RETURN TO THE CATACOMBS
It has long seemed obvious to me that the teachings of
the Catholic Church are intolerable to the goals of
"multiculturalism," broadly considered.
Therefore, if the Church cannot be fully hollowed out from
within, it must be gradually suppressed from without.
Evidence of the former is not hard to find in Canada.
Our social revolution has been directed for four decades
by Catholic politicians. Except for the apocryphal Kim
Campbell interregnum, every prime minister from 1968 has
been a "devout"1
Catholic: Pierre
Trudeau, Joe
Clark, John
Turner, Brian
Mulroney, Jean
Chretien, Paul
Martin. But the reaction of the Catholic
hierarchy to their Parliamentary and court-appointed
assault on marriage, the family and, ultimately, the
divinely-ordered roles of men and women, has been laissez-faire,
to put it mildly. Indeed, it is difficult to regard the obsequies
upon Trudeau's demise as anything other than evidence that
the Church in Quebec has conspired in its own demise.
The fatal error of the accomodationists—religious and
secular, in Canada and everywhere else—is their belief
that if we give the multiculturalists this one last
thing—whatever it might be—they will then admit
victory and get off our backs. But there is never one last
thing, and they will not get off our backs until society
is utterly destroyed. The multiculturalist belief is not
only that everything we know is wrong but that everything
we have ever known is wrong.
Belloc
said, "The Faith is Europe, and Europe
is the Faith." Catholics have little time for Belloc
these days, but what he said is not only true; it is also
obvious. The Faith created Europe; and the Roman Church is
to the Roman Empire as the New Testament is to the Old.
Europe, broadly considered, is not only the Faith; it is
Western Civilization. And this explains not only the
multiculturalist hatred of the West in general2
("Hey,
hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!",
"Dead
White European Males," etc.) but also
its hatred of the Catholic Church in particular.
There are many mansions in the multiculturalist house,
but the most luxuriously appointed is the "gay
movement." It is obligatory at this point to note
that there are many homosexuals who do not share the goals
of the gay movement, who simply want to be left to their
own devices. Obligatory (and true) but also irrelevant.
For it is an article of faith in the gay church that any
homosexual who does not fully assent to its reductionist
agenda is anathema. This unity of purpose, combined
with exploitation of the amusing conceit that homosexuals
are "oppressed" as a "gender" (or
"genders") and the accomodationist (or worse)
stance of the elites, explains why the gays have carried
all before them for two generations.
Barbara
Findlay, interviewed below, has said
famously—and with admirable (and rare)
honesty—"The legal struggle for queer rights will
one day be a showdown between freedom of religion versus
sexual orientation." That day is now at hand. The
gradual3
suppression of the Catholic Church has begun.4
1
Is there such a thing as a non-"devout"
Catholic? I recently researched reviews
of Eric Rohmer's film Ma
Nuit Chez Maud and discovered that that
the character played by Jean-Louis Trintignant is
routinely described as "devout." He is nothing
of the sort. He is not given to devotions; he is merely a
Catholic who attends Mass and lives, as best he can, by
the dictates of the Church. Canada's Catholic prime
ministers consider the Magisterium optional, but according
to the media they remain "devout" as all get
out. By this measure, nothing short of being televised ripping
up a picture of the Pope suffices to
excommunicate Catholics from the category. So the
answer to my question is Yes; there is one, and her name
is Sinéad
O'Connor.
2 And Europe in particular, of course. The
multiculturalists hate Islam, but they conspire in its (re)conquest
of Europe as a means to destroy what remains of Christian
civilization there. They believe that after this is
accomplished they will put paid to the Prophet and his
works. We shall see.
3 As Belloc reminds us, "gradual"
does not mean "slowly"; it means "by
degrees."
4 And who better
to start with than the Knights of Columbus, named as they
are after the wickedest "dead white European
male" of them all.
Homosexual Activists Target The Knights
by Kevin Michael Grace
National Catholic Register
20 February—26 February 2005
Homosexual activists routinely claim that their drive
to legalize homosexual "marriage" is no threat
at all to freedom of religion. So does
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.
A complaint by two lesbians against the Knights of
Columbus heard
last month in British Columbia suggests otherwise.
Deborah
Chymyshyn and Tracey Smith are suing for
damages because in September 2003, the Knights, a lay
Catholic fraternal order, cancelled the booking these
lesbians had made for their hall in Port Coquitlam, a
Vancouver, British Columbia, suburb, after learning it was
for a reception celebrating their homosexual
"marriage."
The lesbians, who booked the hall in person, claim they
had never heard of the Knights—despite one of them being
raised a Catholic—and claim they had no idea the hall
had any religious connection. The hall stands directly
behind Our Lady of the Assumption Church.
As the brief
presented to the human-rights tribunal by the Knights’s
lawyer, George
Macintosh, pointed out, however,
The inside of the Hall is
adorned with a large crucifix, photographs of the Pope and
leaders of the Knights, a certificate from the Supreme
Council of the Knights, a painting of the ascension of the
Virgin Mary [and] posters of various Catholic
organizations.
The facts presented at the hearing demonstrate that the
women suffered no material damage. The Knights apologized
to them for what they regarded as a regrettable
miscommunication, returned their payment checks, and,
furthermore, after consultation with the Archdiocese of
Vancouver, which owns the hall, paid them CAN$594.59 in
compensation for wedding invitations, postage and
alternate hall rental.
The Knights and the Archdiocese expected a legal
release in exchange for their courtesy. Instead, Chymyshyn
and Smith enlisted the legal services of Barbara Findlay,
Canada’s most famous lesbian activist. Findlay
pronounced in 1997: "The legal struggle for queer
rights will one day be a showdown between freedom of
religion versus sexual orientation."
Findlay insisted she bears no animus against the
Catholic Church. She said she does not believe Christian
churches should be forced to "marry" homosexuals
nor that they should lose their tax exemptions for
refusing to do so.
"The conflicts begin to develop when the churches
want to assert rights past the traditional sphere of their
protected acts, which is the church itself," she
explained. "[The Knights] say they will rent this
hall for bingo but not for a same-sex marriage. In that
area, I say you can’t do that."
When asked to explain why, she responded: "Because
the human
rights code says not. The human rights code
says that if you’re going to rent the hall to the
general public, you can’t discriminate."
‘Red Herring’
"Nobody is banning persons who have homosexual
attractions from our facilities," said Paul Schratz,
spokesman for the Archdiocese of Vancouver. "The
contention before the tribunal is the use to which the
facility is being put. If the use is not consistent with
the principles and teachings of our faith, that’s when
we run into a problem. I would suggest that the homosexual
persons’s argument is a red herring."
The tribunal’s decision, which may appealed in the
courts, is expected in early spring.
Knights’s lawyer Macintosh pointed out that both the
provincial human rights code and Canada’s Bill
of Rights protect discrimination under
certain circumstances, one of which is religious belief.
He said that this case is quite similar to that of Scott
Brockie, a Toronto printer and evangelical
Christian who refused to print materials for a homosexual
group.
"The tribunal
in the first instance said he had to print
stuff for this homosexual group even though he deeply
believes that homosexuality is wrong," Macintosh
explained. "The court
on review said Brockie had to print
innocuous stuff. He had to print letterhead for this gay
group because that cannot be reasonably be said to offend
his core religious beliefs."
The comparison to the Knights’s case, he said, is
that "The Catholic Church welcomes [celibate]
homosexuals, and the Knights will welcome
homosexuals." But they can’t be forced under the
law to "marry" them or to hold
"wedding" receptions for them on Church
property.
Ian Hunter, professor emeritus of law at the University
of Western Ontario, said it is obviously offensive to
religious people and institutions to be told by
quasi-judicial agencies what counts as
"innocuous." He said that Canada suffers under a
"new despotism" administered by "a plethora
of administrative agencies, boards, commissions and
tribunals that mutually reinforce a whole legal system
that operates outside the regular courts."
Hunter is in no doubt as to where this road
leads—Canada’s churches will be forced to
"marry" homosexuals.
"It’s simply a questions of whether this happens
tomorrow or two years from now or five years from
now," Hunter said. "The federal government would
be just as happy to leave the issue alone, but I don’t
think they’ll be allowed to leave it alone; just as they
weren’t allowed to leave gay ‘marriage’ alone. It
will be put to them as a fait accompli."
Church United
However, defenders of traditional marriage point out
that homosexual marriage is not yet a fait accompli
in Canada. The Church is more united on this issue than it
has been on any social issue for decades. Cardinal
Aloysius Ambrozic of Toronto made front-page
news last month when he released an open
letter to Prime Minister Martin demanding
that he reaffirm traditional marriage lest he destroy
society.
Member of Parliament Pat O’Brien, a firm opponent of
the bid to legalize same-sex "marriage" even
though he is a member of Martin’s ruling Liberal Party, charged
Feb. 2 that the party was pressuring its members to
support the legislation despite having promised that they
could vote according to their conscience on the issue.
O’Brien, who is Catholic, said the pressure demonstrated
that Martin fears the legislation will be defeated if
Members of Parliament are allowed to vote freely.
"What it tells me is that this vote’s closer
than people would like to think and that the
government’s a little nervous," O’Brien said,
according to the Canadian Press.
A poll
released last month by the National Post is even
more cheering for opponents of homosexual
"marriage." It revealed that, despite claims
Canada has embraced "progress," two-thirds of
Canadians say they support keeping marriage the union of
one man and one woman.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 5.50 p.m., 15 March 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Democracy is a bit of a
fraud, quite frankly.
—Patrick
J. Buchanan
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.28 a.m., 14 March 2005►
LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE
It was an occasion that demanded the genius
of a Bateman:
"The Woman Who Refused To Schmooze With Antonia
Zerbisias." The woman is our old friend Kathy
"Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella" Shaidle, and the
occasion was when Zerbisias, Toronto Star media
columnist, crashed
a "blogger’s bash" in Toronto last month.
By all accounts,
the males in attendance were captivated, and the
photograph here
serves to explain why. The females, however, were another
matter. Woman is shrew to woman, as they say.
Somehow managing to hold back the tears, someone called
Debbye "Sic" Stratigacos writes:
She still doesn't get it. I
find it amusing that today's column was All. About.
Zerbisias. and not about Lebanon, the fatwa issued by
Spanish clerics, or the bombing of yet another Iraq
funeral procession which can all be connected to OIF. I
guess each of us have different priorities…
The war has a personal face
for most of us, and it isn't fun or happy. But for some
reason, we manage to keep posting.
I have no humour, and I must post. Pace
Zerbisias, there’s real bravery for you.
A typically illiterate communiqué
was issued from the Saskabush bunker occupied by Kate
"Why Oh Why Doesn’t The MSM Report The Good
News From Iraq?" McMillan:
Not just one, but two shiny
brass rings went swinging slowly by....plump, juicy
low-hanging fruit...and they turned the bitch loose…
Er, is there a Mr McMillan?
But of course the cake was taken by La
Shaidle. She begins by comparing Zerbisias
to "Shelly [sic] Winters" and insinuates
she was drunk and acted like a tart. Then she complains
that Zerbisias "was indeed ‘surrounded’ in a
matter of minutes by just about every man in the place. It
was like the opening scene of Gone With The Wind."
More like the senior prom all over again.
"I don't wish Zerbisias any harm," Shaidle
claims. You could have fooled me. "We patched up the
litte [sic] spat she alludes to last year [sic]."
Then she insinuates that Zerbisias is an anti-Semite.
Not only that but...wait for
it..."traitorous."
projection
noun 8. Psychology a. The
attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings or
suppositions to others [American Heritage Dictionary]
Above all, Shaidle wants it to be known she is a woman
of import. She clings to her amour propre as a
savage clings to his talisman (or a Shaidle to her stodge):
I have no desire to abandon a
perfectly comfortable chair and a platter of greasy potato
skins to play [Zerbisias’s] flying monkey, either…
I myself have no use for
schmooze, at least not with a mid-ranking liberal
columnist at my least favourite daily. I bitch about my
cellulite, but here's one perk of having a decade's extra
life experience over some of my fellow bloggers: I've
already met A- and B-list movie stars and rock stars and
writers I'd admired from afar (12 Step membership has its
privileges); at one point, my address book contained the
phone numbers of my local transexual [sic] drinking
buddies and Catholic university presidents. Another
Toronto journalist? Whatever…
And I already have a
"real" writing career, not that I think that's
the ultimate goal of every other blogger. At this point,
media people tend to approach me, not the other way
around.
And why wouldn’t they? Transsexuals and
Catholic university presidents? That’s one bitchin’
Rolodex.
In the words of the immortal Charles
Pooter,
I have often seen
reminiscences of people I have never heard of, and I fail
to see—because I do not happen to be a
"Somebody"—why my diary should not be
interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it
when I was a youth.
My only regret is that I did not realize sooner that
Kathy Shaidle is our own Ms Pooter. A furious
"Nobody," to be sure, but all the funnier for
that. She is the troll under the blog whose snarls serve
to remind us how blessed we are in comparison. She is a
national treasure.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.18 a.m., 14 March 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Do you know that
Shakespearean admonition 'To thine own self be true'? It's
premised on the idea that 'thine own self' is pretty good,
being true to which is commendable. What if 'thine own
self' is not so good? What if it's pretty bad? Would it
better, in that case, not to be true to 'thine own self'?
See? That's my situation.
—Des McGrath, The
Last Days of Disco
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.48 p.m., 12 March 2005►
THE NEW EUGENICS
The National Catholic Register is printing
several of my stories, but as this estimable publication
doesn't maintain a full Internet
archive, I've decided to post them here,
after a suitable interval. They will be improved with
hyperlinks, of course.
The story below concerns "designer babies."
So perhaps a few words about my political beliefs are in
order. I'm pretty libertarian in my inclinations, although
Nick
Gillespie and his ilk would condemn
me as a Torquemada.
I have followed the recent
debate on whether old-school conservatives
could find a home in the libertarian camp with interest,
as recent Thoughts of the Day attest. First, however, I
believe that an obsession
with typology is proof of a disordered
mind. Second, while King Kevin would dream of rolling back
government to, oh, say, where it was in 1910, I am not an
anarchist. Anyone who says, "There
is no such thing as society," is not
my friend—and he is not your friend either. There
are some choices people should not—must not—be
permitted.
From 'Designer Babies' to a Master Race?
by Kevin Michael Grace
National Catholic Register
13 February—19 February 2005
Julie
Fletcher is expecting her third child. And
a lot is expected of him.
Fletcher and her husband, Joe, have a two-year-old,
Joshua, afflicted with Diamond
Blackfan anemia, a rare blood disease that
requires constant, debilitating and exceedingly expensive
treatment and will likely kill him before he is 30. A
stem-cell treatment would stimulate his body to produce
healthy red blood cells, but neither of his parents, nor
their 5-year-old son, is a close-enough match.
The [Northern Irish] couple turned to in-vitro
fertilization to create a sibling that would be a
match after Britain relaxed
a law against embryo selection in
September. Their new baby will donate umbilical stem cells
to facilitate a born marrow transplant for Joshua. The
procedure will not harm the baby.
The quest for perfection, coupled with continuous
advances in biotechnology has resulted in a "new
eugenics," a leading expert in bioethics warns. Wesley
J. Smith, author of Consumer’s
Guide to a Brave New World, told the Register
that this new eugenics—unlike that of Hitler or Margaret
Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood—"doesn’t
promote itself with crass racist terminology; it promotes
itself on the basis of compassion."
Pope Paul VI, in his 1968 encyclical Humanae
Vitae (On Human Life), noted,
Man has made stupendous
progress in the domination and rational organization of
the forces of nature, such that he tends to extend this
domination to his own total being: to the body, to
psychical life, to social life and even to the laws which
regulate the transmission of life.
Today, man’s "domination" has made possible
"designer babies." These are babies created
through in-vitro fertilization for a specific purpose:
either to provide genetic materials for medical use or
simply to embody desired physical traits.
Britain’s Human Fertilization and Embryology
Authority has permitted the use of the preimplantation
genetic diagnosis test to screen embryos for their
suitability to result in donor children.
Responding to criticism of the authority’s decision,
Mohamed Taranissi, the Fletcher’s physician, said,
"What we are doing is simply helping treat sick
children."
It is not that simple, Smith said. "The problem
is," he said, "we are beginning to treat human
life as an instrumentality, as a natural resource to be
exploited and in some cases, suppressed." (By
suppression, he means the fate of the unsuitable embryos.)
In the United States, the first type of designer baby
is illegal, but the second is not. As the London Times
reported,
sperm, egg and embryo donors are "routinely screened
according for high intelligence, family medical history
and physical traits such as height, weight and eye, skin
and hair colors."
According to Smith, "When you start talking about
‘enhanced’ babies, this is ‘master race’ thinking.
When you start talking about ‘better human beings,’
this is the heart and soul of eugenics. You have started
down the road that leads to exploitation, oppression and,
indeed, if it gets truly radical, killing."
‘Hidden Eugenics’
Eugenics—from the Greek word for "well
born"—was devised by British scientist Sir
Francis Galton, who died in 1911. A cousin
of Charles Darwin (and heavily influenced by his theory),
Galton saw eugenics as a means to prime the pump of
natural selection. The human race was not advancing as it
could, in his mind, because the "best" people
were not breeding (positive eugenics), while the
"worst" were breeding all too often (negative
eugenics).
Eugenics quickly became the rage in scientific,
socialist, racialist and feminist circles. The phrase "birth
control" had a eugenic origin. Margaret
Sanger, who entertained genocidal
fantasies about African-Americans, promoted
contraception as the technology that would enable a mass
reduction of "inferior" peoples.
All over the West, except for Catholic countries, eugenic
principles became law. Mental defectives
were forbidden to marry or were sterilized—as
were epileptics, criminals, the poor and feckless. Between
1907 and 1963, 64,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized.
"Master race" thinking reached a horrifying
conclusion in National Socialism. From 1933 to 1945,
450,000 the Nazis forcibly sterilized 450,000 Germans and
murdered millions of "inferiors"—Jews, Slavs,
gypsies. The revulsion that followed the revelation of
these crimes drove eugenics from polite society.
It is now a "hidden eugenics," according to
ethicist Margaret
Somerville, professor of law
and medicine at McGill University. She told
the Register, "The Nazi eugenics was a
combination of what they thought was perfect—the blond,
blue-eyed, Aryan—with new science. What is more than a
little scary is that this is exactly the same combination
of features we have today.
"At a time when we are saying we must be as
diverse as possible, we are also eliminating whole groups
of people," she said. "You go to these
conferences and you hear people saying, ‘We won’t have
any more Down’s
syndrome children soon.’ They sometimes
say it would be negligent not to eliminate them,
that people don’t have the right to impose disabled
children on society."
This culling of "worthless" babies through
abortion is so far voluntary, subject only to societal and
not governmental coercion. But as Paul VI warned in Humanae
Vitae, the latter remains a distinct possibility:
Let it be considered also
that [in the acceptance of artificial birth control] a
dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of
those public authorities who take no heed of moral
exigencies. Who could blame a government for applying to
the solution of the problems of the community those means
acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the
solution of a family problem?
Too Risky?
Peter
Augustine Lawler, professor at Berry
College and a member of President Bush’s Council
on Bioethics, worries that soon
"having babies the old fashioned way will be seen as
way too risky." Lawler, a Catholic, told the Register
that as the number of children born to American women
continues to fall, the definition of unacceptable
"risk" continues to expand. He explained,
"As all of life becomes more individualistic, the
only person that has to love you is your child, so
parents are expecting far too much."
Amniocentesis and ultrasound have been used for years
to detect imperfect children to be killed before birth.
The PGD test, which the Wall Street Journal reports
is "exploding"
in popularity, allows a far more accurate appraisal of the
"worth" of the unborn. Lawler predicts that
in-vitro fertilization (and the artificial
womb, which he believes to be only a few
years away) will become the default method of childbirth
for, first, the wealthy and sophisticated, and then,
eventually, for everyone else.
Lawler suspects that advances in eugenics will come so
fast that the pro-life movement will be unable to keep up.
He said, "The pro-life Catholics and Mormons and such
will become, in a certain way, pro-choice, in that
everyone will design babies but we will decide we don’t
want to."
Janet
Smith, Chair of Life
Issues at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in
Detroit, responded, "Catholics first and foremost
need to learn, teach and live by the Church’s teaching.
Catholics are contracepting
and having abortions at the same rate as
the general population; Catholics are having
sex before marriage at the same rate as the
rest of the population. And my suspicion is that Catholics
are having
recourse to IVF at a very high rate."
Smith concluded, "We cannot be beacons of life
unless we respect life ourselves."
This teaching, Paul VI admitted in Humanae Vitae,
"will perhaps not be easily received by all."
Following it will require "heroic sacrifices."
However, "The Church does not because of this cease
to proclaim with humbler firmness the entire moral law,
both natural and evangelical."
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.40 p.m., 12 March 2005►
RIP ALICE
THOMAS ELLIS
The novelist Alice Thomas Ellis died Tuesday at the age
of 72. (Here are obituaries from the Guardian,
the Independent,
the Telegraph
and the Times.)
Lung cancer was the cause of death, and doubtless the
puritans will make much of her champion smoking and carry
on as if she was taken in "the prime of life" or
some such nonsense. As always, they miss the point,
because she certainly lived no longer than she cared to.
As the Telegraph reported,
When she was diagnosed... in
2003, she felt no fear, but rather "huge
excitement." Surgery reprieved her for a time—much
to her disgust: "The plane went off without me. I
still have forms to fill in, the Inland Revenue to cope
with, and it is so irritating."
That's the spirit.
Ellis was a remarkable woman. Raised a Comptean
atheist, she found God as an adolescent and became a
postulant nun, only to be sacked after she developed a
medical disorder, as was the habit of the time. She moved
to London, where she met an equally remarkable man, Colin
Haycraft, Oxford double first, rowing blue
and aspiring publisher. She became Anna Haycraft after her
marriage, and it was by this name she was best known.
Colin Haycraft revived and later became the proprietor
of Duckworth,
the firm which had the enviable distinction of first
accepting, then rejecting, Decline
and Fall (allegedly for smut). He was a
genius, but his books, which reflected a great knowledge
of classical culture, tended to be on the recondite side.
They sold few copies, although he did publish Awakenings
by Oliver Sacks, who became a family friend, like so
many other authors. He claimed not to care for novels, so
he gave over that side of the business to Anna, who
discovered and edited, among others, two of the finest
British novelists of the 20th century, Beryl
Bainbridge and Penelope
Fitzgerald. (Some years ago, when I
discovered the shocking pittances Bainbridge earned for
her bestsellers, I understood it was only loyalty and
certainly not money that kept Anna's authors in the
stable.)
Anna tended her list while raising six children (a
seventh having died shortly after birth) and conducting
(and cooking for) an often riotous salon at her
home in Camden Town, whose habitués included,
besides Bainbridge and Sacks, Kingsley Amis, A.J. Ayer,
Alan Bennett, Jeffrey Bernard, Michael Frayne, Jonathan
Miller, Claire Tomalin and Ralph and Ursula Vaughan
Williams. Elegant and somewhat mysterious, her eyes and
her body always adorned in black, Anna stood and smoked
and listened.
Here was a woman that could have be said to "have
it all," although Anna Haycraft would have sneered at
that. She detested with a passion the Sixties, feminism
and their "spirits." She had
little time for eros either:
I was once asked by a
newspaper to write down a thought for Valentine's Day. I
wrote, "Men love women; women love children; children
love hamsters; and hamsters don't love anybody." I
wanted, for the sake of neatness, to begin, "God
loves men," but I couldn't because that would have
implied He loved women less and, as we all know, He loved
His mother best of all. In Paradise Lost Milton
wrote, "He for God only, she for God in him," a
typical piece of male arrogance aggravated by a tendency
to wish-fulfilment. D.H. Lawrence suffered similarly. He
was troubled by the suspicion that women did not dote on
him sufficiently, that they failed to venerate the unique
glory of the male and probably gave way to bawdy giggling
when out of earshot. He was right of course. Milton and
Lawrence belong to the same Puritan tradition. The
Romantic tradition too, pessimistic and despairing,
springs from the dim awareness that sexual love is never
fully reciprocal, that there is "one who kisses and
one who is kissed." Once a child is conceived, the
male, in a very basic sense, is redundant. The Troubadour
went wailing around the castle walls because his lady was
either a virgin or all sewed up in a chastity belt and not
for him. In real life she would probably have been too
busy minding the baby to hear his plaints.
Anna Haycraft/Alice Thomas Ellis, 1932-2005:
'"Be still and know that I am God" is a phrase I
constantly invoke'
Anna Haycraft first published a cookbook under her real
name and then, at the age of 45 in 1977, her first novel, The
Sin Eater, as Alice Thomas Ellis. This
was a pseudonym chosen to evade charges of nepotism, as
the book was published by the family firm. She needn't
have worried, as she was from the beginning a success. She
was a Booker Prize finalist, won the Yorkshire Post
Book Award, and her Summer
House trilogy was filmed for television
with Jeanne Moreau and Joan Plowright. She eventually
published 13 novels, a collection of short stories, a
memoir, more cookbooks, four collections of her Spectator
columns and several books on religion. She also
co-authored two books of sociology.
In 1978, her 19-year-old son Joshua fell from bridge
while trainspotting. He lingered for months, comatose,
then died. Anna Haycraft was crushed by a grief which
oppressed her until her own death. Further sadness was to
come when Duckworth foundered and Colin died, a martyr to
money worries, in 1994. Anna retired to Wales, where she
had been raised. She kept a cat called Basil, after the
Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster, whom she couldn't
abide.
Her marriage was obviously a curious one, as Colin was
fond of saying that religion was "really for women
and queers" and defined "religious maniac"
as "someone who believes in God." The Telegraph
obituarist wrote:
In one of many paradoxes in
her life, she combined a high degree of tolerance for
family muddle with a stern demand for an ordered Church.
Continuing the paradox, she combined her fervent
traditionalism and love of ritual (she was a regular at
the sung Latin mass at St Dominic's Priory in Kentish
Town) with an irreverence about the modern Church which
amounted to a bitter anti-clericalism.
The last is grossly unfair. Anna Haycraft loved the
Church, but she knew that men do not make the Church.
Especially not the effetes who have dominated it since the
Second Vatican Council. She loved the faith of our fathers
and demanded that our present fathers start acting like
men. She didn't, like so many of the female "people
of God" so-called, want to be a priest herself. She
simply wanted them to do their jobs, so she could better
do hers.
She was sacked as a columnist for the Catholic
Herald in 1996, after attacking the memory of
Archbishop Derek Worlock, who had the enviable
distinctions of reducing Catholic worship in Liverpool to
almost nothing and of constructing a monstrous new
Cathedral, immortalized by some wag as "Paddy's
Wigwam." She took her column to
Richard Ingrams's The
Oldie, where it remained.
Her writing, both theological and worldly, is
distinguished by Johnsonian fierce good sense and, also
like the good Doctor's, is fine-tuned to the numinous. Her
critical reputation has suffered from what Dennis
Sewell has described as "a creeping
secular fundamentalism among the wider
intelligentsia." Anna Haycraft claimed not to care
much for her novels, but I can't agree. Give The
27th Kingdom a try, and see what you
think.
In those days: I heard a
voice from Heaven, saying to me: Write: blessed are the
dead, who die in the Lord. Henceforth now, saith the
Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; for their
works follow them.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.45 a.m., 11 March 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Until you have been really
poor, you will not understand to what lengths human beings
can be driven by poverty.
—Thomas
Fleming
Kevin
Michael Grace, 6.13 a.m., 11 March 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Luttwak says he is not
anti-capitalist, nor is he against economic growth.
"My question is: growth for what?" he said.
"National leaders cannot just announce that growth
will increase by 2 per cent. You also have to address the
question: What happens to the growth?" He counts as
one of the most dangerous features of
"turbo-capitalism" a widening gap between rich
and poor. This week, the United Nations reported that Bill
Gates of Microsoft, the Sultan of Brunei and the Walton
family of the Wal-Mart grocery stores were together worth
more than the combined gross national product of the 43
poorest countries.
Luttwak's underlying purpose
is to warn against the fanatical pursuit of efficiency.
"It has taken me a whole
book to say that efficiency should be
presumed bad until it can be proved good," he said.
So the remedy is to bring
back inefficiency?
"We should shield the
inefficiencies that remain," he replied. "We
should at least stop demanding that institutions which
don't cost very much, don't lose very much, should
abruptly conform to the model that's appropriate for a
company in the City of London.
"We should stop asking
institutions that do not exist to make a profit to be
profit-maximising. Instead, we should evaluate their
functional value, their social and cultural content."
He added: "Whatever is
worthwhile about us as individuals, groups or societies is
the inefficient part. Inefficiency is where human life
exists, social life exists, where love, hatred and culture
exist.
"For instance, my
marriage is inefficient. It diminishes my mobility, my
economic productivity. The time I spend with my neighbours
I could be spending on business and increasing the world's
GNP. The fact that I read a book—I'm reading one now
about Byzantine political thought—is inefficient. And so
it goes."
—Profile
of Edward Luttwak by Christian Tyler, Financial Times,
17 July 1999
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.30 a.m., 9 March 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Social
conservatives have long faced an apparent paradox. No
matter how Christian the president and members of his
party claim to be, no matter how many “solid”
conservatives are elected [to] Congress, the fabric of the
social order continues to fray. At some point the question
must be asked, is this because there still aren’t enough
good people in government?—how many would ever be
enough? Or is it because the state by nature, far from
buttressing the organs of civilization and the way of life
dear to conservatives, instead undermines those very
things? As Albert
Jay Nock once observed, sending in good
people to reform the state is like sending in virgins to
reform the whorehouse.
—Daniel
McCarthy
Kevin
Michael Grace, 6.46 a.m., 8 March 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Libertarianism
is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the
delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and
collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image
delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and
individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism
and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to
function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the
fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori
account of the political good without the effort of
empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly
or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like
Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for
making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the
moral rules of their society.
The
most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very
simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the
only good thing in life.
—Robert
Locke
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.47 a.m., 7 March 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
The theme of this picture is
whether men are to be ruled by God's law or whether they
are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses.
Are men the property of the state, or are they free souls
under God? This same battle continues throughout the world
today.
—Cecil B. DeMille, Prologue to The
Ten Commandments
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.57 p.m., 5 March 2005►
SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS
I used to play something called the Actor Game; at
least that's what I called it. I didn't invent it, but I
refined it. The question was, "If a movie were made
of your life, who would play you?" Trouble was, it
elicited too many "appropriate" responses. I
wanted people to confess their ideals; all too
often, I got the received wisdom. So what if you're a
mousy little brunette; if you see yourself as Ursula
Andress, tell me. So I recast the game. Two
questions. 1. "If a movie were made of your life, who
would be cast as you?" And 2. "If a movie were
made of your life, who would you cast as yourself?"
This proved far more revealing. Often unfortunately so.
Back in the 70s, an appalling number of women told me
they'd want Glenda Jackson to play them. I made
certain not to make passes at them.
(I played a variation of the Actor Game with the Alberta
Report crew. My choices can be found here.)
I've invented a new game, which I'll share with you. I
call it Memento Mori, and I suppose it's a
variation of Desert Island Discs. "If you could
choose one piece of music to be played at your funeral,
what would it be?" Again, I'm not interested in
"appropriate responses"; I want to expose character.
(But you could recast this game into a two-parter as
well.) If you'd like the funeral march from Eroica
to send you off, that's fine. If you'd prefer "Hey Ya!",
"The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down," "Misty
Mountain Hop" or "Hippy Hippy Shake,"
that's fine too. I make no moral judgements.
Ambler readers are requested to send me their
selections, with a view to publication in this space. But
of course the game can reveal character only if one knows
something of the player. So published responses will be
restricted to those I know personally or through their
writing. And no, my own choice is not "I Wanna Be
Sedated," as tempting as that might be. You'll have
to wait for it.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.56 p.m., 4 March 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
More horrendous than the wind farms themselves are their
implications. They represent the principle of total
utility. According to this, nothing matters in the world
except material use. Everything must be governed by
"growth" and "the economy" rather than
by beauty or antiquity or quiet or anything really
valuable and beneficial to human life. If this principle
is allowed to prevail, and there's every sign that it
will, what sort of country would be left for our
descendants, if any, to live in? It will be a country
where only degraded pleasures, including the pleasures of
violence and cruelty, remain. It will be a country fit
only for madmen.
A symbol of
that future: a group of wind turbines planted in a lonely
place, their vanes inanely revolving.
—Peter
Simple
Kevin
Michael Grace, 10.23 p.m., 4 March 2005►
PENSÉE
Under capitalism, people get as much healthcare as they
choose to afford, but when "you and I" foot the
bill, there is a strong temptation to accuse
"you" of consuming more resources than
"I" am willing to pay.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.50 p.m., 4 March 2005►
BEGGARY WEEK: WRAP-UP
Day 7 and beyond of my appeal raised $70 in PayPal
contributions, and $20 in cash arrived today from an
anonymous Canadian. My heartfelt appreciation to all who
gave. God bless you.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 9.46 p.m., 4 March 2005►
PAGING SYD BARRETT
From another brilliant Telegraph popcult obit—Chris
Curtis: drummer, popstar, nutter, taxman:
After leaving
the Searchers,
Curtis recorded a single entitled "Aggravation,"
but it failed to make a dent in the charts. His next
venture, a band called Roundabout, was with the guitarist
Ritchie Blackmore and the keyboard player Jon Lord, with
whom Curtis was staying in London. But Curtis’s
behaviour had become increasingly erratic. “I came back
from being up north for a few days,” Lord recalled,
“and my entire flat was covered in silver paper. The
tables, chairs, the toilet, the toilet seat …Chris came
out of the loo and said, ‘Hey man, what do you think?
New concept.’ I knew he’d lost it.” Roundabout went
on to become Deep Purple, one of the most successful rock
bands in the world.
Curtis joined
the Inland Revenue.
Kevin
Michael Grace, 1.55 a.m., 3 March 2005►
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Those who profess to favor
freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want
crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain
without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without
the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral
one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral
and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes
nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have
found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which
will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until
they are resisted with either words or blows, or with
both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the
endurance of those whom they oppress.
—Frederick Douglass
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.32 p.m., 2 March 2005►
THE
AMBLER REDUCED TO BEGGARY WEEK: DAY 7
(NEW POSTS APPEAR BELOW)
Days 5 and 6 of my appeal brought
in $31, one dollar of which was solicited as a test of my PayPal
account. (Works fine, folks!)
It was self-evidently a mistake to couch my blegging in
kitsch, rather than maudlin simplicity. This I knew from
the outset, but I couldn't resist. You know me: always
joking and always serious. So no more tooth and claw. In
the event, a search for further "animal
companions" drew a blank. A raven, a gecko, an albino
skunk? Hector and Morgan Le Fay have been returned to
their respective owners, and my "crib" is
quieter and more quotidian thereby. (P.S. For those who've
asked, yes, that really is a photograph of me below, taken
March 1957.)
On the stereo, Wire, Chairs
Missing, "Outdoor
Miner" (Colin
Newman and Graham Lewis):
He lies on his side
Is he trying to hide?
In fact it's the earth
Which he's known since birth
Kevin
Michael Grace, 11.59 a.m., 2 March 2005►
