale, kitchen-sink drama in which characters take what seem like small steps into darkness, only to find themselves in far over their heads. The way out requires terrible physical and emotional sacrifice. The great, heroic actions in these novels are often acts of renunciation, earning no glory. 

Hide Me Among the Graves begins with one of these little, enormous complicities. A teenage Christina Rossetti takes a tiny statue from her father. Although his words have made her suspect that there’s something wrong about the statue, something out of line with the Christian faith of her sister Maria, she holds on to it. Following a superstition which she hopes will allow her to dream of her future bridegroom, she rubs her own blood on the statue and falls asleep with it under her pillow. 

That night she thinks that she’s been revisited by an old nightmare, the figure she called “Mouth Boy” because his sharklike maw seems to take up his entire face. But Christina sees that the nightmare figure looks strangely like her brother, and seems to be in some kind of need, so Christina—not realizing she’s in a vampire tale!–invites her dream visitor into her home and, eventually, her bed. She knew she was doing something we might call “sketchy” today, something a bit morally off-center; she didn’t realize that she had reawakened one of an ancient race of jealous, powerful vampiric creatures, the Nephilim of the Bible, and that her nighttime visitor would seek to kill everyone she loved and eventually involve her in a plot to destroy London. 

The rest of the book involves the quest to thwart the Nephilim plan of destruction. But the quest is complicated, in part because not everyone fighting the vampires really wants to see them defeated. Powers is terrific at capturing the nostalgia for sin, the longing for it, and it touches and warps many of the characters in this novel. Some characters go through moments of despair, others are tempted by the possibility of being a great poet. Others simply long for the intensity of the Nephilim’s all-encompassing, devouring love, “the dark elation of being severed from human concerns.” Only one character—a young girl who was taken and used by the Nephilim awakened by Christina, then left to wander the streets with other cast-off and damaged children—manages to turn her awful childhood into a source of ferocious, steadfast resolve. The other characters, with their more divided hearts, view her with a kind of uneasy awe. 

Powers can evoke real shivers: When Christina, early on in her association with the vampires, begins to draw a rabbit on her sketchpad, the picture “began to go wrong under her darting pencil—the hind legs and back seemed broken now, and the creature’s face began to take on a human-like expression that somehow expressed both scorn and pleading—and when she heard her brother Gabriel gasp at the sight of it, she crumpled the paper.” 

There’s also a recurring theme, as seen in the title of The Stress of Her Regard, of the fear of being looked at, the fear of being found out, being the focus of an otherworldly attention. A creature, essentially an unborn child transformed into a vampire, gets the especially frightening description: “In fact, if it hadn’t been for the lively attention in his eyes, she would have believed he was dead.” When one character considers “the special mutual awareness between redeemer and redeemed,” even this salvific awareness seems to throb a little, painful, in a novel about the inflamed attention of the Nephilim. 

There are some moments of humor: “How could she still be in love with a man who was dead,” Gabriel Rossetti wonders about his laudanum-dazed, vampire-ridden wife, “and who furthermore could no longer form a coherent sentence?” There’s a nice sense of the exasperation felt by people who have to deal with immensely powerful beings who simply don’t think like humans: “Ghosts are such imbeciles,” one of them notes. This is a novel full of codes, tricks, and home remedies—for ghosts and vampires. 

But this is, overall, a sad and scary book. It’s a book in which adults almost casually use children as instruments for the fulfillment of their own destructive desires. It’s a book in which even seeing the terrible cruelty of the Nephilim isn’t enough to make the human characters turn entirely against them. The Nephilim use lust, pride, envy against their victims, but also pity, as when they impersonate family members or appear as cold and needy children. Powers makes the eldritch bond between human and vampire totally believable: You can feel the longing yourself, the sweet pain, the ache where an old sin was only mostly healed. 

So curl up under your comforter. But whatever you do, don’t open any windows.

Hide Me Among the Graves

]]> http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/tim-powerss-fantasy-of-salvage/feed 3 http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/on-being-a-catholic-writer http://www.crisismagazine.com/2012/on-being-a-catholic-writer#comments Wed, 16 May 2012 08:11:36 +0000 Ralph McInerny http://www.crisismagazine.com/?p=8235

Many Catholic writers have balked at being called that. They were Catholic and they wrote, all right, but they didn’t want to be read as if the point of their fiction was a religious message. As if you could earn an indulgence by reading them. And maybe they didn’t like the prospective company. There used to be Catholic book publishers who published Catholic fiction. Some of it was pretty good — I still remember books by a Jesuit named Finn, Tom Playfair, Percy Wynn: I’ve looked for copies of those books but without any luck. Some of that Catholic fiction was pretty bad, of course, largely because it was trying to be so good. You just knew there was a lesson to be learned, like the point of a homily. Priests in those stories were usually unbelievable, almost as unbelievable as the lay people.

A few years ago, I went through a list of the recipients of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal and was struck by the number of novelists, most of them women, who had been honored. I looked up some of their novels and read them. One woman who wrote under the pseudonym of Christian Read had a predilection for plots in which Protestants were bested in argument and eventually came into the Church. (She herself was a convert.) Other women wrote movingly of the plight of single Irish girls in the New World. Maurice Francis Egan, who ended up as American ambassador to Denmark, wrote some pretty good novels. Kate Chopin never won the Laetare Medal but she was a powerful Catholic writer at the turn of the century. Not everyone knows that Knute Rockne wrote a novel called The Four Winners: The Hands, The Feet, The Head and the Ball, a boys’ book set at DuLac Academy. When I first came upon it, I was disposed to laugh — until I noticed that it was dedicated to one Arnold McInerny who had fallen in the First World War.

Such items suggest that there was a tradition of Catholic writing that is ignored in standard accounts of American literature. Is this because it was inferior? Much of it wasn’t. It was simply not aimed at the WASP audience. It was sort of like the Negro Baseball League.

I don’t mean that Catholic fiction is a genre, sort of like westerns and mysteries, and that the Catholic writer simply works within certain conventions. The more you think about it, the less plausible that is. Historians would probably explain the marginal place of Catholic fiction by noting the immigrant status of Catholics and the fact that they were generally far down on the social scale. If you live in a more or less hostile cultural environment, the explanation would run, you will produce your own culture.

I don’t know what American Catholic first wrote simply for whom it might concern, to be read as one might read anyone else off the shelf. F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly not the first, but in this, as in other matters, he provides a cautionary tale. Most biographers of Fitzgerald — and their number increases annually — show little interest in his Catholicism. I have a theory that he was shamed out of it by people like Edmund Wilson, who patronized Fitzgerald while secretly envying him. In a letter from St. Paul where he had gone to write This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald wrote Wilson that he “tells his chrystalline beads no more,” a sad little remark that seems to invite congratulations from Wilson.

Fitzgerald is a complicated case, but it can be said, I think, that he came to see his faith as an impediment to his literary ambitions. His short story, “Absolution,” intended as the beginning of The Great Gatsby, reads like an outsider’s view of the terrors of the confessional and the perils of the celibate life. But Catholicism never lost its hold on Fitzgerald’s imagination. Beneath the romantic longing and the effort to find gold behind the glitter, Fitzgerald’s fiction takes place under the watchful godlike eye of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. It is good to know that Fitzgerald now lies in consecrated ground.

But it is the apostate Catholic writer James Joyce who looms large. The end of the Portrait makes clear that Joyce saw his art as a substitute for religion — it was either/or. Joyce took no cheap shots at the faith he abandoned, however, something one notices after the spate of novels written by disgruntled Catholics telling the world how awful it was, all that sexual repression and sense of sin, the hypocritical clergy and religious. The note of special pleading is dominant.

It is a good thing for an aspiring writer, and everyone else, to realize that Western literature, our entire culture as a matter of fact, is inconceivable apart from the faith of those who produced it. This overwhelmingly obvious fact is an antidote against the not always implicit assumption that religious belief is an impediment in the arts. It would be easier to argue, historically, that in large part Christian faith has been a condition of existence for the arts.

“But enough about me,” the typical writer might say. “What did you think of my last book?” I have been uncharacteristically keeping myself out of the discussion thus far, but now I want to make a personal appearance.

The thought of becoming a writer came to me in stages. First, as a kid, when I spent a lot of time in the Roosevelt Branch Library on 28th Avenue in South Minneapolis. At thirteen, I went off to Nazareth Hall, the minor seminary of the Archdiocese of St. Paul, and this opened up a whole new world to me. In my first year, an upperclassman named Waldo Hermes handed me Maisie Ward’s life of Chesterton, saying he thought I might like it. The book was almost as big as I was, and I was flattered by the thought that I moved in the same mental universe as young men who needed to shave.

Chesterton did it for me. I wanted to do the sort of thing he did. At the back of study hall there were a few reference works, among them a huge green volume, Twentieth Century Authors by Kunitz & Haycraft. I spent hours with it, reading about writers, looking at the little postage-stamp-size photographs of them, noting how old they were when their first book was published. How I longed to be among their number. When I joined the Marine Corps at the age of seventeen, I thought I was embarking on my career as a writer. College? Not on your life. I would confront life in the raw and write memorably about it. The main thing I did in the Marines was to read through the section on American fiction in the El Toro library. And I kept a notebook in which I issued promises and predictions to myself.

When I got out, I went back to the seminary, and writing was done on the edge of other things, as it usually is. I wrote poems and a verse play and began a novel. But I was more interested in being a writer than in writing, so to say. When Chesterton was in art school, he noticed that there were more artists than people who painted and drew. Dilettantes. I was one.

For years I entertained the velleity of being a writer. Months would go by during which I wrote nothing at all. I published a couple poems — scholarly writing is not writing in the sense we are talking of here — I completed two alleged novels as well as some stories, but I really wasn’t serious about writing. It was necessity, as they say, that became the mother of invention.

I was now a professor of philosophy, married, the father of a growing family, and we bought a house to keep them in, more house than I could afford. I borrowed money in order to take on the mortgage. I faced the prospect of five years of two payments a month on the house. What to do? I remembered a writers’ magazine I had bought in the train station in Los Angeles in 1946. Its advertisements and articles were devoted to the proposition that there was money to be made writing. I was in need of money. Therefore I could write.

Write seriously. I made a resolution to write every day for a year and if at the end of that time I had not sold anything I would take up bank robbing or maybe sell one of the kids. Every night at ten o’clock, after the kids had been put to bed, and Connie and I had some time together, I went down to the basement where I had put my typewriter on a work bench, and, standing, would write until two o’clock. Since I wanted to make money, I aimed my stories at the slick magazines. I was about to serve my apprenticeship as a writer.

Not many weeks passed before it dawned on me that I hadn’t the least idea what I was doing. Well, maybe the least idea. But the transition from consumer of fiction to producer is a wrenching one. It is necessary to become quite analytical about what it is in the stories one enjoys that engages one’s interest and holds it. What is it that makes a story linger in the imagination after we have finished it? There are techniques to be learned. The difference between a serious writer and a dilettante lies in their contrasting attitudes toward technique. The dilettante writes to amuse himself, an easy task, but the serious writer seeks to interest a reader. Over my typewriter I pinned the legend: No one owes you a reading. It has to be earned. The old-fashioned way — with plot.

Under the tutelage of my first editor, Sandra Earl at Redbook, I learned to turn hitherto shapeless narratives into stories. Later I saw that I was learning the hard way what I had read about in Aristotle’s Poetics. And I was constrained by the demands of commercial fiction. There was no room for tangential flights of fancy. “Why the second paragraph on page 9?” an editor might query. “It is so wonderfully well written,” would not serve as an answer. It had to play a role in the story. I learned economy and I learned to concentrate on what the reader’s likely response would be so that I could guide it by what I wrote. If you devote a paragraph to the view from the back bedroom window in a short story, that better be significant for the way things come out.

The thing about technique is that it can be taught and learned. This is true of any of the arts. You can take a course in watercolors, you can take piccolo lessons, you can take a writing course. The emphasis will be on technique, how to do it. What the course cannot give you is vision or a voice. You can mimic the masters for a while, you might do plausible imitations of them — art imitating art rather than nature — and come to realize that is all you can do.

This is why technique is looked down upon. This is why, fatally, it is thought to be unimportant. The fact that it is not sufficient does not make it unnecessary. Even E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, laments that he must tell a story in order to amuse the masses when he would rather just write. Thank God for the masses if they made Forster write the novels he did. A contempt for the masses goes hand in hand with the rejection of technique as the means of engaging the reader.

It is with something more than technique that the question of the Catholic writer arises. Stories are about people doing things, pursuing goals, meeting difficulties, overcoming or being overcome, succeeding or failing. The men and women in stories face problems we all face, and this can interest us in the account of how they fare. Now this is true of commercial short stories as well. Why is it that having made some money, gotten out of debt, and learned how to write, I would not have wanted to just go on writing for those markets? It had to do with the range of issues, the treatment of them, the constraints I mentioned above. Some of the stories I wrote for the magazines were as good as any I have done. “The First Farewell,” my debut in Redbook, is all right; and the novella I wrote for the same magazine, A Season of Endings, inspired a bit by Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams, is better than I remembered. But basically what I wrote were domestic stories — the first recital, going off to camp, the visiting grandma: dramas but not pressed to any great depths. And love stories, the most persistent theme of fiction.

My first novel, Jolly Rogerson, was published by Doubleday in 1967, my second, A Narrow Time, in 1969. What I had learned on the magazines enabled me to write these, and in doing so I realized I was liberated from a kind of generic set of standards of success and failure. Slick magazine fiction does not go to the most fundamental questions involved in human action. It sails the sea of received opinion. In my first novels I was able to write out of my own deepest beliefs about what it all means. In those novels, I realized I had a voice and a mass of material and that I wanted to go on doing this as long as I lived.

My characters were Catholic. They saw what they were doing through the lens of their faith; success and failure finally was a matter of grace or sin. Catholic fiction in this sense is not a matter of lore or the settings but of the nature of the eye through which the action is seen. J. F. Powers is an exquisite writer about Catholic things, and Flannery O’Connor, equally good, mentions things Catholic in only one of her short stories — but the sensibility of all her fiction is Catholic.

When Dante dedicated the Paradiso to Can Grande della Scala, he said that the literal meaning of the Divine Comedy is the way in which human beings by their own free acts earn eternal punishment or reward. That is the vision of human action that makes fiction Catholic. It is not a matter of having priests and nuns on the set, not a matter of explicit reference to Catholic things, but rather the Dantesque vision. There are priests and nuns in stories that lack this vision; this vision is present where there is nothing peculiarly Catholic in view.

My next two novels, The Priest (1973) and Gate of Heaven (1975), were about Catholic things as well as being Catholic in the fundamental sense. The first asked, in effect, what it was like for a young priest in the postconciliar Church, and the second asked what it was like for old priests who saw the structures of a lifetime crumble around them. The Priest was a best seller; Gate of Heaven has its discriminating fans.

It was this writing about priests that led to the suggestion that I try my hand at a mystery series involving a clerical sleuth. Somewhat reluctantly, I responded, little suspecting that Father Dowling would turn out to be my most popular character. Mysteries are matters of life and death, of crime and punishment, but sin and forgiveness are also in play, and it is the latter that explain Roger Dowling’s interest in murder and mayhem. The television series, based loosely on these stories, ran for three years in prime time and continues to be shown both here and abroad. Some years ago, a priest from Japan told me he had watched the series in Tokyo. I forbore asking him if he liked my characters in Japanese.

There are other mystery series and other novels, some in my own name, others under pseudonyms. I am having, thank God, the exuberantly pullulating writing career I thought of when reading Chesterton. It was, of course, the Father Brown stories that gave me pause when I was asked to invent a clerical sleuth. But I am reconciled to being less than Chesterton. And there are many things in the wings.

Just as natural law is included in Christian revelation, so there is a natural moral vision of human action operating in fiction that is not Catholic in the sense mentioned above. Alas, we live in a time when natural morality is thought to be religious, doubtless because the Church seems the major champion and defender of the natural law. The recognition that adultery and deviance and killing people is wrong is often thought to be the quirky outlook of Christians. But of course great pagan literature also proceeds from this recognition.

Embarrassment about the notion of the Catholic writer is like embarrassment at the notion of Catholic universities. The faith is seen as an embarrassment and an impediment. Both attitudes founder on the same fact. Universities were born ex corde ecclesiae, out of the heart of the Church, and so was our literature. Being a Catholic writer is not a falling away from an ideal; it is the way to fulfill the ideal completely — to see human acts in terms of the ultimate stakes of life.

And to engage and amuse the reader in doing so.

This article originally appeared in the December 1995 issue of Crisis Magazine.

President Barack Obama’s five-point plan for turning the war back to the Afghans is designed to cover the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces and “forge a just and lasting peace.” What does the plan involve, and can it work?

Here are the five points:

1. Making Afghans responsible for their own security within two years
2. Training and operationalizing a 352,000-man Afghan security force
3. An enduring partnership with the United States providing training and counter-insurgency guidance
4. Pursuing a negotiated peace with the Taliban
5. Building a global consensus for peace

Afghanization—the practical consequence of the withdrawal of American forces—requires the strengthening of the Afghan military to withstand the Taliban. Elements fundamental to its success involve improving and modernizing the Afghan military, pacifying rural areas, strengthening the national political apparatus, delivering essential services while building a viable economy and, most importantly, ensuring security for the people.

Subsidiary tasks include expanding and improving the police, establishing democratic institutions down to the village level, restructuring the agricultural economy away from opium production, and rooting out the Taliban infrastructure. Given the non-specific nature of goals four and five in the president’s plan, the three essentials of Afghanization are: self-defense, self-government, and self-development.

Neutralizing the Taliban infrastructure is critical to extricating the U.S./NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan for the past decade. In part, this overly long commitment resulted from misjudging the nature of the war from the start, thinking it would be relatively easy to destroy al Qaeda and replace the Taliban government that nurtured and protected the terrorists. What are the obstacles successful Afghanization?

On the plus side, the Afghans are tough, resilient fighters who defeated Alexander the Great, thwarted British imperialism, humiliated the Soviets, and frustrated the U.S./NATO coalition. Molding the Afghans into a Western military image will be difficult. Unlike the Iraqis and Pakistanis, Afghans lack the British military tradition. That 86 percent of Afghan recruits are illiterate makes building a modern U.S.-style military a challenge. Leadership tends to be tribal and reflects the corruption rife in Afghan politics. Warriors abound but many of them are Taliban. Modern armies, however, require trained soldiers and effective leaders. Additionally, the security of advisors and trainers is integral to building a viable Afghan fighting force. So far, 20 percent of U.S. casualties have come at the hands of Afghan military personnel. This does not bode well for the advisory phase.

Item four in the Obama plan specifies a negotiated peace. Leverage is key to successful negotiations. President Obama declared, “A path to peace is now set before them (the Taliban). Those who refuse to walk it will face strong Afghan Security Forces, backed by the United States and our allies.” Is the president’s threat credible?

The Taliban knows that U.S. forces are leaving and 1,834 combat deaths (as of May 3, 2012,) have depleted American will. Given that Washington’s objective seems to be the extrication of U.S. combat forces by 2014, with an advisory contingent remaining, the enemy senses the “new day on the horizon” belongs to them. The Taliban responded to President Obama’s pre-dawn declaration with a daybreak attack within earshot of the U.S. embassy coupled to a strategic proclamation targeting U.S. military forces as well as Afghan security personnel and political leaders. Expect the Taliban to keep the pressure on during withdrawal.

The challenges of Afghanization mirror those of Vietnamization, which succeeded only in providing a patina for extracting U.S. forces from South Vietnam. The precursor to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam was the advisory and training phase that began in November 1961 but so failed to overcome cultural and military impediments that it required a massive U.S. military commitment starting in 1965 to forestall defeat. In 1969, when Vietnamization started in earnest, the original cultural and political challenges remained. Attempts to replicate the U.S. military structure focused on meeting the managerial imperatives of logistics rather than building armed forces able to withstand a North Vietnamese attack.

In the end, Vietnamization fulfilled President Richard Nixon’s vow to bring the troops home by the end of his first term. The president’s promise to South Vietnam’s President Nguyen Van Thieu to enforce the Paris Agreements of January 23, 1973 proved irrelevant following Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. Barely two years after the last U.S. troops departed South Vietnam, Saigon’s army disintegrated in the face of a concerted North Vietnamese attack. The South Vietnamese lacked military acumen and leadership and, most importantly, the will to fight … and so did the United States, whose Congress drastically cut appropriations needed to sustain the Industrial Age force Vietnamization rendered.

Afghanization succeeds only if it proceeds with a bodyguard of political and economic reforms compelling the Afghan people to fight for themselves. Otherwise, Afghanization only needs to endure until early November and the re-election of President Obama.

Every Sunday, from the kickoff to the final Hail Mary attempt as time expires, Americans glue themselves to their TVs and cheer on their team. Football may not quite be America’s Pastime, but it’s certainly America’s Game.

And yet, the most popular, the most watched, the most lucrative sport in the United States has a serious problem on its hands. People are still watching, buying tickets and expensive satellite TV packages. The NFL is still making money hand over fist. They don’t have a financial problem, they have a moral problem. And, we, the fans, have a moral problem.

Last week four players were suspended for their roles in a bounty program designed to give players bonuses for injuring the opponent. Extra cash if the player left on a stretcher. A couple weeks prior, their coaches were suspended for organizing and allowing such a program.

Last week, Junior Seau, former All-Pro linebacker for the San Diego Chargers and New England Patriots, killed himself. Seau, 43, shot himself in the chest. He didn’t leave a note, but it’s the same method Dave Duerson, the former Chicago Bears star, used to kill himself last year. The reason for the chest, and not the head? The brain would be preserved for scientific study.

This after former player Andre Waters shot himself in the head in 2006. The few parts of the brain left intact showed he had a degenerative brain condition called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Waters was 44 years-old when he killed himself. Dr. Bennet Omalu at the University of Pittsburgh said the brain looked like it belonged to an 85 year-old.

Duerson’s brain was studied and was found to have the same condition. We don’t know for sure yet in Seau’s case, but the smart money’s on him having CTE as well.

I’m not trying to condone anyone’s suicide. Far from it. But, this has become a trend. And it goes far deeper and far wider than the high-profile suicides.

Former players are reporting dementia, memory loss, and other symptoms of serious brain injury often and at early ages. Currently there are over one thousand former players suing the NFL, alleging that league did not do enough to educate players about concussion, nor are they doing enough to help players with their effects.

Players and coaches organizing bounty programs designed to seriously injure other opponents doesn’t help.

Much of this, of course, is between the players and the league. Compensation and education regarding concussions and post-concussion effects really has nothing to do with fans, aside from the fact that we like our institutions to care about this stuff and to act justly.

So, where do we, the fans, come in? Do we come in at all? Our we truly just fans, an audience watching the events unfold? On at least one level, yes. We are certainly spectators. We don’t call plays, we don’t sub players in and out. We don’t make tackles, catch passes, throw blocks.

But, on another level, we are intimately involved with a sport that, it’s becoming increasingly clear, is inherently violent and life-threatening, at least in its current form.

The NFL has recently begun cracking down on headshots. But only certain kinds. Lineman hit each other in the head on nearly every play, for instance. And running backs are generally not protected by the rulebook from blows to the head. In other words, it’s not just the blatant, deafening helmet-to-helmet hits.

Still, the NFL is taking some steps address the issue, and yet they continue to endorse the idea of extending the season, which would only open up players to more abuse.

The players, for their part, are not without blame. They play the game in the first place, and the overriding culture of toughness leads many players to try to play through head injuries, and in some cases even ridicule other players who won’t.

There are, of course, risks to everything we do. If people didn’t take risks, nothing would ever be done. You run the risk of dying every time you leave your house.

But there’s something different about football. Sure, there are risks to everything, but the amount and severity of head injuries to NFL players is becoming overwhelming. Sure, it’s the players who make the choice to play the game, but we make the choice to support it and derive entertainment from it.

Now might be a good time to note that I love watching football. It takes precision, teamwork, immense skill, and it’s just flat out entertaining. And that’s where I start to squirm.

A large part of the NFL’s entertainment value comes from the crushing hits. And it goes beyond just the illegal plays. Players who are legally tackled often get their head smacked against the ground. Linemen are constantly knocking helmets while jostling for position. Fullbacks, tight ends, receivers, and lineman often lead with their heads while blocking for the running back, who routinely takes shots to the head.

And we (you and I and millions of others) sit down every Sunday in the fall and winter and are entertained by it.

My thoughts keep getting drawn back to the gladiator games. The similarities are striking. Many of the gladiators possessed great skill ; they were paragons of man in his physical form. Disciplined. Athletic. Masters. The games themselves were awe-inspiring, entertaining events. They also frequently ended in death.

And while football players aren’t dying right there on the gridiron, they are dying. They are enduring years of brain damage, dementia, and memory loss at a high rate. It was their decision to put themselves in that position, certainly. But it’s our decision to watch them do it.

The Church Father Tertullian writes in De Spectaculis that “the innocent can find no pleasure in another’s sufferings” in reference, in particular, to the gladiator games. Football and the gladiator games are, of course different. The goal of the gladiator was often to kill or maim. And all for the entertainment of the spectator.

Football is different, of course. Despite some of the rhetoric that surrounds the game, the goal is to score more points than the other team (as John Madden will tell you), not to literally kill them. Brain injuries, memory loss, and sometimes death are by-products. And yet, they seem not to be merely accidental, but rather inextricably tied to the sport. The growing trend of brain-damaged players experiencing serious symptoms and even early death is alarming.

To be sure, football is not played in order to inflict brain damage. And we certainly don’t watch football in order to see people get brain damaged. But does there come a point where the harm the sport inflicts, intentionally or not, outweighs the merits of watching it?

Can we take delight in the well-executed block or the legal tackle, knowing what they’re doing over time to the players? Can we cheer the big hits? Marvel at the bone crunching collisions? Can we disapprove of those, but support the game as a whole. How many times can we cringe at a big hit, watch a player get carted off, and mutter, “What a shame. Hope he’s okay.” At what point does a shame become a trend? And at what point does a trend become part of the game?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. But the issue, at the very least, deserves discussion. The consequences of playing football, it’s becoming increasingly clear, can be quite serious. Deadly, even.

We’d do well to at least begin to probe what the consequences of watching it might be.

Will you be watching in the fall?

Since my meditation on playing LPs in late February, I have been engaged in an even more revanchist activity – listening to live music at concerts and opera houses.  For those interested in my musical autobiography, my reviews of the LA Opera and a number of performances of the National Symphony Orchestra can be found at: http://ionarts.blogspot.com/  I can tell you that Placido Domingo is still singing well at age 71 in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and that conductor Christoph Eschenbach particularly excels in making the transcendent perceptible in his riveting performances at the Kennedy Center, particularly with the Bruckner Ninth Symphony in February and Dvorak’s Stabat Mater in March.

I was also blessed to hear a supremely beautiful and moving NSO performance of Elgar’s First Symphony, with conductor Andrew Litton, in April. The adagio was heart stopping.  Litton and the NSO pricelessly captured the hushed, almost sacred moments of such great tenderness that a musical friend of Elgar declared it “the greatest slow movement since Beethoven.” This is music to crack open the heart.  It certainly had my eyes watering.  The delicacy of the NSO’s delivery was refined to the point of perfection.

Therefore, I can confidently report that musical standards are very high, and that performances are well attended.  In fact, the classical music life ofAmericais so vigorous and accomplished that one wonders how we have gained such a reputation as cultural Babbitts.  And then one remembers, of course, pop culture, which, unlike classical music, goes everywhere and besmirches everything, including our good name.

Yet, listen to this.  The League of American Orchestras has a membership of approximately 850 orchestras across North America that runs the gamut from world-renowned symphonies to community groups.  And, according to the Wall Street Journal, “in theUnited States alone, 360 opera houses and concert halls were completed between 1994 and 2008.”  That’s not too shabby.  In fact, it’s an impressive indication of vitality.  There is hope.  And it is not simply that we are performing music well.  It is also that Americans continue to compose very fine music today.  Later, I will briefly review several of the outstanding new releases of contemporary American music.

As much as I love the concert hall – and the experience of live music can never be completely replicated by a recording – I must resume my duties as a CD reviewer.  And here there is also a great amount of good news – so much so that space will not allow me to get through my recommendations in a fell swoop.

Let me start with the pleasures of the pleasant.  Not all music need shake the rafters or plumb the depths. Some is written simply to be enjoyed, and that was never truer than in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when there was still a premium on gracefulness and charm.  Of course, Mozart and Haydn were the pinnacles, but much was written of worth slightly below their level.  No less a person than the great American composer, David Diamond, personally recommended to me the music of Adalbert Gyrowetz (1763-1850).  Gyrowetz was practically overcome by his own modesty and his music nearly forgotten.  This would have been tragic, as his music is terrific.  There is a new recording on the NCA label (order number 60231) that features four of his wonderful piano trios, played by the Trio Fortepiano.  I happen to dislike the clangy, tinkling sound of the fortepiano (the piano’s immediate precursor), but I could not resist this music and the verve with which it is played on original instruments.  The whole thing sparkles.

Like Gyrowetz, Joseph Martin Kraus (1756-1792) wrote at, or very close to, the level of Mozart.  In fact, Haydn remarked that Kraus was the only other composer he knew who was as great as Mozart.  Though little-known, Kraus’s music, particularly his outstanding symphonies, have been given new life by the Naxos label. The Ondine label (ODE 1193-2) has just released a new CD of two Kraus Concertos for Viola and Orchestra, and another for Viola, Cello, and Orchestra, beautifully played by the Tapiola Sinfonietta, with cellist David Aaron Carpenter.  This is a wonderful addition to the Kraus Canon.  Start with theNaxossymphonies.  If you like them, grab the viola concertos.

Anton Eberl (1765-1807) was another Mozartian.  He was not only a Mozart family friend, but some of his compositions were, without his permission, published under Mozart’s name.  One can see how an unscrupulous publisher got away with this when one listens to his Piano Concertos in E flat and C major, on a new CPO CD (777 354-2), with the  Kolner Akademie.  This is very vivacious, enjoyable music.

I cannot praise the Marco Polo label too highly for its faithful endeavor to record all 36 string quartets of Louis Spohr (1784-1859).  It has now issued the last volume, number 15 (8.225981), containing Quartets Nos. 19 and 22. Spohr was an early romantic of such high repute that his name used to grace the walls of 19th-century concert halls, along with those of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.  I have never been entirely convinced by his symphonies, but I find that his chamber music, at its best, approaches the song-like, touching quality of Schubert’s quartets.  Listen most particularly to Quartet No. 22, aptly played by the New Budapest Quartet, and you will see what I mean.

The devil is always a good sell, and he comes across wonderfully well in the music of both Robert Schumann (1810-1856) and Arrigo Boito (1842-1918).  So, I want to briefly mention how good the Naxos recording (8.572430-31) is of Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, an entirely convincing performance by the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, under Antoni Witt.  This is a terrific bargain.  I was somewhat hesitant to listen to Boito’s Mefistofele, which is one of my favorite operas, in a Naxos recording (8.66048-49) of a provincial performance by Teatro Massimo, Palermo, under conductor Stefano Ranzani.  But I am glad I did. This is a rip roaring portrayal that leaps to life, with no lack of high drama.  It may be a bit rough around the edges, but it is great fun.

Because of space constraints, I’m going to have to leap directly to our times to keep my promise to cover recent American music.  Do not worry; we are not getting that far removed from the pleasures of the pleasant.

Take, for instance, the new Naxos CD (8.559687) of Peter Schickele’s works for woodwind quintet, played beautifully by the Blair Woodwind Quintet.  I have always enjoyed Schickele’s “serious” music, particularly his enticing chamber music.  His string quartets and piano quintets are quite wonderful.  He, of course, is far better known for his comedy send-ups as PDQ Bach, but I wish he had spent less time clowning around and more on composition.  You will hear why.  The title piece here is A Year in the Catskills, accompanied by Dream Dances, Diversions, and other pieces.  These are sweet, genial musical musings that percolate pleasantly along.  Much of it is gentle and reflective, capturing a poignant nostalgia. I am not damning with faint praise.  These are works of sheer delight and attractive fancy.  There is simply not a mean bone in the body of this music.

James Aikman (b. 1959) has written a Violin Concerto, subtitled Lines in Motion.  Its opening orchestral ostinato is repeated enough times in a minute and a half to begin to annoy, but the work is soon rescued by a highly lyrical and rhapsodic violin line that is extraordinarily long.  It sets up a deeply felt yearning against the somewhat mechanical ostinato. This segues into a very stirring Quasi una Fantasia, which is the heart of the work.  It achieves a Samuel Barber-like beauty.  Music like this is a nail in the heart of the avant-garde.  The Concerto is followed up by an exquisite Pavane for String Orchestra, called Aina’s Song, and a Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra.  This CD (8.559720) is another winner in Naxos’ “American Classics” series, and is done to perfection by the St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra, under Vladimir Lande, with the excellent violinist Charles Weatherbee.

Daron Hagen (b. 19610 also has a very heartfelt quality in his Piano Trio No. 3, “Wayfaring Stranger” (2006), which is based on the hymn Poor Wayfaring Stranger.  I had not known until I read the Naxos program notes that this work was written in memory of his brother.  It is very touching and directly affecting.  Anyone who thinks that modern American composers do not write music that, without condescending to any sloppy emotions, goes straight to the heart should listen to this work.  The equally attractive Piano Trio No. 4, “Angel Band” (2007), is also based on a hymn and has a strong Appalachian feel to it.  It, too, is very moving and, at times, ecstatic.  The earlier two piano trios on this CD, Nos. 1 and 2, are more angular, acerbic, and “modern” sounding, at least in part, with less direct appeal, though obvious promise.  The Finsterra Trio delivers what sound like definitive performances (Naxos 8.559657).  There is a real joy of discovery here, which is why I write this column.

Stay tuned for my discoveries from the late 19th and early 20th centuries early next month.

It may have erupted in the Twitterverse and on MSM sites, but the only possible surprise element may have been the timing. Maybe.

Because President Obama’s was among the most expected and awaited coming out moments in the nation. Which makes you wonder, what was outed, per se?

So President Obama has come out in favor of same-sex marriage. Now what?

His announcement Wednesday provoked an outpouring of appreciation from the gay community, but it also raised questions about whether and how it would translate into actions. Having made history as the first sitting president to support gay unions, he could leave it at that, turning his attention back to the economic concerns that remain the top priority for American voters.

(Note that sentiment. It’s important.)

But his endorsement has increased hopes among gay rights groups that Obama will take a more forceful stand on gay rights as well as gay marriage, which remains a divisive and emotional subject that could complicate his reelection efforts.

“This is the most LGBT-friendly administration in history, and the things the White House has done and the administrative agencies have done on behalf of [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people are tremendous,” said Rachel B. Tiven, executive director of Immigration Equality, which advocates for same-sex couples in the immigration system. “And yet, everybody wants full equality, not half equality.”

So this is where I have a question or thought or two. Because everything else involving Vice President Joe Biden setting the stage for this announcement, and the president’s admission which was not exactly breaking news, has received saturation coverage already. Especially as it relates to political strategy, which seems to be the driving force of this evolution.

Especially considering that it came the day after the North Carolina election in which voters again upheld the historical legal definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.

But that’s part of my observation about this issue and very public debate. The language used to debate it.

In almost everything I heard on this issue, it was framed by media as opposition to a good, a right. And who is opposed to it (North Carolina voters being the latest) and who favors the right, such as it is claimed (the vice-president and president  being the latest). One network news commentator declared it as the civil rights issue of our time. Or at least the one I heard, while tuned in.

None of us wants to be on the wrong side of any human rights issue. Which is why it’s so strategic to make this a human rights issue. No wonder the poll numbers are changing, trending towards acceptance or approval of “same sex marriage.” By word control the merchants of ideas and politics are attempting thought control, and it works by casting a whole segment of the population as “opponents” of a “right.” When in fact what we’re talking about is the redefinition of marriage. Which changes the linguisitic calculus.

So let’s do a thought experiment: Instead of being intolerant opponents of same-sex marriage (a negative), majority voters in 32 states now (all the states where it was put to a vote) are actually proponents of the traditional definition of marriage (a positive), and opponents of that tradition are intolerant of anyone who disagrees with their views of legal recognition of marriage. Which members of the Catholic church hold as a sacrament besides a law.

Almost nobody is talking about the rights of children in this battle. Almost. But these folks are.

William B. May, founder and chairman of the San Francisco-based group that promotes Catholic social teaching on society’s common interest….[says]

“Underlying the proposal to redefine marriage, is an assumption that marriage is merely the committed relationship between two loving people…And a lot of us think of marriage in terms of the adult perspective, and the benefit for adults.”

“That’s a private interest – and that’s not what marriage really is.”

“Marriage is more than that. It’s a communion of persons. And when we look at it from the perspective of the child, it’s the heart’s desire of every person – without exception – to be united with, and to know, the man and woman that they came from. That’s part of who we are.”

“What’s happening now, with the redefinition of marriage in the minds of people, is that more and more children are becoming deprived of that experience – which is a human right – to be born into, and raised in, a family with a mother and a father united in marriage.”

Society and culture, May explained, have perennially defined marriage in this manner for the sake of binding men and women to fulfill this duty to their children.

Thus, any redefinition weakens the unique cultural and legal standing of the only institution that secures the integral bond between children and parents.

“The harm is this,” he said. “By redefining marriage as merely the public recognition of a relationship between adults, we essentially ban the promotion of marriage as the only institution that unites a man and a woman with each other and any children born from their union.”

“It creates a conflict with the human rights of the child, to know and be cared for by their mother and father in the union of a marriage.”

May said this conflict would represent a clash between the public interest of all children – in the recognition and promotion of the type of union in which they have a right to be raised – and the private interest of homosexuals involving an essentially different type of relationship.

“To promote the unique value of the union of a man and a woman would then be legally ‘discriminatory’ against homosexuals – because it would be making a statement that one type of relationship has greater value. And it would not be permitted, if marriage is redefined as merely a committed relationship between adults.”

Not only the state, but “every institution in society,” May indicated, would then be “bound under the law” to ignore the most compelling public purpose for marriage, as a safeguard for children’s rights.

As for other ’interest groups’ (since this is a political calculus), Elizabeth Scalia does an interesting roundup here.

My first thought was: what does this mean for the black churches? Back in 2008 it was the black Christian vote that defeated gay marriage in California. African Americans voted for Obama, but while they were there, they voted against gay marriage. It’s one of those stories no one wanted to talk about. Now, things become interesting: do African American churches, hearing the president say that “my Christian beliefs” inform this newly declared viewpoint, simply give up their own beliefs to support his or do they stand for their own? And then, who’s Christian beliefs are right? That’s a whole ball of wax I bet no one wanted to deal with in this election.

But there it is. Forcing the issue to the public arena of ideas and debate. So let it be about that, beliefs and worldviews on economic and foreign and domestic issues, and public policy on social moral issues as well as fiscal issues.

And let it be fair and honest.

This article was originally published on MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons Licence.

On Sunday, Jan. 25, 1959, Pope John XXIII proclaimed that it was time to drag the church out of the Dark Ages and into the modern world. It was time, he said, to open the stained-glass windows and let in some fresh air. Shortly thereafter he convened the Council of Vatican II to implement his “Aggiornamento”. Unfortunately, this “bringing up to date” of the Church’s practices and structures quickly took on a life of its own when it lost its tether to ressourcement (i.e. a return to the sources of tradition) and became a vehicle for constant experimentation and change. Eleven years later, in his famous speech of June 30, 1972 Pope Paul VI shocked the Catholic world by stating that he sensed “the smoke of Satan”was within the Church.” It was believed”, the pope said, “that after the Council of Vatican II a sunny day in the Church’s history would dawn, but instead there came a day of clouds, storms and darkness.” That day of infamy continues to dawn inside the Church with increased intensity. Catholics today in large measure feel lost, confused, perplexed and disappointed. Ideas opposed to the truth are being scattered abroad in abundance. Heresies, in the full and proper sense of the word, have been spread in the area of dogmas and morals, creating doubts, confusions and rebellions. The root cause of this chaos is Modernism which has affected almost every area of church life. One area especially effected is the priesthood and religious life.

The crisis of the priesthood, which has seen mass defections, corruption, and a steady decline in priestly vocations since Vatican II, is principally spiritual in nature and can be traced to the church’s excessive desire to conform to the world’s way of thinking. On a purely religious level, there is an impoverished understanding of freedom which prevents one from joining his free will absolutely to something absolute. On a supernatural level there is a failure in faith, that is, doubt about the existence of the absolute to which a priest dedicates himself.

After the Great Council, the church began relaxing canonical discipline allowing post-conciliar priests a wider authority to invest their own private opinions. This enabled priests to publish books without prior approval from their bishops, issue statements, hold protest meetings, speak on radio, television and the internet, go onto the streets to demonstrate against papal decrees, mix with non-Catholics and take full part in their meetings. They can, as it were, now preach their own ephemeral and transient opinions as if they were the message of the Gospel and the doctrine of the Church. Even Pope Benedict XVI has stated in the forward to his book Jesus of Nazareth: “Everyone is free to contradict me” suggesting that everyone’s subjective opinion of Christ is worthy of being advanced today.

Then too there is the post Vatican II tendency to dissolve the sacramental priesthood into the priesthood of the faithful and thus reduce the priest to the same level as all Christians. Speaking to the Roman clergy in February 1978, Pope Paul VI lamented this “mania for laicization” which has “undone the traditional image of the priesthood [and] removed from some men’s hearts the sacred reverence due to their own persons”. Pope Benedict XVI also bewailed what he called the “secularization of clergy and the ‘clericalization’ of the laity.” The two Roman Pontiff’’s were not just speaking about a false sense of equality and a denial of the church’s hierarchical structure, but about a new kind of corruption which consists in a refusal to acknowledge the nature of things. This trivialization of the commitment involved in being a priest, robs the priesthood of the air of totality and permanence that appeals to the noblest part of human nature, by persevering through trial and hardship.

The new theology revives old heretical doctrines, which came together to produce the Lutheran abolition of the priesthood. Obvious practical consequences flow from this error. Manual work and utilitarian productivity is placed above contemplation and suffering. Being a man like all others, the priest will now demand the right to marry, dress as he wishes and take an active part in social and political struggles; so too he will join revolutionary struggles that look upon a brother as an enemy to struggle against, unjust though this be. But it was the regular clergy, those more separated from the world, the men in the cloisters, who exercised not only the most powerful religious but the most powerful civil effects in the world around. They shaped civilization for centuries, even gave birth to it, since they were the ones who produced the structures of culture, and of social life, from agriculture to poetry, from architecture to philosophy, from music to theology.

Today people want real priests. They do not want a sociological priest with a theory about the evils of society, they do not want a relativistic priest who sees no evil in anything, they do not want a politicized priest so busy organizing revolution that he has no time to see them. They want a priest to tell them about Jesus Christ. In place of the promises of Christ, we have been given belief in something called “community,” where we can make up our own religion, share our memorial meal, forgive one another, answer each other’s prayers, get our reward from the State and live for today not eternity.

The biblical account of miracles is too often relegated from pulpits to a first century propensity for myth-making. Yet people go to church looking for miracles. Their job is on the line. Creditors may foreclose.  A daughter is shacked up with a punk. They want miracles. The churches are filled today at the noon hour Masses with young men and women, heads bowed low over the back of the pew in front, transfixed, praying hard for a reprieve from sickness or death. These are humble people not at all unlike the disciples who followed Jesus around Galilee. This is the laity many of our priests and bishops have abandoned. Too many priests today have listened to theologians and are somewhat ashamed of the promises of Christ.

Today the church has been invaded by people who have very little interest in religion, but who regard it simply as a means to get ahead. If you are the mainstay of the Parish Council, or the head of the Liturgy Committee, or Director of the Building Committee, you can have your way though you may not know your way around the Bible, or the Sacramentary, or the Anointing of the Sick.

This is where I miss the days when the priest was the power behind the parish and when you knew what to expect and you got it, or you simply went away.

Religious Orders

While we continuously hear about the present day priest shortage, few seem aware that all religious communities, great and small, male and female, contemplative, active or mixed, if not strictly decimated, have been reduced to a fraction of their former selves in the course of the past fifty years. The cause of the decay has been a false reform and the distorting of the evangelical councils by taking them as a psychological and sociological outlook rather than as a special state of life structured in accordance with the counsel Christ gives in the Gospels. True renewal means an adaptation of external activities with a view to a more effective pursuit of holiness. It is begotten by a disgust with weakening of discipline and by a desire for a life that is more spiritual, more prayerful and more austere. Post conciliar reform tends to move from the difficult to the easy or less difficult rather than from the easy to the difficult or more difficult. Today, a religious order questions itself, confronts experiences, demand creativity, searches for a new identity (which implies that it is becoming something other than itself), moves toward building “true communities” (as if for centuries past religious orders had consisted entirely of false communities).

Ultimately the crisis among religious is the result of an excessive conforming to the world, and a taking up of the world’s positions because one has despaired of winning the world over to one’s own. A by no means small or unimportant sign of this alienation is the change in the dress of members of religious orders, inspired by a wish that it should no longer differ from that of secular persons.

This drift in reform of religious life today is parallel to the one governing the reform of the priesthood. On the one hand there is the obfuscation of the difference between the sacramental priesthood and the priesthood of all believers; and on the other, of the difference between a state of perfection and the common state. What is specific to religious life is washed out or watered down in thought and behaviour. Take for example, the three evangelical councels (chastity, poverty, obedience) that are essential to religious life. Today, there is a certain distaste for chastity. A certain decline in delicacy and care are obvious not only in the widespread slackness in clerical dress, but in the more frequent mixing of the sexes, even on journeys, and in the abandonment of the precautions adopted even by great and holy men. In regards to poverty there is a habitual and at times uncontrollable use of such technology as the television and internet. Of all the councels, obedience is the one where the drift towards relaxation in religious orders shows itself most clearly. The concept of obedience has been lowered by lowering the principle of authority and mixing it up with a kind of fraternal relationship by means of a fruitful dialogue. True Catholic obedience, however, implies submission to the will of the superior – so long as the command is not manifestly illicit – and not a re-examination of the superior’s command by the one obeying. Catholic obedience does not seek a coinciding of the wills of subject and superiors.

In 2005 Pope Benedict XVI issued a resounding call for reform in the Catholic church. He lamented “How much filth there is in the church, and even among those … in the priesthood.” In May, 2010 he reiterated this plea stating: “Today we see in a really terrifying way that the greatest persecution of the church does not come from the enemies outside, but is born from the sin in the church,” These exhortations were widely interpreted as references to the sex- abuse scandal affecting the church’s standing in North America and other parts of the world. However, the Pope’’s comments were also directed more widely to the phenomenon of modernism that is poisoning the church at its core – the result of decades of liberal exegetical, theological, and “pastoral” creativity in the name of the Second Ecumenical Vatican Council. One of the key areas where modernism has been allowed to take root, fester and spread has been the priesthood. Unless the priesthood is revisited with a profound desire to restore true Catholic identity, the Church will fail to recover that honored credibility and vibrancy it experienced before Vatican II.

Thankfully, there remain good priests and Religious who – though forced underground by the event since Vatican II – have never given up the vision of the Eternal Church and have passed this on to younger priests and Religious, who in scattered places preserve the Apostolic faith, much as the monks did on their lonely islands during the Dark Ages. It is with this hope that the church will again be revitalized and become once more a vehicle for re-Christianizing a world so desperately in need.

Both Vice-President Joseph Biden and President Barack Obama have said that their positions regarding same-sex marriage have evolved. When you are “evolving,” you should really watch your grammar. Otherwise, people might suspect you are devolving instead.

Take for instance, the hapless Joe Biden’s pronouncement of why he supports same-sex marriage. It’s all a matter of “who do you love.” His statement is both substantively and grammatically incorrect. It should, of course, be “whom do you love”. “You” is the subject and “whom” is the object of the verb “love.” Biden’s grammatical error reveals the problem with same-sex marriage. It has two subjects without an object.

What is the object of marriage? It is for two to become one flesh. Anatomically and morally, only a man and a woman can do this. Only spousal love is properly sexual for only it provides for the protection of that at which the marital act aims both in its unitive and procreative senses.

But what about “love”? Isn’t it a bit mean-spirited not to allow people who love each other to get married, even if they are of the same gender? Love always seeks the well-being of the loved one. This is true in all sorts of love, whether between parents and children, between children themselves, or between friends. Sexualizing the love in these relationships would be profoundly mistaken since none of these loving relationships is or could be spousal in character.

Therefore, sex between parents and children, between siblings, or between unmarried friends, or between friends of the same gender is objectively disordered and will inflict harm on the parties involved no matter how they “feel.” This is the opposite of seeking the loved one’s well-being.

Biden is now telling the country that this is not so – that if one man loves another man, sexualizing that love in the form of an act of sodomy is not only not harmful, but provides a sound moral basis for marriage. That is why Biden is in favour of sanctifying sodomy.

How does one evolve into this curious position? One undertakes what Nietzsche called the transvaluation of values. In other words, you take Christianity and dump it on its head and turn it into its opposite, while calling it the same thing. Let’s consider how President Obama “evolved” in this way. On September 25, 2004, Obama said:

“I’m a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”

Indeed, that is what Christianity teaches. One wonders what in Christianity is inconsistent with his political views. How are his political views formed? Are they consistent with moral philosophy? Is the judgment of moral philosophy, as in a work like Aristotle’s The Ethics or in Socrates’ condemnation of sodomy, inconsistent with Christian teaching on same-sex marriage? Why doesn’t Obama’s moral reasoning lead him in the same direction as his Christian faith?

In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama gives us a clue. He writes that:

“Implicit in [the Constitution's] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ and any tyrannical consistency that might block future generations into a single, unalterable course…”

In other words, truth leads to tyranny. Truth does not set you free; it imprisons. Moral relativism sets you free. Then you can do what you want.

But it is absurd for him to say that the Founders of the United States did not believe in absolute truths. Had this been so, there would have been no Declaration of Independence (“we hold these truths…”) and no Constitution. Obama is reading his own moral relativism back into the document and then trying to use it to legitimize the very opposite of what it proclaims.

Here is another example. On January 28, 2010, during a town hall meeting at the University of Tampa, Obama said:

“My belief is that a basic principle in our Constitution is that if you’re obeying the law, if you’re following the rules, that you should be treated the same, regardless of who you are. I think that principle applies to gay and lesbian couples.”

Only a moral relativist would or could read same-sex marriage back into the Constitution. What Obama is really proposing to do is change the rules so that those who are not following them can have their own special set of rules. So, in the name of equality before the law – a sound constitutional principle – he denies equality before the law.

This all leads to Obama’s striking statement on Wednesday, May 9. Here it is with the personal pronouns italicized:

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbours when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I‘ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

Ten personal pronouns or the word “my” in one sentence. That is an impressive feat of solipsism that undergirds the moral relativism that authorizes what “is important for me” as the standard by which to judge what is right and wrong. Abraham Lincoln said that there is no right to do what is wrong.  Obama and Biden are complicit in making a wrong a “right.”

The transvaluation of values requires more than the denial of objective morality. It requires that the negation – the transvaluation – becomes the new religion. It is the sanctification of nihilism, the Church of Nada. It needs to be sacramentalized, as in same-sex marriage. That is why Obama and Biden insist upon it.

Listen to this final, breathtaking part of Obama’s rationalization. Just as he used the Constitution to justify its opposite, he now employs Christianity in the same way. Christianity, which has unambiguously condemned sodomy for more than 2000 years, is enlisted to endorse it:

“The thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the golden rule – you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids, and that’s what motivates me as president.”

After all, Christ died to make the world safe for sodomy…

In other words, if you would like your moral misbehaviour to be rationalized, you should be willing to rationalize the moral misbehaviour of others. That way, we are all equal. That’s equal opportunity. This is Obama’s new golden rule. The transvaluation of values is complete.

Fear for the Republic. For the truths for which it stands have been taken away by this president.

The election of Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande to the presidency of France epitomizes the sorry state of contemporary democracy. By that, I don’t mean to imply that the French people should have voted for the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy. Neither would be capable of solving France’s intractable problems in a way acceptable to French voters, nor are the problems with democracy unique to France. To varying degrees they exist throughout Europe as well as here in the United States.

The first problem is: widespread economic illiteracy. Hollande campaigned on a platform of economic growth and expanded job creation, to be accomplished by raising taxes on the rich and increasing government spending. Well, good luck with that one. Even Lord Keynes himself advocated lowering taxes rather than raising them to stimulate economic activity. And the record of net job creation via government stimulus is one of dismal failure. Hollande’s program can’t work, and yet a majority of the French electorate voted for it. How sad.

The second problem is the utter cynicism of today’s politics. One wonders whether Hollande himself truly believes his own campaign rhetoric. One senses that he knows that his socialistic policies would drive France’s struggling economy into the ditch: According to the World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org)—who were cheerleaders for Hollande’s campaign promises of more tax & spending—Hollande’s team has told Reuters that he is going to change course and “carry out reactionary policies … and intensify social cuts.”

The third problem is that people sometimes believe in fairy tales. Who knows what Hollande believes or understands about economics, but let’s give him credit for being politically astute. He understood that the key to electoral success is to tell voters what they want to hear. In France’s case (as in the recent elections in Greece and northern Germany) most people are opposed to “austerity.” Hollande sized up the public mood and won the presidency on the theme of, “You don’t want austerity, and under me, you won’t have it.” That’s bunk. There is going to be “austerity” (in France and elsewhere) whether the people want it or not.

The fourth problem is that the public is in denial about reality. What is commonly called “austerity” is more accurately termed “sobriety.” For years, people in the democracies have been voting themselves economic freebies and subsidies—getting high on the drug of government wealth transfers. They became addicted to politicians who promised and voted more and more monetary fixes for their present and future desires. That means that politicians who indulge voters’ fantasies and play along with the delusion that the government is a bottomless cornucopia of goodies will have the electoral advantage over those who are courageous enough to tell people the truth about the hard choices that must be made.

What the voters didn’t reckon on—and what they are still in denial about—is that just as a feel-good drug addiction eventually brings one to the point where additional fixes could prove fatal, so the democratic Santa Claus state has neared the breaking point. Either the binge stops—that is, government spending and promises of future benefits are trimmed back—or the system breaks down. The ineluctable fact is that there simply isn’t enough real wealth in existence to make good on all these government promises. The penalty for not facing up to this painful economic truth will be either a market rejection of sovereign debt or a central bank “quantitative easing to infinity” that debases the currency, either of which will convulse markets horribly.

The biggest problem underscored by the French election is the degenerate state of modern democracy (with apologies to Aristotle and our Founding Fathers, who would consider “degenerate democracy” a redundancy). Democracy today is both childish and cannibalistic. It is childish in the sense that masses of people believe that if they want something, all they need to do is vote for it and they will get it—as if economic reality can be transformed by a mere act of will, and government can conjure desired benefits out of thin air. It is cannibalistic in that so many have fallen into a state of moral depravity and pathetic impotence in which they believe that the only way they can have the comfortable life is for government to take other people’s wealth and give it to them.

Many people believe that government is the answer to their problems. They are about to learn the painful lesson that government isn’t the answer. I doubt many of them will recognize that their pain will be self-inflicted. As H.L. Mencken once put it, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” The French, the Greeks, and a lot of other people living in democracies are about to get a jolt of economic reality and sobriety “good and hard.”

Editor’s note: A version of this article first appeared at Forbes.com.  Copyright 2012 The Center for Vision and Values