01 July 2006

Quote for the Day


It's the birthday of editor and writer William Strunk Jr., born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1869). His book The Elements of Style has become the standard style manual for writers all across America. Strunk wrote, "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

28 June 2006

Quote for the Day


It's the birthday of Mark Helprin, born this day in 1947. He writes about characters who go on adventures, have crises, and come to appreciate the beauty of life. He said, "I have no agony or resentments. Boredom and alienation don't mean a thing to me."

Editor's note: Postmodernist writers or would be writers, take note and mend your prosaic ways.

Spucatum tauri Bovine excrement: The National Catholic Reporter

Editor's Note: The NCR editorial to which we're referring here is, in the purest sense of the term, spucatum tauri--bullshit. But we know they prefer neutered English, so in deference to their sensitivities we'll call it bovine excrement today. Let it never be said we're overly harsh or unfair.

As if we needed more reasons to doubt the Catholicity of this publication (note the intentional refrain from using "newspaper"), their
6/30/06 editorial on the US Bishops' vote approving liturgical translations more faithful to the original Latin gives us yet another.

The tactics used to reverse the reforms that had resulted from the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s and more than three decades of subsequent work were secretive and engineered by people incompetent in the discipline and accountable only to a small group who had achieved power. That power was used to accomplish what they could not by persuasion or through the mainstream of liturgical scholarship.
Ah yes, more secret Vatican conspiracies. When did Dan Brown join the NCR's editorial board? Their logic seems to be "Church authorities co-opted our agenda and produced an outcome we and our ilk didn't like, so there must have been trouble afoot." And let's not even talk about "mainstream" scholarship. Religious education in parishes and schools is still recovering from the devastation wreaked by "mainstream" scholarship. Do you like emptying pews, an ill-informed flock, and the vocations crisis? Well, you can thank, among other culprits, "mainstream" scholarship for that.

If wars ever have winners, then the winners in this one comprised a small crowd of powerful actors in the Vatican, in league with others passionately opposed to the direction that translation of documents had taken in the 35 years since Vatican II, who managed to overthrow that process and put in place one of their own. In 1997, as John L. Allen Jr. reported nearly eight years ago, 11 men met in secret in the Vatican "to overhaul the American lectionary, the collection of scripture readings authorized for use in the Mass. Short-circuiting a six-year debate over 'inclusive language' by retaining many of the most controversial uses of masculine vocabulary, and revamping texts approved by the U.S. bishops, this group decided how the Bible will sound in the American church."
More conspiracies. It's starting to sound like a John Birch Society leaflet. If we have to thank a conspiracy for killing the utterly absurd move towards "inclusive" language, that's fine by me. By the way, if you say 'he/she/it' fast enough it sounds like 'horseshit', ironically. But I digress. Or do I? How better to describe the attempt to erase a disinction found in both Tradition and Scripture? God chose to reveal himself in the masculine form. Jesus was not a hermaphrodite. Moreover, when Scripture refers to "man" it's in reference to all of mankind. But that's just plain unacceptable to those who would dumb down the language of worship to makeaccommodatedate a political agenda, I guess.

That was the beginning of the final phase of a coup that upended all of the processes that had been in place since Vatican II, translation principles that had been approved by a previous pope and decades of work by a number of bishops and a host of liturgists and Bible scholars.
Yes, the stars aligned and the right-wing cabal prepared to strike its final blow. Like Pinotchet toppling the Allende government, a select few at the Vatican conspired to overthrow the unsuspecting, innocent, and harmless vox populi. Why not just change Pentecost to the closing day of Vatican II?

Of the group that met in secret, only one man (no women were included) held a graduate degree in scripture studies; two members were not native English speakers; another was from the United Kingdom and had spent no significant time in the United States; and the group included several members who came in with reputations for opposing inclusive language. "Powers in Rome handpicked a small group of men who in two weeks undid work that had taken dozens of years," the NCR report continued.
The junta is revealed. What cretins be they, meeting in secret? Too few Americans, not enough native English speakers, no women, and...this is most terrifying, folks, it's not for children or the squeamish...several were known to oppose inclusive language! They cut a swath far and wide, undoing work that had taken dozens of years. What a bunch of malarkey. The NCR is ticked because Rome stopped people from turning us into Episcopalians.

Life goes on and so will the community, even if we have to wrap our tongues around awkward constructions that treat Latin as if it were the language Jesus himself spoke and even if we have to wait longer for our own official language to acknowledge that more than half the human race is female.
Resting on self-congragulatory smugness, the NCR asserts they know better than the corpus of US Bishops (who, by the way, voted 173-29 to accept the more authentic translation...hardly a nail-biter). The revolution failed and the Church is to blame. They speak as if "community" doesn't have anything to do with "communion," forgetting that the latter is requisite for the former. By the way, here's some translation-- "Life goes on...even if we have to wait longer for our own official language to acknowledge that more than half the human race is female," really means: "Life goes on...even if the Church fails to alter Scripture and the liturgy to appease the radical feminist agenda." No need to check that translation, as it's been approved by our own staff of registered curmudgeons.

Finally, we suspect that the way forward will also include accommodating those who simply refuse to go along and will stand in place and continue to use the same language they've been using for decades. Our suspicion is that God will not be terribly upset by a little show of resistance.
I wonder if the NCR shows such magnanimity towards those who came to Mass one day a few decades ago and noticed the priest facing them, the high altar gone, and the Latin absent from the liturgy. Their world changed suddenly, yet they're browbeaten by the "progressives" and told they need to get with the program.

Finally, the NCR's suspicion that God won't mind a little resistance from them is probably true, but only because He's grown accustomed to it by now.

Off the Record, a feature of Catholic World News, also took a humorously satirical shot at NCR's editorial.

27 June 2006

Spucatum tauri: Modern Art


'Thought to Have Merit'
An English sculptor loses his head.

from the Wall Street Journal

BY LIONEL SHRIVER
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
12:01 a.m.

LONDON--Once in a while a news story so speaks for itself that it threatens to put commentators out of a job.

In this year's summer show at London's Royal Academy of Arts, "Exhibit 1201" is a large rectangular tablet of slate with a tiny barbell-shaped bit of boxwood on top. Its creator, David Hensel, must be pleased to have been selected from among some 9,000 applicants for the world's largest open-submission exhibit of contemporary art. Nevertheless, he was bemused to discover that in transit his sculpture had gotten separated from its base. Judging the two components as different submissions, the Royal Academy had rejected his artwork proper--a finely wrought laughing head in jesmonite--and selected the plinth. "It says something about the state of visual arts today," said Mr. Hensel. He didn't say what. He didn't need to.

Moreover, the Royal Academy denies having made an error, for the plinth and hastily carved wooden support were, according to an official statement, "thought to have merit."

For those who despair that artists these days seem to have lost the skill of fashioning meticulously crafted objects, don't blame Mr. Hensel. While the slate base took only four hours to hack from a mortuary slab, and the little boxwood prop less than an hour, he had painstakingly carved and polished that laughing head for two months. But alas, the sculpture itself has--shudder--emotional content. It was originally christened "One Day Closer to Paradise," a far too expressive title; Mr. Hensel would have been better off with the portentously enigmatic "Exhibit 1201." His laughing head is not only fatally well rendered, but exudes a sense of joy and hilarity, and the overtly evocative is declassé. How much more sophisticated, a stoic square of slate that speaks of--well, ask the viewers.

"The sculpture is a mixture of heavy stone with a light piece of wood on top," the Daily Telegraph quoted a Dane as explicating last week while admiring the plinth. "I like the total effect. It is a really nice contrast." A Londoner rejoined, "If it was in more of a minimalist show, it would definitely seem more beautiful." Presumably these folks would find an emperor clad in a "minimalist" manner equally stunning.

Me, I just put a brick on my desk. I gaze in wonderment at the contrast in textures--the smooth, unyielding sides of the brick, the rough, almost sexual crumble on its chipped corner, the humbler, more submissive sensuality of the scarred plywood desktop. I marvel at the fierce, affirmative perpendicular of the brick, in firm opposition to the languid, taciturn serenity of the lateral . . . But that's not even funny, is it? Joseph Beuys has piled bricks on a floor of the Guggenheim and called it art. How exasperating, a field so far out in la-la-land that it is impervious to parody. You see what I mean about being out of a job.

Of course, the Royal Academy's exaltation of that plinth recalls many a misapprehension in galleries, where visitors are wont to coo over the fire hydrants, ventilation grates and trash cans, all of which are more durably and fastidiously crafted than the works on display. For that matter, one gift that contemporary art seems to have given us viewers is a way of seeing every object in our surround--as I look about my study now, the powerful yet precarious piles of paperbacks, the airy, ephemeral flutter of bank statements--as art. But in that event, we not only don't need commentators; we don't need artists, do we?

Or the Royal Academy.

Spucatum tauri: The myth of moral equivalence

Gulags on Ellis Island
A dissonant note of moral equivalence at an exhibit on communist horrors.

BY BRIAN M. CARNEY

ELLIS ISLAND, N.Y.--Tucked out of the way on the top floor of the main building here is a curious little traveling exhibit about the Soviet Gulag. On the day that I visited, no signs in the lobby of the Ellis Island Museum announced the presence of the exhibit; one happened upon it through determination or by chance, stepping with little warning from display cases devoted to the hopes of immigrants seeking freedom or opportunity in America into the hopeless deprivation and cruelty of Siberian death camps.

The Gulag exhibition is on display at the museum through July 4, after which it will travel around the country over the next two years--to Boston; Independence, Calif.; Atlanta; and Washington. The show's title, "GULAG: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom," offers some hint as to why the exhibit is being housed here during its New York stop; Ellis Island is, in its own way, about the struggle for freedom. And it sits, of course, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

In this setting, the exhibit's collection of artifacts from Gulag camps--supplemented by a brief history, Soviet propaganda newsreels and short biographies of notable dissidents who were exiled to the Gulag at one time or another--takes on an affecting, mesmerizing quality. The space it occupies could be tramped through in the blink of an eye. But one is invited to linger, not least by the secluded feeling up in the attic, away from the bustling main reception hall, and the sense of discovery that comes from having found the exhibit at all. Moreover, the small artifacts with which the story of the Soviet Union's system of forced-labor camps is told are strikingly effective. One display explains that spoons, cups and bowls were in such short supply that the crude and makeshift examples here on display --made from castoff tin cans and bits of scrap metal--were highly prized.

Another explains that the Belomorkanal--a slave-labor-intensive project that was hailed as a great early success of Stalinism--was not only built by terrorized prisoners but proved useless in practice. It is only after this that one is shown the silent newsreels of the allegedly happy socialist workers building the canal, intended to connect the White Sea with the Baltic, while Stalin looks on approvingly. Experienced in this way, the cheerful-seeming newsreel shot takes on a captivating, horrifying double meaning. From the explanatory panels elsewhere in the exhibit, a visitor now knows, watching the grainy footage, that prisoners who grew too weak to move their quota of dirt in this and other projects were routinely killed or left to die; the socialist system had no resources to waste on those who could not contribute their share.

There are also full-scale mockups of a Gulag prison cell and prisoners' firsthand accounts of their degrading treatment at the hands of both guards and fellow prisoners--common criminals were sent to the Gulag along with political dissidents, and the former were often employed by the prison guards as oppressors and tormentors of the latter. As for what constitutes a political crime, we learn of a man sent into exile for scrawling an ironic remark on an allegedly secret ballot (which had, in any case, only one candidate listed). Others, we are told, might receive three years of forced labor for being thrice late to work; indolence was a crime against the people.

But then, abruptly, the spell is broken, and in a dispiriting if not alarming way. "Brutal systems have played a prominent role in many countries, including the United States," one of the exhibit's last panels tells visitors. By itself, that one clause--"including the United States"--would be bad enough. But the panel continues. "Although slavery ended after the American Civil War, its consequences persist. The repercussions of the Holocaust in Europe and apartheid in South Africa reverberate even today. Similarly, Russians face the legacy of the gulag. How can citizens in these countries face up to the horrors of the past?"

Just as it is the small details of the Gulag exhibit that lead one to consider the depth of the deprivation its captives endured, it is the word "similarly" that so effectively undermines what has just been shown. After all, if the Gulag is "similar" to anything in American life or history, does it teach us anything about the Soviet Union--or about anything at all? "If you cannot distinguish between levels of evil, you are a cause of evil." Such was the astute reaction of a man whose father spent a decade in the Gulag, when confronted with this moral equivalence in the paragraph above.

It is certainly true that learning about evils perpetrated in other times in other countries can too easily lead to a comfortable sense of moral superiority. That can, in its own way, undo what might otherwise be a teaching moment. All the same, however, things are not all the same. If the Gulag is interesting only as a means of turning a mirror on the injustices of our own penal system, it is arguably not interesting at all. The Gulag was, and is, a reductio ad absurdum of sorts of the Soviet system itself. It was where "counterrevolutionary" elements were sent to learn the virtues of work and of collectivism, but the lesson was predominantly that of man's inhumanity to man. All prisoners were slowly starved to death, and those too weak to work were starved faster than the strongest. Thus the weak grew weaker and the strong stronger. The overwhelming impression at the heart of the Gulag exhibit is just this--that cruel and arbitrary power lay at the heart of a system that purported to redress inequalities but instead etched them in stone.

The Soviet Union tried throughout most of its existence to forcibly prevent its citizens from seeking freedom in the West. The rest of Ellis Island tells a very different story about a quite different country and system. It's the story of a country that, for centuries, people have risked their lives to reach. No moral equivalence there.

Mr. Carney is a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board. The article can be read here.

25 June 2006

Quote for the Day


Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities.

- William Butler Yeats
from "Under Ben Bulben"

Quote for the Day


"You can't go back home to your family--
to a young man's dream of fame and glory
to the country cottage away from strife and conflict
to the father you have lost
to the old forms and systems of things which seems
everlasting but are changing all the time."

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again