Throne and Altar

From that same article, another horrendous idea making the rounds:

That the Church in Germany is what preoccupies the quondam Holy Office today is shown by two new initiatives:  the memorandum signed by the director of the Karl Rahner Academy, Bernd Wacker, and the letter from the Kölner Kercheninitiative…in which they asked the Pope to open the procedure for the election of a bishop to the laity as well.  At Christmas, in fact, the conservative Cardinal, Joachim Meisner, will be 80 years old and soon will retire after five years of postponement.  Gerhard Müller has made clear that to change the rules of the procedure is not possible…

I’ve got a better idea.  Let’s just let the editorial board of the New York Times select bishops.  You know, eliminate the middle man.

Of course, this is what I say about democracy in general.  I seriously would rather that my enemies in the media directly control the government than that they indirectly control it through brainwashing the populace.  I have no problem with the rule of a few per se, and the inevitable devolution of democracy into media rule means that it doesn’t matter whether I have a problem with it or not; it is unavoidable.  However, direct rule is preferable to indirect rule–even if we grant that the brainwashing will continue (and it might slack a bit if it were no longer needed for controlling policy)–for three reasons.  First, unlike being the power behind the throne, being the recognized ruler comes with recognized responsibility.  For decades, we have followed the NYT prescription for social degradation, and it has had many deleterious effects, but no one now thinks to blame our true rulers.  Second, recognized rule can only justify itself by some sort of positive appeal to legitimacy or the common good, while indirect power can rely entirely on resentment toward scapegoats, that is, toward the nominal, powerless establishment.  Third, if the NYT directly ruled, it could impose things like gay marriage without the complicity of a majority of the populace.  Thus, fewer people would damn themselves with the making of each evil law.

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The heretics Marx and Kasper aren’t even pretending that the upcoming Synod on the Family is about better teaching the Catholic theology of marriage, as opposed to overthrowing it.  (Note Cardinal Kasper practically promising that unrepentant adulterers will soon be able to receive the Eucharist.)

On the bright side, it looks like my name choice wasn’t so bad after all.  Divorce is turning into the great Catholic battle of our time.

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My three-year old daughter Julie loves The Princess and the Frog, one of the two or three actual movies she’s seen, and I agree that it’s pretty good.  It’s actually pretty impressive how well many of the Disney animated movies turn out given the restrictions they’re under.  Everybody in the world feels that they have the right not to be offended by Disney movies, and so they’re obsessively scrutinized by interest groups the world over.  Just think about the kind of grief they get.  “Ariel in The Little Mermaid was infatuated and irresponsible.  We need more strong, independent women!”  “Those hyenas in The Lion King sound black.  That’s racist!”  I remember reading these criticisms among many others in newspapers.  With each new movie, the writers must figure out how to accommodate the ever-escalating demands of political correctness.  And yet, they can’t go full-PC nonwhite-lesbian-commune-fighting-America either.  They don’t want to offend ordinary people, and they have to know that the whole attraction of the princess genre is heterosexual, strongly sexually differentiated, and non-democratic.  They’re selling people something they say they (or rather their children) don’t want but obviously do.  The trick in that kind of game is to sell the customer what she wants while giving her some plausible cover to say what she’s bought is really something different.  I suppose Disney could just drop the princess movie line and only write other kinds of stories, but that’s not going to happen while selling princess accessories to toddler girls is such a goldmine.  I’ve tried to mildly discourage it and encourage her in other things, but my daughter has latched onto princess and fairy stuff, and it’s slowly building up in our apartment.

By the way, I think this is the secret of Dora the Explorer’s success.  You want to indulge your toddler daughter’s girlishness a little, without going full Disney Princess.  It doesn’t work.  We’ve tried.

Last aside:  Julie does have some strong non-princess-and-fairy interests.  She’s fascinated by snakes and ceiling fans.  I should tell you stories sometime.

Anyway, three things impressed me about The Princess and the Frog.

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Continuing my investigation of the relatively greater vigor of the neoreactionaries compared to the orthospherians.

Let us consider how we gauge success in blogging.  Now, you may say truly that it is a greater thing to bring one soul to Christ than having a large following who are not spiritually helped in any significant way by your writings.  But we are talking here about visible blogging success.

The increasing levels of success, as I see them:

1. People read your posts.
2. People comment on your posts.
3. Other bloggers link to your posts.
4. Your posts trigger conversations among other bloggers.
5. Your posts introduce new ideas or arguments that are then developed or applied by other bloggers and by online journals.

(As Bruce Charlton has pointed out, the purpose of media is to generate more media.  This applies as much to reactionary media as to any other kind.)  Notice that the three highest levels of success pretty much require one to be part of some sort of blogging community.  I conclude that neoreactionaries are at present a better community for a blogger to belong to than any comparable group in the religious reactionary Right.  It’s easier to make a splash on the internet–that is, to write blog posts that inspire other people to write blog posts–as a neoreactionary speaking to other neoreactionaries.

Not that you can’t have this success as an Orthosphere-style religious reactionary.  See Bruce, whether he likes it or not, achieving this “success” in the previous paragraph.  Another example:  Larry Auster and the concept of unprincipled exceptions.  You can do it, but you have to be very good.

So why then do we generate fewer multi-post, multi-author conversations than some other internet groups?  That I don’t know.

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Stealing the name of a historical figure is stupid.  Why create unnecessary confusion?  And although intended as a tribute to the original, it also means claiming an unearned identification.  In fact, I’ve realized this for some time now, but at this point what can I do?  I suppose I could make up a new name for myself at the risk of more unnecessary confusion.  I could drop the pseudonym altogether, but I’d rather not have this be the first link that comes up when my students google my name.  (Having it come up when university officials and funding agencies google my name could also create complications, of course.)  And, being a rather bad orthodox Catholic, something just feels ridiculous about religious writings under my actual name.  Bits of my name won’t work either.  My last name is too distinctive, and my first name isn’t distinctive enough.  So probably I should just bite the bullet and make up a new name.  I’m having trouble thinking of anything good, though.

Maybe I should take a cue from the biblical scholars and start calling myself “Deutero-Bonald”.  Scratch that.  It’s a stupid idea.

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Lower your standards.

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Has anybody else noticed this?  For some reason, Japanese are the only non-Westerners who are supposed to be constantly apologizing, who are never allowed to have a healthy patriotism, who get scolded by major newspapers for not allowing themselves to be ethnically cleansed through mass immigration.

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