Screwtape on the stage...

Max McLean, playwright and actor, has adapted Lewis’ Screwtape Letters into a two-person stage performance. McLean plays Screwtape on a single stage along with Toadpipe, who slithers about his feet, climbing about the set taking dictation of Screwtape’s “advice”—most of which is taken verbatim from the book. A friend and his wife attended a performance recently in Chicago.

My friends couldn’t imagine how anyone would turn a story, based exclusively on letters, into a entertaining stage act but found that McLean has written an almost perfect adaptation by cleverly mixing modern interpretations of evil with Lewis’ original text. In doing so, McLean shows just how timeless and fixed evil is, a point illustrated often by Lewis. My friends report that for all its deviations, the play stays true to the original story. The set, aside from the sinister lighting, never switches from Screwtape’s layer in hell where he pontificates to his hapless nephew Wormwood. For the all the dark tones of the Screwtape Letters, the play is funny, just as Lewis would have intended, for a major part of his project was to mock the devil himself.

Lewis, after repeated requests to make a sequel to Screwtape, refused because it forced him to think too much like a evil demon. (He was able to, as Fitzgerald said, “…live in the Book.”) Despite the numerous obituaries, theater is not quite dead in America.

(Many thanks to JFH.)

Some actions have no remedy...

I wish there were courts which could right every wrong, but some things cannot be settled on this earth. Investigating, much less punishing, every excess of war is one of those things. I have written often about the limits of international law, and one of the main limitations is that it only reaches where the strong want it to reach. As much as the Nuremberg trials are praised, the treaty which created the tribunal deliberately omitted any investigations or trials for atrocities committed by the victors. (Can you imagine FDR or Churchill, much less Stalin, allowing investigations by an international tribunal of our conduct of the war?)

The conumdrum of any powerful government to investigate itself while it tries to protect its interests, guard its allies, and defend itself from dangerous enemies does not go away. Peggy Noonan writes:

'Torture is bad, and as to whether the procedures outlined in the memos constituted torture, you could do worse than follow the wisdom of John McCain, who says, "Waterboarding is torture, period." This is something he'd know about. Abuse is wrong not only in a specific and immediate sense but in a larger one: It coarsens and damages the nation that does it while undermining its reputation in the world and its trust in itself. I freely admit it is easy to say this on a pretty day in spring 2009, and might not have been when 3,000 Americans had just been killed. In New York it took months for us to lose the terrible, burnt-plastic smell of the smoke. The earliest memos were written by men who still had the smell of smoke in their noses.

'Why have reservations, then, about release of the memos and the investigations that will no doubt follow?

'For these reasons. Prisoner abuse has been banned. Mr. Obama himself, as he notes in the quote above, banned it. It's over. The press, with great difficulty, and if arguably belatedly, did and is doing its job: It uncovered and revealed the abuse. The historians are descending, as they should. Hearings, commissions or prosecutors would suck all the oxygen out of the room and come to obsess the capital, taking focus off two actual, immediate and pressing emergencies, the economy and the age of terror. Hearings, especially, would likely tear up the country as we descended into opposing camps. They would damage or burden America's intelligence services, and likely result in the abuse of those who acted from high motives, having been advised their actions were legal. As for the memo writers, some of whose constitutional theories were apparently tilted to the extreme in favor of the executive, it is hard to see how it would help future administrations, or this one, to have such advice, however incorrectly formulated, criminalized.'

I remember the 1970s very well, in particular, the hunt for culprits of any excesses in the Cold War and Vietnam War. We are doing the same now, that is, turning differences of opinion on public policy, in particular, national security, into crimes. Some injustices have no legal remedy, and revenge must be left to God.

Lost in Russell Kirk tonight...

Eric Voegelin

I had an exhausting week, and I am a bit weakened still by the end of my flu and perhaps some spring allergies.

After Mass today we ate lunch, and I slept the rest of the afternoon. When I awoke, my wife and daughter were visiting at a neighbor's house. I stayed in bed and read the next-to-the-last chapter of Russell Kirk's Enemies of the Permanent Things, the chapter on Eric Voegelin. I am still digesting it. It is worth more than one post when I get a chance. Of course, I'm not the only one posting about Kirk: here is one at the Mackinac Center, one by a grad student in California,Robert Thomas Llizo, and one by a Lousiana homeschooling mother.

Calling all homeschoolers...

After four years at the local Montessori School (secular), my wife and I were looking to send our very bright daughter to a local prep school started by Presbyterians. (The nearest Catholic parochial school is 45 minutes away or more, depending on the traffic.)

The new school, however, wanted us to front-load the tuition, and we simply don't have the money yet. That got us thinking about her education and what our ideals are. Then my wife suggested we homeschool our girl.

We had planned to do so when we first married and read a wonderful book about a California couple who homeschooled their sons and sent them to Harvard back in the days when homeschoolers weren't just odd but freaks. When my daughter turned five, however, we were a bit nervous about teaching her the most basic fundamentals on our own. The local Montessori program did her much good. She reads very well and is well-rounded, mature, and sociable. Like many one-and-onlys, she talks well to adults. Now we are thinking about giving her an education not only at home, but through field trips to museums, zoos, botanical gardens, aquariums, battlefields, theaters, churches, regular Mass, etc. The world is our classroom. We are not planning to wing it every day, but we want learning to be an adventure, just as life should be.

There is a place for a regular curriculum, but I have to ask myself: How would I have wanted to be educated? Elementary school was a prison for me. I never enjoyed the classroom until I was in college. My icon is Saint Thomas More, who gave his daughter the best education any woman in the 16th century likely received.

I know that some of the readers of this blog are Catholic parents, so please feel free to comment on your ambitions, experiments, successes, failures, and methods of educating your own. Thanks in advance.

(Portrait above of Margaret More Roper (1505-1544))

Russell Kirk on Ideology

I am almost finished reading Russell Kirk's Enemies of the Permanent Things. It is not an easy read because it is a compilation of essays on a variety of subjects. It needed a gentle editor trusted by Dr. Kirk, but it was published about the time he was writing Eliot and His Age and being second-guessed by young editors who knew less about the English language than Dr. Kirk had learned before he was twelve. The essays in Enemies are great, but they don't always flow smoothly. Of course, Dr. Kirk is discussing gigantic topics which don't lend themselves to succinctness.

A few weeks ago, Kyle Cupp's blog had a long discussion of ideology. "Ideology" is commonly used today to describe anyone's politics one does not like, or sometimes to describe a worldview in general. (An "ideologue" is simply someone whose politics one doesn't like.) (Mr. Cupp has posted on this topic more than once.)

Dr. Kirk believed that ideology ought to be defined as a poison, a fanatical political religion:

'"Ideology does not mean political theory or principle, even though many journalists and some professors commonly employ the term in that sense. Ideology really means political fanaticism- and more precisely, the belief that this world of ours may be converted into the Terrestrial Paradise through the operation of positive law and positive planning. The ideologue- Communist or Nazi or of whatever affiliation- maintains that human nature and society may be perfected by mundane, secular means, though these means ordinarily involve violent social revolution. The ideologue immanentizes religious symbols and inverts religious doctrines.'

Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormality in Literature and Politics (1969, 1984, 1988) at p. 154.

Dr. Kirk wanted to reserve the use of "ideologue" to those whose religion is their politics. To use the term simply to describe any worldview, (German, Weltanschauung), is to confuse the term, which few take as a compliment, with more general terms. I must agree.

The discussion that Dr. Kirk gets criticized for is his characterization of conservatism as the denial of ideology. Many people believe Dr. Kirk was saying that anyone who calls himself a "conservative" cannot be an ideologue, but that is not true. It is quite possible for anyone to turn his politics into an inverted religion, e.g., Oliver Cromwell. What Dr. Kirk is saying is that the true conservative does not put much faith at all in politics as the means of human perfection. Of course, the millions of people who have given up on divine redemption and eternal rewards find little to believe in except politics.

Here is one of Dr. Kirk's essays, "The Problem of Tradition.

I'll post again on Enemies of the Permanent Things.

Disillusionment can lead to enlightenment and sometimes to virtue.

As I read Peggy Noonan's column this week, I thought of this John Denver song called "Blow Up Your TV."

A piece from her column:

'Mr. Wojtowicz was a truck driver frustrated by long hauls that kept him away from his family, and worried about a shrinking salary. His wife was self-employed and worked at home. They worked hard and had things but, Mr. Wojtowicz said, there was a "void." "We started analyzing what it was that we were really missing. We were missing being around each other." So he gave up his job and now works the land his father left him near Alma, Mich. His economic plan was pretty simple: "As long as we can keep decreasing our bills we can keep making less money."'


This recession (and I won't call it a "depression" unless unemployment climbs to 20%) has slapped almost everyone in the face and revealed a number of idolatries common to people who really thought they had rejected much of this world's materialism.

My wife and I simply want to get out of debt and join the herd of cats scattered around the world who would rather scavenge a living on our own than work for someone else. As the great philosopher Waylon Jennings said: "Maybe we'll sell your diamond ring, find some boots and faded jeans, and go away."

Spengler reveals his identity and tells a little of his life story...

It turns out that Pepe Escobar, another writer at Asia Times Online whose political, social, and religious views are much different from Spengler's, refused to reveal Spengler's identity to the curious. He simply said, "He's a nice guy."

Spengler can say some outrageous things, and being anonymous has its advantages for candor, as 18th-century polemicists knew well.

In this column, he tells us who he is, and he is as complicated and intelligent as I expected him to be.

An excerpt:

'Both as classical musician and as a Germanist, I had better insight than most Jews into the lofty character of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI. His writings on the spiritual riches of Western classical music were an inspiration to me almost thirty years ago, when it seemed possible that this most sublime of Western arts would die out for lack of interest. Ratzinger was kind enough to review and comment on the draft of one of my articles on music theory in the 1980s. There is a connection between Ratzinger's insider's grasp of music and his Fingerspitzengefuhl for Jewish theology - something I tried to express in an essay entitled "The Pope, the Musicians and the Jews."

'I was in, but not of, the world of rabbinical Judaism, of classical music, of conservative economics, of practical finance, of cultural history - I belonged everywhere and nowhere. I could address each of these spheres only ironically and aphoristically, in a voice that only could be anonymous - for anonymity allowed me to be in but not of all of them. As First Things editor Joseph Bottum observed to me, "Spengler's" voice freed my style. Why not openly identify myself? Because my readers then would have jammed my thinking into the Procrustean bed of their prejudice.'

William Faulkner once blew off a wannabe biographer by saying, "Just tell 'em he was born, he wrote the books, and he died." In a world obsessed more with why a man holds his opinions than the merits of those opinions, anonymous writing will always have a place.

Divine Mercy Sunday

A gift of art, mystery, and prayer from someone who had little formal schooling and died in her thirties in a convent in Poland. More about Saint Faustina Kowalska here.

234th Anniversary of the "Shot Heard 'Round the World"

Some think that's a long time ago. Think again.

More here.

"The Patriotic Bob Dylan" by Paul Cella

A good piece here for those who admire Bob Dylan not as some sort of 60s icon and revolutionary but as a man without a century, someone who might have traveled the West during the California Gold Rush or entertained sailors in an 18th-century tavern, a poet whose politics are completely subservient to his art.

Any comments about this?

'Dylan would go on to hurl many scornful polemics at the generation which was as ridiculous as a mattress on a bottle of wine, the 1960s — as he would at many targets. Then, the bitterest cut: he would consummate his defiance of the 60s by releasing in the year 1968 an album of simple country songs, of sincerity and regret, which uttered hardly a word about war when the Vietnam War was all his peers seemed to care about.

'I fancy what really turned him against the 60s generation was its anti-patriotism. So many of these people found America in a basic sense hateful. He could never accept that. Even as a Leftist Bob Dylan was a particularist, which is the first and most vital step in patriotism. He could never hate his particular native land. And when the system or philosophy of the 60s got done with its platitudes and abstractions, when it finished with street theater and clownish posturing, it was going to destroy America. It may yet accomplish our ruin. But the man who is sometimes foolishly said to have put this 1960s philosophy to song, the proclaimed Voice of a Generation, very certainly repudiated it.'

Like T.S. Eliot, Bob Dylan showed up at a particular time and appeared to be a nihilist. To the horror of some, Dylan, like Eliot, had not a drop of nihilism in him.

Cella continues:

Bob Dylan is a born contrarian. In an age of shining Christian faith, he might have been a pop-culture Voltaire. But by the fine irony of providence, he lived in an age of faddish unbelief. He lived in an age when Chesterton’s famous line about the problem with the man who stops believing in God — not that he believes in nothing but that he believes in anything — was exemplified, and exemplified above all in the counterculture which imagined that Dylan was its poet and minstrel. And indeed there is a magnificent poetry in Dylan’s astonishing initial conversion. He didn’t convert to highbrow Anglicanism, or sophisticated intellectual Calvinism, or even to serene Roman Catholicism, with its ballast in the long history of the world. No: what Bob Dylan did was convert to apocalyptic evangelical Christianity....

'Nothing is less “cool” in urban fashionable and enlightened society than orthodox biblical religion of the apocalyptic variety. Nothing, therefore, so distressed, bewildered and annoyed the society which accumulated around Bob Dylan and his music, than his very public conversion to Christianity. But still he could not be ignored. Only a fool (or someone narrow enough to judge only on the evangelism of its lyrics) could deny the greatness of, for instance, Slow Train Coming (1979), no matter how it confounded his fans. When it wasn’t the horrifying imagery — “Can they imagine the darkness / That will fall from on high / When men will beg God to kill them / And they won’t be able to die” — it was the hard words of St. Paul, as when Dylan put some of the themes of the Book of Romans to song in “Gotta Serve Somebody.”'

For some reason, I see Dylan as far closer to Russell Kirk than to Noam Chomsky, but Dylan has carefully avoided being pigeon-holed, so I won't go farther than that.

Hilton Head Island

We just returned from a much-needed vacation. When my trip to Panama fell through in January, a friend offered us the use of his condo on Hilton Head Island. I had never been before, so here is my take:

1. It's quite nice, almost too nice. The development and sign regulations are very strict, so strict that it's hard to find a gas station until you stumble into one. It appears illegal to paint anything in primary colors, so everything is subdued. It is the opposite of Gatlinburg.

2. As posh as it looks, most of the tourists are renting someone else's condo. It's not as if you have to be a millionaire to go there.

3. The beach is very broad, especially at low tide. Hilton Head has not been hit by a major hurricane in decades. The beach slopes gently to sea; according to the navigational charts, the sea is shallow for miles offshore.

4. The island is covered with bike trails. We rented bikes and rode all around. The bicycling on the beach at low tide was the highlight for me.

5. The live oaks, palmetto trees, flowers, and foliage are beautiful.

6. The culture of the Gullah is interesting, though I regret that I had little time to explore it.

7. The lagoons, canals, and ponds on the island are largely left over from the days of rice and indigo cultivation. They are beautiful, but the oppression of gang-system slave labor for those crops cannot be denied. Life on the island was once very cheap, and life expectancies were low. Amidst the splendor is a history of harshness.

8. The condo didn't allow pets, so we had to board our dogs. We missed them terribly.

9. There is a restaurant called "Flavors"that I highly recommend.

10. A bad day at the beach is better than a good day at work.

11. Holy Family parish is alive and well.

12. Vacationing during Holy Week takes something away from your Lenten disciplines, but I had time to read the Magnificat and the liturgies.

What if there isn't really an "international community?"

The term "international community" is overused to say the least. The problem is that once a phrase becomes common speech, its apparent meaning is assumed even if the underlying premise is false.

I don't think an international community exists outside of trade and commerce, the Olympics, FIFA, and a few other things. Commerce makes the world seem smaller and sometimes even friendlier, but if the international community consists of nations willing to shed blood to prevent violence, terrorism, exploitation, and injustice, its members are few. Moral scolds without morals are everywhere, but they don't matter when it comes to peace and justice. George Will's column is linked above. Here is an excerpt:

'Officially, NATO says the Afghanistan campaign is vital; actually, it promises a mere 5,000 more troops, none of them for combat. Most of the NATO nations that grudgingly send dribs and drabs of troops to Afghanistan send them enveloped in caveats that virtually vitiate their usefulness, including the stipulation that they shall not be put in harm's way. Tom Korologos, who was U.S. ambassador to Belgium from 2004 to 2007, recalls that when Belgium finally agreed to send a few hundred troops from its unionized "army"—average age: 40—other caveats concerned bottled water, a certain ratio of psychiatrists to troops and a requirement that dust be kept to a minimum.'

I trust one brigade of the 101st Airborne Division more than I trust anyone speaking for the "international community."

Harry Kalas, R.I.P.

You knew his voice, even if you didn't listen to baseball or know his name. He was simply one of the very best broadcasters of our day.

Work, sickness, vacation, Holy Week...

I'll post again after Easter.

Ooops!

A new type of affirmative action: The University of California emailed 46,000 applicants to welcome them to campus. The problem was that only 17,000 had been accepted; 29,000 had been rejected.

Last time I checked, this act still would not constitute "negligent infliction of emotional distress," even in California, but it affirms the old rule of computers: "To err is human, but to really screw something up requires a computer."