Susan Sontag - Intellectual Heroine or Inellectual Heroin?

The late Susan Sontag was an author of decay, of intellectual malaise. In a Slate obit, Christopher Hitchens gives her a glowing elegy, Susan Sontag - Remembering an intellectual heroine.

Sontag's essay "On Camp," celebrates a vision in which aesthetics triumph over morality. This vision “neutralises moral indignation”. Sontag told us that camp divorces beauty from truth. She maintained that aesthetic pleasure was morally inert (although by appreciation of the beautiful she maintained we are morally edified). A more recent essay “An Argument about Beauty” was no more enlightening. She wrote of “the beautiful [being] colonized by moral judgments”, as if ethics were an invading army raping and oppressing the poor put-upon aborigine that is beauty. She was a vanguard of radical chic and the drivel that proceeded from such a sensibility.

Sontag was deservedly excoriated for her comments in The New Yorker about the attacks on the U.S. of September 11th, 2001:

"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions...In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

Ironically, years earlier when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for Salman Rushdie's death because of purported sacrilege in “The Satanic Verses,'' Sontag protested vigorously. Apparently, to Sontag books were more important than people.

In the 1960s she stated with regard to Vietnam War: ``the white race is the cancer of human history.'' No doubt the five million Vietnamese who fled the atheism and oppression of communists would disagree with her (not to mention the two million slaughtered in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge). The white race that fought with the Vietnamese against the puppet government of the Chinese and the Soviets were not “white devils”. Only fuzzy brained knee jerk anti-Westernism could lead to such a foolish pronouncement.

Hitchens claims that Sontag saw more than most the future defeat of communism. Hitchens also claimed that its defeat was “inscribed in its negation of literature”. What the communist bloc was most notably lacking was not literature but faith. And with all due respect to Ms. Sontag, it is fair to say that more than most the rise and the fall of communism was inscribed at Fatima.

Former New York City mayor Ed Koch not long ago declared that "Susan Sontag will occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell for her outrageous assaults on Israel. I will no longer read her works."

It has been noted that the supposed gigantic intellect who was Sontag did not create many original ideas but largely rehashed postwar, continental, postmodern claptrap. She, like many who think they are dismantling a current tyranny when in fact they are adding bricks, unwittingly or otherwise, to the edifice of a future tyranny, did so because of muddled thinking. One thing Sontag could have kept in mind which would have tended to straighten out her thoughts, the final lines of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn": “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”

Don’t let it be said that I would only speak ill of the dead. Sontag did have an appreciation of great literature and sought to introduce others to it. Although I have read a number of her essays I have not read, and do not intend to read, “In America” for which she won the National Book Award. I will pray for her soul.

Newsweek/MSNBC's The Birth of Jesus: A Christianity for Relativists and Multiculturalists?

What does the recent Newsweek article on the Nativity MSNBC - Religion: The Birth of Jesus, have to say about Newsweek and their buddies at MSN, and more generally, about the mainstream media?

Although the author, Newsweek's John Meacham, is a self described believing Christian according to his recent appearance on MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews, he sees something of a dichotomy of faith and reason. Meacham has maintained in an interview that he does not believe faith and reason are incompatable, referencing Augustine, but he gives too much weight to skeptics than even a modern day Aquinas or Augustine would.

In his Nativity article, he gives credence to Dan Brown's preposterous, ahistorical novel while contrasting the Nativity narative with history. He holds up similarities between the Nativity narative and pagan myths as evidence of syncretism, as opposed to being evidence that these are universal truths which therefore had the ring of truth even to the pagan mind and about which even pagans may have had some revelation or natural knowledge. Meacham couldn't possibly find it within himself as a Christian to suggest that the similarities with pagan myths were due to the fact that the soul is as Tertullian and Augustine put it, naturaliter Christiana. He likewise casts the similarities between the miraculous birth of Jesus and earlier miraculous Biblical and classical births as a literary affectation, rather than a divine foreshadowing, progressive revelation or old covenant/new covenant mirroring. Would he likewise as easily dismiss the concept that Mary was the ark of the new covenant or that Jesus was the new Adam (bringing redemtion versus sin).

Meacham calls the Jesus Seminar (that fringe group which the astute Richard John Neuhaus has described as "academically risible") "a group of scholars devoted to recovering the Jesus of history". Meacham, in an act of either jouralistic ignorance or irresponsibility, does not really give his reader an indication of how controversial the Jesus Seminar is, nor of the fact that they have concluded that the Gospel accounts are in their very essence wrong, or that the "Seminar" has concluded that the Resurrection never occured. Based on such a conclusion, the participants of the seminar cannot be fairly considered Christians.

While Meacham rightly points out that "[i]n 1965, the Second Vatican Council held that while the Scriptures are ultimately 'true,' they are not necessarily to be taken as accurate in the sense we might take an Associated Press wire report about what happened at a school-board meeting as accurate." Now, while this is a proposition that fundmentalists would not accept, Meacham doesn't either give account of the fact that Catholic exegesis accords more literal weight to the Gospels than to, for example, Genesis or Revelation. Meacham maintains that the Gospel writers had little to work with; the implication being that they were writing so long after the time of Christ. But that is not really the case. If the evangelist Mark was writing in 60 A.D., it is in the neighborhood of three decades after Jesus' passion and resurrection - less distance than a biographer of J.F.K. today. Paul's letters were written even closer to the time of Christ. There were, without any doubt, folks still alive at the time of Mark's writing who were around at the time of Jesus' birth. Granted, some of the classical literary techniques were employed in the Gospels, and I, myself, do not hold to a literalist view. Still, a certain degree of literalism is to be required of those who would call themselves Christian.

Consistent with the rest of his approach, Meacham quotes the oft cited but never insightful Elaine Pagels, with her inane blather about gnosticism. He mentions what are sometimes called the "battles" over Christianity. He tellingly fails to mention that all of the gnostics texts substantially postdate the canonical scriptures. The insinuation of those like Pagels and Bart Ehrman is that these "other Christianities" had equal footing with the orthodox. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although Ehrman doesn't mention it in the text of his book Lost Christianities, a glance at his own chart of the various noncannonical books found at the beggining of his book, shows that these other gospels and epistles were of a substantially later date.

According to Meacham, summoning his knowledge of Greek, gnostics merely engaged in a "choice" (how appropriate), while Saint Irenaeus - Meacham doesn't use that moniker, he's merely "Iraneus" - the author of Detection And Overthrow Of The False Knowledge:A Refutation of Gnosticism, commonly known as Against Heresies, is the "fierce" scourge of these ill fated advocates of choice.

Meacham, who in an interview expressed his distaste for claims of exclusive truth, cites John Henry Newman in a fashion that probably has the great English churchman rolling over in his grave. Newman spoke of Christ as a light which guides us through life. To Meacham "The Christmas star is just one such light; there are others". What a wonderfully multicultural and nonjudgmental Christianity Meacham espouses. And this is the type of Christianity which the mainstream media can tolerate. Perhaps we can edit and redact the appropriate portions of the Gospels to suit non-Christians, as the seething bigot Daniel Goldhagen recommends in A Moral Reckoning (the L.A. Times listed this shrill screed as one of the 100 best books in the year it was published). "I am a Way, a Truth (is that to strong Mr. Meacham?), and a Life. Anyone can come to the Father in a myriad of ways."

"UNOS, DOS, TRES, CATORCE!": DOES THIS STRANGE COUNTING AT THE BEGINNING OF U2'S SINGLE "VERTIGO" MEAN SOMETHING?

And now for something completely different. Well, o.k. not completely different, but it is pop culture, so it’s a bit different. U2’s new single Vertigo, off their album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb starts with, as do many songs, a count. And, like Wooly Bully, it's in Spanish. But Bono doesn’t say “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro.” He says, "UNOS dos, tres, CATORCE", meaning "Some two, three, fourteen".

So why does he do that? What, if anything, does it mean? Here, along with my analysis of the entire song, with pertinent lyrics in boldface, is my educated guess.

From what I can gather, the song is about a guy, a believer, maybe Bono, in the setting of a meat market nightclub. And the subtext is about darkness - temptation, grace and therefore redemption through prayer:

The song begins, after the counting, and a request for the “Captain” to “turn it up loud” "The lights go down, it’s dark"..."at a place called Vertigo"... “And though your soul it can’t be bought, your mind can wander.”

“Hello, hello. Hola.” Addressing, calling out for someone in the dark. That someone I would say is God. “Donde estas?” “Where are you?” God cannot always be seen in the darkness.

“Except you give me something I can feel.” Sometimes we can fell God’s presence.

“The night is full of holes, Those bullets rip the sky, Of ink with gold.” Light shines through the darkness.

“All of this can be yours" - an allusion to Satan's temptation of Christ – “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’” Mt. 4:8-9. One has the high mountain, giving the sense of vertigo along with the temptation. The next line alludes to the same chapter of Matthew: “Just give me what I want and no one gets hurt” which is also a temptation from a high place. “Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 'He will give his angels charge of you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.'’” Mt. 4:5-6.

Then we are introduced to "A girl with crimson nails” who “has Jesus 'round her neck" – A girl with crimson nails “swinging to the music” – temptation again. But crimson nails – are they not the nails of the cross stained with blood? And then there is her crucifix neckless, which serves as light in the darkness, a gift, a bestowal of grace, and a reminder to this guy in the club. "You give me something I can feel" - its not just about thoughts, which are not as strong as feelings. "...teaching me how to kneel" - obviously to pray, to worship.

So what is the "some 2:3-14"? My guess: John 2:3-14 which fits the subtext of the song:

"Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments. 4 He who says, "I know Him," and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. 5 But whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him. 6 He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked. 7 Brethren, I write no new commandment to you, but an old commandment which you have had from the beginning. The old commandment is the word which you heard from the beginning. 8 Again, a new commandment I write to you, which thing is true in Him and in you, because the DARKNESS is passing away, and the true LIGHT is already shining. 9 He who says he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in darkness until now. 10 He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him. 11 But he who hates his brother is in darkness and walks in darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. 12 I write to you, little children, Because your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake. 13 I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young men, BECAUSE YOU HAVE OVERCOME THE WICKED ONE. I write to you, little children, Because you have known the Father. 14 I have written to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning. I have written to you, young men, Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, And you have overcome the wicked one."

I could be wrong, but its the best explanation I've seen yet.

G.K. Chesterton's Great Classic Poem "Lepanto" - Historical Perspective For Today's Battle With Islamofacists.

I recently read for the first time G.K. Chesterton's great classic poem Lepanto. The poem is an account of the naval battle at the Gulf of Lepanto, called the Gulf of Corinth today, where on October 7, 1571, Don Juan of Austria leading the European forces broke the naval domination of the Ottoman Turks in what is considered one of the most decisive battles in history. On that day more than 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed. The battle ended the prospect that the Mediterranean would become an Ottoman lake. One notable warrior in the battle, also referrenced in Chesterton's poem, was Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote.

In addition to being a beautiful piece of poetry, Lepanto gives some historical perspective on today's Islamofascist Jihad.

The following site provides a good, brief historical summation of the battle:
http://www.nafpaktos.com/battle_of_lepanto.htm .

According To A Newsweek Poll, The Overwhelming Majority of Americans Believe The Virgin Birth Is True.

Newsweek reports that 79% of Americans believe in the virgin birth. Sixty-seven percent believe that the entire account surrounding the birth of Christ, as told in the Gospels, is historically correct.


MSNBC - The Christmas Miracle

Habermas, Prominent Atheist Philosopher Sings Praises of Christianity.

A prominent atheist singing the praises of Christianity? In Europe, where the culture wars have gotten to the point that the thought police in Sweden jailed a minister for a month because of his preaching against homosexual acts, that is exactly the case.

According to L'Esspresso Online, the German philosopher and proponent of the Frankfurt school, Jürgen Habermas, who describes himself as "a methodical atheist", in his recent essay "A Time of Transition" attributes Christianity alone as the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization.

According to Habermas:"To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."