Category: Current Events

Reflections on the “revolution” that is defining contemporary 21st Century American life, avoiding, as much as possible, any overly harsh opinions, but never, when necessary (which is almost always) avoiding giving way to great dismay.

THE GREAT SCATTERING

Why, oh why this bizarre reign of what we’ve come to call “identity politics”?

Damned if I know, if, that is, I confine my thoughts to those thoughts I can just peel off the top of my agitated head. Go deeper, like one diving with full oxygen into a murky lagoon, and –why, there you find a tangled subaqueous plethora of reasons why a reasonable race of bipods such as we are should find ourselves so messed up.

I’m helped –after being launched upon — this deep dive by writer Mary Eberstadt whose 2019 book Primal Screams (plural) explores our penchant for dividing along racial lines and other related common contemporary phenomena such as the insane excesses of modern political correctness, frequent compus demonstrations over every perceived injustice and what has been called the “cancel culture” in which, at the whim of some influencer, you or I can be discredited and banished from public discourse. Throw in radical feminism, gender-bending ideology, the excesses of the Me Too movement and all manner of unhinged activism.

I confess that Eberstadt’s book is on a heap of unread books on my library wish list. I just happened to stumble upon an old review. Therefore, I’ve read excerpts in that review that assure me the author’s analysis is free of rancor or any diatribe against “cultural Marxism.” It feels like a good book for the times.

She maintians our current state of affairs is not all about “power” — a charge I often level against the activists. She claims all such contemporary social-justice rebellions, now so tiresome to so many of us, amount to a “survival strategy” for the alienated. (Come to think of it, I, too, in my vigorous push-back against it all might also be engaging in such a strategy. I’m feeling alienated, too.)

“Such phenomena are indeed bizarre,” she writes, “if we examine them with the instruments of Aristotelian logic. But if instead we understand them against the existential reality of today –one in which the human family has imploded, and in which many people, no matter how privileged otherwise, have been deprived of the most elementary human connections –we can grasp in full why identity politics is the headline that just won’t go away.”

Eberstadt calls this process “the Great Scattering.” Because so many people below a certain age no longer enjoy a traditional family. They are, indeed, scattered.

Her first salient point: there has been a breakdown of family and familial bonds — our “natural habitat.” What is the connection between blood and personal identity? Haven’t we all become disoriented in search of intimacy — and personal identity? The human animal is now a flock of sheep without a shepherd. We now place more emphasis than did our ancestors on voluntary associations rather than on our once far more solid family environment. Feel free to challenge all these assertions. By themselves, they can feel gratuitious.

That’s why we should read books not reviews. But Eberstadt’s conclusions were there for me to ponder, such as that a healthy sense of self, and our moral maturation, among other essential developmental stages, have not only been delayed; they have, in many cases, been entirely stunted in the individual. I encounter a fair number of colleg-age students who seem to be crying out for protection from, rather than exposure to life.

So, we must ask, who are we? Who are people who will protect us? What is our “family”?

Eberstadt goes further, and here no doubt she rankles modern sensibilities with a thesis that is truly politically incorrect: she blames the sexual revolution for the advent of identity politics.

How? Why?

Well, ask yourself what has been the impact of the sexual revolution on marriage, family life, romance as reflected in everything from modern anthropology to popular culture? She does not write or speak here in religious terms. This is not an evangelical screed. Not, at least, so far as I can tell from the aggregate of quoted passages, though I know Mary Eberstadt to be Christian religious and so her thinking on all matters will doubtless reflect that, however subtly.

Nonetheless, consider how the pervasive use of artificial contraception, so essential, as is abortion, to the sexual revolution, has released us from consequences, led to mutual objectification between the sexes. A popular series such as “Sex in the City” reflects that, not without an entertaining level of self-analysis. I only chanced to watch one episode in which one comically sex-obessed female character blurts out, “I hate religion. It f**ks up your sex life.”

And nowadays, one wonders if it isn’t only the religious — and specifically the Catholic religious — who abstain from the dartificial regulation of birth. And far from all of them, or even, maybe, most of them. I guess that’s what’s called Modern Love.

But….

Biology once pushed us toward marriage and family life, even if it was a less than perfect family life. Traditional sexual mores imposed restraints. And we have viewed the casting off of those restraints as liberating. We were free! But — free of what? And for what? Chronic anxiety, crushing loneliness — at least in some cases. Or so Eberstadt believes, as do I. I see it in Generations X, Y and Z –and, to some extention, in us Baby Boomers who first cast off the yoke of convention in the 60s.

We’ve come to place a high priority on individual freedom and autonomy over against the maintaining of the integrity of the traditonal family in an ordered social whole.

And (laughing) I say, Yow!!…

I’ve suddenly begun to think of those Progressive Insurance TV commercials — so funny I make a point of watching them — dramatizing mock classes in which youngish people are instructed how not to turn into their parents. Yes, very funny. Of course, those amounts to only gentle raillery against superficial life habits –and, of course, insurance-buying practices — of superanuated adults; not to those deeper, more serious ways in which we might profitably emulate those who nurtured and raised us.

But I’ll challenge my own thesis here — and wonder if it isn’t, in our modern world, far more appropriate for children to explore their own talents and interests, search on their own terms for a spouse and occupation and a social situation suitable to them personally.

I’ll also ask if that can lead to true human flourishing unlinked from deep families ties and identities.

As for the impact on personal identities, destinies, attitudes and human outcomes of the sexual revolution — I know the Genie is not going back in the bottle. But I will always maintain that this particular revolt against our biology and ( I believe) human emotional reality has set us on a dark, unknown moral and spiritual path that may one day erupt in an entirely unforseen counter-revolution short of a reversion to Puritanism. The Genie will climb voluntarily back in the bottle. The so-called hook-up cultural, among other negative outcomes, unquestionably led to the course correction of the Me Too movement.

Perhaps human intimate and familial relations will ever hence exist suspended in a kind of utilitarian, humanistic malaise altered only by these new non-family, racial associations and identities –until the end of time.

Whatever.

Meanwhiile, you might want to explore these question, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. You might even want to read this book, even if you disagree with its conclusions — just for the vital questions it raises.

I DROPPED THE BALL ON THE ‘BALL DROP.’ WE ROLL INTO JANUARY

No, I never said much about the passage into yet another new year. Hopes and fears and all that — or anything about the old year. Old years are old, that’s all I’ll say about that.

I just remember the little dog quivered and trembled as July 4th fireworks exploded outside the home in Rotterdam Junction where I went to escape the Florida heat for that hot month. I wanted to be on the lawn watching them and hearing them, in the distant sky and the lawn across the street — concussions and flaring, hissing spectacles, great and small. But I was inside, consoling a dog — the same dog who looked so unhappy and distressed at the thud, whistle, crash and boom of New Year’s Eve incendiaries all around us as midnight crept up and over the fence like time’s predator. The dog might have thought, ‘save me from that beast!’ Or, ‘existential man, making needless noises. No wonder there are wars.’

And what more can be said of new beginnings for those of us who are never finishing what we begin?

Somehow, I remember the guy who came into The Last Mile Lounge on January 2nd, 2017. That already seems like a long time ago. (It is, after all, already a mystical seven years ago.) Oddly enough, this guy was r emembering stuff from back in 2012. Crazy, he, too, was wondering, where’s the time go? Then, he was launched on a riff about time — and eternity.

A New Year. Time Square delirium already days gone. All the confetti swept up. But, in his mind, the observances continued.

And this guy in the shadowy corner of the lounge was saying to a few people at another table — all of them strangers who’d “dropped in” for a beer and a “ball.” Speaking of balls.

And then there was this guy. He seemed a seer; seemed to sense that life sweeps us down river. And he was speaking haikus, from what I could hear (I’d just dropped in, too. The bartender’s name was Cynthia; she works Thursdays and Fridays, still. Therefore this must have been a Thursday or Friday. She could hear the guy; everybody could.)

The seer at the back table said:

“We’re bug on a leaf, floating down stream. Singing.”

Wher had I heard that?

He said:

“I will arise now, and go to Innesfree…”

I knew where I’d heard that. Or read it. Or heard it, ‘in the deep heart’s core.’

He said:

“You shall tread upon the asp and the viper; you shall trample down the lion and the dragon.”

Everybody was listening now. Crazy. But where had we heard that? Snakes, dragons, lions.

He stood now. We were all listening, worried. Would we need to call the cops?

He said:

“Shall he who shaped the ear not hear, or he who formed the eye not see? The Lord knows the thoughts of men and that they are vain.”

Then he said:

“Happy New Year!”

Then he sat. He was drinking ice water. He never said another word.

A cold rain was falling outside.

Yeah, happy new year….

GAZA

The sin at our origin. The Lord of Filth.

Satan, which means enemy, Apollyon

Which means Exterminator

Beelzebug, which means Lord

of Flies or Beelzebul, which means

Lord of Filth

The rest are an evil anonymous

multitude.

Pre-conscious terrors.

Demons. Meanwhile,

Leaflets shower d own. Leave, abandon your home

Run

Though you may be killed on y our way.

Fortunes of War.

War is the suspension of all

Fortunes.

Hamas. Lords of Filth

In Arabic, it looks like this:

 حركة المقاومة الإسلامي

Which translates, Resistance

Or some such meaningless thing.

Right.

Lies.

Meanwhile,

We’re coming, we will scour hot rubble.

We’ll find you.

But find me an end to this.

Find the baby killers.

But find me an end to this.

An end.

The End.

But…

World’s over for a while.

Maybe forever. War Without End

Which is the Middle East, Beelzebul’s

Playground. Cradle of Civilization.

Land where it all began.

Where there is war with out end.

War always feels like the end. It never ends.

Savegery.

Maybe civilization, and the world’s

Proud self-sufficient hopes, died with the first war

The first hurled prehistorica rock. Somewhere

Maybe Times Square

But, for now…

Words. Talk. Useless

Somewhere some guy I know

Is probably sitting on the world’s toilet,

reading his iPhone, seeing the news and saying, blithely,

“This too shall pass.”

As if history were a bowel movement.

Because who can excrete

or defecate reality?

Who can ever pass that load?

The Filth in the bowl this time is called

Hamas.

__________________

Wilfred Owen, January 19, 1917, writes his mother that “No Man’s Land is pockmarked like a body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer…No Man’s Land under snow is like the face of the moon, chaotic, cratere-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.

Wilfred Owen, soldier and poet, was killed in action, trying to get his men across the Sambre Canal, November 4, 1918, a week before the Armistice.

Now, tell me what that was all about?

______________________________________________

This time…

No Man’s Land is orange Gaza dust, close by the Holy Land and The Wailing Wall, where the promises of deliverance began

where the young raved

Til dawn, and the devil on scooters, came, rudely ended the party and Sara and Ira were hunted

Like animals. By animals.

On barren orange dust “like the face of the moon.”

Hunted like animals.

All sin involves following one’s own desire

And then comes The Lord of Filth

To Gaza.

__________________________________

“The bitch that bore him is in heat again.” -Brecht, of Hitler.

Gaza.

Gaza

Gaza

The Lord of Filth walks in Gaza.

EARTHLY IMMORTALITY

British novelist and columnist Lionel Shriver (she’s a woman), writing vividly in the July 10, 2023 National Review about the modern quest for immortality, reminds us that there’s a difference between wanting to feel young — to have energy, to be free from pain and impairment, an ambition with which most of us would be sympathetic — and wanting to look young.

She claims that 46-year-old Tech tycoon Bryan Johnson boasts that he has the lung capacity of an 18-year-old and the skin of a man age 28. Shriver also claims he employs thirty doctors for his Project Blueprint to remain personally youthful, while getting regular transfusion of his 17-year-old son’s blood. His regime also incudes microdoses of Botox and the injection of salman-sperm DNA around the eyes. (Apparently, the son doesn’t mind the transfusions but, Shriver opines and many would agree, this seems an entirely vampirish practice.)

Shriver has obviously been thinking about the youth craze for some time. “For the Silicon Valley set, as for their neighbors in Hollywood,” she write, “appearance seems to be paramount. Especially for people so wealthy that money is meaningless, youthfulness is the preferred currency.”

She admits she, too, is vain. (and I’m also a charter member of that Vain #MeToo Movement.) But, she adds, “It’s just that a smoother complexion in middle age…is hardly one giant leap for mankind.”

Most of her essay deals fascinatingly and in considerable depth with the strikingly large tech industry working to cancel death and allow us to live forever — about which she concludes, “the vision of a species that has calcified into the same individuals forever, with no renewal, no turnover, no children, is ghastly.”

And that’s not half of the ghastliness.

AIN’T IT A SHAME?

In November, 2021, all kinds of negatative cultura/political “stuff” was coursing through our nation’s bloodstream with blinding speed, rivaling the ravages being inflicted on us by the pandemic. It was about the same time Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema was under prolonged attack by fellow Democrats for holding out on key tax, health and climate legislation.

In that November period, the reliably insightful Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review suggested that the countercultural Left, like the Marxist-Leninist Left before it, was Dionysian in character, given to public theater like Occupy Wall Street and even following their political enemies into the toilet, as they had recently done to Senator Sinema.

“The essence of totalitarianism,” wrote Williamson, “is the abolition of private life and privacy. “

Now, Senator Sinema is an Indpendent. And I understand a third of voters in once-reliably Republican Arizona are registered as Indpendent.

But Elvia Diaz, writing for the Arizona Republic, levied a decidedly negative and cynical assessment of Sinema’s Party shift a year after Williamson noted her persecution at the hands of the Leftists. Diaz wrote in December, 2022, “She’s ditching the Democratic Party because she either figured she can’t win a primary or she no longer needs the party’s money and infrastructure for her next move – or both.

“Her trajectory suggests she’s adept at ditching anyone or anything no longer useful to her. She began her public life as a Green Party activist. That went nowhere so she became an independent, which didn’t work, either. Her big break came after she conveniently became a Democrat.”

Maybe so.

Sinema wouldn’t be the first politician to shed seeminglyi bedrock ideological affiliation and drift among Parties looking for a softer resting place for their self-centered political aspirations. Consider Joe Biden, the “moderate.” Don’t make me laugh. Donald Trump, loyal Republican. Yeah, right.

But can we deny Sinema’s assessment that “pressures in both parties pull leaders to the edges – allowing the loudest, most extreme voices to determine their respective parties’ priorities, and expecting the rest of us to fall in line.”

Isn’t that where we find ourselves in August, 2023?

Ain’t it a shame?

THE F.B.I.

As multiple political and law enforcement embroglios engulf us, I’m going to indulge, very briefly, my fears and mixed feelings about the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Bureau’s credibility has unquestionably been compromised by the domestic security missions it has undertaken. It has come to light, for instance, that agents were infiltrating and investigating Catholic Latin Mass-goers as potential terrorists. On what evidence did they undertake such a thing?

It remains, as far as we know, a bureacracy still capable of remarkable achievements in the area of criminal investigation. Of that I feel certain.

But it has been assigned contradictory missions. This has generated problems. It has revealed incompetence, malfeasance and political bias in its ranks. This has hurt its reputation. We know supervisors tapped into partisan sources in their investigation into Donald Trump’s alleged Russia ties, such as uncorroborated Hillary Clinton campaign opposition research. Prior to that, by contrast,agents had cleared Mrs. Clinton of any wrongdoing in her email scandal despite finding that she had recklessly mishandled classified information and destroyed government records. It’s true, the investigation tarnished her image. She lost the election — and blamed the F.B.I. She might be right. But, here again, should such investigations be in the perview of the F.B.I.?

You might ask – who else should handle them? Well, frankly, I don’t know. But where the target of the investigation is an elected official, trouble in the form of political bias seems to ensue. Is it impossible to de-politicize the Justice Department? One would hope so.

Meanwhile, can we have any faith the Bureau is doing any better handling the multifaceted Trump investigation into, among other things, mishandled classified files? You can be certain Trump supporters don’t think so.

An agency like the F.B.I. lives by its reputation and credibility. It is just one of the federal agencies many Americans have ceased to trust.

That’s a problem for all of us.

WOMAN MARRIES SNAKE

They are calling this ” a peculiar Indian love story.” It comes from Harper’s Magazine on-line.

Note: I started reading, on my iPhone, this story I might have thought, smugly, was merely an amusing novelty affirming my belief that the world has gone mad, forgetting the anthropological realities that divide humanity and make one soul’s rituals and objects of worship another person’s folly. And I most especially want to note that I have borrowed here from the narrative account of Mischa Berlinski, a writer unknown to me who made the journey to the ‘bride and groom’s’ village intrigued by the tale and on a mission to discern the truth in the best spirit of the best writer’s and journalists. I did not mean to plagiarize, but caution that, even without quotation marks, many of the words are Ms Berlinski’s in this highly condensed account.

And so, we learn:

In Bhudaneswar, India, in the state of Orissa, June 2nd of 2023, a thirty (?) year-old woman who claimed to have fallen in love with a snake got married to it. There was a Hindu ritual ceremony. Two thousand people were in attendance and there was the traditional procession of celebration.

The snake was a cobra.

The story was picked up by all the Indian daily newspapers, the wire services and translated into two dozen languages. Thousands of bloggers commented on the post (including, now, this one). Gay bloggers still living in countries where gayh marriage is illegal wondered why, if this woman could marry a snake, they couldn’t marry their beloveds. Hindu bloggers took issue with the marriage, saying that it was the kind of thing that made everyone think Hindus were weird. It affirmed conservative arguments that marriage, so broadly and loosely defined, would inevitably lead to people marrying their pets. On Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert countered that attacks on gay marriage growing out of Bimbala’s nuptuals were misplaced, because the union was, in fact, heterosexual: the groom/snake in question is male.

Ms. Berlinski who visited the site of the wedding was introduced to the snake’s new mother-in-law, a trim, 75-year-old silver-haired woman. She seemed to feel her daughter’s marriage aspirations were the work of God, since the girl had been unhappy and unhealthy in a multitude of ways and had visions that a snake had helped cure her of sickness. “We cannot disturb God’s work,” the woman said. The writer also learned from her guide that the snake is not an animal to the people of india. It is a god — and considered the religioius leaders of the girl’s village.

Indeed, anthropologists tell us that there is strong evidence of snake worship in antiquity. “One of the first challenges of the authors of Genesis was to confront the cult of the snake,” writes Berlinski.

Prehistoric Indians found themselves confronted by two terrifying animals — the powerful elephant and the unpredictable, often venomous snake.

The worship of the cobra in modern India is particularly associated with the god Shiva, one of the more impressive and terrifying of god in the Hindu pantheon. Shiva is often depicted with a cobra hanging around his neck.

But Berlinski, in her journey of research, had yet to meet the bridegroom. In video made of the wedding, only a brass snake is in attendance. Apparently the real snake could not be coaxed into attending. Apparently it (he?)lives in an anthill.

The writer’s account ends with the greatest of respect, describing village women on their knees in prayer near the bride’s hut on a peaceful afterenoon, “saying very little and hoping that Debo (the snake’s name, apparently)would come out fro the antihill.”

So what shall we make of this? With equal respect — again, having borrowed many of Mischa Berlinski’s words verbatim — I will say that we mortals of every race and creed, are groping our way through the heat, chaos and fever of life toward the god of our understanding. Can I be anything but humble, as a Christian, knowing how, in sacrament, image and prayer, I go on reaching toward God and the God-man Christ through the tangled darkness of the material world?

MUST A BRILIANT,BEAUTIFUL VIRTUOSO INSIST ON BEING EYE CANDY WHILE SERVING US FOOD FOR EAR AND SOUL?

Yuga Wang is a brilliant young pianist and artist, also a beautiful Asian woman. Why does she insist on taking to the concert stage dressed, very often, skimpily and thus distractingly and in ways that draw as much attention to her dresses as to her most flawlessly executed playing of the world’s most beautiful music? (How much do I feel like a puritanical, hopelessly square nudnick for even asking the question? And at this stage, I acknowledge that experienced music-lovers and concert-goers are probably quite inured to –and dismissive of –Yuga’s wardrobe and might even rush for tickets to see just how sexily and colorfully clad Yuga will emerge from back stage on her way to the piano bench, then forget all about it as she crashes down on the first chords of Beethovan.)

She has lovely legs, which I appreciate. Her short, revealing dresses often let us see a good deal of them well up on the thigh. But I, for one, want nothing to distract me from the appreciation of the beautiful music. Okay, the average cabaret chanteuse might be dressed provocatively while singing Cole Porter. And what female rock star doesn’t give us pounds of fleshly eye candy? But…can’t there be a sedate,”classical” distinction made for the concert hall?

Who cares anymore?I shouldn’t, I suppose. Perhaps it’s that I’m chagrined see the norms-smashing spirit of the age invading one of the last sanctuaries of classical culture, i.e., that same concert hall.

And in an age in which we all vye for attention and boldly shout our body image and in which people asking questions such as I just asked are shamed for “body shaming,” I guess I’d better take the hint and go back into my 17th Century cloister.

And who of us, male or female, is fortunate enough to know we could fall back on being a model if the piano thing doesn’t work out?

And I guess this is the Age of Marketing. Talent isn’t enough. You need to Stand Out.

Our age might also come to be known as an age of E.I. (Expressive Individualism) and (SEPS) Sartorially Excentric Public Statements , and most especially, TSOEIOFOA (The Sexualization Of Everything In One Form Or Another).

I don’t question Yuga’s artistry. I’m no prude, puritan or saint but rather see sanctity in the work –or artistry –of modest people (in every dictionary definition of that word) who go about their diurnal tasks conscientiously , calling attention, not to themselves, but to that artistry or other products — abstract or concrete — of their hands, be it an exquisitely well-made cake or a brilliantly played concerto.

If it’s not a ballet, opera or broadway show, why is a “costume” required?

But maybe I’m risking being cast into the outer darkness with all the other cultural rubes and cranks by failing to note the eternal tendency of artists to shatter norms. Perhaps the stodgy atmospherics of high culture were doomed to be dispersed by gusts of supposedly fresh air.

Maybe the banner over Yuga’s Steinway should read, T.E. (That’s Entertainment).

The banner over all our lives should read V.V.A.T.A.V(“Vanity, vanity, all things are vanity.”)

And let’s not forgot the words of the poet (T.S. Eliot, being that poet who never lived to see his Cats in costume under the bright lights): “With pungent sauces multiply variety/ In a wilderness of mirrors.”

Yuga herself just says with a thoroughly ingenuous shrug that she simply likes to wear certain kinds of stuff. She actually seems oblivious to the norm-shattering. And while they can mandate dress code at places like a golf course, who ever said venues of public performance should impose such a code? I guess someday someone will go out there naked. Expressive Individualism probably knows no limits. So be it — I guess.

And I guess I should go see what further things Yuga herself has had to say about those signature non-musical elements of performance and about her insistence on making bold fashion statements.

This is from her after a September, 2018 performance in Houston when asked about her choice of outfit:

“I don’t have anything to say, really. I like looking good. I love heels. I love a concert dress that matches the piece I’m playing.” ( I wish I knew what piece she was playing and how she dressed for it). “I thought in Houston,” she went on,” I just wanted to be sparkly.”

I bet Houston, hub of oil and aerospace, has never been more sparkly.

When she played the Hollywood Bowl in 2012, she said,

“I can wear long and black too. I like being versatile … I wanted to do the shock value.”

Ah, so she does like having shock value in her repertoire. (Did I seriously doubt it?) As she ages, her legs might begin to lose the taut shapely tone that she now believes compliments her Steinway’s tone but is far more likely to excite the likes of ZZTop who do a whole song about legs.

She was a prodigy and I’m told there’s video of her at the piano at age seven in pigtails and a sweet little white dress.

Ah! Perhaps that’s the purity for which I long.

Shock us with radical innocence, Yuga. Wrap yourself in flowing whiteness and modesty and let us concentrate on Mozart, not your yams.

PAT ROBERTSON DIES…AND THE PUNDITS GO ON ENDLESSLY PUZZLING OVER HIS LEGACY

The two italicized paragraphs below were written twenty-two years ago after Pat Robertson stepped down as chairman (yeah, sorry: chair man) of the political/evangelical empire he’d founded. Michael Lind, commenting in the New York Times wrote, at that time, the following sourly begrudging commentary about Robertson’s phenomenal political influence over the American Republican Party. This is merely an excerpt: two paragraphs that come near the end. I believe they capture the spirit of Lind’s remarks. I don’t deny his broad claim that Robertson had an outsized and lingering influence over the G.O.P., but take sharp exception to the notion that “hot button” cultural/moral/ scientific issues enumerated in the first line of the first paragraph would not have enjoyed an urgent life of their own even in the secularized universe of American politics — even had Robertson never entered the political arena.

Abortion and homosexuality in particular are defining civilizational (not merely Republican) issues, and our civilization will go on struggling with them and all their multifarous manfestations for the century to come. Robertson and the Religious Right did something of a disservice to cultural conservatives for making them seem solely fundamentalist religious issues, and therefore easily dismissed.

(I interviewed Pat Robertson during the 1988 Presidential Primary season. I recall being greeted by his pleasant traveling handlers in the middle of one of Boston’s Logan International terminals and being told Pat — who was either coming or going or just on a layover in Boston — had just escaped briefly to the men’s room (guess he was ‘going’). He soon came smiling across the bright, broad ticketing area toward us. Can’t recall what I asked him — the usual, no doubt. (Think you can win?) Then I recall arriving to cover the Iowa Caucuses and entering the Hyatt well out into the cold, rolling yellow hills around DesMoines and seeing him — smiling, as usual- making his way across the lobby surrounded by a gaggle of reporters and cameras.

Now, Mr. Lind, wherever he is, has the floor. He wrote:

The obsessions of Christian fundamentalists, like abortion, homosexuality, pornography and evolution, still define today’s Robertsonized Right. And conservative intellectual journals like Commentary, National Review and The Weekly Standard now join Kansas and Tennessee fundamentalists in attacking Darwinian biology….

Pat Robertson enjoyed a remarkable winning streak, despite playing an extremely weak hand. By exploiting the ambition, fear and ignorance of America’s out-of-touch political class, this spokesman for a marginal subculture reshaped American politics and became a kingmaker in one of the two major parties.

—Michael Lind, New York Times, December, 2001, linked to Roberto’n’s NYT obituary of June 8, 2023.

Ambition, fear and ignorance? Well, sounds like Lind, the modern “mainstream” print and broadcast media and the leadership of the modern American Democratic Party might have been looking in the mirror as they diagnosed Robertson, et al., while being unawares of enumerating their own sui generis obsessions.

R.I.P. Pat Robertson (Oh, you should see the commentary thread of the Times! Thirty clay jugs could not contain the gallons the vitriol.)