Category: Naked Emperors
Words, words, words
All Trump
If you’re tired of criticism of Trump, this is not your afternoon at the Tipsy Teetotaler. That’s a trigger warning, not a taunt. I can fully understand just wanting normalcy.
Potpourri 6/19/17
Christian Worldview® processing
The return of Debbie Downer
I was kind of a “Debbie Downer” yesterday, wasn’t I? Well hold on. It may get worse.
Writing of Amazon killing Big Box which killed Mom & Pop, and what peril that leaves us in, made me reflect once again not only on our ugly places but on how readily we chase after attractive things — sex, lower prices, extreme convenience, etc. — oblivious of consequences.
I’d already been ruminating on such things after listening to the latest Kunstlercast, which made me aware of how fragile our whole existence has become because it’s all mediated electronically now.
I’ll be chatting with Rocky Rawlins who is the man behind The SurvivorLibrary.com, a phenomenal website that contains scans in pdf-file form of hundreds of books on basic technology and the skills for applying them, mostly dating from the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s hard to overstate the scope of this vast trove of practical knowledge — everything from bee-keeping to wagon and coach-building. In other words, what you need to meet The Long Emergency. The scientific elegance of these books and monographs is something to behold, the clarity of the language and precision of the instructions is breathtaking. I think you’ll like Rocky very much.
Why should we care? Three letters: EMP.
Electro-magnetic pulse damage was a topic of conversation in both of the Republican debates on Thursday night. Rick Santorum, one-third of the warm-up debate, warned of the possibility of an EMP being used as a weapon, a “devastating explosion” that would “fry out” anything with a circuit board. “Everything is gone,” he said. “Cars stop. Planes fall out of the sky.” If Iran got a nuclear bomb, he warned, they could explode one in the atmosphere over the United States and break every phone, car, computer and anything else electronic underneath.
During the main debate, Ben Carson raised the same issue. “[W]e have enemies who are obtaining nuclear weapons that they can explode in our exoatmosphere and destroy our electric grid,” he said, adding, “Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue at that point?”
(Washington Post) It doesn’t even have to be nuclear.
Or if you don’t like that, try Kunstler’s Long Emergency. If I had read Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I think I’d have something from him about now.
Then, for me, the piece de resistance: Rod Dreher reflecting on the painful accuracy of a New Yorker profile (he justifiably trusted the author, and let him tag along for a week as Rod promoted The Benedict Option). This stretch and what followed is very self-revealing:
OK, I have to share this passage about Andrew Sullivan:
The writer Andrew Sullivan, who is gay and Catholic, is one of Dreher’s good friends. Their friendship began in earnest in 2010, when Ruthie got sick and Dreher, moved by a spirit of generalized repentance, e-mailed Sullivan to apologize for anything “hard-hearted” he might have said in their various online arguments. Sullivan has a long-standing disagreement with Dreher over same-sex marriage, but he believes that the religiously devout should be permitted their dissent. “There is simply no way for an orthodox Catholic to embrace same-sex marriage,” he said. “The attempt to conflate that with homophobia is a sign of the unthinking nature of some liberal responses to religion. I really don’t think that florists who don’t want to contaminate themselves with a gay wedding should in any way be compelled to do so. I think any gay person that wants them to do that is being an asshole, to be honest—an intolerant asshole. Rod forces you to understand what real pluralism is: actually accepting people with completely different world views than your own.”
In “The Benedict Option,” Dreher writes that “the angry vehemence with which many gay activists condemn Christianity” is the understandable result of a history of “rejection and hatred by the church.” Orthodox Christians need to acknowledge this history, he continues, and “repent of it.” He has assured his children that, if they are gay, he will still love them; he is almost—but not quite—apologetic about his views, which he presents as a theological obligation. He sees orthodox Christians as powerless against the forces of liquidly modern progressivism; on his blog, he argues that “the question is not really ‘What are you conservative Christians prepared to tolerate?’ but actually ‘What are LGBTs and progressive allies prepared to tolerate?’ ” He wants them to be magnanimous in victory; to refrain from pressing their advantage. Essentially, he says to progressives: You’ve won. You wouldn’t sue Orthodox Jews or observant Muslims. Please don’t sue us, either.
“What I really love about Rod is that, even as he’s insisting upon certain truths, he’s obviously completely conflicted,” Sullivan said. “And he’s a mess! I don’t think he’d disagree with that. But he’s a mess in the best possible way, because he hasn’t anesthetized himself. He’s honest about a lot of the questions that many liberal and conservative Christians aren’t really addressing.” Talking to Sullivan about Dreher, I was reminded of Father Matthew’s law: “You’ve got to love your dad even if he doesn’t love you back in the way that you want him to.”
Andrew is right: I’m a mess, but I hope I’m a mess in the best possible way.
…
I can’t let go of the story of my family and its fate …
We now live in a world that was made for somebody like me, with my aspirations and talents. It is a world in which people like Daddy and Ruthie, and what they stood for, can scarcely thrive. (I read Chris Caldwell’s piece on the situation in France, and it resonates with regard to the small places like West Feliciana.) The values and the customs and the way of seeing the world that meant everything to them is very hard to sustain. The great tragedy of my family is that my father and my sister held onto their vision so tightly that they made all those around them whom they catechized far too rigid to survive the shocks of their passing. And now the family that they revered above all else is shattered. What will happen to the land that my father acquired, cultivated, and revered, after my mom is gone? Ruthie loved the land as much as he did, and planned to live on it till the day she died. And she did — but she did not count on dying at 42. Everything that seemed so solid, so unbreakable, has dissolved, and is broken.
I’ve been thinking about how things might have gone differently had I been able to return to St. Francisville when Ruthie was first diagnosed. What if I had been there during the 19 months she lived, and had discovered the awful truth while there was still time to resolve things. Might everything been different? Maybe, maybe not ….
What the confluence of these thread brings to mind is a famous man’s famous aphorism:
Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote that the doctrine of original sin is “the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” The evidence of ingrained sinfulness, he thought, is apparent everywhere in acts of violence, in the mistreatment of the vulnerable, and in the greed built into economic systems. Even human beings’ greatest accomplishments are inevitably tainted by sins of pride and self-interest, he argued. The problem is not just that humans commit sinful acts but that they are by nature sinful.
Yup. Individually and collectively, we’re a hot steaming mess. Lemmings. Pleasure-seekers. Idiots. Bundles of complexes and compulsions. If you think you’re an exception, you’re probably just uncommonly oblivious.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!
* * * * *
Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers and physicians. (John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at St. Andrew’s, 1867)
“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
What liturgy’s forming you?
Living within the truth
Dignicide
I went to my first conference on Physician-Assisted Suicide in 1988. It was an educational effort by a Legal Services Corporation national service center, on whose Board I served. The motives of the Center personnel who organized the conference were opposed to normalizing a practice seen as opposed to best interests of those whose legal interests were our focus: the medically dependent and disabled.
As conferences tend to be, it was earnest, sometimes compelling, talk. And in liquid modernity, talk, however logically compelling, rarely carries the day. PowerPoint arguably makes it worse, though TED and TedX seem to enhance talk a bit.
The day gets carried by story-telling. It’s a powerful combination when you can sell an audience of able-bodied bon vivants that getting rid of their aging parents and disabled children promotes the parents’ and children’s autonomy and dignity, and thus makes you, the proponent, a virtuous person. That it frees up your inheritance (while one still remains), or removes a great financial and emotional burden from you, is (Of course! Heaven forfend! Perish the thought!) not the point at all (wink, wink).
[A] steady stream of uncritical coverage in the media continues to push the euthanasia movement along. Such coverage usually takes the form of TV documentaries that follow, and gently cheer, a disabled or terminally ill patient’s journey to the death chamber.
(Sohrab Ahmari, Wall Street Journal)
Finally, someone is telling a better, truer story. Liz Carr, an actress and activist “who suffers from a genetic disorder that prevents her from extending her muscles, among other impairments,” has staged “Assisted Suicide: The Musical” in London.
Much of “Assisted Suicide” involves Ms. Carr taking on her alter ego, a character named Documentary Liz. Film footage shows Documentary Liz living a humdrum disabled life, while a lachrymose melody plays and a narrator dourly describes the scene: “Liz feels trapped, imprisoned by her difficult circumstances. Liz has few freedoms, few choices on a day-to-day basis.”
Onstage, the real Ms. Carr rolls her eyes and provides a running commentary, acidly mocking the documentary clichés …
“Assisted suicide has become part of the narrative of death, of illness, of disability,” she says. That was the work of euthanasia proponents, who knew that “it takes 15 to 20 years to get social support and to get the culture to change—then you pass the law.”
(Sohrab Ahmari, Wall Street Journal)
The sketch of rebranding Assisted Suicide was very clever and knowing that it was a real exercise does not deflect from the truth – the campaign for Assisted Suicide (AS) is very well funded and slick. .There is a scene with flip charts, marker pens, and PR specialists trying to come up with the catchphrase to make suicide palatable. They come with: ‘Society is off the hook…I choose it as my free will and I’ll be brave,’ The idea linking freedom and choice with AS is sown.
(Eleanor Lisney at the Disability Visibility Project)
The main watchword of the euthanasia movement is dignity. The argument runs that disability, terminal illness, senility and the like rob it from their victims. Assisted suicide allows people in such circumstances to die on their own terms, before their conditions erase their sense of personhood. In making their pitch, some proponents use the portmanteau “dignicide”—dignified suicide—a coinage that comes in for much ridicule in Ms. Carr’s musical.
“We’ve lost the word ‘dignity’ to the concept of ‘death with dignity,’ ” says Ms. Carr. The truth, she insists, is that “your state of health, mental or physical, has no bearing on your dignity.”If voters and lawmakers take the view that dignity derives from good health and ability, then all sorts of weak and vulnerable people can be discarded.
…
The other slogan for euthanasia is self-determination. That phrase was used at least 97 times in the various government hearings that resulted in Belgium’s 2002 legalization, according to the religious-freedom advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom. Autonomy and self-determination are at the heart of the Western liberal project: Shouldn’t people have the choice of how and when they die?
Ms. Carr’s answer is: Whose choice? Whose determination?
“Even if you go to the doctor where assisted suicide is legal,” she says, “you don’t get it on demand. You have to jump through some hoops. The doctor will make the choice.” It’s a subtle but crucial point: “Legalizing euthanasia doesn’t empower you. It empowers doctors.” In the context of the modern welfare state, that means empowering agents of the government.
Legalization hides a dramatic action—the taking of life—behind the veil of the patient-doctor relationship, with all the power imbalances inherent in it.
…
The line between “exercising autonomy” and feeling goaded into assisted suicide is blurry, especially for vulnerable people who are already made to feel they are a burden. “We don’t applaud healthy people deciding to kill themselves in the name of autonomy,” Ms. Carr says. “We conveniently herald choice and autonomy as concepts that should be supported for people who are disabled and ill but not for everyone else.”
…
Assisted suicide isn’t ultimately about autonomy, Ms. Carr thinks. “It’s about fear of mortality,” which is harder to manage in an increasingly secular society. “Religion, certainly in the U.K., used to hold our fears and our discussions about death. That’s where we saw death, in church or in funerals, and that helped us and provided us with a way through.” She’s quick to add: “I say this as an atheist.”
(Sohrab Ahmari, Wall Street Journal)
I’m a purveyor of futile words. I’ve been involved in theater only very, very marginally, but it seems to me, unfortunately, that Assisted Suicide: The Musical might not travel well because Liz Carr, a known figure on British Television, may not travel well, and she’s the riveting star of the production.
Do we have an American version of Liz Carr?
* * * * *
“The truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood, and that is life.” (G.K. Chesterton)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 