Religion, Uncategorized

“Why didn’t anyone say anything?”

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I wrote, some time back, about “discovering” Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” – years and years after the rest of the world did, of course. And I mourned the man’s death, having found some of his stuff both intriguing and moving. I didn’t know a lot about his personal life, though. Kyle Smith fills in the details in his article about a new documentary on Cohen’s romantic life, over at National Review:

Directed by Nick Broomfield, the new documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love is intended as a tribute to the relationship that inspired one of Cohen’s best-known songs. It is actually more of an indictment. In nauseating detail, it documents the damage wrought by open relationships and other errors of the counterculture. Cohen, once he achieved success as a performer, discovered he was the Elvis of bookish depressives and indulged himself with the women who stampeded to his shows. He was living with Marianne while writing songs about hooking up with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel. A friend of Cohen from those years, Julie Felix, recalls, “Leonard was a great, uh, feminist. He said to me once, ‘I can’t wait till women take over.’” Ladies, when a man says this, listen carefully. What is he really saying? Cohen was giving himself a license to treat women badly.

And there it is again, the sour legacy of the ‘60s. And the ‘70s. When I reminisce about those anarchic decades, you must bear in mind (in fairness) that I was not a neutral observer. I didn’t envy the hippies their drugs – I’ve never understood why anyone would want to lose control of their mind – but I envied them the sex. Sex in the Age of Aquarius was a loud party in the next room, keeping me awake all night.

From Leonard Cohen to Charles Manson to Ira Einhorn (the founder of Earth Day who murdered his girlfriend and stored her body in a suitcase), the Sexual Revolution was an era of the manipulation of young women, justified by high-sounding philosophical and psychological claptrap. We’ll never know the cost in ruined lives, ruined health, and actual deaths. (The movie Forrest Gump is one of the few honest treatments in cinema.)

When we look back at that era from the perspective of contemporary sensibilities (which happens rarely, because the old hippies are still around and still determined to hush it up) it’s hard to comprehend. “How could people allow this to happen?” you might ask. “With so many victims, why didn’t anyone say anything?”

The answer is that some people were saying something. Preachers were saying something. Church people were saying something. Small town people were objecting, and farm people.

Uncool people. People nobody listened to. People they made fun of on TV.

Today, the victims are different. My friend Moira Greyland Peat, author of The Last Closet, one of the earliest “guinea pigs” in the Great Gay Experiment, has chronicled how children in “gay families” are subject to sexual abuse far out of proportion to their percentage of the population.

Again, people are sounding the alarm. But we’re not the cool people. The very fact that we don’t parrot the approved public narrative is proof that we’re bigots, and unworthy of a hearing.

We live in a new age of ignorance, I think. Through most of history, information was limited by physical unavailability. Most people knew what their neighbors knew and what their priests told them, nothing more.

Nowadays there’s so much information around, we depend on great information aggregators to choose for us what we’ll hear. We’re back to depending on the neighbors and the priests, only those neighbors and priests are wealthy strangers far away, with their own motivations.

You can’t operate on lies forever. Structures with flimsy foundations must inevitably fall. So the falsehoods won’t stand forever.

I just fear how many more innocent victims will be crushed in the collapse.

Fiction, Reviews

‘I Have Sinned,’ by Caimh McDonnell

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He had always been a deceptively good athlete, in the sense that, to look at him, you wouldn’t have thought he was any kind of an athlete at all.

Bless me Father, I loved this book. Loved it to death. I’ve enjoyed all Caimh McDonnell’s novels, but this one was a special delight.

If you haven’t been following the series, fat old drunken Bunny McGarry, former Dublin policeman, is thought by his Irish friends to be dead. He is not. Instead, he’s in the United States on a personal mission. The love of his life is living in hiding, protected by a shadowy, renegade order of nuns called the Sisters of the Saint. He needs to contact her and warn her about something. As I Have Sinned begins, he has learned the name of a man who might be able to put him in touch with those women. But that’s another challenge. The man is Father Gabriel de Marcos, a priest in a New York ghetto neighborhood. Father Gabriel has no time for Irishmen on missions – he’s trying to save a few of the kids in his flock from the trap of gangster life – a girl who can box, a boy who can paint, a young man with a gift for words.

But Bunny stubbornly insists on sticking around until Father Gabriel can help him. Bunny can even help with coaching the kids in the church gym. Reluctantly, Father Gabriel lets him move in as a type of assistant priest –a tough gig for Bunny, devoted as he is to getting drunk and cursing. Gang leaders are threatening Father Gabriel, accusing him of stealing “their” people. But the priest insists he has no need of Bunny’s  protection.

And it’s almost true. Father Gabriel has secrets, and a history. A history that’s catching up with him.

It all comes together in a farcical explosion of improbable action, slapstick, and genuine heroism and grace.

What I loved most about I Have Sinned was that along with exciting fights and witty writing, there was genuine goodness and sweetness here. Father Gabriel is a tremendous hero, a sincere man of God, loving his neighbor and struggling to redeem his past (I could quibble that he has a poor understanding of grace, but what do you expect from a Catholic?). I was charmed even while I laughed. You’d have to go far to find a more positive portrayal of a man of God in any novel.

Nevertheless, you need to be prepared for lots of foul language. But other than that, I highly recommend I Have Sinned. You’ll probably want to read the rest of the books first, though.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nowhither,’ by John C. Wright

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I very much enjoyed John C. Wright’s wildly creative – and wildly fun – fantasy novel, Somewhither, which I reviewed a while back. There we met one of the strangest heroes in fiction – teenaged boy Ilya Muromets, who always knew he was adopted – after all, he looks like a Neanderthal, while the rest of his family is slender and blond. What he has learned since is that he is actually an alien from another universe, and pretty much invulnerable. If he gets wounded – even beheaded – his body just reassembles itself. So one day when he saw the girl he had a crush on – scientist’s daughter “Penny” Dreadful – pulled through an interdimensional portal into an alternate reality, he did what came naturally. He followed her, wearing a bathrobe and carrying his grandfather’s katana sword. After all, he’d always wanted to be a hero. Then followed the bizarre adventures of that book.

At the beginning of Nowhither, the second book in the series, Ilya finds himself trapped in a sort of interdimensional transit station, besieged by evil wizards who are slowly breaking down his own wizard’s defense spells. With him are some friends he’s made plus 150 pretty slave girls he’s rescued, all of whom look to him as a leader for some reason. At last he and his friends work out an escape plan, and they manage to escape to Penny’s home planet – an undersea world peopled entirely by something like mermaids. Here Ilya will be reunited with part of his family, and learn some hard truths about himself and the consequences of his actions.

Nowhither is an unabashedly Christian novel – though the Christianity is emphatically Roman Catholic, which will probably bother some Protestant readers. The theological implications all through are complex, and I generally didn’t bother worrying about them. The book is fun, and I wish I could say it was as fun as Somewhither was. But in fact I have some reservations.

One is complexity. Author Wright has created a richly imaginative world, full of characters, nationalities, religions, and even universes – all anchored in the Book of Genesis. But a by-product of that fecundity of invention is that lots of exposition is required. It seemed to me that about half of Nowhither consisted of people explaining stuff. There was some action, but a lot less than in the last book.

The second problem is one I hesitate to name, but can’t avoid. Nowhither is a very sexy book. Young Ilya gets subjected to a level of sexual temptation that’s hard to describe. His (successful) efforts to keep his chastity are admirable, exemplary, violent, and biblical. But lots and lots of time is spent describing the sensual delights of “the drowned world.” (The “mermaid” on the cover is dressed much more modestly than the ones in the book.) I fear that, for teenaged male readers, that may have… unintended results. This much “skin” in a book will not, I fear, contribute much to the Gross National Continence.

Maybe I’m just a prude.

Anyway, I do recommend Nowhither, but mainly so you can keep up with the series and be ready for the next book. And for the jokes, because it’s pretty funny.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Only the Dead,’ by Malcolm Hollingdrake

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The formula for the British police procedural seems to be fairly well established. You have your stalwart Inspector, both wise and experienced (and always male for me, because I don’t read the other kind). You have his stalwart, younger partner – usually, but not always, male – who seems dumb but only in comparison to his boss. Underneath these, a scattering of team members of both genders – the females usually more gorgeous than is probable, but correspondingly smart, and one or two members of racial minorities. You pretty much need to resort to personal quirks to distinguish one series from another.

In the Harrogate Mystery series, set in English Yorkshire, the main character is Detective Chief Inspector Cyril Bennett. He distinguishes himself by being a good dresser, and somewhat OCD about organization. At least in this book, he’s unusual in suffering from Bell’s Palsy, which temporarily paralyzes half his face, leaving one eye constantly staring.

But that doesn’t keep him from working in Only the Dead. On the grounds of a teacher training college, workmen discover the buried bodies of two infants. At the same time, a vigilante is walking the streets of the city, using mustard gas recovered from unexploded World War I shells to attack and incapacitate (not kill) certain disgraced members of the elderly care industry. Investigation will lead to an insidious human trafficking operation.

I found Only the Dead a little hard to get into at first – the descriptions seemed kind of amorphous. But that got better. After that, the story moved right along and kept my attention.

My problem with the book stems from my personal beliefs and reactions. This book is not an apologia for the “gay” movement – the gay characters in the book are fairly unpleasant people. But we spend a fair amount of time with them, and the scenes get kind of… intimate. I find that icky.

So all in all, my verdict is “neutral.” Not a bad book; the writing was good. There seemed to be a strong moral sense undergirding all – whether it’s consistent with my own sense it’s too early to say. But the “ick” factor may keep me from going back.

The Press, Uncategorized

Brutal Opposition (Sometimes Fictitious)

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Journalist Andy Ngo has spent a good bit time looking at hate crimes and hoaxes of them. He said, “If you constantly tell the public that bigotry is everywhere, some will do anything to seek it out or even create it when they can’t find it.” This piece backs up that assertion, in which Ngo starts with the lawsuit Oberlin College lost to a local bakery and notes the numerous hoaxes its student body has generated. He reports,

In 2013, students at the elite liberal arts college panicked after someone reported seeing a person in a Ku Klux Klan robe on campus. The administration cancelled all classes for the day. The phantom klansman was never found, though police did find someone wrapped in a blanket. This overreaction was preceded by a month-long spate of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay posters around campus. These, too, were found to be hoaxes. 

Twitter is good at these misdirections. Today people are noticing a trending hashtag #NotMyAriel, supposedly in response to the adorable Halle Bailey being cast in a live action remake of The Little Mermaid. However of all the comments pushing back on her casting, none of them use that hashtag. You’re yawning; I can tell. Am I boring you?

Ngo’s reporting is far more serious than unused hashtags. He has worked to expose Antifa for the dangerous group it is. In Portland, Oregon, last Saturday, he was attacked by protesters and consequently hospitalized. Quillette magazine states, “Like schoolboy characters out of Lord of the Flies, these cosplay revolutionaries stomp around, imagining themselves to be heroes stalking the great beast of fascism. But when the beast proves elusive, they gladly settle for beating up journalists, harassing the elderly or engaging in random physical destruction.”

Ngo has written more on the attack in this piece for the Wall Street Journal, going so far as to say Portland is growing into a sanctuary city for “domestic terrorists.”

Music, Uncategorized

Happy Independence Day!

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For some reason I’m in the mood for some jingoistic, flag-waving music today. I bet you didn’t even know “The Stars and Stripes Forever” had lyrics. Well, here they are, courtesy of some Barber Shoppers.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Thicker Than Water,’ by J.D. Kirk

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I was impressed with J. D. Kirk’s first DI Jack Logan novel, A Litter of Bones. So I pre-ordered the second book, Thicker Than Water. It’s out now, and I’d say the quality has been maintained, though I have cautions.

For the convenience of the reader, Detective Inspector Jack Logan has decided to leave his former post in Glasgow and move permanently to the Highlands, where he solved the Litter of Bones mystery. Now he’s officially in charge of the squad he headed up last time, even including another outsider who also conveniently transfers in.

The body of a woman is found floating, wrapped in a tarpaulin, in Loch Ness. She was murdered in a particularly savage way, and it’s extremely aggravating that internet nutbars are flocking in in droves to proclaim with delight that the Loch Ness monster is responsible.

The mystery leads to some pretty ugly worms under pretty weird rocks, and Jack will (in the honored tradition of fictional detectives) have to “walk off” a concussion and several broken ribs in his effort to bring a very twisted killer to some kind of justice.

The strength of the Jack Logan books is the characters and dialogue, especially the constant teasing of a junior detective. What I have the most trouble with is that the murders seem to be selected for their extreme cruelty. Also, I’m not sure what to make of one purportedly Christian character.

But all in all, pretty good, if you like this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Long Time Coming,’ by Aaron Elkins

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I was weary of the string of brainless mystery/thrillers I’d been reading, so I looked for a change of pace. A novel by Aaron Elkins showed up on an Amazon list. I have no idea where or when I conceived an opinion on Aaron Elkins, but I had an idea he wrote intelligent mysteries. I was not wrong.

In A Long Time Coming, we meet Val Caruso, an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Val is preparing for a trip to Milan, to do prep work for a touring exhibit. He gets a call from his friend Esther, who works with a foundation devoted to returning art stolen by the Nazis to its original owners. The case she wants help with now is one they lost. Italian courts have a high view of the rights of good-faith purchasers, and so old Sol Bezzecca has lost his claim to a pair of early Renoir paintings that once hung in his great-grandfather’s home. But the current owner of the paintings is a friend of Val’s. Would it be possible to persuade him to lend the old man one of them, just until he dies, which can’t be long now?

Val agrees to try. He’s helped the foundation out before. In Milan he approaches his friend, art dealer Ulisse Agnello, and proposes the deal. Ulisse says he’s inclined to agree, but there are “complications.”

The complications involve a high-class loan shark and a slightly dubious art restorer. Eventually there will be murder, and Val’s knowledge of Impressionist art will enable him to untangle a devious, ruthless scheme and make an old man happy.

I enjoyed A Long Time Coming quite a lot. The details about the art world and Milanese culture were interesting. The characters were plausible and quirky. The writing was very good, sometimes moving. And it was a great relief to finally read a book where the detective has the sense to listen to his doctors and stay in bed after sustaining a concussion.

I recommend A Long Time Coming. There may have been some bad language, but it left no impression on me.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wild Justice,’ by Tripp Ellis

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I’m a sucker for boats. That’s my problem, I think.

Recently I’ve been reading a string of mystery/thrillers set in the coastal American south, most of them having boats on their covers. I like boats, and stories about boats. I really loved the sailing mysteries Bernard Cornwell wrote a long time ago, but apparently nobody else liked them. So he went on to historical epics, which I don’t like nearly as much. At least I don’t like his approach…

Where was I?

Oh yes, so the last book I reviewed was Wild Ocean by Tripp Ellis, and although the story didn’t shiver my timbers, I gave the series one more try with the second installment, Wild Justice.

I think that’s plenty.

Tyson Wild, hero of the series, former black-ops contractor now living in Coconut Key, Florida, is approached by the local sheriff, who’s short-handed. He wants Tyson and his buddy JD to help him investigate the murder of a reputed drug dealer. They agree, mostly for the fun, and in between juggling their various gorgeous girlfriends and intervening in JD’s drug-using daughter’s problems, they do this. An innocent woman gets killed in a horrible way, and a good deal of implausible heroics are indulged in.

I’ve had enough. Wild Justice is low grade male entertainment, comparable to a shallow-end romance novel for women. I don’t recommend it. Also, there are a lot of homonym errors, and an annoying tendency to end speculative sentences not phrased in the form of a question with question marks.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture