THE LIST of famous authors accused of anti-Semitism at some point, either while living or dead, is quite long — so long in fact that one wonders if the whole literature racket shouldn’t be shut down, along perhaps with reading itself. Goodbye to The Great Gatsby, The Merchant of Venice, Oliver Twist and The Canterbury Tales. Anything short of a completely flattering portrayal of Jewish characters is enough to land an author in this gallery of rogues. Even Jewish authors have not escaped the charge. American author Philip Roth was accused of anti-Semitism for his negative portrayals of Jewish characters in his novels.

I did some random searches of well-known authors on the Internet and all of them except for E.B. White came up guilty. (I wasn’t surprised to find another New Yorker, the sassy Dorothy Parker, was among the charged.) It was a relief at least to know Stuart Little isn’t yet accused of being a Nazi. But I wonder about him ….  well, he was at least a white supremacist, I’d say, because of the lack of diversity in his environment and the natty way he dressed. The oldest surviving work of French literature, La Chanson de Roland, did not come up clean.

I found additional compilations (see sources below). Below are some of the literary deadbeats who, by today’s standards, belong behind bars. For Hypersensitive Hebrews, the canon of Western literature is similar to one of those shooting booths at a country fair. A figure pops up and — crack! — you try to shoot it down. It’s a sport, in a way. Contrary to what these sharpshooters believe, we cannot peer into the hearts of other human beings. But if we could, I’d be willing to bet we wouldn’t find an ounce of true hatred in any of these famous targets.

William Shakespeare
Geoffrey Chaucer
Christopher Marlowe
Charles Dickens
G.K. Chesterton
T.S. Eliot
Dante
W.B. Yeats
Mark Twain
Herman Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Balzac
George Sand
Flannery O’Connor
Frank Norris
Theodore Dreiser
Ernest Hemingway
Celine
Henry Adams
George Eliot
George du Maurier
James Joyce
Virginia Woolf
Graham Greene
Evelyn Waugh
E.E. Cummings
Henry Miller
Dorothy Parker
Byron Scott
F. Scott Fitzgerald (more…)

A dark, truthful image.  

FROM Racism, Guilt, Self Hatred And Self Deceit: A Philosopher’s Look at the Dark Continent by Gedaliah Braun (2010):

I have long suspected that the concept of rape cannot mean the same in Africa as elsewhere. And now (over the Internet, MSNBC Home), I find this from Newsweek (“Breaking The Silence”, by Tom Masland, dated 9 July 2000; emphases in original):

According to a three-year study [in Johannesburg] … more than half of the young people interviewed – both male and female – believe that forcing sex with someone you know does not constitute sexual violence…. [T]he casual manner in which South African teens discuss coercive relationships and unprotected sex is staggering.

Masland is stunned by blacks’ behaviour, asking ‘Why Has The Safe-Sex Effort Failed So Abjectly?’ Well, aside from their profoundly different attitude towards sex and violence and their intense libido, a major factor has to be their diminished concept of time and their inability to think ahead, resulting in a ‘just-don’t-give-a-damn’ attitude. (more…)

"[W]HEN philosophies are bankrupt and life appears without hope — men and women may turn to lust in sheer boredom and discontent, trying to find in it some stimulus which is not provided by the drab discomfort of their mental and physical surroundings. When that is the case, stern rebukes and restrictions are worse than useless. It is as though one were to endeavour to cure anaemia by bleeding; it only reduces further an already impoverished vitality. The mournful and medical aspect of twentieth-century pornography and promiscuity strongly suggests that we have reached one of these periods of spiritual depression, where people go to bed because they have nothing better to do." --- Dorothy Sayers, “The Other Six Deadly Sins“  

FROM a 2013 post, “Seeking a New Life after Lesbianism:”

I am a young woman. As a teenager, I desperately longed for a young man to pursue me and make me his wife. I especially longed for a man to take charge and be the authority in our marriage. But I had no background for this and no idea of how to pursue it. My parents didn’t have this type of relationship, nor did anyone I knew. No one I knew was traditional. I wanted nothing more than to be married and have children, but it was lonely and no one supported me, especially since I was an overachiever in school and had a good job. They told me to focus on that and to date casually, for fun. I became deeply disillusioned and saddened by my reality. Over time, I drifted into lesbianism and other perversions. People outside the community don’t know, I think, but very masculine lesbians are ‘allowed’ oftentimes to act like men, while men in our society are afraid to or are shamed for doing so. These women are often protective and authoritative, and want to take care of a woman. I longed for that feeling so much that I became very confused. Now I feel like damaged goods and like a good man will not want me. I feel a lot of shame and disappointment in myself, but that’s also what’s keeping me from finding light.

I don’t think this makes me not guilty of any sin, but I think it speaks to the horrible sickness in our society. I think many people are getting confused for similar reasons. When men are forced to not be men, it harms them, but it also harms women. I needed masculinity in my life very badly and didn’t know where to find it. (more…)

[Just ran across this post from September, 2016 in my archives. Except for the dated photo, it still works.] THE ASCENT OF women to the top reaches of the political world means exactly the opposite of what most people say it means. It is not female empowerment. It is female disempowerment. In order for a woman to be president, tens of thousands of women have to enter the lower ranks of political life and government. Most of them are relatively low-paid administrators; the top female candidate puts a pleasant spin on the hard reality. Does power for a few make drudgery for the many palatable? Does the thrill of cheering selfishly for your own sex make the years on the treadmill less unpleasant? In order for a woman to be president, most women, even beyond these workers, have to be politicized. But the strength of womanhood, as G.K. Chesterton said, is not to be found in her support for laws or rules or political platforms or abstractions. It is to be found in her defense of persons. Her natural kingdom is society itself. A woman rules best by sympathy, prejudice and wisdom. She must compromise all of these things, so tied to her intuitive strengths and deepest desires, when she rules as politician -- and she must turn the political into a socialist projection of her natural instincts. She also apparently has to surrender to ugly pantsuits. Imagine a priest giving up his vestments for a…

 LISTEN to more here.  

“PRIDE is the obstacle to man’s virtue and wellbeing. It is pride that leads us to resist God, to make self our last end, in a word, to work our own ruin. Humility alone can save us from this terrible danger. Who will give us humility? The Holy Ghost; and this, by infusing into us the Gift of the Fear of God.

“This holy sentiment is based on the following truths, which are taught us by faith: the sovereign majesty of God, in comparison with Whom we are mere nothingness; the infinite sanctity of that God, in Whose presence we are but unworthiness and sin; the severe and just judgment we are to go through after death; the danger of falling into sin, which may be our misfortune at any time, if we do not correspond to grace, for although grace be never wanting, yet we have it in our power to resist it.

“Man, as the Apostle tells us, must work out his salvation with fear and trembling (II. Philipp. ii. 12); but this Fear, which is a gift of the Holy Ghost, is not the base sentiment which goes no further than the dread of eternal punishments. It keeps alive within us an abiding compunction of heart, even though we hope that our sins have long ago been forgiven. It prevents our forgetting that we are sinners, that we are wholly dependent upon God’s mercy, and that we are not as yet safe, except in hope (Rom. viii. 24).

“This Fear of God, therefore, is not a servile fear; on the contrary, it is the source of the noblest sentiments. Inasmuch as it is a filial dread of offending God by sin, it may go hand-in-hand with love. Arising as it does from a reverence for God’s infinite majesty and holiness, it puts the creature in his right place, and, as St. Paul says, it contributes to the perfecting of sanctification (II. Cor. vii. 1). Hence this great Apostle, who had been rapt up to the third heaven, assures us that he was severe in his treatment of himself, lest he should become a cast-away (I. Cor. ix. 27). (more…)

Sequence for Pentecost

COME, Thou Holy Paraclete,
And from Thy celestial seat
Send Thy light and brilliancy.

Father of the poor, draw near,
Giver of all gifts, be here,
Come, the soul’s true radiancy.

Come, of comforters the best
Of the soul, the sweetest guest,
Come in toil refreshingly.

Thou in labor rest most sweet,
Thou art shadow from the heat,
Comfort in adversity.

O Thou light, most pure and blest,
Shine within the inmost breast
Of Thy faithful company.

Where Thou are not, man hath naught;
Ev’ry holy deed and thought
Comes from Thy divinity. (more…)

KATHY G. writes in response to this entry on the New Orleans police chief, Anne Kirkpatrick, who looks like she is wearing a ridiculous costume with an oversized cap: I see these installed agents, like this grandma chief, and what jumps out is the reality of a woman (a silly, old woman!), attempting to fill a masculine role, and instead of thinking "See? Anything he can do, she can do", I see a pathetic, anemic imitation of maleness. It screams weakness, emotional thinking, and denial of the natural order and physical attributes. It is inversion, camouflaged as "equality". It denies the unique attributes of both sexes, and attempts to impose the idea of amorphous and fungible human beings. To do this, all logic, intelligence, and biological realities must be eradicated from the thought process, made irrelevant in the minds of people. In short, it's a psyop. So true. If you had asked people 50 years ago about a woman, especially a senior woman, working as the police chief of a major city, most would have laughed. The idea would have struck them as absurd. Women in roles of masculine authority are a form of transgenderism. It's just as bad as men playing on a women's soccer team. It has a strong psychological effect on girls and young women, leading them to believe it is possible to be a man and a woman at the same time. I bet every single officer,…

WHAT are the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost? 1.The Gift of Fear 2.The Gift of Godliness 3.The Gift of Knowledge 4.The Gift of Fortitude 5.The Gift of Counsel 6.The Gift of Understanding 7.The Gift of Wisdom Read more here.  

ClOUDS are cheap. We don't pay a dime for them. We take them for granted or, even worse, misunderstand them. They entertain and enshadow, magnifying to immense proportions the proposition that life is ever-varying shades of grey. Boredom is just a state of mind -- not reality -- when clouds are in the sky. The plumes, puffs, phantasms and pillows parade across the local heavens. Few days are completely bereft of clouds in May and June, at least where I live. Brides keep planning their weddings as if thousands of June weddings hadn’t been obscured and dampened by banks of Cumulonimbus. This is cloud-denial, a common psychological condition. Cloud deniers always act surprised when spring is cloudy. They have a fixed, illusory image of a cloud-free spring --- a delusion resistant to all past experience. Spring propagandists, including many poets, have spread this myth. May skies are sometimes so overcast we turn on the lights during the middle of the day. Cumulus clouds are to June what snow is to January. They accumulate in the lower atmosphere and sometimes extend in massive, vaporous monuments upward into the stratosphere. Cumulus mediocris look like shredded cotton balls. Cumulus humilis are more reminiscent of clotted cream. Cumulus congestus create muscular heros, suggestive of so many shapes it is not surprising Zeus was believed to create the image of his wife, Hera, out of a cloud. (The cloud was violated and Centaurus was conceived.) Each Cumulus cloud is “the…

“THE child needs father and mother; but it does not need them only as some think, alternately, now the father’s influence and then the mother’s or in some things the father’s influence and in other things the mother’s. The child needs the father’s masculine influence and the mother’s feminine influence always together, the two streams uniting to pour their fructifying influence through the child’s life into the life of humanity.”    ---- Felix Adler, Marriage and Divorce, 1915  

  

ALAN writes:

A million tomorrows shall all pass away, Ere I forget all the joy that is mine today.

More than twenty thousand tomorrows have now faded away since I first heard the lovely song with those words in 1964. But I have not forgotten all the joy that was mine in years long ago — because my mother made it possible.

Which is not to say that those years were filled only with joy. Far from it.

When I was a boy, my mother gave me everything a boy could hope for, and those were years of countless joys.  But there was one thing she didn’t give me, because she couldn’t. That was paternal authority. She tried her best to provide something equivalent, but it was ersatz authority and largely ineffectual.  She gave me chores to do around the house, but they were pseudo-responsibilities, not real responsibilities like those that she and her brother learned by necessity in their childhood home in the 1920s-’30s.  Checks and balances were generally in place in my boyhood home, but were not always enforced as firmly and consistently as they might have been.

The problem with my childhood was not that it was too hard but that it was too easy. (more…)