WE ARE ALL
TROTSKYITES NOW
David Pryce-Jones writes
in the Sunday Telegraph:
Ignorance,
fear and lack of respect for Arabs—these were the most
obvious traits on display in yesterday's demonstration
against a war in Iraq. Could so many people really think
that it is better to leave Iraqis under Saddam Hussein's
vicious tyranny than to liberate them from it?
Their protests
suggest that it is not worth risking anything at all to
free Arabs. To risk spilling a single drop of blood to
liberate Iraq would be futile—not merely because it
would be "destabilizing" or "kill
children," but because the Arabs have no capacity for
"Western" freedom anyway. Behind the
demonstrators' slogans lies the assumption that Arabs
should be left alone: they don't mind being brutalized,
tortured and murdered by a fascist thug like Saddam. Where
they come from, it is the natural order of things.
That line of
thought is nonsense. More than that—it is racist
nonsense. No one knows better than the Arabs the horror of
being oppressed. No one knows better than they that
tyrannical oppression is all that they will get so long as
Saddam and his family are in power. Saddam's despotism is
not a denial of "Western" freedom: it's a denial
of the freedom that every person needs to be able to live
a worthwhile life. To imagine that the Iraqis don't want
to be freed, or are not entitled to it, is simply to
suppose that they are less human than us.
"Racist,"
"fascist"—good, good, but what happened to
"sexist" and "homophobic"? Here is
further proof that the fall of communism has led to the
ultimate triumph of Leftism, in its final stage of
Procrustean "compassionate conservatism." We
kill Iraqis because we love them. I’ve heard of
being cruel to be kind, but this is a bit thick.
Kevin
Michael Grace,
11.32
p.m., February 15,
2003 [Link]
PATHETIC FALLACY
I felt like Lear on the
heath, like the Duchess of Malfi bayed by madmen. I
summoned cataracts and hurricanoes, and as if by conjury
the call was immediately answered.
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead
Revisited
The snow began after the feast of the birth of Our
Lord. I smiled, because it had come at my command. Like
had called to like, albeit without knowing. A frozen heart
had wrought a frozen world. An occasion of the season, the
people said, but they knew neither the curse of the
contract nor the will of the conjurer. There was but one
season now, and the snow fell without end. Sky of zinc and
ground of steel, and the people grew anxious. Through
January and February, my hand gripped the faraway
multitude. On the feast of the martyr of romance, I opened
the heavens. The mighty city stilled. All was ice and
silence, and the people knew the dread of the forsaken. In
the eye of the storm, stood the one who had sold love for
gold. It had turned to ashes, and no matter the wandering,
winter would follow. As above, so below.
Kevin
Michael Grace,
10.49 p.m., February 14, 2003 [Link]
STILL ILL
No, this site isn't moribund. I haven't been posting
for three reasons. 1. Professional obligations. 2. Malaise
or what you will. My talent for expressing misery is not
as elegant as that of the late Father Hopkins, S.J. Any
recent posts would have resembled Jeffrey Bernard's Low
Life column: "a suicide note in installments."
Although...perhaps that should be my new direction.
God knows I've got the material. 3. Illness. I've been
rather under the weather all week. As far as I can tell,
it is either a festering abscess in my jaw or something
worse. I'll know soon enough. I'll post again as soon as I
am able.
Kevin
Michael Grace,
6.12 a.m., February 14, 2003 [Link]
POETRY CORNER
"I wake and feel the fell of dark,
not day…"
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not
day.
What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most
deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
Kevin
Michael Grace,
1.06 a.m., February 12, 2003 [Link]
AGAINST THE PANSIES
In every clime, Death studies
your devices
And vain contortions, laughable Humanity
And oft, like you, perfumes herself with spices
Mixing her irony with your insanity!
—Baudelaire
Iraq’s New International Brigade has a new enlistee:
the Guardian’s Julie Burchill. As someone who has
followed Julie’s career for a quarter-century, this
development is deeply satisfying.
I must apologize for having previously described
Burchill as a "Trotskyite." I knew better but
had sought taxonomic simplicity. Burchill has never
disguised her admiration of the Man of Steel. ("My
heroes always disappoint me. Joe Stalin, Indira Gandhi,
Bryan Ferry—one by one they blow it.") Stalin
wasn’t stallin’—and neither was La Burchill.
Here’s an excerpt from her interview
with the British journal The Devil:
DEVIL: Were you ever
suspected of being a KGB agent?
BURCHILL: I wish I had been
one. Too late now. I was the only person that supported
Soviet Communism. All my friends even on the Left said
'Those bloody fascists.’ They tried their best. Of
course there were terrible things done. But when you
realised how they pulled themselves out of the mess they
were in—starvation, peasants unable to read or write,
being invaded. How could people imagine after being
invaded by three countries in the first days after the
revolution that the Soviet Union would go to being bloody
Hampstead? Of course they were going to become barbarians.
Of course they were going to throw up a Stalin. Because
they were never left the fuck alone to develop. Of course
they became fearful and paranoid. Through thick and thin
you've got to stick to them. Like that great Scottish poet
Hugh McDiarmid who joined the Party when all the other
tossers were leaving it, after the invasion of Hungary in
’56. He said, 'Now they need us.’ When the Berlin Wall
fell, and those liberal tossers cried 'Oh, freedom! Oh
wonderful,' my dad called me up, he was crying, and he
said 'They've got us, girl.' Everybody else was saying
come and join the celebration, but I thought 'fuck off.'
My Dad and me got on the phone about it, we'd moan like
two old married women, having to suffer these brutes.
They'd never lived it. When my dad had cheered up a bit,
he said 'Tell you what though, everything's going to
happen now, drugs, crime, gangsters, I think we're well
out of it basically. Over and out.' And he put the phone
down.
According to Burchill, opponents of invasion are
"racists."
If you really think it's
better for more people to die over decades under a
tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a
brief attack by an outside power, you're really weird and
nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I
recognise. And that's where you link up with all those
nasty rightwing columnists who are so opposed to fighting
Iraq; they, too, believe that the lives of a thousand
coloured chappies aren't worth the death of one British
soldier. Military inaction, unless in the defence of one's
own country, is the most extreme form of narcissism and
nationalism.
Now I get it:
"Military inaction" equals "social
fascism."
You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
War is peace.
Justin Raimondo is absolutely correct—the
pro-invasion side really is a Red-Brown
alliance.
But never let it be said that the Bitch of Brighton
lacks self-awareness. Burchill has cleverly
anticipated the disgust her support for invasion will
engender.
"Ooo, your friends
smell!" Well, so do yours. We may be saddled with
Bush and Blair, but you've got Prince Charles (a big
friend of the Islamic world, probably because of its large
number of feudal kingdoms and hardline attitude to uppity
women), the Catholic Church (taking a brief break from
buggering babies to condemn any Western attack as
"morally unacceptable") and posturing pansies
such as Sean Penn, Sheryl Crow and Damon Albarn.
Ooo, pansies! Whatever can this erstwhile lipstick
lesbian mean? That it is sissified to inhale the stench of
the charnel-house and not call it Chanel? To only bugger
babies and not kill them? Here’s Julie "I’ve had
five abortions, and what of it?" Burchill on the maternal
instinct:
"No woman takes abortion
lightly," even the valiant pro-choice spokeswomen
have taken to saying, not realising that they are adding
to the illusion that abortion is a serious, murderous,
life-changing act. It isn't—unless your life is so sadly
lacking in incident and interest that you make it so.
Myself, I'd as soon weep over
my taken tonsils or my absent appendix as snivel over
those abortions. I had a choice, and I chose life—mine.
So what’s it going to be then, eh? The side of Prince
Charles, the Catholic Church, Sean Penn, Sheryl Crow and
Damon Albarn—or the side of Tony Blair, Christopher
Hitchens, Salamander Rushdie, Andrew Sullivan (no pansy,
he!) and Julie Burchill?
The invasion of Iraq is old Communist blood in new
bottles.
Those at the forge must do
their duty
And we'll strike while the iron is hot
(Not that Andy Sullivan's a Commie, mind—oh no, no,
no. He’s a "Tory"—hee, hee, hee!)
Kevin
Michael Grace,
1.50 a.m., February 9, 2003 [Link]
ONE IN 10?
I’m enjoying Terry’s Teachout’s The
Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, but I
get the impression Teachout doesn’t like poor,
damned Henry very much. Ronald Knox said that novelists
should hate their subjects and biographers should love
theirs--good advice, I’d say. The following passage
struck a chord.
In a set of autobiographical
notes prepared for the use of scholars and put under time
seal, Mencken left no doubt as to his bleak view of
adolescence: "The teens are at once too grotesque and
too pathetic to be dealt with in the mood of the three
‘Days’ books. They belong, intrinsically, to
pathology, and it is no wonder that they offer a happy
hunting ground to quack psychologists. The individual
passing through them has lost the artlessness of childhood
but is still far from the rationality of maturity."
I once expressed a similar sentiment to Lorne Gunter,
and he looked at me askance, to put it mildly. Glad to
discover Mencken felt the same.
Elsewhere, Teachout reports on today’s Baltimore,
"One in 10 Baltimoreans is a heroin addict."
Surely some mistake. Jesse
Walker, can you help me out here?
On the stereo: the Kinks, BBC
Sessions: 1964-1977, "When I Turn
Off the Living Room Light" (Ray Davies):
Your nose may be bulbous,
Your face may be spotty,
Your skin may be wrinkled and tight.
But I don't want to see you,
The way that you are,
So I turn off the living room light.
Kevin
Michael Grace,
11.04 p.m., February 8, 2003 [Link]
NOLO CONTENDERE
I had planned on posting a whole slew of new items last
night…and then spent the evening putting out fires.
First off, I didn’t have any stats. Actually, I had a
few, which didn’t make any sense, as I didn’t have the
Site Meter HTML on my site. So I put it back, but I
couldn’t see it. That’s because my default was for
some reason set to invisible. Fixed that and then
discovered that the blogroll on my index page was
buggered. Spent about an hour trying to make it the same
as the other pages where the blogroll was not buggered.
All the settings were identical, as far as I could see.
After much profanity and hair pulling, eventually wiped
the page clean, imported another page as a template and
then reinserted the data. Then I discovered that the links
on the index page didn’t work. Well, they didn’t work
for me, anyway. They worked for other people, but when I
clicked on them, they pointed to pages on my hard drive,
not the website. Who cares?, you ask. I care. If
you had any idea how long it took me to reconfigure every
single break, head and hyperlink in my archives, then
you’d understand.
I must be the only person in the world who uses
FrontPage to blog. If there are any others, please let me
know. Hand coding blows. Oh, I know it’s not hand
coding, per se. It’s object-oriented hand
coding. Same dif. Microsoft seems to have missed out
entirely on the whole blog thing. C’mon Bill, have you
lost your touch? I would have expected you to have
seconded Steve Ballmer a year ago to figure out how to get
people to pay for what they’re been getting for free.
Reaction to the redesign: no prizes for picking up on
the Spinal Tap references. Nobody picked up the King
Crimson ref, however. Not even Colby Cosh. I am disappointed.
Here’s a clue—check out the booklet that comes with
the four-CD live set; the review is of Red, by Gary
Kenton, if memory serves.
Warren
Kinsella writes:
Nice new design. Nice photo.
It all looks rather...similar to something I've
seen somewhere. Hmmm.
Hmmm, I guess it does. But I didn’t design it. Dave
Stevens did, and as anyone can tell you, Dave hasn’t the
slightest interest in politics. There’s about as much
chance he cribbed my design from your site as there is of
you working for the Canadian Alliance. And on the Doppelgänger
front, I love the Vines
CD too; it’s my second favourite release of 2002. First
is Sea
Change by Beck.
Kevin
Michael Grace,
10.15 p.m., February 8, 2003 [Link]
BITE-SIZED
A press release purportedly from Canadian Alliance
leader Stephen Harper crossed my desktop Wednesday:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 5, 2003
HARPER ON...IRAQ
OTTAWA—In response to demand from columnists and
opinion leaders for regular updates on our daily
messaging, the Office of the Leader of the Opposition will
be providing a regular release bearing a quotation from
Leader Stephen Harper, encapsulating our messaging on the
issues leading the day's news. Please find below our daily
volley: "What is the logic in our Government
continuing to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the
doubt?"—Canadian Alliance Leader Stephen Harper
-30
For more information please call: Carolyn Stewart Olsen
613-297-9479
Pithy.
Further volleys will include:
How much is that doggie in the window?
How soon is now?
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does
your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost
overnight?
What’s the 411?
Do you know the way to San Jose?
Who put the bomp in the bomp, bomp, bomp?
How do they get that delicious caramel into
the Cadbury Caramilk bar?
Kevin
Michael Grace,
11.15 p.m., February 7, 2003 [Link]
-
BACK
IN BLACK
I
wear black on the outside, ’cause black is how I feel
on the inside. You are witnesses at the new birth of The
Ambler, Mark Two.
What,
did you think I was pulling a Kelly
Torrance on you? Not bloody likely. And
what does “insecurity” have to do with it, anyway?
This blog is a testament of my insecurity. My life
is summed up by that song—"Unloveable,"
that is, not "Jazz Odyssey"—and yet I go on
regardless.
I am black, but comely, O ye
daughters of Jerusalem. Nigra sum, sed formosa. A
favourite line of Muriel Spark’s and also of mine,
because it encapsulates my name. Formosa means
comely in Latin, and Kevin means “comely birth” in
Irish.
And black is the colour of priests
and anarchists, as Erik von Kühnelt-Leddihn reminds
us.
Credits:
Photo by Kevin
Steel, taken January 6, 2003, in the
Terry Johnson Memorial Room at the magazine formerly
known as The Report, Edmonton..
Jacket by Danier.
T-shirt by The Gap.
Hair by Jimmy’s Barber Shop, Victoria.
Photo retouching and Web design by Dave “Hercules”
Stevens.
I had considered passing off a
picture of Dirk Bogarde or Laurence Harvey as myself but
decided against it. Behold the man. I may not be
conventionally good-looking, but feel the power.
Hope you enjoy my new direction.
Navigation should be easier, as I have, as promised,
delivered a real archive. (A handful of links do not
work yet, but these will be repaired soon.) Praise,
complaints, etc., to the email address below.
Kevin
Michael Grace,
4.22 p.m., February 6, 2003 [Link]
-
-
- POOR
LITTLE GREEK BOY
-
- The
New Yorker once ran TV ads touting itself
“the best magazine that ever was.” Far too
precious and ponderous for my taste, I’m afraid. For
me, the best magazine that ever was was the Spectator,
when Alexander Chancellor edited it in the 1970s and
1980s. Reading the Spectator then was like
overhearing the dinner-table (and after-dinner)
conversation of a group of unusually intelligent and
amusing men and women. It was a magazine of opinion,
often strong opinion, but there was no Olympian
posing; it harboured no delusions about “making the
world a better place.”
-
- Chancellor,
ironically, later worked
for Tina Brown during her reign of terror at the New
Yorker. It was an ill-fated pairing, as the two
couldn’t be more different. Chancellor is of the
tradition that views success as something of an
embarrassment and striving for success as beyond the
pale. Brown, of course, was noted for her ambition
even as a student at Oxford. Chancellor’s laissez-faire
approach has since become legendary. Graham Lord
writes in Just
the One: The Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard:
-
- The
editor of the New Statesman, Anthony Howard,
would regularly make Bernard rewrite his articles
before he would publish them, whereas Alexander
Chancellor’s approach was much more relaxed—or
“slightly bizarre,” as Dick West, who was lured to
the Spectator at the same time, put it: “The Spectator
was edited in a shambolic way, completely
instinctively, over many drinks in a pub. It was very
fluid.’ Dick West used to joke that Alexander
Chancellor’s typical day as editor of the Spectator
began thus:
-
- 10.55
Arrive at office
11.00 Lose article by Solzhenitsyn
11.05 To pub for gin and tonic
-
- During
Chancellor’s tenure as editor the Spectator
and Private
Eye (then edited by Richard Ingrams)
shared so many writers it seemed like one magazine
with two faces: a nice one and a nasty one. For years
my allegiance to the two organs was so complete I
began to think of their writers as my friends. A
foolish belief but a pleasant one. As I later
discovered to my sorrow, journalists aren't even
friends with each other. We hacks are characterized
primarily by insecurity, and our lives are poisoned by
a thousand fears, jealousies and resentments.
-
- Chancellor’s
tenure came to a sad end. His friend Auberon Waugh
wrote in his autobiography, Will
This Do?:
-
- I
know the drama of Alexander’s sacking only at
second-hand. I was not a participant. But the
generally accepted version of the story is that
Alexander had hired A.N. Wilson, the novelist, as his
literary editor and then wished he hadn’t. An
opportunity arose to sack him when a reviewer sent in
an article which praised the appalling Clive James, so
Andrew (Wilson) altered it to say the opposite. The
reviewer complained, and Clive James complained, so
Alexander was able to sack A.N. Wilson, saying this
was unethical behaviour.
-
- Next
thing—or so the story goes—the sacked Andrew
Wilson makes friends with [new Spectator owner
Algy] Cluff and starts whispering in his ear that
Chancellor is no good, Chancellor drinks too much,
Chancellor is never in the office.
-
- This
was exactly what Algy wanted to hear, so he sacked
Alexander and appointed Charles Moore. [Now editor of
the Daily Telegraph.]
-
- The
fears, jealousies and resentments of that time and
place are described amusingly in Jane Ellison’s roman-à-clef
Another
Little Drink—and, somewhat less
cattily, in Harry Thompson’s Richard
Ingrams: Lord of the Gnomes.
-
- All
this was unknown to me when I became a hack myself and
had the great good fortune to interview many of the
participants: Chancellor, Wilson, Ingrams, Richard
West and his wife Mary Kenny, Piers Paul Read. I
can’t say how much they enjoyed our little talks;
perhaps they found my hero-worshipping (or
arse-creeping, as the British call it) tiresome.
-
- When
I spoke to Waugh—then as now my journalistic
idol—I was shaking with terror. But for some reason
I cannot explain, I wasn’t nervous at all when I
spoke to Taki, even though my acquaintance with him
(as a reader) went back the farthest—all the way
back to the late 1960s, when he wrote for National
Review. (Although Taki he claims his columns were
actually written by William Buckley’s then-teenaged
son Christopher.)
-
- It
was early morning for me in Vancouver, but afternoon
for him in London when I reached the great man at his
home. He told me he was watching women’s tennis from
Wimbledon, cheering for Pam
Shriver—“because she’s the only one who isn’t
a dyke.”
-
- How I love a
man who says what he thinks! And how very rare that
is—especially today when hacks aspire to
become trimmers and time-servers. I have admired Taki
for over three decades, and my admiration has
threatened to become somewhat unhinged since he
decided to bankroll Pat Buchanan’s American
Conservative. Not everyone holds
him in the same esteem, however. Ingrams, who once
employed him, denounces
him on a monthly basis, while Canada’s own
snuff-stained John Fraser considers him "the most
conspicuously enfranchised bigot in Western
journalism." Oh dear.
-
- It was
Alexander Chancellor who made the genius decision to
pair Taki with Jeffrey Bernard as High
Life/Low
Life stablemates (he also poached Waugh
from the New Statesman). Bernard and Waugh are
dead, and Taki is the only remaining link to the
glorious Chancellor era. His days might be numbered. A
recent Spectator column
has come to the attention of Scotland Yard, which
apparently has better things to do than combat the
crime making life in Britain intolerable.
-
- The Independent
sniffs:
-
- Even
by Taki's standards the piece was extraordinarily
offensive. Under the headline "Thoughts on
Thuggery" he wrote: "Oh boy, was Enoch--God
rest his soul--ever right! Now there's a man who was
tough on the causes of crime long before the crime had
been Blaired."
-
- Referring
to the New Year shootings
of two black girls in Birmingham he continued:
"Only a moron would not surmise that what
politically-correct newspapers refer to as
'disaffected young people' are black thugs, sons of
black thugs and grandsons of black thugs…West
Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war,
multiply like flies, and then the great state
apparatus took over the care of their multiplications.
The "Rivers
of Blood" speech by Enoch was
prophetic as well as true, and look what the
bullshitters of the time did to the great man."
-
- Indeed. But no
one thought of arresting him. I had long thought
Canada would be the first Anglosphere country to
arrest journalists for their opinions, but Britain has
pipped
us to the post. Here’s an
opportunity, perhaps, for Jean Chretien to learn
something from President Tony Blair. After all, Tony
has learned so much from Canada. Where do you think he
got the idea of turning his MPs into trained seals?
-
- Taki has
already fallen
out spectacularly with the Spectator’s
proprietor, Conrad Black, and now his editor, Boris
Johnson, says he was on vacation when the offending
column was published, “It was a terrible thing,”
etc., etc. Too bad Johnson doesn’t demonstrate the
loyalty to his writers Chancellor did—or Tina Brown,
for that matter. Bron Waugh once compared, in the Tatler,
a bottle of wine
-
- in
its presentation and appeal, with “a dead
chrysanthemum on the grave of a still-born West Indian
baby.”
-
- Waugh was
“hauled before the Press Council to answer these
charges.” There, “Tina stood beside me throughout
the ordeal, keeping a beautiful straight face."
-
- Inspector
Knacker is sorely mistaken is he believes Taki will be
cowed by the threat of imprisonment. He's already
served a stretch
and acquitted himself handsomely.
-
- Kevin
Michael Grace,
3.45 a.m., February 4, 2003 [Link]
-
-
-
- WHERE
THE PRATIES GROW
-
- Picked
up a copy of Flann O’Brien’s The
Poor Mouth on Friday. Published in
Irish in 1941, it is a satire on the cult of Irishry.
The introduction by its translator, Patrick C. Power,
MA, PhD, contains one of the funniest paragraphs I
have ever read.
-
- In
The Poor Mouth [O'Brien] comments mercilessly
on Irish life and not only on the Gaeltacht [the
Irish-speaking region of Ireland]. Words such as
“hard times,” “poverty,” “drunkenness,”
“spirits” and “potatoes” recur in the text
with almost monotonous regularity. The atmosphere
reeks of the rain and the downpour, and with
relentless insistence he speaks of people who are
“facing for eternity” and the like. The keywords
in this work are surely “downpour,” “eternity”
and “potatoes” set against a background of squalor
and poverty.
-
- Ah,
the noble tuber!
-
- Kevin
Michael Grace,
2.17 a.m., February 3, 2003 [Link]
-
-
- ONWARD
CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS
-
- My
apologies for the lack of new posts. My magazine was
completely redesigned this week. Didn’t finish until
3.30 this morning, and I won’t begin to feel human
again until tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s more
of the best of KMG. Another Galaxy 500 piece
from 1999, which gives some insight into the
"mindset" of those braying loudest for an
invasion of Iraq. Original posts will return tomorrow.
- A
friend of mine has programmed his TV so that stations
he never watches are “locked out.” Not me: I need all
500 channels (well, 65 in my neck of the universe) for
the full surfing experience--even the mysterious 59,
which is not listed in TV Guide, and is
identified on the screen only as DTY. (The Destiny
Channel?) Channel surfing is the closest
non-specialists like me will get to the stochastic
universe so beloved of quantum physicists. It’s a
funhouse in a box; step right up my friends for the
show that never ends! Move me or lose me! You never
know what’s up next: a face, a name, an explosion, a
female voice exclaiming, “Two shocking predictions
in the great Egypt pyramid!”
-
- The
last was the opening of Jack Van Impe Presents,
which boggles minds for 30 minutes every Sunday on
Vision TV, the CRTC-approved virtual church that
answers that thorny theological question “What’s
religious broadcasting without a generous helping of
second-rate British sitcoms?” The promise of
Egyptian arcana was made by Rexella Van Impe, Dr. Van
Impe’s wife, whose tousled, bottle-blonde hair and
sexy-neurotic microphone technique make her the End
Times Marilyn Monroe.
-
- JVIP
is the Washington Week in Review of biblical
prophecy. Rexella breathlessly (or breathily)
announces some
the-world-is-going-to-hell-in-a-handcart item culled
from the press--Anti-Semitism Is On The Rise in
Russia! The Cold War Isn’t Over!! Islamic Terrorists
Have Nuclear Weapons!!!--and then hands it over to
Jack, a suave fellow with buttery jowls and Jimmy
Johnson hair whose emotional state turns on a dime. He
then bats it out of the park: “Listen to me: It
isn’t going to be long!” Rexella then looks at him
lovingly and utters an endearment, such as,
“Umm….my, that’s so good, Jack.”
-
- Dr.
Van Impe’s line of thinking is called dispensational
premillennialism. Seeing as this is one of the hottest
trends in evangelicalism, you might think it’s
easily obtainable from any number of local churches.
But you’d be wrong. According to Jack, your
preachers aren’t giving you the straight goods. Why,
some of them “don’t have enough backbone to take a
chiropractic adjustment.” (Rexella really liked that
one!) And does your local church offer the Apocalypse
on video starring Jeff “Lawnmower Man”
Fahey and superannuated supermodel Carol Alt, with
cameo appearances by Jack and Rexella, available for
the low, low price--sorry, donation--of $34.95?
I thought not.
-
- As
someone who was taught that “trusting to
charms, omens, dreams, and suchlike fooleries” is
a snare of the Devil, I believe that biblical prophecy
is best avoided--unless you are called Isaiah or St.
John the Divine. But let’s get back to Rexella’s
promise. What does the Great Pyramid of Gizeh have to
teach us? Well, you see there’s this timeline
written on its walls, and it’s never been wrong in
4,000 years…Funny, I’ve never read anything about that
in my translation of the Bible.
-
- If
JVIM makes you want to start taking
anti-depressants, then Faithville, which
follows it on Vision, makes it you want to lower your
dose. I have never seen a Christian sitcom before, and
I hope I will never have to again. For Faithville
is, without question, the most bizarre television
program I have ever seen. According to its producer,
it is intended to “preach God’s word in a fun
way.”
-
- If
your idea of fun is a man dressing up in Scuba gear
because he’s afraid he’ll be drowned when
baptized, then Faithville is right up your
exegesis. A Pilgrim’s Progress for
children--or mental defectives--it has mustachioed
characters with allegorical names (Up, Doubt, Hope,
Charity, Cutwright, etc.) and a stupid one (Dr. Les To
Doo, geddit?), pratfalls galore, Baptist theology and
even canned laughter. Even a guy scratching his head
with a screwdriver. Now that’s comedy. And a happy
ending of course. Mr. Doubt, who learns that becoming
born again is not an extreme sport, decides to forgive
the wacky pranksters who led him on, concluding, “I
really should be angry at those guys. But come to
think of it, it was a really good joke.” Thou sayest,
buddy.
-
- A
detailed examination of Faithville would
require a viewing of 67 episodes available on video
(price not announced). I may get around to that one
day, but right now I’m back to the Bible. I think
I’ve found proof that the number seven in the Book
of Seven Seals refers to my local CBS affiliate.
-
- Kevin
Michael Grace,
10.08 p.m., February 1, 2003 [Link]
