The League of Bearded Catholics

Wikithoughts

In trying to tease out just what I think of the ruction over the latest Wikileaks scandal, I begin more and more to wonder what our Four Patrons would have thought of it. Tolkien had anarchist leanings (not the violent Rage Against the Machine kind) and one can perhaps imagine Chesterton and Belloc not being just too awfully sympathetic to Caesar as they see his laundered robes aired in public.

I've wondered again and again what life is WARSHington might be like if there were absolute transparency... if there were no such thing as meeting behind closed doors. I've even daydreamed of that creative and whimsical president who decides to live stream every meeting he attends, installing web-cams all over the White House (except, you know, in the washroom). One immediate effect would likely be a lot of lobbyists hanging around the washroom.

Then, there is that part of me that finds it easy to see Julian Assange as a reckless, attention-seeking punk... a more continental and sophisticated version of James O'keefe. I don't know if the damage he is causing is the good kind that humbles governments a bit, or the bad kind that really compromises security. I don't expect he knows, either (how do you thoughtfully read through 250,000+ documents?), which is why I think he's probably something of a punk.

But, truthfully, I confess I've reached the point where the spectacle of politicians in a panic is not something I find wholly unpleasant... and so, my ambivalence.

What's a Bearded Catholic to make of it?

Thanksgiving

Over at the National Catholic Register, Mark Shea gives a tip of the slouchy, shapeless hat to The Most Grateful Man Who Ever Lived, Gilbert Keith Chesterton -

Chesterton muses on Robinson Crusoe;

After all, the process of making everything that one wants cannot be carried too far in this world. We have all saved something from the ship. At the very least, there was something that Crusoe could not make on the island; there was something Crusoe was forced to steal from the wreck; I mean Crusoe. That precious bale, in any case, he brought ashore; that special cargo called “R. C.,” at least, did not originate in the island... Even the pessimist when he thinks, if he ever does, must realise that he has something to be thankful for: he owes something to the world, as Crusoe did to the ship. You may regard the universe as a wreck: but at least you have saved something from the wreck.

I'm thankful for a lot this year. One is always led to single out this or that, but life is complex and I'm grateful for the grace behind all the complexity. For instance, though I am very thankful once again to have reliable, paying work, for the last few months this work has made it devilishly hard to find time to paint or to write, and so the League seems nearly comatose a year after it was begun. I say seems comatose. I look at it as being less like a coma and more like a long nap. It will take some disciplined effort, though, to wake it and get a mug of hot tea into it. My schedule has grown more rigid and unaccommodating than one of those blue-gloved TSA workers.

I'm grateful to have learned a bit more about beekeeping, recently, and to have made progress on the home brewing front this year.

To say I'm grateful for my family would be an understatement of scandalous proportions.

One more thing for which I'm especially grateful is our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI. Jonah Goldberg, writing in the Jewish World Review, gives a perspective on our beloved German Shepherd for which I am very grateful, indeed. As Mr. Goldberg's father wisely observed, "we need more rocks in the river".

C.S. Lewis - Nov. 29, 1898 - Nov. 22, 1963

 
Clive Staples ("Jack") Lewis died on this day in 1963.

I have had my beard to the grindstone the last few weeks and the date snuck up on me. I will smoke a bowl on the porch later in his honor, though I have a headcold. It's one of those Taliban headcolds... I've fought much worse bugs, but it just won't go away.

I Have Issues

 
Cover of the new issue of Gilbert Magazine, by Anthony VanArsdale).

In what can only be seen as a regrettable and hopefully temporary lapse in editorial judgment, Sean Daily and his (ordinarily brilliant) staff at Gilbert Magazine decided to pad their latest issue on The Arts with some of my own rudderless musings, accompanied by a few reproductions of my paintings. The damage to their reputation is somewhat ameliorated by making the article in which I am featured a kind of tandem interview with an actual illustrator, the inestimable Jef Murray.

Make sure to order a bunch of copies. It really is a fine magazine.

I look forward to receiving my issue in the mail, partly because this will enable me to see whether they were able to pull of some kind of editorial miracle, but mostly so that I might be reminded of what it was I actually said. Something about art and the meaning of art. Something about modern art is in there somewhere, I'm almost sure.

Stop Using Art as a Weapon!

On a related note, those of you who have read C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy may remember that at one point in the story, some examples of modern art are used against the main character as a kind of spiritual anesthetic or moral poison, as part of a general brainwashing program.

You may be interested to note, then, that it has recently been revealed that some of what is now the most well known modern art of the twentieth century may owe a great deal of that notariety to having been actively promoted and used as propaganda during the Cold War years by the C.I.A.! Using shadow "foundations", they funneled money to artists, collectors and museums, and funded traveling exhibits in the U.S. and overseas (they had to cancel the one in the U.S. after just a few weeks because, well, everyone hated it). They also controlled a number of influential publications which they used to praise the new art as an indicator of the creative freedom enjoyed in the U.S. (as contrasted with the Soviet Union).

You can't make this stuff up! I always suspected it was some kind of plot... of course the article from London's The Independent points out that we are not allowed to say that sort of thing, that abstract expressionism would have been just as popular, anyway... "probably".

The thing is, I remember how the official art of the Soviet Union was denigrated as being mere "propaganda", while ours was a high and pure art. It's true that the heroic realism of the U.S.S.R. was stiff and not very good in a lot of cases, and it's also true that it was transparent propaganda. Every Soviet citizen knew it, too. But Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were also propaganda, only of a somewhat more subtle kind... and we did not know it.

The Soviets would have been much better off letting their brilliant impressionist painters represent them around the world, that's for sure.

Inklings Cage Match!

A while back there was a string of posts on the Christian Pipe Smokers forum, each pitting one sort of thing against another in an online poll. Kind of a Que Es Mas Macho? sort of thing. For those of you who don't remember, Que Es Mas Macho? was a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Bill Murray as the host of a Mexican TV game show by that name. He would ask contestants "Que es mas macho?" ("What is more macho?") and then they had to choose between two seemingly completely random and unrelated things, like "knife, or pineapple?". The answer was always seemingly random, too, except that where famous people were concerned, Ricardo Montalban was always more macho than anyone.

That's the way I feel about a lot of such contests, which is why a show like Spike's Deadliest Warriors fails to hold my interest. It's all fantasy. It sounds for all the world like the concept was hatched by two potheads in their dorm room, "Okay... okay, like... Samurai vs. Viking... who would win?... No! No!... Ninja vs. Spartan. Ninja? No way. Yer so wrong. A Spartan would totally OWN a ninja...". Of course, it's on Spike, so that's about what one would expect.

So when "J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis?" came up as a poll topic, I kind of rolled my eyes, but weighed in anyhow;

Unfair! This is like asking me which Siamese twin I will allow to live.

That being said, I voted for Tolkien (though I love Lewis).

I certainly owe my reversion to Christianity more to Lewis, since his books were a big influence and were more openly apologetic works. I actually discovered him and Tolkien at about the same time, and had no idea they were friends or that they influenced one another so greatly.

I just had to take into account that Tolkien wrote one of the pivotal works of fiction of the twentieth century, a model for what Christian culture should be like, as opposed to the hamfisted, lowbrow kitsch that is so often foisted upon us (and on a watching world) in the name of JAY-zussss.

Tolkien's tales soak into an unsuspecting heathen's bones and begin to convert his subconscious mind before he ever begins thinking in concrete terms about religion or philosophy. Lewis articulates a meaningful universe, but Tolkien makes you long to live there.

Not everyone makes these connections, of course, or follows through on them, but I think Tolkien's work prepares the soil for those who may later cultivate and harvest.

That's an over-simple analysis, of course. Lewis wrote some marvelous passages that made heaven seem almost palpable. What thinkest thou?

(incidentally, I'm beginning to figure out that part of what has cut into my blogging of late has been a growing Facebook habit, as well as the CPS forum. I react more readily than I invent. I will endeavor from now on to save more ascii and precious brain power for TLBC)

Electorate Comes Out Swinging

The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

- G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw In America, 1922

 

Chesterton penned that about 90 years ago. The question is, of course, have voting and elections come any closer to destroying our confidence in the "assumption of the equality of citizens"?

I ask because I have been trying all morning to think of someone I know who really believes that our government is at all concerned anymore with "the people", their problems or welfare. There is a growing recognition of two classes in society; the hoi polloi and the ruling elite.

I don't believe this is mere cynicism, either, but is just an acknowledgement of something more or less transparently true. As the saying goes, and Randy Quaid might insist, "You're not paranoid if everyone really is out to get you.".

One sees, though, glimmers of life in the electorate, yet. We can be a cantankerous and still (hopefully) unpredictable bunch. The recent shuffle in Congressional seats, though welcome, I don't read as any sort of deep tectonic shift. It strikes one more as, well... I opened with GKC... migth as well close with him;

 

The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings. - "The New House" Alarms and Discursions