COW THE CATHOLICS, WAYLAY
THE WEST
Or
THOSE WHOM THE PC GODS
WISH TO VICTIMIZE, THEY FIRST MAKE VICTIMIZERS
“To learn who rules
over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize.”
~Voltaire
One does not defame certified victim groups. The political
correctness gods have seen to that. Certified victimizer groups are an entirely
different story. They are fair game. One may defame a victimizer in polite
company. One may do so with impunity. One will not be called upon to grovel before
a coterie of one’s self-anointed betters. No consignment to a re-education camp
will be in the offing. To the contrary, one may well find one’s lack of
sensitivity celebrated for its edginess. Sweepingly vicious stereotypes aimed
at a certified victimizer group? Why, that’s just hip and sophisticated
derring-do!
* *
*
The boss approached my cubicle. “Is that your Geo Prizm
parked in back?”
I looked up from my spreadsheet. Perhaps I’d parked in an
unapproved space? “Yes,” I answered, tentatively.
“The bumper sticker? It’s not on our approved list.” He cracked
a smile.
It’s not a good idea to publicize your political views at
work, certainly not when you’re an anarchist, but we’re talking one lousy offbeat
bumper sticker here. I could put a less crackpot spin on things.
“`Visualize World Police’? Yeah, well, that’s just one of my
things.”
“New World Order? Black
helicopters? Conspiracy theories? That sort of stuff?” He seemed genuinely interested.
“Well, there’s that. Less hysterically, I’m questioning the
wisdom of centralization. Lots of people see it as a good thing. They equate centralized
political power with law and order. I see it as a recipe for tyranny and chaos.
Order is a spontaneous and grassroots sort of thing.”
“No, I get it. In fact, my father used to say the same
thing. He said they could drop an atomic bomb on Washington, D.C.,
and it would probably set things back about a week. After that, life would dramatically
improve. He used to say the same thing about the Catholic Church. He didn’t
have much formal education, my dad. But he knew how the world worked.”
“Yeah, my dad says the same thing about the Jews,” I parried.
“He’s a Holocaust denier.”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha! As if! I would have kissed
off my vague semblance of a career had I so much as whispered even a passing
familiarity with The Thought Crime That Dare Not Speak Its Name, let alone acknowledged
that an immediate family member endorsed it. Some things are off limits.
Other ostensibly
comparable things are not. I had a picture of my first-grade daughter in
her Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform on my desk. My surname is Italian. I burned
vacation days on Good Friday. Surely, the boss had an idea where my cultural sympathies
lay. He probably even suspected I clung to a Catholic-flavored Big Sky Daddy &
Son reality-tunnel.
No matter. He knew my religious background warranted no consideration.
All bad roads lead to Rome. The boss knew it. I knew it. He knew I knew it. Everybody
knows it. The Church of Rome is racist, obscurantist, anti-Semitic, misogynist,
homophobic, triumphalist, reactionary, anti-scientific and (horror of horrors!)
anti-democratic. She may have made her share of contributions to Western
Civilization; those easily pale against her crimes.
* *
*
The world improvers do the certifying. They separate the
goats from the sheep, the oppressors from the oppressed, and the victimizers
from the victims. The criteria vary. It may be the victimizers once resisted
the world improvers’ designs. Perhaps the issues raised by the victimizers in a
past conflict with the world improvers pose stumbling blocks to the world
improvers’ ongoing and future designs. It may well be that the world improvers disposed
of the victimizers in harrowing and ruthless fashion. No matter. The
victimizers—every man, woman and child—got what was coming. Think World War II
and the War of Northern Aggression. Think Germans and southern whites. Even
today, you can’t go wrong defaming Germans and southern whites. The Lord’s love alone endures forever, but those two tribes’ accursedness will give it a run for
the money.
* *
*
Anu
Garg is an Indian-born writer and software engineer. He is also the founder
of Wordsmith.org, an online community of word lovers comprising better than one
million
A Word A Day subscribers in 200
countries. One would think that someone with Mr. Garg’s cosmopolitan outlook
and demonstrated marketing savvy knows better than to subject wide swaths of his
audience to gratuitous smears and insults.
Here’s how he introduces his
A Word of Day theme for
the week of August 13, 2012: “Latin is the preferred language of the
Vatican,
but don't hold it against the language. It had no say in the matter.” Not the
red carpet introduction a papist sympathizer might hope for, but surely the Vatican
hyperlink directs the reader to nothing more scurrilous than a good-natured “I
survived Catholic School”
YouTube
spoof? Or perhaps a
Wikipedia account
of the political intrigue that has infected the papacy, here and there, over the
centuries?
Nothing that bland is in the offing. The reader is directed instead
to a venomous screed by the late Christopher Hitchens, in which he calls out
the Church as a veritable nest of pedophiles. Yes, Mr. Garg chooses the same even-handed
social critic who reckoned Dick Cheney a more estimable human being than Mother
Theresa to provide general background summary on the Vatican—with results predictably
fair and balanced.
* *
*
Nine Eleven changed next to nothing; but this much at least it
did change. Before that meteorologically bright but geopolitically dark
September day, Islam basked in Oriental cachet. It was exotic, enchanting, haunting,
offbeat, mystical and even hip. Its recurring clashes with Christianity only
elevated it in the eyes of the bien-pensants.
Things went south dramatically when Mohammedans flew airliners into the Twin
Towers and Pentagon. As the symbols of state-directed, forced-to-be-free,
welfare-warfare capitalism came down, so did the semi-esteem in which the bien-pensants held Mohammedans. Islam now
finds itself morphing into victimizer. Even the execrable Bill Maher sees fit
to denounce it.
* *
*
“We need a petition to know this?”
“My goodness gracious, of course the Roman Catholic Church
is a hate group.”
“The Catholic church in particular has a very long and
lamentable history of what could only be described as crimes against humanity
and science. All too often the church has fostered ignorance and attacked the
intellect. They have aligned themselves time and time again with despots and
tyrants. The church has tortured, killed, maimed and robbed millions and
millions of innocent people for personal gain and treasure. This latest Pope
[Benedict XVI] (in my opinion one of the more despicable men to hold that
office), has an allegedly fascist past, has decided to attack and demonize GLBT
people. He has appointed Bishops and Cardinals who promote hate and intolerance
and preach it to their congregations. To me, there is a valid argument to be
made for labeling this organized religious faction a hate group as much as
there is Westboro
Baptist Church,
the AFA or Scott Lively's Abiding Truth Ministries among others. As for
petitioning the WH, I think that may be the wrong forum. Petitioning the SPLC
might be a better venue.”
“Just recently the Catholic Church claimed Jews to be their
enemy. What's that about? Doesn't sound like love to me.”
“Actually, you are wrong, artical [sic] not withstanding
[sic], The Church has always claimed it were [sic] ‘The Jews’ that [sic] killed
their [sic] Jesus. So much so they [sic] aided the Third Reich in financing
their [sic] intended destruction of the Jews. Then the [sic] plundered riches
from Germany as they [sic] were
aiding the Nazi's [sic] exodus to South America.
More recently The [sic] Church also sponsored terrorism in Northern Ireland. The Church has
washed their [sic] gilded hands in blood.”
And so on. And so forth.
* *
*
It was 390 A.D. The Thessalonian general had tossed a
charioteer in the hoosegow. The populace, long since addicted to the Empire’s
bread-and-circuses, vehemently objected. The general died in the murderous
rioting that followed. The Emperor Theodosius meted out swift—but also
disproportionate and indiscriminate—justice for his fallen viceroy. Seven
thousand Thessalonians were wheedled into the circus and put to the sword.
St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan and Confessor of Emperors, did
not take kindly to the Christian Emperor’s regression to pagan justice. Theodosius
expected summary forgiveness, but Ambrose demanded he complete a lengthy regimen of prayer and penance. Some accounts have the unarmed prelate stiff-arming the
monarch at the porch of the church. Even if only inconsistently and
sporadically, this episode set the tone for the relationship between throne and
altar in the West. Right would thereinafter entertain a claim against might.
In
“Reflections
on Heresy,” the agnostic Fred Reed wonders why “the ruling classes of
America are so grindingly antagonistic to religion.” Is it, he asks, because
believers “tend to be Southern or Catholic, both of which are regarded as
politically inappropriate conditions?” The always insightful Mr. Reed begs the
question here. The ruling classes by definition are “grindingly antagonistic”
to those they regard as “politically inappropriate.” What makes Southerners and
Catholics so?
Back when it had something to do with Protestants who took
their religion seriously, anti-Catholicism enjoyed no such respectability.
Inside-baseball polemics—justification through faith, symbolic presence versus
transubstantiation, papal primacy, Mariology, the church as hierarchy as
opposed to a priesthood of believers—made the aggressively secular ruling circles squeamish. Both brands of believers espoused a natural-law morality that transcended realpolitik and thereby impeded the ruling circles’ utilitarianism. Better to impute sectarian disputes to religious bigotry and marginalize them altogether.
Owing to the Late Unpleasantness, the ruling circles always had
reason to hate the South, apart from its religiosity. Meanwhile, over the last
half century, Southern Protestants continue in large numbers to practice their faith,
even as their Northern cousins backslide—theologically and culturally—at
alarming rates. While Northern Protestants--and many self-identified Catholics, for that matter--embrace their Supervisors' utilitarianism, significant minorities of Southerners and Catholics still cling to the natural-law view.
The dictatorship of relativism could use a dose of transcendence.
Not only as a wake-up call for a people hopelessly adrift in a culture bereft
of its moorings, but to rein in the pagan excesses of our Supervisors. If the
deontic vision ever regains a foothold—and it’s never better than tenuous, even
in the best of circumstances—we can reverse our civilizational decline and put a
damper on the homicidal humanitarianism of our Supervisors. As Westerners, it's our only hope.
“To learn who poses a threat to those who rule over you, simply find
out whom you are allowed to criticize, insult, smear, mock and defame.”
