Defending everything but our own.

Worth Reading

So here’s my theory: the religious double standard in the secular West, expressed most starkly in differing treatments of Christianity and Islam, is not due to ideology or fear but to a kind of boredom. Fifty years of imbibing multiculturalism, relativism, religious indifferentism,  and every other sort of –ism aimed at untethering our culture from its foundation, has left us in a posture of weary disdain for our Christian, European patrimony, and a reflexive preference for anything foreign to it.

From this posture it seems perfectly natural, when a Richard Dawkins criticizes the religion of our forefathers, to shrug (or to join in), but criticism of some alien thing sets off all our tolerance alarms.

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There may be a silver lining, though: one that suggests a promising future for the mission of Catholic Answers and indeed all the faithful.

I recall a snippet that appeared in This Rock magazine some years ago, about a Catholic university that offered a course promising an insider’s look at the Church’s most secret teachings and practices. The course, called “Underground Catholicism,” was apparently a runaway hit with the undergrads—so much so that the professor could never bring himself to tell them that he was simply teaching from the Baltimore Catechism.

What’s the connection? Well, I don’t think that our collective accidie over Christianity and Western culture can last forever. It took nineteen centuries for us to get so bored with our heritage that we pretended to like something else better, but it may not be more than nineteen years before that whole project collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. When that happens, an entire generation that never knew what it was supposed to have rejected will go looking for it. What was old will be new again, and the vineyards of evangelization will be ripe for harvest.

If you remember "Civilization" or "World at War" as documentaries (before they became computer games)...

...this post on the rise and fall of documentaries will interest you.

Rutgers' student accused of "invasion of privacy allegedly causing suicide" gets a 30 day sentence...

...and a $10,000 fine...

...which seems trivial given the media attention to the story.

According to this article:

A former Rutgers University student who used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate was sentenced Monday to just 30 days in jail — a punishment that disappointed some activists but came as a relief to others who feared he would be made a scapegoat for his fellow freshman's suicide.

Dharun Ravi, 20, could have gotten 10 years behind bars for his part in a case that burst onto front pages when Tyler Clementi threw himself to his death off the George Washington Bridge.

Instead, Superior Court Judge Glenn Berman gave Ravi a month in jail, placed him on three years' probation and ordered him to get counseling and pay $10,000 toward a program to help victims of hate crimes.

"Our society has every right to expect zero tolerance for intolerance," Berman said.

Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said he will appeal the sentence, calling it insufficient.

Several points.

First, it sounds like the original media narrative was jammed into the homophobe narrative from the beginning and, in a word, was largely B.S. The "revisionist" position - there was no broadcast, the gay student wasn't "outed"; he was already "out" - seems to have been vindicated.

Chalk this up as a reason to take anything the media tells you with a grain of salt.

Second, there really is a problem with privacy protection. It's too easy to have one's conduct observed, permanently recorded and broadly disseminated. I'm not sure what the defendant really did in that regard, or the extent of his culpability, but that is a problem and deserves legal sanction, whether a person is a politically favored minority or not.

Third, what's with the judge's comment that ""Our society has every right to expect zero tolerance for intolerance"?

What happened to "the right of one man to his own opinion"? Or the right to swing one's arm ends at another person's nose?

Does our society really have a right to expect that every member will entertain no "intolerant" thoughts? Or is it that our society has a right to expect that no one will engage in actions that injure another person for malicious reasons, whether the motive is intolerance, personal gain or sheer immature meanness?

I thought it was always the latter. If Dahrun Ravi injured Clementi out of malice, then 30 days would seem not to be enough, given the fact that Clementi killed himself. On the other hand, if Ravi is being punished for his thoughts or attitudes, then 30 days is way too much.

Finally, what struck me most about the story was the ugliness of all involved. Clementi kicked Ravi out of his room for his gay trysts. How is that respectful of Ravi's right to use his room. Ravi intercepts Clementi's sexual activities and then broadcasts the fact about what was going on like a fishwife gossip. How does that respect Clementi's privacy? There seems to be a whole lot of selfishness and narcissism defining these privileged students at a top-ranked university.

The Huntley-Brinkley Report's final show...

...and how the 60's infantilized American culture.

A casual conversation had me searching for Huntley-Brinkley to satisfy an idle curiousity, and I found this clip of the final sign off from the last episode of the Huntley-Brinkley Report from 1970.  A few observations.

First, notice the language used by the reporters.  The language is formal and complex and strangely beautiful. These were people who expected that their readers expected them to set a standard of professionalism.

Second, notice how both Huntley and Brinkley are frequently looking down.  They are not reading from a teleprompter; they are reading from the papers on their desk.  I suspect that we would find that behavior today to be completely unprofessional.  In other words, we've shifted our standard of professionalism from the content of reporting to the way in which it is presented.  

Third, I remember the sign-off music at the closing credits, which Wiki advises was "the second movement (scherzo) of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, from the 1952 studio recording with Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra." It was heavy, ponderous, serious, classical music. It communicated the sense that reporting the news was serious because news was a serious business.

Could you imagine any news show - any show - using such music today?  Seriousness is passe in this day and age.

Fourth, the final broadcast was in 1970, when I was ten.  I would have sworn that it was on well into my teen years, because I remember Huntley-Brinkley and the final music.

Check out the final sign off: