If the Dead Rise Not, by Philip Kerr

If the Dead Rise Not

Writers, especially lady writers from New York, were thin on the ground at the Adlon that month. It probably had a lot to do with the fifteen-mark-a-night room rate. This was slightly cheaper if you didn’t have a bath, and a lot of writers don’t, but the last American writer who’d stayed at the Adlon had been Sinclair Lewis, and that was in 1930. The Depression hit everyone, of course. But no one gets depressed quite like a writer.

Such delightful passages as this show up pretty regularly in Philip Kerr’s novels, and (in my opinion) If the Dead Rise Not offers more than the average. I liked it. A lot. Not only for the writing, and the fascinating narrator, soul-weary German detective Bernie Gunther, but for something else I think I detect in the text. A spiritual element.
Of course I have to be cautious in saying that. I knew a man once who saw God, not only in every leaf and flower, but in every book he read and movie he saw. All the writers, he was convinced, must be Christians, because he saw Christian messages in all their stories, and it wasn’t possible they’d meant something else altogether and he’d taken it wrong.
But still there’s something here… I think. Continue reading If the Dead Rise Not, by Philip Kerr

Proud To Be Right, edited by Jonah Goldberg

Proud To Be Right



First of all the disclaimer:
I got my copy of Proud To Be Right: Voices Of the Next Conservative Generation from our friend Rachel Motte of Evangelical Outpost, one of the book’s contributors.

Proud To Be Right is an anthology of essays by various young conservative writers, all edited by Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online. At 247 pages, I found it an easy read, and I zipped through it in a couple days. It’s difficult to make a summary statement about the contents, though, because a very wide range of views is showcased here. You’ve got Bible conservatives on one end, and atheist libertarians on the other. You’ve got supporters of the War On Terror, and an isolationist. You’ve got a stay at home mother and a gay marriage advocate. My primary reaction, as an obsolescent Baby Boomer, is that if these young conservatives ever win the political war and kill big government liberalism forever, they will immediately split into factions, and the new political divisions will be as sharp as the old.

There are some excellent essays here. I was impressed with “A Noncomforming Reconstruction” by Justin Katz, a poetic meditation on the preservation of culture, using the restoration of an old house as a metaphor. Rachel Motte’s “Liberals Are Dumb: And Other Shared Texts” is an extremely thoughtful warning to think beyond bumper stickers and slogans; to treat people and arguments with respect: “My generation’s forebears were fortunate in that their elders were willing to tell them when they were ignorant—but for our entire lives, our elders have been too busy trying to emulate us to even realize how poorly they taught us.” (This essay may really be the most valuable of the collection, and I don’t say it just because Rachel’s a friend. The kind of snarky thinking she decries is precisely what’s wrong with some of the other essays in this book.) “Immersion Experience” by Caitrin Nicol is another good essay, a defense of homeschooled kids combined with an appreciation of her liberal friends. I also enjoyed “Ducking the Coffins: How I Became an Edu-Con” by Ashley Thorne, a memoir of her experience as a student at King’s College, a classical curriculum college in Manhattan.

At the other end of the spectrum, there were a couple essays I actively disliked. Pride of place, needless to say, goes to “The Consistency of Gay Conservatives” by James Kirchick. This is a remarkably dysphoric piece, entirely lacking in humor, self-questioning, or charity. His thesis is that many gays have decided that the Republican Party is a more useful vehicle to get them to their goal than the Democratic Party, so they claim this territory in the name of the queens. We’re here, we’re cheerless, get used to it. He makes no attempt to soft-peddle his contempt for the knuckle-draggers in flyover country who refuse to get with the program.

“The Leptogonians: Growing Up Conservative in a Disrupted Decade” by James Poulos, is almost unreadable, at least for someone not current with hipster culture. I suspect it may be a brilliant and tightly-knit rhetorical tour-de-force, but I have no way of telling.

“The Smoker’s Code” by Helen Rittelmeyer performed the almost impossible task of nearly destroying my long-standing sympathy for smokers in a tobacco-hating culture. Its argument seems to be that we should concentrate more on finding ways to look cool than on constructing reasoned and convincing arguments.

The rest of the essays fall somewhere in between. My overall take-away is that the term “conservative” doesn’t seem to have much positive meaning anymore. The only thing these writers have in common as a group is their rejection of big government. Our country could change into something almost unrecognizable, and it would still be considered a conservative victory by the standards of many of these writers.

I wonder what Jonah Goldberg actually thought about this collection (I discount what he says in his introduction, of course). The book is educational. I’m not sure it offers great hope for the future of conservatism.

The Best Time To Write

Stewart O’Nan on writing between other responsibilities: “Some days I’d get a sentence. Some days I’d get two sentences. Some days I wouldn’t get anything. Use your time, steal the time, manage the time somehow.” (Thanks to Ed Champion)

Matus: Boring, Trivial, Mundane

Irvin Leigh Matus, an extraordinary Shakespeare scholar who died recently, said this back in 1989. “Get a 9-to-5 job? No way. When you have a mind like mine, such a wonderful mind, well, to have it virtually imprisoned in the boring, trivial and mundane would be torture.”

Matus was homeless for a long time while pursuing his research. He wrote two critically acclaimed books on the Bard, but would not–perhaps could not–hold a regular job or I guess even an irregular job. I offer you his quote above both to point you to an interesting obit on him and as a writing prompt. What would a wonderful mind do in a regular job? How would a genius handle the everyday humility needed for living under God?

Stop Laughing, It's Not Funny

From our Practical News Desk: Scientists have learned chimpanzees will laugh at things they don’t find funny. Just like people who will laugh in order to share the moment, even when the moment isn’t funny, chimps will laugh in order to bond with each other and no doubt optimize their evolutionary progress in order to whip us up in the next generation–or two.

Chimp Yoga

Laugh at that, you puny man.

The remains of the week

For some reason, the immortal Andrew Klavan’s web site has been down most of the week, but I see it’s up again now. Here’s his report of his attendance at the Tea Party Patriots American Policy Summit in Phoenix.

“Now, this is very high-level intellectual material,” I told the crowd, “and I know you’re just a bunch of knuckle-dragging, Bible-thumping tea partiers who might not be able to understand its subtlties. And some of you may be asking in your simple, silly way, ‘Hey, what’s the difference between post-modernism and lying?’”

What, indeed?

A couple items from Joe Carter’s ever-interesting Thirty Three Things post at First Things blog:

Facebook Blamed In 1 in 5 Divorces in the U.S.

In the end, Facebook is a social tool. For single people, social networks can help them meet that special someone. Even for marriages, social networks can help further along a relationship. Just like with any other social medium, however, even the most innocent of intentions can turn ugly with improper use.

You don’t need to be a psychologist to realize that Facebook can accelerate the process. Stories of people whose marriages were destroyed by affairs that began on social networks abound on the Internet.

You know, I was a conscientious objector in the sexual revolution. Now I seem to be using Facebook and missing all the most… interesting stuff.

I’m beginning to think I’m kind of clueless.

Yoga Is Not As Old As You Think… Nor Very Hindu, either


The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism, in which Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played as crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely along the theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the US-origin, India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga renaissance.

In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United States and other Western countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras—which has been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’—to create an impression of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is thus part of a false advertising campaign about yoga’s ancient Brahminical lineage.

Maybe those Christian yoga groups aren’t as dangerous as we thought…

"Deposed Crime Kings"

Over at The American Culture, where my byline can occasionally be seen, scholar Curt Evans has posted two essays on the “Golden Age” of English mystery writing, refuting the common view that a few female authors are all you need to know about the period. He has posted a two-part essay, here and here, entitled “The British Golden Age of Detection’s Deposed Crime Kings”:

All four of the Crime Queens have been in print in paperback every decade since, while most of their male Golden Age contemporaries languished after their deaths.

It makes sense, then, that the idea of four Crime Queens has solidified over the last sixty years. Even so, this notion is chronologically ahistorical. Not until the very tail end of the Golden Age, or even just after, about 1938-1941, can all four Crime Queens truly have been said to have risen to dominance in the world of British crime fiction. Even Christie and Sayers, who appeared earlier on the mystery scene, in 1920 and 1923 respectively, really only began to tower over most of their male contemporaries in the 1930s, say 1930 to 1935.

There are some good reading suggestions here, if you can find the books.

A deficit of pity

I’m not qualified to judge the legal merits of the Supreme Court’s decision in the matter of Albert Snyder vs. Westboro Baptist Church today, but that won’t stop me from expressing my moral horror at what seems to me a deeply perverse and dangerous ruling.

World Magazine reports:

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, concluding that under the First Amendment, even despicable speech is protected if it concerns a public matter. “A group of parishioners standing at the very spot where Westboro stood, holding signs that said ‘God Bless America’ and ‘God Loves You,’ would not have been subjected to liability,” he wrote. “It was what Westboro said that exposed it to tort damages.” But Roberts acknowledged that the speech itself was odious: “Westboro believes America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro.”

The opinion noted that the case was decided based on the specific circumstances of Matthew  Snyder’s funeral, and shouldn’t be construed as a broad ruling. Westboro protestors stood on a public sidewalk more than 1,000 feet from the funeral, complying with local laws. Albert  Snyder reportedly only saw the tops of the signs at the funeral, and didn’t see what they said until afterward, meaning he wasn’t a “captive audience,” Roberts wrote, a condition for the court to restrict speech.

As a non-lawyer, what I see here is a symptom of a larger problem in American life. There seems to be a greater concern with satisfying “jot and tittle” legal points, than with doing justice. Jesus said, “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.” (Matthew 23:23)

In order for society to work, the people need to believe, a) that the laws are for their protection, and b) that the people who administer the law are morally sane.

It seems to me this decision calls both principles into question.

I could find a bright side in this decision, if I wanted to. I could say, “Well, if the detestable expressions of Westboro Baptist Church are legally protected, my own politically incorrect speech is probably pretty safe.”

But I cannot feel that way.

I will not feel that way.

In any case, the protection of an insane legal system is not be relied on.

I wrote about “zero tolerance” rules a few days ago, how authorities are more and more enforcing rules without thought or sympathy, regardless of the harm it may do.

This decision looks to me like an instance of the same thing. They upheld the letter of the statute. They missed (I would contend) its purpose entirely.

Our judicial system, to all appearances, has utterly abandoned its mandate (which I consider a divine mandate) to restrain evil. It’s possible to nurture discussion and debate about the most radical and controversial issues, while still preventing people from purposely causing children to cry.

One of my favorite moments of drama in Scripture comes from the story of David. The prophet Nathan comes to the king, to confront him over his sins of adultery and murder. He engages the king’s emotions by telling a story about a rich man who, instead of killing one of the sheep out of his own vast flocks to feed a guest, steals a poor man’s only sheep, a family pet.

David burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.”

Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man!” (2 Samuel 12:5-7)

The members of Westboro Baptist Church have no pity. More and more in our culture, I fear, we are at the mercy of people who have no pity.