REMEMBER, YOU DON'T HAVE SUFFERING ESP.

OKAY THEN!

The online producers at CBS posted a photo slideshow the other day that appeared under the following rather literal headline:

Activists Hold Annual March For Life On Roe v. Wade Anniversary

So, just thinking out loud, what percentage of the pictures in this gallery would you expect to be of, well, the thousands and thousands of activists who traveled to Washington, D.C., in order to take part in the annual March For Life on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade?

If you guessed anything other than zero, you would be wrong.

There are literally no pictures of any pro-lifers in this feature.

more--in the comments you can read that the slideshow was changed to be 50/50 marchers/protesters sometime today. This (Mollie's comment at 7.47 pm) is also worth noting.

THIS COUNTRY IS A GUN AND YOU ARE THE SILENCERS:

...As throughout the review, Gray is being a little unfair to Pinker here. (The book isn’t quite so blithe about mass incarceration as Gray makes it sound.) But his example gets at an important point about what you might call the hiddenness of contemporary violence, and the extent to which modern people can afford to recoil at various forms of cruelty not because they’ve completely gone away, but because they take place offstage, behind society’s scenes, in forms that most people don’t experience directly and therefore don’t need to reconcile themselves to.

So we regard public executions as an anachronistic barbarity, to say nothing of flogging, the stocks, and other pre-modern forms of punishment. But we’re kept safe from crime by a penal system that locks lawbreakers away in a self-enclosed world pervaded by hidden cruelties and unacknowledged forms of torture. We have a growing distaste for cruelty to animals, manifest in polls, pop culture, foxhunting bans, you name it. But the vegetarian minority notwithstanding, our daily meals come from factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses where animals are treated in ways that would make our gorges rise if we ever actually confronted them. And more provocatively, of course, there’s the case of infanticide: Common in premodern societies, abhorred in our more civilized age … unless, of course, you count the million-plus abortions in America every year, perhaps the most common and the most concealed form of violence that our society accepts.

more

MOONLIGHT ENCORES: I checked out My Sergei, Ekaterina Gordeeva's memoir of her brief, happy marriage to Sergei Grinkov, because I'd heard that it was a window on to life, marriage, and dating in the late days of the Soviet Union and especially the Soviet sports machine. The book is so focused and so simply, cleanly-written that it doesn't actually illuminate the cultural context as much as I'd hoped, but it's a limpid portrayal of true love and the journey toward adulthood.

It's also quite candid. To take maybe the most obvious example, Gordeeva describes her plans to abort her child. Her mother and her priest basically talk/manipulate her out of it, and Daria becomes her most precious and lasting reminder of Sergei after his death. Ordinarily I would wonder what it must feel like to read that one's mother seriously considered abortion, but Gordeeva's love for her daughter (as a person in her own right, not solely a memento of lost love) shines through so clearly. The message, to the extent that there is one, is not only that children are a blessing but that it's later than you think.

There are also really detailed, lovely descriptions of the emotions behind the programs of Gordeeva and Grinkov's last year. I can't wait to watch or re-watch them with the insight Gordeeva provided.

ABORTION AND/AS/VS. HONOR KILLING. A pretty fascinating post, with no conclusions but some provocative questions.

I especially liked the description of how people can believe something is wrong, but it's the right thing to do--this comes up all the time at the pregnancy center--and the acknowledgment that contemporary American elites also operate with an honor/shame culture when it comes to women's reproductive capacities. The insistent, inaccurate identification of non-elite women's choices with shame, and elite women's choices with responsibility, was one of my least favorite things about Red Families vs. Blue Families. (I suspect the "Tiger Mom" fight/"mommy wars" in general reflect honor/shame culture around motherhood as well.)

And I really liked this point:

Volf, writing some guidelines for dialogue between Christians and Muslims, quotes another scholar saying that in any such discussion there are four participants: you and me, and your image of me and my image of you. Volf adds another dyad to that equation: my image of myself, and your image of yourself.

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COLD FEVER: I would just like to warn you that Saturday Night Fever is one of the most depressing movies I've seen in a while.

No, really: At first you think you're just watching the story of a working-class shlub who has a bickering family and doesn't treat his girl very well. Kitchen-sink, sure, but not kitchen-Titanic.

What's interesting is that things start to barrel downhill right after Tony Manero's brother quits the priesthood. The family is devastated; everyone around ex-Father Manero still treats him like "the priest/he's the doctor/he can handle the shocks"; the disco becomes his confessional, and therefore his purgatory. After that it's just kind of a domino rally of abortion, race war, suicide, and other forms of despair.

Who won the sexual revolution?

"THE GREAT UNWEAVING": I have a long piece at Inside Catholic:

I'm sitting outside a downtown Starbucks with two George Washington University undergraduates, talking about sex, politics, and religion. Michele Walk and Conor Joseph Rogers fit my stereotype of contemporary American college students. They're sincere, confident, and hyperaware of the ways in which they're different from their parents.

Michele and Conor also represent a growing demographic: They consider themselves both pro-life and supporters of gay marriage.

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WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS: JWB notes that I might want to inform readers that my Weekly Standard review of Red Families vs. Blue Families is now available to nonsubscribers. I did not know that!

So you can read it here. As I said before, I don't think I nailed the problems with the book, but the review might still be worth reading. Please politely ignore the way I completely fuddled the rich man/CAMEL/eye of needle metaphor at the end! Or laugh mercilessly at my incompetence... you know, whatever floats your cup of tea.

AT MARRIAGEDEBATE NOW: interracial marriage rates, "Come for the pizza, stay for the deconstruction of masculinity," how pregnancy is viewed in Israel vs. Japan, surrogacy laws may change in India, and more.

BOSS LADY. Maggie Gallagher has a column on the whole red vs. blue families shtik. I generally think she's better in books than in columns, but this one is really good, assuming she's right about the numbers. More soonish.

THANK GOD FOR MISSISSIPPI: There is a fun meme called "red families vs. blue families." This Seussian formula may not be especially based on the book of the same name, which I haven't read and which I therefore don't want to assimilate to the sins of its followers. But the meme itself is not really new.

The idea is that families in "blue states" are relatively adept at transmitting some aspects of a marriage culture to their children. Massachusetts, e.g., is home to families where the children mate for life. Meanwhile "red states" produce children (they produce more children, usually, by the way) who marry in haste and repent in somewhat-delayed-haste, lots of divorces and out-of-wedlock births and similar signs of family-values hypocrisy. When I say "this isn't new," I mean, "I got 10 cents off my Caribou coffee by knowing that Mississippi has an extraordinarily high rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies more than a year ago."

These are facts, and there are a lot of ways of responding to these facts. You can explore ways in which the contemporary economy and culture, by (for example) prioritizing postsecondary education and stigmatizing living with one's parents, has made it extraordinarily difficult to sustain a culture of more-or-less postponing sex until marriage. You could criticize the notion of marriage as the capper on life's to-do list, to be sought only once all the other boxes are checked and you're "stable," rather than a foundation for a later stable life. You could, in other words, ask why a consumerist culture is so hostile to a communal and marriage-based way of life.

You could maybe talk about Protestantism! Catholic states tend to have very different problems from Protestant ones: They tend to be aging states--whether we're talking about Massachusetts or Italy--where divorce is rare but birthrates are low. What can the competing Christian cultures teach one another?

You could look for institutions and traditions within so-called "red state" cultures which promote lifelong marriage and serve to more-or-less-okay manage the problem of intercourse. You could find heroes and show how "red state" life works, when it works, and which conditions need to be in place for it to work.

These are all things you could do.

The other really fun thing you could do, though, is blame "red state" families for being Not Our Kind, Dear. It is just so sad that their pathetic religious delusions make them slutty hypocrites. (Yum, by the way; I think hypocrisy makes your breasts bigger.) You could argue that they're really promoting abortion, 'cause it's their fault they haven't adapted to the contracepting, college-educated ways of the elite. It's not about poverty, or the fatalism it breeds, or the terrifying knowledge of how close you really are to falling off the ladder. It's about Baptists suck.

You could wage class war, in other words, on the side of the privileged. You could focus on shaming people who are really different from you, and not on figuring out how marriage and family life can be strengthened across a variety of religious and moral beliefs and a variety of class and cultural backgrounds.

Of course, if the (for example) Catholic view of marriage is simply doomed and pathetic, then I guess it's just ripping off the Band-Aid quickly to say so. But I really think if you spend any time with actual humans actually trying to make decisions about their sexual lives, their unborn children, their religion, and their relationships, you will not sound the way a lot of the "red vs. blue families" commentators sound.

They sentenced me to twenty years of blogwatch
For trying to change the system from within...

Camassia: More on The Last Station.

MarriageDebate is just a cornucopia, people. "Are Sperm Donors Really Anonymous Anymore?"; "Would Your Boyfriend Be Pleased By Your Surprise Fetus?"; Can a court tell a parent what religion his child will be?; Catholic girls (and Canadian schoolteachers) gone wild; Yale administration promotes sincerist sex; and whether major economic shifts are leading women to redefine "marriage material." And much, much more. As always, send me links if you've got 'em....

The Rat is back to frequent, linkalicious blogging! Opera, lit, meta-cannoli and much more.

"Why There Is No Jewish Narnia." Really intriguing, though I'm way too far from being a Tolkein or Narnia fan to address its claims. I'd be interested in others' reactions. Two recent novels, Lev Grossman's The Magicians and Hagar Yanai's Ha-Mayim she-bein ha-olamot (The Water Between the Worlds), are reviewed as part of a longer and more speculative essay. Plus the piece is worth it just for the rabbinic description of the fate of Leviathan! Via Arts & Letters Daily.

"Weaponizing Mozart," and other present-tense dystopias from the place that was England.

To Save a Thousand Souls, a new book for men discerning a vocation to the priesthood, has excerpts posted here. The book aims to answer "frequently asked questions" with clear examples and stories. Via Mark Shea.

Stanley Fish asks, "Are there secular reasons?" He says no, but--kinda like what I did when I addressed the same question here and here--he equivocates on how a fully-secular philosophy might proceed. What are the possible objects for the philosopher's eros, the nuptial meaning of the mind, in a fully secular worldview? I dunno, because I've never done it, but I welcome your thoughts. Anyway, here is a bit of Fish, fishifying:

...Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?” ...

Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed? By “smuggling,” Smith answers.

. . . the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway — but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.

The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include “notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian ‘final causes’ or a providential design,” all banished from secular discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a direction — to even get started — “we have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversations — to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise.”

And how do we do that? Well, one way is to invoke secular concepts like freedom and equality — concepts sufficiently general to escape the taint of partisan or religious affiliation — and claim that your argument follows from them. But, Smith points out (following Peter Westen and others), freedom and equality — and we might add justice, fairness and impartiality — are empty abstractions. Nothing follows from them until we have answered questions like “fairness in relation to what standard?” or “equality with respect to what measures?” — for only then will they have content enough to guide deliberation.

more (and yet more of me here, a familiar link to longtime readers)

And this Peter Steinfels column from 2006 makes some good, basic points in crisp language:

But otherwise, Mr. Saletan's approach emphasizes making pregnancies intended and presumably wanted. The Democrats for Life approach emphasizes making pregnancies wanted, whether intended or not. Mr. Saletan emphasizes making any abortion choice unnecessary. Democrats for Life emphasizes making it what the group would consider a genuine choice. And at a very practical level, which is the level of political reality, the two approaches would finance very different and in many respects adversarial networks of organizations and ideology.

It is at this point that the ambiguity remaining in Mr. Saletan's use of ''bad'' cannot be avoided. Is abortion bad like hurricanes or cancer, or is it bad like persecution or child abuse?

whole thing

WILL THE FETUS BE ABORTED? BY AND BY LORD, BY AND BY: I just got the second installment of Alphonse: "Murder Sleep."

Alphonse is a horror comic about a fetus who survives abortion; he knows, and thinks, and hates. My review of the first issue is here.

The cover of this second installment tells the story. A broken doll sits in horrifying suspense in front of the inevitable revenge: a carving-knife. All my Pet Sematary terror-feelers started tinglin'.

Alphonse continues to complicate the categories of abortion-horror I talked about here. It's baby-horror and grief-horror at once--almost as if both sides had a point!

The art is lumpensympathetic. The grays are used to suggest a world of complicity and fog and nightmare. There are some well-chosen, sharp echo images: The light gleams and breaks against the ice in a glass of scotch the way it breaks against the display window of a cell phone. The overall aesthetic is a wash of gray with sharp black character-defining lines coming out of the quicksand.

The actual storyline is hard for me. This is the second installment, thus we're getting more pieces on the chessboard; and I guess I don't care yet about the new pieces. There are suddenly mafiosi (yes, with heavy irony and a pet white cat, but still) and some kind of conspiracy plot. This seems more... comic-booky, and you know what I mean even if you want to be defensive... than the basic wrongful-birth plot. So far I'm okay with the comedy-horror of the conspiracists, but I wish we had more sympathy for them. The first issue of Alphonse was striking in large part because of its relentless focus on suffering and complicity: No one was exempt from its punishing storyline. This issue, again solely because the conspiracy tropes are hit so hard, seems to exempt its audience from some of its horror. Not all the horror, by any means--the pro-life girl and guy are still really messed-up, and their dialogue is well-balanced and gives a real sense of how people suddenly dropped into an impossible, perhaps miraculous but also horrifying, situation might respond. But this issue seemed to have "villains" in a way which the first one didn't.

It's impossible to talk about this comic without talking about abortion. I think the first installment was less-polarized than this one. Nonetheless I think this comic understands the terror of pregnancy and childbearing. So far, I'm not sure this comic will work--especially if it goes too far in the conspiracy direction, which is what soured me on Human Target, since I honestly think conspiracy stories are the opposite of complicity--you don't do conspiracy stories unless you think no one would ever do bad if they knew they were wrong.

But so far, I'd strongly recommend Alphonse to every horror-comics fan who doesn't immediately reject it based on the subject matter. That isn't a criticism. The politics of abortion are intrinsic to the story. There are at least a hundred reasons you wouldn't want to read a comic in which that was a plot element. So far, though, I--as a pro-life Cat'lick dyke, who has never been in danger of pregnancy in all her ramblin' life--think this comic is presented without sentiment, with sympathy for those who support abortion rights, and with... it's hard to tell because of the particular storyline... but with at least some sympathy for women who abort. I think if you can read Alphonse as a story about abortion it makes sense; I don't know if it makes as much sense if you read it as a story of one woman's abortion. But the narrative hints that we will learn much more about Alphonse's unwilling mother, and if that happens, I think it will go a long way to addressing my uncertainty about this approach.

Highly recommended; despite my qualms, I have to admit that nobody else is doing this, and someone should be. If you read this blog, you may be the sort of person who wants to support Catholic arts! This is a great way to do so!

UMBERT THE UNHEIMLICH: If you spend a lot of time in Cat'lick pro-life circles, you may well run across a cartoon strip called "Umbert the Unborn." In this thing, a charmin' little guy hangs out in his (never-pictured) mother's womb, offering uplifting folk wisdom about the funny little things in life.

You... can probably tell from that description that this strip is way too Bil Keane for me to understand its virtues. Apparently at least one other pro-life Catholic has found the premise of this strip intensely creepy.

Matthew Lickona's Alphonse features a similarly-sentient fetus. But Alphonse is vividly aware of his utter helplessness--not as a political contingency but as an existential threat. His mother wants to kill him. And she would succeed... except that Alphonse, in a horrific freak occurence, survives and crawls away.

This is a horror comic which simultaneously exploits and transcends the abortion-horror storylines I talked about here. The comic relies on the flesh-creeping, Uncanny Valley nature of the late-term fetus in order to get its effects--yet, unlike most other horror-baby works, it treats the creature as a person: a monster like Frankenstein's, a bloodied self whose individuality is real, not purely symbolic. And Alphonse's would-be savior herself must break ethical boundaries in order to do what she thinks she has to do to preserve his life. We get trapped in spirals of wrong actions, and when you get down low enough it's hard to see a clean way out.

(The fact that the comic never states explicitly that that's the very reason many women abort is one of its many signs of respect for its audience. There are several parallels between the would-be abortive mother and the would-be baby-saver, but they're done quietly, not stridently.)

The artwork is gritty but not awkward, by an artist who's worked in mainstream comics (WildStorm and maybe something else?) and who uses fairly standard contemporary Western comics techniques clearly and well. The art basically doesn't get in the way, though it also won't be the reason you buy the comic. The figures, gestures, "camera angles," and pacing are all unobtrusively well-chosen. (The women, by the way, look like individual women--indie comics usually do a lot better about this than superhero titles, but I still thought I should mention it.)

I don't know to what extent I can recommend this title yet, since I've only seen the first issue. It's the sort of thing where the premise might be much better than the denouement. But if you think this sounds worth trying, do check it out. I'll say that it does pummel you emotionally, but not ideologically. I'm excited to see where this story goes. Lickona's website might be the best place to order it.

CULTURES OF DEATH:

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era.

more (via Mark Shea)

AND A BAND CALLED "AMERICA" SINGS A SONG ABOUT THE DESERT, AND A HORSE WITH NO NAME: Inside Catholic did a symposium about how Catholics can move forward from what has been--let's be honest--a devastating eight years.

I'm on page three, I think. I guess my entry is kind of, "Oh hey, powerlessness! Double down!"

So take it for what you paid for it.