Cristo Rei, Mississauga
[Photo By:KPA]
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Church in Snow
Cristo Rei, Mississauga
[Photo By:KPA]
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
We Might Be Able to Go a Long Way With Enthusiasm and Earnestness
The ruined church, Péronne, France, 5 September 1918. [Source: AWM E03187]
Here are a couple of interesting additions to my previous post: The contradiction (hypocrisy?) of a Socialist Atheist
Demanding the Subsidy of a Place of Worship to Maintain its Artistic Merit, which was an analysis of the text The Death of the Cathedral by Marcel Proust.
I have read, many years ago, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and I've seen some film variations of it, so I am really not an expert on Proust. I read his article at face value, and concluded that Proust's atheistic, socialist view would only destroy (eventually) the church he admires so much.
Here is Francois Mauriac, another French author, who writes about Proust:
En 1922, dans son éloge nécrologique de Marcel PROUST, François MAURIAC écrit :“Dieu est terriblement absent de l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust. Du point de vue littéraire, c’est sa faiblesse et sa limite (...) le défaut de préoccupation morale appauvrit l’humanité créée par Proust, rétrécit son univers ...”.
In his obituary eulogy for Marcel Proust, Francois Mauriac wrote:And here is another development posted at Tiberg's Galliawatch:God is terribly absent in Marcel Proust's work. From a litterary point of view, it is his weakness, and his limitations...the lack of moral concern improvishes the humanity created by Proust, shrinks his univers...[My translation].
A Christian revival in FranceI am sure such Christians are worshiping in earnest, but I think there is a long way to go to bring back the reverential Christianity, which imbued almost all aspects of life, and not just the churches. Without a strong society, Christianity is still vulnerable. Going to church is not enough.
A reader sent this optimistic English-language article on a possible re-awakening of Christian fervor in France. Citing the Manif Pour Tous and his own experiences as a church-goer in France, Pascal Emmanuel Gobry paints an encouraging picture of a Catholic France that may play dead, but that is in reality very much alive and unwilling to capitulate to Islam. And he debunks the myth of the "empty churches of France" with first-hand evidence to the contrary.
But, perhaps, like the nascent Christianity at the beginning of Christianity, we can go a long way with enthusiasm and earnestness.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
The contradiction (hypocrisy?) of a Socialist Atheist Demanding the Subsidy of a Place of Worship to Maintain its Artistic Merit
I received the following article from a correspondent, who suggested that I might wish to discuss it.
The text is an English translation of a paper by the French writer Marcel Proust, written in 1904, and titled The Death of the Cathedral.
I have analyzed sections of the text below.
I should add that this I am suited to discuss this text, not only because I do write about the loss of culture, in my thesis Reclaiming Beauty, but I have closely studied a cathedral here in Toronto, which I eventually abandoned visiting because what it had become was just too painful to witness.
I went to this cathedral, St. James Cathedral, only a few days ago, with my camera, to see how "far gone" it was, and it still stands, nor does it have a "soon to be demolished" sign by it, nor is there any mosque nearby.
But, its degeneration is more subtle. It is standing, but what is is it being used for?
The most telling sign was this big, turquoise "Welcome" banner, draping the full vertical of the cathedral.
Welcome to whom? I doubt it is a welcome to new parish members, or to those who decided to return, or for those visiting on the occasional Sunday.
I think it is a "welcome" to all those who want to enter this culturally and "spiritually" open establishment, to stand and basque in the great quietness of it all. Our God, I don't think, comes into the picture at all.
There are still Sunday services, a standing choir with a first class repertoire, clergy who give sermons quoting from the Bible? But on what, about what?
I left, having been a regular Sunday goer (I went to the evening services), since the message I heard was so un-Biblical, that even the beauty of the place could no longer keep me there.
Here, in 2011 is where I write of one of the last times I went there, and when I started to seriously consider no longer attending the services and how I decided not to attend any more, in 2011:
Better, I would say, start all over. Build another Saint James, and with careful, and repeated, requests that God bless it.
Below are the photographs of Saint James, I took yesterday. Below that is my discussion of the text The Death of the Cathedral.
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THE DEATH OF CATHEDRALS - and the Rites for which they were built
By Marcel Proust
Le Figaro
August 16, 1904
Saint James Cathedral, rising high in downtown Toronto
Welcome! in bright blue
Welcome close-up
Tiles at the entrance
Cross in a side chapel, St. George's Chapel
Stained glass of what looks like a falling dove
View from the entrance looking towards the alter
The organ pipes, above the entrance
Stained glass above the alter
[Photos By: KPA, 2015]
Below is discussion of the text Death of the Cathedral, by Marcel Proust. The full text, is here in English is here, here in French.
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1. Text:
KPA: Admirable, as any grand object is admirable. Unintelligible because no-one uses them as they were designed to be used, and therefore we can no longer relate to their message, meaning, and signs.
2. Text: When the government underwrites this resurrection, [of the Cathedrals] it is more in the right than when it underwrites the performances in the theaters of Orange, of the Opéra-Comique, and of the Opéra, for Catholic ceremonies have an historical, social, artistic, and musical interest whose beauty alone surpasses all that any artist has ever dreamed, and which Wagner alone was ever able to come close to, in Parsifal—and that by imitation.
KPA: More to explain this below, but the argument is that French culture has more in relation than with its religious-artistic culture than with its secular artistic one.
3. Text: “Alas! How much more beautiful these feasts must have been when priests celebrated the liturgy not in order to give some idea of these ceremonies to an educated audience, but because they set the same faith in their efficacy as did the artists who sculpted the Last Judgment in the west porch tympanum or who painted the stained-glass lives of the saints in the apse. How much more deeply and truly expressive the entire work must have been when a whole people responded to the priest’s voice and fell to its knees as the bell rang at the elevation, not as cold and stylized extras in historical reconstructions, but because they too, like the priest, like the sculptor, believed. But alas, such things are as far from us as the pious enthusiasm of the Greeks at their theater performances, and our ‘reconstitutions’ cannot give a faithful idea of them.”
KPA: How beautiful these ceremonies must have been when done in true adherence to their purpose, even though they still retain that beauty from these historical origins.
4. Text: That is what one would say if the Catholic religion no longer existed and if scholars had been able to rediscover its rites...But the point is that it still does exist and has not changed, as it were, since the great century when the cathedrals were built. For us to imagine what a living and sublimely functioning thirteenth-century cathedral was like, we need not do with it as we do with the theater of Orange and turn it into a venue for exact yet frozen reconstitutions and retrospectives. All we need to do is to go into it at any hour of the day when a liturgical office is being celebrated. Here mimicry, psalmody, and chant are not entrusted to artists without “conviction.” It is the ministers of worship themselves who celebrate, not with an aesthetic outlook, but by faith—and thus all the more aesthetically.
KPA: Still, even with the distance of time and purpose, if one goes into a cathedral, and listen to the services conducted, one gets the true beauty of the place. It is the worship that makes the beauty, not the physical environment, the building, even in our alienated, areligious era.
5. Text: One could not hope for livelier and more sincere extras, since it is the faithful that take the trouble of unwittingly playing their role for us. One may say that thanks to the persistence of the same rites in the Catholic Church and also of Catholic belief in French hearts, cathedrals are not only the most beautiful monuments of our art, but also the only ones that still live their life fully and have remained true to the purpose for which they were built.
KPA: And it is the persistence of the few, innocent, faithful, who allow this beauty to continue, despite the threat from great men and institutions.
I think this shows the hope that faith, true faith, can possibly turn the tides.
6. Text: Now because of the French government’s break with Rome debates on Mr. Briand’s bill and its probable passing are imminent. Its provisions indicate that after five years churches may, and often will, be shut down; not only will the government no longer underwrite the celebration of ritual ceremonies in the churches, but will also be enabled to transform them into whatever it wishes: museums; conference centers, or casinos.
KPA: And now mosques. There is a current tide where abandoned churches and cathedrals are being converted into mosques, or rented out to Muslims who could use them for their own worship.
7. Text: Your clever zeal has often been effective; surely you will not let all the churches of France die in one fell swoop. Today there is not one socialist endowed with taste who doesn’t deplore the mutilations the Revolution visited upon our cathedrals: so many shattered statues and stained-glass windows! Well: better to ransack a church than to decommission it. As mutilated as a church may be, so long as the Mass is celebrated there, it retains at least some life. Once a church is decommissioned it dies, and though as an historical monument it may be protected from scandalous uses, it is no more than a museum.
KPA: Here the author is saying that a "decommissioned" church, or a church which is no longer used for its liturgy is worse than a mutilated church. A broken down church which conducts its services is better than a church which just stands as a bare building.
It is in these "decommissioned" churches where museums, theaters, condominiums and mosques become replacements.
8. Text: When the sacrifice of Christ’s flesh and blood, the sacrifice of the Mass, is no longer celebrated in our churches, they will have no life left in them. Catholic liturgy and the architecture and sculpture of our cathedrals form a whole, for they stem from the same symbolism.
9. Text: It is a matter of common knowledge that in the cathedrals there is no sculpture, however secondary it may seem, that does not have its own symbolic value. If the statue of Christ at the Western entrance of the cathedral of Amiens rests on a pedestal of roses, lilies, and vines, it is because Christ said: “I am the rose of Saron”; “I am the lily of the valley”; “I am the true vine”.
If the asp and the basilisk, the lion and the dragon and sculpted beneath His feet it is because of the verse in Ps 90: Inculcabis super aspidem et leonem. To his left, in a small relief, a man is represented dropping his sword at the sight of an animal while a bird continues to sing beside him. This is because “the coward hasn’t the courage of a thrush”: indeed the mission of this bas-relief is to symbolize cowardice, as opposed to courage, because it is set under the statue that is always (at least in earliest times) to the right of the statue of Christ, that is, under the statue of St. Peter, the Apostle of courage.
Historical Archive: Genoels-Elderen ivories.
Rheno-Mosan Insular Bavarian late 8th or early 9th century
[Christ trampling on the adder and the lion]
And so it goes for the thousands of statues that adorn the cathedral.
KPA: Psalm 90: Inculcatis super aspidem et leonem.
Psalm 91:13 Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder
God will give you strength to vanquish your enemies.
10. Text: Here is the interpretation of a daily ceremony: the Mass. You will see that it is no less symbolic.
The deep and sorrowful chant of the Introit opens the ceremony: it proclaims the expectation of the patriarchs and prophets. The clergy are in choir, the choir of the saints of the old Law who yearn for the coming of the Messias and do not see Him. Then the bishop enters and appears as the living image of Jesus Christ. His arrival symbolizes the Advent of the Lord that the nations await. On great feast days, seven torches are born before him to recall that, as the prophet says, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost rest upon the head of the Son of God. He processes under a triumphant canopy whose four bearers may be likened to the four Evangelists. Two acolytes walk to this right and left and represent Moses and Elias, who appeared at Mount Tabor on either side of Christ. They teach that Jesus held the authority of the Law and of the Prophets.
KPA: The symbolism in music, sculpture, art and architecture to show through beauty to word of God.
11. Text: The very clothing the priest wears to the altar” and the objects used in worship amount to so many symbols, M. Male adds. “The chasuble, worn on top of the other garments, is charity, which is above all the commandments of the Law and is itself the supreme law. The stole, which the priest puts over his neck, is the light yoke of the Lord, and since it is written that every Christian must cherish this yoke, the priest kisses this yoke when he puts it on or takes it off. The bishop’s two-pointed miter symbolizes the knowledge he must have of each of the Testaments; two ribbons are attached to it to recall that Holy Scripture is to be interpreted both literally and spiritually. The bell is the voice of the preachers and the timber from which it hangs is a figure of the Cross. Its rope, woven from three twisted threads, points to the threefold understanding of scripture, which must be interpreted according to the threefold sense, i.e., historically, allegorically, and morally. When one takes the rope in hand to set the bell ringing, one symbolically expresses the fundamental truth that the knowledge of Scripture must lead to acts.”
KPA: The objects in the liturgy, the clothing, the ribbons, the interaction with these objects, all convey the symbolic, ritualistic significance of the church ceremony. And these objects are designed and constructed with aesthetics in mind.
12. Text: And in this way everything down to the least of the priest’s gestures, down the stole he wears, comes together to symbolize Him with the deep sentiment that gives life to the whole cathedral and which is, as M. Male puts it so well, the genius of the Middle Ages itself.
KPA: Not only the objects, but the gestures, and the interactions with these objects, are carefully and aesthetically conducted.
13. Text: Doubtless only those who have studied the religious art of the Middle Ages are able to analyze the beauty of such a spectacle fully. That alone would suffice for the State to have to see to its preservation.
KPA: I think this is the discussion that always centers around "are the experts the only ones to know....?" Experts are essential, but they have to be:
a. Experts, and not ideologues who may (will) direct the public in the wrong direction (e.g., feminists, etc.)
b. That they can properly translate the information so that it doesn't stay in some ivory tower of elites, and cannot influence the world around them.
14. Text: But let us hasten to add that the people who can read medieval symbolism fluently are not the only ones for whom the living cathedral, that is to say the sculpted, painted, singing cathedral is the greatest of spectacles, as one can feel music without knowing harmony.
KPA: Analyzing music without the emotional attachments, coldly and detachedly is good for a theoretical thesis, but even then, if the student of that piece of music has no attachment to it, he will relegate it to some file "for further reference" and remove its essential quality: that it be listened and enjoyed.
15. Text: I am well aware that Ruskin, when he was demonstrating what spiritual reasons explain the arrangement of chapels in cathedral apses, declared: “Never will you be able to delight in architectural forms unless you are in sympathy with the thinking from which they arose.”
KPA: Ruskin has already said more eloquently what I have demonstrated above.
But to add my take, I think this is a very important point, and it adds the importance of the human element in art. It is not only the form that "delights," but the purpose of the form. A beautifully shaped stone cannot delight as would a beautifully carved stone, which cannot delight as would a beautifully carved sculpture, which cannot delight as would a beautifully carved sculpture of Christ, or Mary, or one of the disciples.
It is evident even in mundane pieces. A brooch which is of pure abstract shape might delight for a while, but think of a finely crafted brooch of a leaf or a flower, or a heart.
And even better, a diamond which has all its symbolism of love and eternity, given as an engagement ring.
The context behind the work of art makes the work more valuable and meaningful, at least to the owner. And the "owner" becomes collectively a family, a culture, and then a nation.
16. Text:: Still, we all know the ignorant man, the simple dreamer, who walks into a cathedral without any effort at understanding yet is overwhelmed by his emotions and receives an impression which, though perhaps less precise, is certainly just as strong.
KPA: Here, the symbiotic and osmotic influence of a culture informs even the most illiterate of laymen, who understand intuitively the importance and significance of certain cultural symbols, and even more so symbols that represent their religious beliefs. The rich, the poor, the erudite and the less intellectually versed, everyone, can in common agreement say "This is mine." The religion and its symbols become keepsakes to protect, cherish, and use.
17. Text: As a literary witness to this state of mind, admittedly quite different to that of the learned person of whom we were speaking a moment ago and who walks in a cathedral “as in a forest of symbols who gaze on him with familiar glances,” yet which allows for a vague but powerful emotion in a cathedral during the liturgy, I shall quote Renan’s beautiful text The Double Prayer:
18. Text: There are many gradations between between this reverie, which is not without its charm, and the religious art “connoisseur’s” more conscious joys. Let us bear and keep in mind the case of Gustave Flaubert, who studied—albeit with a view to interpreting it within a modern outlook—one of the most beautiful parts of the Catholic liturgy:
19. Text: There is therefore more than one way of dreaming before this artistic realization - the most complete ever, since all of the arts collaborated in it—of the greatest dream to which humanity ever rose; this mansion is grand enough for us all to find our place in.
KPA: Proust continues with his theme that the church is "grand enough," big enough, for everyone.
20. Text: The cathedral, which shelters so many saints, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, kings, confessors, and martyrs that whole generations huddle in supplication and anxiety all the way to the porch entrances and, trembling, raise the edifice as a long groan under heaven while the angels smilingly lean over from the top of the galleries which, in the evening’s blue and rose incense and the morning’s blinding gold do seem to be “heaven’s balconies” - the cathedral, in its vastness, can grant asylum both to the man of letters and to the man of faith, to the vague dreamer as well as to the archeologist.
KPA: The cathedral is a repository for the grand representatives of God, who can give respite to the most humble of his children. But the humble are seen also in their behavior, and not just in their materials.
21. Text: All that matters is that it remain alive...
KPA: And this is the condition, that it be a vibrant place.
22. Text: ...and that France should not find herself transformed overnight into a dried-up shore on which giant chiseled shells seem marooned, emptied of the life that once lived in them and no longer able even to give to an ear leaning in on them a distant rumor from long ago, mere museum pieces and icy museums themselves.
KPA: I can only repeat Proust's poetic words, the modern-day landscape where "giant chiseled shells seem marooned, emptied of the life that once lived in them...
23. Text: They wanted the church of Vézelay to be decommissioned. Such is the silliness that anticlericalism inspires. Decommissioning that basilica amounts to taking away what little soul it has left. Once the little lamp that shines deep in the sanctuary has been snuffed out, Vézelay will become no more than an archeological curiosity.
KPA: Vezelay has in fact now become a UNESCO World Heritage Centre. What Proust predicted has happened. Cathedrals are now simply museums, places of curiousity, where people go to gape at what once was.
24. Text: Things keep their beauty and their life only by continuously carrying out the task for which they were intended, even should they slowly die at it. Does anyone believe that, in museums of comparative sculpture, the plaster casts of the famous sculpted wooden choir stalls of the Cathedral of Amiens can give an idea of the stalls themselves in their august yet still functional antiquity?
KPA: A church, and a cathedral, still has more life than a museum, since at least its original function was not to store sacred objects, but to include them in the liturgy and ritual.
25. Text: Whereas a museum guard keeps us from getting too close to their plaster casts, the pricelessly precious stalls, which are so old, so illustrious, and so beautiful, continue to carry out their humble task in the cathedral of Amiens which they have been doing for centuries to the great satisfaction of the citizens of Amiens, just as those artists who, while having become famous, yet still keep up a small job or give lessons. This task consists in bearing bodies even before they instruct souls.
KPA And Proust compares cathedrals with those artists who still keep contact with the common man, despite having become famous. These cathedrals still have a place for the humble worshiper.
And the "task" of these stalls in these cathedrals is first to hold the bodies of the kneeling worshipers, so that they may receive instructions on their souls. All worshipers are equal, when kneeling before God.
26. Text: and that is what, folded down and showing their upper side, they humbly do during the offices. More than this: these stalls’ perpetually worn wood has slowly acquired, or rather let seep through, that dark purple that is so to speak its heart and which the eye that has once fallen prey to its charm prefers to everything else, to the point of being unable even to look at the colors of the paintings which, after this, seem rough and plain. Then one experiences something like ebriety as one savors, in the wood’s ever more blazing ardor, what is so to speak the tree’s sap overflowing in time. The naïf figures sculpted in it receive something like a twofold nature from the material in which they live. And generations have variously polished all of these Amiens-born fruits, flowers, leaves, and vegetation that the Amiens sculptor sculpted in Amiens wood, thus bringing out those wonderful contrasting tones in which the differently colored leaf stands out from the twig; this brings to mind the noble accents that Mr. Gallé has been able to draw out of the oak’s harmonious heart.
KPA: The beauty of these stalls, their carvings, their worn wood, is more precious to the worshiper, who kneels on them in prayer, than even the paintings on the catherdral's walls, since they hold him while he prays.
Mr. Gallé, I assume, is the sculptor.
27. Text: The cathedral, if Mr. Briand’s bill were passed, would not find itself closed and unable to provide the Mass and prayers just for the canons who perform the services in those stalls whose armrests, misericords, and banister tell of the Old and New Testaments, nor only for the people filling up the immense nave. We were just saying that nearly every image in a cathedral is a symbol. Yet some are not. Such are the painted or sculpted pictures of those who, having contributed their pennies to the decoration of the cathedral, wished to keep a place in it forever, so that they might silently follow the services and noiselessly participate in prayer from a niche’s balustrade or the recess of a stained glass window, in saecula saeculorum. we know that since the oxen of Laon had christianly drawn the construction materials for the cathedral up the hill from which it rises, the architect rewarded them by setting up their statues at the feet of the towers. You can see them to this day as, in the din of the bells and the pooling sunlight, they raise their horned heads above the colossal holy arch towards the horizon of the French plains—their “inner dream.” That was the best that could be done for beasts: for men, better was granted.
KPA: The cathedral is not just for the living, but for those who have contributed to have a space in the cathedral at their death, so that "they might silently follow the services and noiselessly participate in prayer."
Mr. Briand was a socialist politician, who briefly became Prime Minister of France, who worked towards the separation of Church and State. The Bill Proust is talking about is probably that which became law in 1905: Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l'État.
28. Text: They went into the church. There they took their place, which would be theirs after death and from which, just as during their lifetime, they could go on following the divine sacrifice. In some cases, leaning out of their marble tomb, they turn their heads slightly to the Gospel or to the Epistle side and are able to glimpse and feel around them, as they can in Brou, the tight and tireless interlacing of crest flowers and initials; sometimes, as in Dijon, they keep even in their tombs the bright colors of life. In other cases, from the recess of a stained glass window, in their crimson, ultramarine, or azure cloaks that catch the sun and blaze up with it, they fill its transparent rays with color and suddenly let them loose, multicolored and aimlessly wandering in the nave, which they tinge with their wild and lazy splendor, with their palpable unreality. Thus they remain donors, who, for this very reason, have deserved perpetual prayers. And all of them want the Holy Ghost, when He will come down from the Church, really to recognize his own.
KPA: Such donors took their place in their lifetime, so that they may follow the cathedral during their death.
29. Text: It is not just the queen and the princes who wear their insignia, their crown, or their collar of the Golden fleece: money changers are portrayed proving the title of coins; furriers sell their furs (see [Emile] Male for reproductions of those windows); butchers slaughter cows; knights wear their coat of arms; sculptors cut capitals. Oh! all of you in your stained glass windows in Chartres, in Tours, in Bourges, in Sens, in Auxerre, in Troyes, in Clermont-Ferrand, in Toulouse, ye coopers, furriers, grocers, pilgrims, laborers, armorers, weavers, stonemasons, butchers, basket makers, cobblers, money changers, o ye, great silent democracy, ye faithful obstinately wanting to hear the office, who are not dematerialized but more beautiful than in your living days now in the glory of heaven and blood that is your precious glass: no longer will you hear the Mass you had guaranteed for yourselves by donating the best part of your pennies to building this church. As the profound saying goes, the dead no longer govern the living. And the forgetful living stop fulfilling the wishes of the dead.
KPA: Money-lenders, laborers, butchers and cobblers are equally present with queens and princes.
30. Text: But let the ruby coopers and the rose and silver basket makers inscribe the backdrop of their stained glass with the “silent protest” that Mr. Jaurès could so eloquently give us and which we beg him to bring to the ears of the representatives.
KPA: Mr. Jaurès was a socialist leader who spoke at one of the Dreyfus rallies, which Proust attended. The plea is to have Jaures speak as eloquently on behalf of the cathedrals as he did for the falsely accused Jewish Dreyfus.
31. Text: Leaving aside that innumerable and silent people, the ancestors of the electors for whom the House has such little concern, let us at last summarize:
KPA: And here are the recommendations Proust makes:
1. Text: First: safeguarding the most beautiful works of French architecture and sculpture, which will die on the day that they no longer serve the worship for which they were born, which is their function just as they are its organs, which explains them because it is their soul, makes it the government’s duty to demand that worship be offered in the cathedrals in perpetuity, while the Briand bill authorizes it to turn the cathedrals into whatever museums or conference halls (in the best of cases) it pleases after a few years, and even if the government does not undertake to do so, it authorizes the clergy (and, since it will no longer be subsidized, compels it) no longer to celebrate the offices in them if it finds the rent too high.
KPA: Proust's message is that if these places of worship are not used for worship, they "will die on the day that they no longer serve the worship for which they were born."
2. Text: Second: the preservation of the greatest historic yet living artistic production imaginable, for the reconstruction of which, if it did not already exist, no one would shrink from spending millions, namely the cathedral Mass, makes it the government’s duty to subsidize the Catholic Church for the upkeep of a worship that is far more relevant to the conservation of the noblest French art (to continue our strictly worldly perspective) than the conservatories, theaters, concert-halls, ancient tragedy reconstitutions at the theater of Orange, etc. etc., all of which enterprises have doubtful artistic aims and which keep up many weak works (how do Le Jour, L’Aventurière, or Le Gendre de M. Poirier stand up to the choir of Beauvais or the statues of Rheims?), whereas the masterpiece that is the medieval cathedral, with its thousands of painted or sculpted figures, its chants, its services, is the noblest of all the works to which the genius of France has ever risen.
KPA: But, like a true socialist atheist, Proust demands that the government subsidize these cathedrals as "the greatest historic yet living artistic production imaginable," relegating religion, and Christianity, to a work of art, but still superior to:
3. Text: ...the conservatories, theaters, concert-halls, ancient tragedy reconstitutions at the theater of Orange, etc. etc., all of which enterprises have doubtful artistic aims and which keep up many weak works (how do Le Jour, L’Aventurière, or Le Gendre de M. Poirier stand up to the choir of Beauvais or the statues of Rheims?), whereas the masterpiece that is the medieval cathedral, with its thousands of painted or sculpted figures, its chants, its services, is the noblest of all the works to which the genius of France has ever risen.
KPA: It is not enough that even if such a committed socialist declare the importance of cathedrals. His point is that their loss is a loss for artistic legacy, rather than religious presence. As Proust eloquently writes, without worship, the cathedral will be diminished, and eventually disappear. In fact, we are seeing this slowly and surely. Our cathedrals, and their more humble variations, our churches, are not simply transforming into "giant chiseled shells [which] seem marooned, emptied of the life that once lived in them..." but are becoming repositories for the biggest take-over of our century: their conversion into mosques.
St. James Cathedral, Toronto
View from the entrance looking towards the alter
Proust may have been prescient in his clarion call about the church, but he was deficient in his fight.
He was insufficiently religious. He was insufficiently Christian.
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[Photo By: KPA, 2015]
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
The text is an English translation of a paper by the French writer Marcel Proust, written in 1904, and titled The Death of the Cathedral.
I have analyzed sections of the text below.
I should add that this I am suited to discuss this text, not only because I do write about the loss of culture, in my thesis Reclaiming Beauty, but I have closely studied a cathedral here in Toronto, which I eventually abandoned visiting because what it had become was just too painful to witness.
I went to this cathedral, St. James Cathedral, only a few days ago, with my camera, to see how "far gone" it was, and it still stands, nor does it have a "soon to be demolished" sign by it, nor is there any mosque nearby.
But, its degeneration is more subtle. It is standing, but what is is it being used for?
The most telling sign was this big, turquoise "Welcome" banner, draping the full vertical of the cathedral.
Welcome to whom? I doubt it is a welcome to new parish members, or to those who decided to return, or for those visiting on the occasional Sunday.
I think it is a "welcome" to all those who want to enter this culturally and "spiritually" open establishment, to stand and basque in the great quietness of it all. Our God, I don't think, comes into the picture at all.
There are still Sunday services, a standing choir with a first class repertoire, clergy who give sermons quoting from the Bible? But on what, about what?
I left, having been a regular Sunday goer (I went to the evening services), since the message I heard was so un-Biblical, that even the beauty of the place could no longer keep me there.
Here, in 2011 is where I write of one of the last times I went there, and when I started to seriously consider no longer attending the services and how I decided not to attend any more, in 2011:
Some dioceses from the Anglican Church of Canada have joined the recently formed Anglican Church of North America, protesting the loss of traditionalism in the original church, including its stance on homosexual marriage and the ordination of homosexual priests.So, a beautiful building still stands, but it is so far gone from its original purpose, of worship, that even that memory is too painful to contemplate.
St. James Cathedral is not part of that protest, and continues to maintain those non-Christian beliefs.
Better, I would say, start all over. Build another Saint James, and with careful, and repeated, requests that God bless it.
Below are the photographs of Saint James, I took yesterday. Below that is my discussion of the text The Death of the Cathedral.
THE DEATH OF CATHEDRALS - and the Rites for which they were built
By Marcel Proust
Le Figaro
August 16, 1904
Saint James Cathedral, rising high in downtown Toronto
Welcome! in bright blue
Welcome close-up
Tiles at the entrance
Cross in a side chapel, St. George's Chapel
Formerly the east entrance to the Cathedral, this area was converted into
the present chapel by the Cawthra family in 1935
to commemorate the silver Jubilee of King George V.
The south window depicts members of the Royal Family
and representatives of the Empire. The window above the altar
depicts Christ the King reigning from the cross. [Source]
Stained glass of what looks like a falling dove
View from the entrance looking towards the alter
The organ pipes, above the entrance
Stained glass above the alter
[Photos By: KPA, 2015]
Below is discussion of the text Death of the Cathedral, by Marcel Proust. The full text, is here in English is here, here in French.
1. Text:
Suppose for a moment that Catholicism had been dead for centuries, that the traditions of its worship had been lost. Only the unspeaking and forlorn cathedrals remain; they have become unintelligible yet remain admirable.
KPA: Admirable, as any grand object is admirable. Unintelligible because no-one uses them as they were designed to be used, and therefore we can no longer relate to their message, meaning, and signs.
2. Text: When the government underwrites this resurrection, [of the Cathedrals] it is more in the right than when it underwrites the performances in the theaters of Orange, of the Opéra-Comique, and of the Opéra, for Catholic ceremonies have an historical, social, artistic, and musical interest whose beauty alone surpasses all that any artist has ever dreamed, and which Wagner alone was ever able to come close to, in Parsifal—and that by imitation.
KPA: More to explain this below, but the argument is that French culture has more in relation than with its religious-artistic culture than with its secular artistic one.
3. Text: “Alas! How much more beautiful these feasts must have been when priests celebrated the liturgy not in order to give some idea of these ceremonies to an educated audience, but because they set the same faith in their efficacy as did the artists who sculpted the Last Judgment in the west porch tympanum or who painted the stained-glass lives of the saints in the apse. How much more deeply and truly expressive the entire work must have been when a whole people responded to the priest’s voice and fell to its knees as the bell rang at the elevation, not as cold and stylized extras in historical reconstructions, but because they too, like the priest, like the sculptor, believed. But alas, such things are as far from us as the pious enthusiasm of the Greeks at their theater performances, and our ‘reconstitutions’ cannot give a faithful idea of them.”
KPA: How beautiful these ceremonies must have been when done in true adherence to their purpose, even though they still retain that beauty from these historical origins.
4. Text: That is what one would say if the Catholic religion no longer existed and if scholars had been able to rediscover its rites...But the point is that it still does exist and has not changed, as it were, since the great century when the cathedrals were built. For us to imagine what a living and sublimely functioning thirteenth-century cathedral was like, we need not do with it as we do with the theater of Orange and turn it into a venue for exact yet frozen reconstitutions and retrospectives. All we need to do is to go into it at any hour of the day when a liturgical office is being celebrated. Here mimicry, psalmody, and chant are not entrusted to artists without “conviction.” It is the ministers of worship themselves who celebrate, not with an aesthetic outlook, but by faith—and thus all the more aesthetically.
KPA: Still, even with the distance of time and purpose, if one goes into a cathedral, and listen to the services conducted, one gets the true beauty of the place. It is the worship that makes the beauty, not the physical environment, the building, even in our alienated, areligious era.
5. Text: One could not hope for livelier and more sincere extras, since it is the faithful that take the trouble of unwittingly playing their role for us. One may say that thanks to the persistence of the same rites in the Catholic Church and also of Catholic belief in French hearts, cathedrals are not only the most beautiful monuments of our art, but also the only ones that still live their life fully and have remained true to the purpose for which they were built.
KPA: And it is the persistence of the few, innocent, faithful, who allow this beauty to continue, despite the threat from great men and institutions.
I think this shows the hope that faith, true faith, can possibly turn the tides.
6. Text: Now because of the French government’s break with Rome debates on Mr. Briand’s bill and its probable passing are imminent. Its provisions indicate that after five years churches may, and often will, be shut down; not only will the government no longer underwrite the celebration of ritual ceremonies in the churches, but will also be enabled to transform them into whatever it wishes: museums; conference centers, or casinos.
KPA: And now mosques. There is a current tide where abandoned churches and cathedrals are being converted into mosques, or rented out to Muslims who could use them for their own worship.
7. Text: Your clever zeal has often been effective; surely you will not let all the churches of France die in one fell swoop. Today there is not one socialist endowed with taste who doesn’t deplore the mutilations the Revolution visited upon our cathedrals: so many shattered statues and stained-glass windows! Well: better to ransack a church than to decommission it. As mutilated as a church may be, so long as the Mass is celebrated there, it retains at least some life. Once a church is decommissioned it dies, and though as an historical monument it may be protected from scandalous uses, it is no more than a museum.
KPA: Here the author is saying that a "decommissioned" church, or a church which is no longer used for its liturgy is worse than a mutilated church. A broken down church which conducts its services is better than a church which just stands as a bare building.
It is in these "decommissioned" churches where museums, theaters, condominiums and mosques become replacements.
8. Text: When the sacrifice of Christ’s flesh and blood, the sacrifice of the Mass, is no longer celebrated in our churches, they will have no life left in them. Catholic liturgy and the architecture and sculpture of our cathedrals form a whole, for they stem from the same symbolism.
9. Text: It is a matter of common knowledge that in the cathedrals there is no sculpture, however secondary it may seem, that does not have its own symbolic value. If the statue of Christ at the Western entrance of the cathedral of Amiens rests on a pedestal of roses, lilies, and vines, it is because Christ said: “I am the rose of Saron”; “I am the lily of the valley”; “I am the true vine”.
If the asp and the basilisk, the lion and the dragon and sculpted beneath His feet it is because of the verse in Ps 90: Inculcabis super aspidem et leonem. To his left, in a small relief, a man is represented dropping his sword at the sight of an animal while a bird continues to sing beside him. This is because “the coward hasn’t the courage of a thrush”: indeed the mission of this bas-relief is to symbolize cowardice, as opposed to courage, because it is set under the statue that is always (at least in earliest times) to the right of the statue of Christ, that is, under the statue of St. Peter, the Apostle of courage.
Historical Archive: Genoels-Elderen ivories.
Rheno-Mosan Insular Bavarian late 8th or early 9th century
[Christ trampling on the adder and the lion]
And so it goes for the thousands of statues that adorn the cathedral.
KPA: Psalm 90: Inculcatis super aspidem et leonem.
Psalm 91:13 Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder
God will give you strength to vanquish your enemies.
10. Text: Here is the interpretation of a daily ceremony: the Mass. You will see that it is no less symbolic.
The deep and sorrowful chant of the Introit opens the ceremony: it proclaims the expectation of the patriarchs and prophets. The clergy are in choir, the choir of the saints of the old Law who yearn for the coming of the Messias and do not see Him. Then the bishop enters and appears as the living image of Jesus Christ. His arrival symbolizes the Advent of the Lord that the nations await. On great feast days, seven torches are born before him to recall that, as the prophet says, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost rest upon the head of the Son of God. He processes under a triumphant canopy whose four bearers may be likened to the four Evangelists. Two acolytes walk to this right and left and represent Moses and Elias, who appeared at Mount Tabor on either side of Christ. They teach that Jesus held the authority of the Law and of the Prophets.
KPA: The symbolism in music, sculpture, art and architecture to show through beauty to word of God.
11. Text: The very clothing the priest wears to the altar” and the objects used in worship amount to so many symbols, M. Male adds. “The chasuble, worn on top of the other garments, is charity, which is above all the commandments of the Law and is itself the supreme law. The stole, which the priest puts over his neck, is the light yoke of the Lord, and since it is written that every Christian must cherish this yoke, the priest kisses this yoke when he puts it on or takes it off. The bishop’s two-pointed miter symbolizes the knowledge he must have of each of the Testaments; two ribbons are attached to it to recall that Holy Scripture is to be interpreted both literally and spiritually. The bell is the voice of the preachers and the timber from which it hangs is a figure of the Cross. Its rope, woven from three twisted threads, points to the threefold understanding of scripture, which must be interpreted according to the threefold sense, i.e., historically, allegorically, and morally. When one takes the rope in hand to set the bell ringing, one symbolically expresses the fundamental truth that the knowledge of Scripture must lead to acts.”
KPA: The objects in the liturgy, the clothing, the ribbons, the interaction with these objects, all convey the symbolic, ritualistic significance of the church ceremony. And these objects are designed and constructed with aesthetics in mind.
12. Text: And in this way everything down to the least of the priest’s gestures, down the stole he wears, comes together to symbolize Him with the deep sentiment that gives life to the whole cathedral and which is, as M. Male puts it so well, the genius of the Middle Ages itself.
KPA: Not only the objects, but the gestures, and the interactions with these objects, are carefully and aesthetically conducted.
13. Text: Doubtless only those who have studied the religious art of the Middle Ages are able to analyze the beauty of such a spectacle fully. That alone would suffice for the State to have to see to its preservation.
KPA: I think this is the discussion that always centers around "are the experts the only ones to know....?" Experts are essential, but they have to be:
a. Experts, and not ideologues who may (will) direct the public in the wrong direction (e.g., feminists, etc.)
b. That they can properly translate the information so that it doesn't stay in some ivory tower of elites, and cannot influence the world around them.
14. Text: But let us hasten to add that the people who can read medieval symbolism fluently are not the only ones for whom the living cathedral, that is to say the sculpted, painted, singing cathedral is the greatest of spectacles, as one can feel music without knowing harmony.
KPA: Analyzing music without the emotional attachments, coldly and detachedly is good for a theoretical thesis, but even then, if the student of that piece of music has no attachment to it, he will relegate it to some file "for further reference" and remove its essential quality: that it be listened and enjoyed.
15. Text: I am well aware that Ruskin, when he was demonstrating what spiritual reasons explain the arrangement of chapels in cathedral apses, declared: “Never will you be able to delight in architectural forms unless you are in sympathy with the thinking from which they arose.”
KPA: Ruskin has already said more eloquently what I have demonstrated above.
But to add my take, I think this is a very important point, and it adds the importance of the human element in art. It is not only the form that "delights," but the purpose of the form. A beautifully shaped stone cannot delight as would a beautifully carved stone, which cannot delight as would a beautifully carved sculpture, which cannot delight as would a beautifully carved sculpture of Christ, or Mary, or one of the disciples.
It is evident even in mundane pieces. A brooch which is of pure abstract shape might delight for a while, but think of a finely crafted brooch of a leaf or a flower, or a heart.
And even better, a diamond which has all its symbolism of love and eternity, given as an engagement ring.
The context behind the work of art makes the work more valuable and meaningful, at least to the owner. And the "owner" becomes collectively a family, a culture, and then a nation.
16. Text:: Still, we all know the ignorant man, the simple dreamer, who walks into a cathedral without any effort at understanding yet is overwhelmed by his emotions and receives an impression which, though perhaps less precise, is certainly just as strong.
KPA: Here, the symbiotic and osmotic influence of a culture informs even the most illiterate of laymen, who understand intuitively the importance and significance of certain cultural symbols, and even more so symbols that represent their religious beliefs. The rich, the poor, the erudite and the less intellectually versed, everyone, can in common agreement say "This is mine." The religion and its symbols become keepsakes to protect, cherish, and use.
17. Text: As a literary witness to this state of mind, admittedly quite different to that of the learned person of whom we were speaking a moment ago and who walks in a cathedral “as in a forest of symbols who gaze on him with familiar glances,” yet which allows for a vague but powerful emotion in a cathedral during the liturgy, I shall quote Renan’s beautiful text The Double Prayer:
“One of the most beautiful religious spectacles one can still contemplate today (and which one may soon no longer be able to contemplate, if the House of Representatives passes the Briand bill) is that which the ancient cathedral of Quimper presents at dusk. Once darkness has filled the vast building’s side aisles, the faithful of both sexes gather in the nave and sing evensong in the Breton language with a simple and moving rhythm. The cathedral is lit only by two or three lamps. In the nave, the men are on one side, standing; on the other side, the kneeling women form a motionless sea of white headdresses. The two halves sing in alternation, and the phrase that one of the choirs begins is finished by the other. What they sing is quite beautiful. As I heard it, I felt that with a few changes it might be fitted to every state of humanity. Above all it made me dream of a prayer which, with a few variations, might suit men and women equally.”KPA: Once again, it is the human emotion which is the conveyer of the meaning. Without feeling, there is no spirituality.
18. Text: There are many gradations between between this reverie, which is not without its charm, and the religious art “connoisseur’s” more conscious joys. Let us bear and keep in mind the case of Gustave Flaubert, who studied—albeit with a view to interpreting it within a modern outlook—one of the most beautiful parts of the Catholic liturgy:
“The priest dipped his thumb in the holy oil and began to anoint his eyes first . . . then his nostrils, so fond of warm breezes and of the scents of love, his hands that had found their delight in sweet caresses . . . lastly his feet, which had been so swift in running to satisfy his desires, and which now would walk no more.”KPA: Proust then quotes another writer, Gustave Flaubert, describing the simple, symbolic and profoundly significant part of a ritual:
19. Text: There is therefore more than one way of dreaming before this artistic realization - the most complete ever, since all of the arts collaborated in it—of the greatest dream to which humanity ever rose; this mansion is grand enough for us all to find our place in.
KPA: Proust continues with his theme that the church is "grand enough," big enough, for everyone.
20. Text: The cathedral, which shelters so many saints, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, kings, confessors, and martyrs that whole generations huddle in supplication and anxiety all the way to the porch entrances and, trembling, raise the edifice as a long groan under heaven while the angels smilingly lean over from the top of the galleries which, in the evening’s blue and rose incense and the morning’s blinding gold do seem to be “heaven’s balconies” - the cathedral, in its vastness, can grant asylum both to the man of letters and to the man of faith, to the vague dreamer as well as to the archeologist.
KPA: The cathedral is a repository for the grand representatives of God, who can give respite to the most humble of his children. But the humble are seen also in their behavior, and not just in their materials.
21. Text: All that matters is that it remain alive...
KPA: And this is the condition, that it be a vibrant place.
22. Text: ...and that France should not find herself transformed overnight into a dried-up shore on which giant chiseled shells seem marooned, emptied of the life that once lived in them and no longer able even to give to an ear leaning in on them a distant rumor from long ago, mere museum pieces and icy museums themselves.
KPA: I can only repeat Proust's poetic words, the modern-day landscape where "giant chiseled shells seem marooned, emptied of the life that once lived in them...
23. Text: They wanted the church of Vézelay to be decommissioned. Such is the silliness that anticlericalism inspires. Decommissioning that basilica amounts to taking away what little soul it has left. Once the little lamp that shines deep in the sanctuary has been snuffed out, Vézelay will become no more than an archeological curiosity.
KPA: Vezelay has in fact now become a UNESCO World Heritage Centre. What Proust predicted has happened. Cathedrals are now simply museums, places of curiousity, where people go to gape at what once was.
24. Text: Things keep their beauty and their life only by continuously carrying out the task for which they were intended, even should they slowly die at it. Does anyone believe that, in museums of comparative sculpture, the plaster casts of the famous sculpted wooden choir stalls of the Cathedral of Amiens can give an idea of the stalls themselves in their august yet still functional antiquity?
KPA: A church, and a cathedral, still has more life than a museum, since at least its original function was not to store sacred objects, but to include them in the liturgy and ritual.
25. Text: Whereas a museum guard keeps us from getting too close to their plaster casts, the pricelessly precious stalls, which are so old, so illustrious, and so beautiful, continue to carry out their humble task in the cathedral of Amiens which they have been doing for centuries to the great satisfaction of the citizens of Amiens, just as those artists who, while having become famous, yet still keep up a small job or give lessons. This task consists in bearing bodies even before they instruct souls.
KPA And Proust compares cathedrals with those artists who still keep contact with the common man, despite having become famous. These cathedrals still have a place for the humble worshiper.
And the "task" of these stalls in these cathedrals is first to hold the bodies of the kneeling worshipers, so that they may receive instructions on their souls. All worshipers are equal, when kneeling before God.
26. Text: and that is what, folded down and showing their upper side, they humbly do during the offices. More than this: these stalls’ perpetually worn wood has slowly acquired, or rather let seep through, that dark purple that is so to speak its heart and which the eye that has once fallen prey to its charm prefers to everything else, to the point of being unable even to look at the colors of the paintings which, after this, seem rough and plain. Then one experiences something like ebriety as one savors, in the wood’s ever more blazing ardor, what is so to speak the tree’s sap overflowing in time. The naïf figures sculpted in it receive something like a twofold nature from the material in which they live. And generations have variously polished all of these Amiens-born fruits, flowers, leaves, and vegetation that the Amiens sculptor sculpted in Amiens wood, thus bringing out those wonderful contrasting tones in which the differently colored leaf stands out from the twig; this brings to mind the noble accents that Mr. Gallé has been able to draw out of the oak’s harmonious heart.
KPA: The beauty of these stalls, their carvings, their worn wood, is more precious to the worshiper, who kneels on them in prayer, than even the paintings on the catherdral's walls, since they hold him while he prays.
Mr. Gallé, I assume, is the sculptor.
27. Text: The cathedral, if Mr. Briand’s bill were passed, would not find itself closed and unable to provide the Mass and prayers just for the canons who perform the services in those stalls whose armrests, misericords, and banister tell of the Old and New Testaments, nor only for the people filling up the immense nave. We were just saying that nearly every image in a cathedral is a symbol. Yet some are not. Such are the painted or sculpted pictures of those who, having contributed their pennies to the decoration of the cathedral, wished to keep a place in it forever, so that they might silently follow the services and noiselessly participate in prayer from a niche’s balustrade or the recess of a stained glass window, in saecula saeculorum. we know that since the oxen of Laon had christianly drawn the construction materials for the cathedral up the hill from which it rises, the architect rewarded them by setting up their statues at the feet of the towers. You can see them to this day as, in the din of the bells and the pooling sunlight, they raise their horned heads above the colossal holy arch towards the horizon of the French plains—their “inner dream.” That was the best that could be done for beasts: for men, better was granted.
KPA: The cathedral is not just for the living, but for those who have contributed to have a space in the cathedral at their death, so that "they might silently follow the services and noiselessly participate in prayer."
Mr. Briand was a socialist politician, who briefly became Prime Minister of France, who worked towards the separation of Church and State. The Bill Proust is talking about is probably that which became law in 1905: Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l'État.
28. Text: They went into the church. There they took their place, which would be theirs after death and from which, just as during their lifetime, they could go on following the divine sacrifice. In some cases, leaning out of their marble tomb, they turn their heads slightly to the Gospel or to the Epistle side and are able to glimpse and feel around them, as they can in Brou, the tight and tireless interlacing of crest flowers and initials; sometimes, as in Dijon, they keep even in their tombs the bright colors of life. In other cases, from the recess of a stained glass window, in their crimson, ultramarine, or azure cloaks that catch the sun and blaze up with it, they fill its transparent rays with color and suddenly let them loose, multicolored and aimlessly wandering in the nave, which they tinge with their wild and lazy splendor, with their palpable unreality. Thus they remain donors, who, for this very reason, have deserved perpetual prayers. And all of them want the Holy Ghost, when He will come down from the Church, really to recognize his own.
KPA: Such donors took their place in their lifetime, so that they may follow the cathedral during their death.
29. Text: It is not just the queen and the princes who wear their insignia, their crown, or their collar of the Golden fleece: money changers are portrayed proving the title of coins; furriers sell their furs (see [Emile] Male for reproductions of those windows); butchers slaughter cows; knights wear their coat of arms; sculptors cut capitals. Oh! all of you in your stained glass windows in Chartres, in Tours, in Bourges, in Sens, in Auxerre, in Troyes, in Clermont-Ferrand, in Toulouse, ye coopers, furriers, grocers, pilgrims, laborers, armorers, weavers, stonemasons, butchers, basket makers, cobblers, money changers, o ye, great silent democracy, ye faithful obstinately wanting to hear the office, who are not dematerialized but more beautiful than in your living days now in the glory of heaven and blood that is your precious glass: no longer will you hear the Mass you had guaranteed for yourselves by donating the best part of your pennies to building this church. As the profound saying goes, the dead no longer govern the living. And the forgetful living stop fulfilling the wishes of the dead.
KPA: Money-lenders, laborers, butchers and cobblers are equally present with queens and princes.
30. Text: But let the ruby coopers and the rose and silver basket makers inscribe the backdrop of their stained glass with the “silent protest” that Mr. Jaurès could so eloquently give us and which we beg him to bring to the ears of the representatives.
KPA: Mr. Jaurès was a socialist leader who spoke at one of the Dreyfus rallies, which Proust attended. The plea is to have Jaures speak as eloquently on behalf of the cathedrals as he did for the falsely accused Jewish Dreyfus.
31. Text: Leaving aside that innumerable and silent people, the ancestors of the electors for whom the House has such little concern, let us at last summarize:
KPA: And here are the recommendations Proust makes:
1. Text: First: safeguarding the most beautiful works of French architecture and sculpture, which will die on the day that they no longer serve the worship for which they were born, which is their function just as they are its organs, which explains them because it is their soul, makes it the government’s duty to demand that worship be offered in the cathedrals in perpetuity, while the Briand bill authorizes it to turn the cathedrals into whatever museums or conference halls (in the best of cases) it pleases after a few years, and even if the government does not undertake to do so, it authorizes the clergy (and, since it will no longer be subsidized, compels it) no longer to celebrate the offices in them if it finds the rent too high.
KPA: Proust's message is that if these places of worship are not used for worship, they "will die on the day that they no longer serve the worship for which they were born."
2. Text: Second: the preservation of the greatest historic yet living artistic production imaginable, for the reconstruction of which, if it did not already exist, no one would shrink from spending millions, namely the cathedral Mass, makes it the government’s duty to subsidize the Catholic Church for the upkeep of a worship that is far more relevant to the conservation of the noblest French art (to continue our strictly worldly perspective) than the conservatories, theaters, concert-halls, ancient tragedy reconstitutions at the theater of Orange, etc. etc., all of which enterprises have doubtful artistic aims and which keep up many weak works (how do Le Jour, L’Aventurière, or Le Gendre de M. Poirier stand up to the choir of Beauvais or the statues of Rheims?), whereas the masterpiece that is the medieval cathedral, with its thousands of painted or sculpted figures, its chants, its services, is the noblest of all the works to which the genius of France has ever risen.
KPA: But, like a true socialist atheist, Proust demands that the government subsidize these cathedrals as "the greatest historic yet living artistic production imaginable," relegating religion, and Christianity, to a work of art, but still superior to:
3. Text: ...the conservatories, theaters, concert-halls, ancient tragedy reconstitutions at the theater of Orange, etc. etc., all of which enterprises have doubtful artistic aims and which keep up many weak works (how do Le Jour, L’Aventurière, or Le Gendre de M. Poirier stand up to the choir of Beauvais or the statues of Rheims?), whereas the masterpiece that is the medieval cathedral, with its thousands of painted or sculpted figures, its chants, its services, is the noblest of all the works to which the genius of France has ever risen.
KPA: It is not enough that even if such a committed socialist declare the importance of cathedrals. His point is that their loss is a loss for artistic legacy, rather than religious presence. As Proust eloquently writes, without worship, the cathedral will be diminished, and eventually disappear. In fact, we are seeing this slowly and surely. Our cathedrals, and their more humble variations, our churches, are not simply transforming into "giant chiseled shells [which] seem marooned, emptied of the life that once lived in them..." but are becoming repositories for the biggest take-over of our century: their conversion into mosques.
St. James Cathedral, Toronto
View from the entrance looking towards the alter
Proust may have been prescient in his clarion call about the church, but he was deficient in his fight.
He was insufficiently religious. He was insufficiently Christian.
[Photo By: KPA, 2015]
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Soup With a Companion
[Photo By: KPA]
Cow from "The Pasture"
Toronto Dominion Centre
Foe Fafard
1985
I had this calm and pleasant companion as I sat in the TD Centre in downtown Toronto, as I warmed up with a Tim Horton's Cream of Broccoli soup on that sunny but very cold day. The soup was delicious ("A lush soup made with broccoli florets combined in a velvety cream base"), and the companion quietly, and politely, solicited this photograph.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Laura Wood of The Thinking Housewife: Fundraisng
Laura Wood, of The Thinking Housewife is holding a fundraising at her website. I have none worthwhile to give right now, but I hope this posting will direct the attention of those who might not know about it.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Donate
THANK YOU to readers who have generously donated. However, I still have a long way to go with my fundraising campaign. Unfortunately (or fortunately), if I don’t reach my modest goal by February 7th, this blog will become a subscription e-mail magazine. I will explain how this will work later. The nice thing about a magazine is that it would allow for longer pieces about the issues discussed here. Anyone who donates will receive some number of editions of this magazine, which I hope will include commentary by regular contributors here, whom readers have come to know and appreciate. Please donate today if you’d like to help prevent this change — or let me know if you want to donate but actually prefer the idea of a magazine format. Thank you again for your support.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
How the Muslim world is being left behind: Why each new terror attack only further marginalizes the Muslim world
The article below is from the recent Macleans, a Canadian weekly current affairs magazine. I've posted the entire article, which is online, since I don't know for how long it will remain online (the alternative is to subscribe to Macleans online,or to buy the magazine. I was going to buy the print edition today, but forgot to do so).
I have a few of criticisms on the article:
1. Why not call the Charlie Hebdo killers Jihadists? They are committed Muslims who are following the madates of the Koran. They have a religious motive, and not a political or personal vendetta.
2. There is much written about the glories of the Muslim world as Europe lived in the dark ages of the Medieval times. I think this is not entirely accurate. The Muslim world has never been as advanced as some Islamic historians opine, and much of their knowledge was borrowed from Christian or Jewish scholars. I will expand on this later.
3. Gilmore describes the combative jihadist activities of Muslims as "terrorist" activities by a few
4. He at times blames the jihadist behavior of Muslims to foreign activities. But jihadist Muslim activity has always occurred whether Muslims were being oppressed, whether there is regional war in the Middle East, or if the West somehow insults Islam.
Other than that, I think it is as straight forward an article we can get from apologist western journalists.
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How the Muslim world is being left behind
Scott Gilmore
Macleans Magazine
January 14, 2015
July 2013: Damaged buildings in front of the Khaled bin Walid mosque, Homs, Syria (Sam Skaine, Getty)
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On the morning of the shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Maclean’s contributor Scott Gilmore filed this column. In the Jan. 29 issue of the magazine, he expands on his argument:
On Jan. 7, Islamist gunmen ran through the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo screaming “The Prophet is avenged!” By coincidence, at the very moment they were killing the journalists, the International Space Station passed silently over Paris.
Consider that for a moment.
As terrorists committed a primitive act of tribal savagery in the name of a prophet who lived 1,400 years ago, right above them, orbiting through space, was the most sophisticated expression of mankind’s ability to transcend ignorance and fear with hope and reason.
Twenty-five nations from around the world have come together to build the space station. They include old enemies who fought each other for centuries over God and gold, Cold War rivals, small countries and large. But none are Islamic nations.
It has become a cliché to point out that science and reason once flourished in the Islamic world. Nonetheless, it is true. While Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages, Islamic scholars made dramatic advances in every field of science including mathematics, optics and experimental physics. Our modern world was built on the scientific breakthroughs of Islam. From the eighth century, mathematicians such as Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who helped develop algebra, there is a direct line of progress that ends with the space station itself. But we no longer associate Islam with progress. In fact, a Muslim astronaut would surprise us as much as a non-Muslim terrorist (although there are many examples of each).
When the Parisian police siege ended on the blood-smeared floor of a kosher supermarket, the Prophet had not been avenged. He was diminished. This terrorist attack, and the others before it, merely isolated the Islamic world further from the global mainstream. In its aftermath, we and our leaders repeat, again and again, “Not all Muslims”—and yet we collectively treat Muslim nations as a threat that must be contained. Equal members of the global community? No. Partners in the space program? Impossible.
The Islamic world is in relative decline. Or, more precisely, a large number of countries with a Muslim majority are not developing as rapidly as the rest of the world, and in some cases, like Syria, they are even regressing.
This is a golden age for most. In the last 100 years life expectancy has more than doubled. In the last 50 years the poverty rate has fallen by 80 per cent. During that same time, the number of wars fell by a similar figure and the number of nations governed democratically tripled.
But, while the global community leapt forward, Islamic nations (as defined as members of the Organization of Islamic Co-operation) have progressed at a much slower pace. This is the case across a wide variety of metrics.
The Social Progress Index, a comprehensive measurement of a nation’s well-being, which includes everything from access to water to freedom of movement, ranks Islamic countries behind every other region in the world, including non-Muslim African countries. The Muslim world does even worse on Transparency International’s Perceptions of Corruption Index. Life expectancy numbers are among the world’s lowest, more than 15 years fewer than North America. And, not surprisingly, on a per capita basis, Muslim nations publish scientific papers at less than one-tenth the frequency of Europeans.
If we are surprised by these numbers, Najmuddin Shaikh is not. The former foreign secretary of Pakistan recently lamented, “The Islamic world is in disarray and decline and that Muslim communities find themselves under siege-like conditions in the West and elsewhere is perhaps an understatement.”
Why has the Muslim world been unable to keep pace? Why is it besieged? The easiest response is to say they did this to themselves. The evidence of this is so pervasive it is hard to refute. For example, just last week alone, while the world was focused on France, there were dozens of other terrorist attacks where Muslims killed Muslims.
In Yemen, a large group of young men were applying for entry into the police academy. They were queued up along a stone wall, which intensified the blast of a car bomb - 33 died.
In Iraq, a wholesale market is held every Saturday morning in Baghdad’s western district of Baiyaa. There a bomb killed five. Later that morning another blast killed three more people in the nearby town of Madian.
In Lebanon, on the same day, a suicide bomber walked up to the crowded Omran Café in Tripoli and triggered his vest. Bloodied survivors were pulling themselves out of the rubble when a second bomber stepped in amongst them. There were nine dead and 37 injured.
In Pakistan, as people gathered to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday by distributing alms at a mosque in Rawalpindi, a bomber pushed his way in. The blast shattered all the nearby windows and killed seven.
In Nigeria, militants wrapped explosives around the midriff of a small 10-year old girl, and told her to walk into the market. When she reached the stalls where the chickens are sold, it went off, killing 19.
This is an incomplete list, from just last week, but it illustrates the broader story well. Internecine conflict in the Islamic world is endemic. The unrelenting Shia and Sunni schism dominates it, but it also includes tribal and ethnic divides. In 2013, there were 12 Western victims of terror attacks compared to 22,000 non-Western fatalities. These do not include those killed by the barrel bombs that Syrian President Assad dropped on his own people, or civilians killed by warfare in Afghanistan or Iraq. From the jungles of Sulawesi to the deserts of Libya, Muslims are killing Muslims at a rate that dwarfs the more highly publicized conflict with the West. In that light, it is hard to subscribe to the theory this is a clash of civilizations. Rather, it is one culture turning on itself.
The self-inflicted wounds are not always violent. The Taliban banned girls from being educated. In Syria, Islamic State closed all schools. In 2013, militants in Mali burned the fabled and ancient libraries of Timbuktu. In a speech just days before the Paris attacks, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi pleaded for an end to this self-destruction: “The Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost. And it is being lost by our own hands.”
Focusing just on the violence does not take into account the broader context, the economic and geographic circumstances in which these countries find themselves. The Maghreb (northwest Africa), the Arabian Peninsula, the Central Asia steppes, the Gulf of Guinea, the Indus valley, the Indonesian archipelago: each of these presents different but equally daunting barriers to building modern economies and functioning states. Whether it is drought or monsoons, a lack of harbours or impassible mountain ranges, the Islamic world was not dealt the best geographic hand.
It has faced economic hurdles, too. The international demand for heroin has created a lucrative but destructive poppy trade that the United States and all its allies could not even slow. Similarly, but perhaps less dramatically, the oil reserves of the Middle East and West Africa have been both a blessing and a curse, fuelling building booms, corruption and instability.
There are also the historical circumstances that must be acknowledged. The legacy of disastrous foreign intervention is everywhere. For hundreds of years the Dutch treated Indonesia as a warehouse, merely to be raided for its wealth, forestalling the evolution of local institutions. When independence came, dictators Sukarno and Suharto merely perfected what the Dutch had begun.
Bangladesh faced a similar colonial legacy, but one that was followed by partition and a brutal civil war. The elites who emerged redefined corruption, and it is difficult to judge which has done more damage: the typhoons or the politicians.
Further west, the arbitrarily drawn Durand Line was established in the 19th century to separate Pakistan and Afghanistan by cutting right through the Pashtun homeland. This colonial relic has remained a festering wound that makes both countries virtually ungovernable.
A similar exercise produced a comparable result in the Middle East. The secretly negotiated Sykes-Picot Agreement, creating spheres of influence for the Great Powers during the First World War, produced fractious borders and lit a bonfire of ethnic and sectarian violence that this week burned the Baiyaa market and the Omran Café.
Even recent history has been unkind to the Islamic world. The U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan exploded into regional instability. repeated conflicts with Israel have drained meagre budgets from militaries who spend most of their time blaming Zionist conspiracies for the repressive chaos they themselves create at home.
When one considers the heavy weight of these extenuating circumstances, it is easier to see that the terrorism of the last 20 years is not the reason the Islamic world has been left behind. But it is perhaps the reason it is staying there.
Lockerbie. Embassies in Africa. Sept. 11. Subways in London. A memorial in Ottawa. A café in Sydney. A magazine in Paris. We have witnessed a steady series of attacks against the West. Some of these were large and well-organized conspiracies, others lone-wolf attacks by mentally unstable men with tenuous connections to Islam. But they had the same effect: to provoke a fear in the West that Islam is a threat, and the impression that the Muslim world is not a partner, but a challenge to be managed.
We, and our governments, don’t say this. In fact, we do all we can to make it appear otherwise. We talk about engagement and launch various initiatives to build “constructive dialogue.” These are just euphemisms.
President Barack Obama wanted to use the space program as a tool to engage the Islamic world. He instructed NASA to help Muslim nations “feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.” In Canada, we reached out by, among other things, naming a special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) and by sending its member countries over $12 billion in aid since 2002. During that same period, the United States sent $137 billion.
These efforts were not about expanding mutually beneficial relations with peers to create new opportunities. They were about preventing problems and neutralizing a threat. Most of our energy has gone into isolating, not engaging, the Islamic world. Compare, for example, what has been spent on intelligence, homeland security and military operations. Since 9/11, Canada tripled its spy budget and spent $18 billion sending troops to Afghanistan. The United States spent between $4 trillion and $6 trillion on military campaigns (including Iraq)—over 25 times more than they spent on engaging through aid.
With every act of terror, we push the Muslim world farther way. We launch more drones. We deploy more troops. We fortify more embassies. We watch more mosques. We accept fewer refugees. We issue fewer visas.
A passport from an Islamic nation is less welcome than one from any other region of the world. Citizens of the OIC enjoy visa-free travel to fewer countries than anyone else. This small fact tells a much larger story about the lack of interpersonal contact between Islamic nations and the rest of the world. It illustrates the fear that some of us feel when we see that the man boarding the flight ahead of us is wearing a shalwar kameez. It highlights the difficulty any of us have had bringing Muslim colleagues to international conferences, or transferring money to business partners in the Middle East. It makes us realize we can’t remember the last time someone talked about going to Egypt to see the pyramids. And it explains why last year less than two per cent of the visitors to Canada were from the Islamic world, despite those countries comprising 25 per cent of the world’s population.
It is not just the West. Russia, China, India: all the global powers have developed similar postures toward the Islamic world. Occasionally, although less frequently than the West, they talk about engagement. But really, like us, their strategy is primarily focused on containment.
The isolation also exists at the multilateral level. Only 19 per cent of global economies are not members of the World Trade Organization, but that short list is dominated by Islamic nations. The centrally important Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has only one Islamic member: Turkey. Canada belongs to 207 international organizations. The average Islamic nation belongs to about half that, making them less connected and included than are European, Latin American, Caribbean and Asian countries.
Of course, it is not all containment. The international community does engage more constructively with some Islamic countries than with others. For example, while Malaysia is not a member of the International Space Station partnership, it did second an astronaut to Russia, who then sent him to the space station. Turkey is not only a member of the OECD, it is also part of NATO. (But is hard to imagine it being invited to join today, given that just this week the United States cancelled the transfer of two frigates to the Turkish navy, due to growing concerns about its Islamist tendencies.)
The United States and Canada are negotiating with Indonesia so that we can enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. And Western oil companies are deeply entrenched in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. But these exceptions prove the rule. Unless you are among the most moderate members of the OIC, or drowning in oil, the international community is not interested.
Ironically, this isolation may be what the extremists actually want. Many of the terrorist attacks were meant to drive a wedge between the Muslim world and the West, to eliminate the degenerate influences of the outside. They want to be left behind, or at least left alone.
Can we change this dynamic? Will we continue to pull back from the Muslim world? It is difficult to find signs that this pattern can be broken. Our economies now depend on trillion-dollar industries whose sole purpose is to protect us from the Islamist threat by building better body scanners and faster cruise missiles. Our own governments have restructured themselves as vigilant watchdogs, safeguarding us from terror. Even as the Paris attacks were still unfolding, the Canadian government was announcing even more anti-terror legislation. And our political institutions have been rewired, dramatically shifting the balance between our personal freedom and our collective security. All of this is intended to build blast-proof walls between us and them.
But perhaps, if we realize that with every terrorist attack our collective instincts to contain the Muslim world grows stronger, we can change this. It would take some patience and courage on our part, and a few leaps of faith, to increase the free flow of our peoples and in their wake, perhaps ideas and values. Of course, it would also require an effort on the part of Islamic nations to reach out, too. We can’t drag them into the OECD.
Terrorists like those who captured our attention in France are not responsible for the relative decline of the Islamic world, but they are prolonging its isolation. This attack and all the others before it have compelled the international community to instinctively respond by containing the threat. But this is merely palliative. As the Muslim world is further contained, it becomes further alienated from the global community, and it falls further behind. This trend must change. We must recognize that as mankind moves further into space, some of us are being left behind.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
I have a few of criticisms on the article:
1. Why not call the Charlie Hebdo killers Jihadists? They are committed Muslims who are following the madates of the Koran. They have a religious motive, and not a political or personal vendetta.
2. There is much written about the glories of the Muslim world as Europe lived in the dark ages of the Medieval times. I think this is not entirely accurate. The Muslim world has never been as advanced as some Islamic historians opine, and much of their knowledge was borrowed from Christian or Jewish scholars. I will expand on this later.
3. Gilmore describes the combative jihadist activities of Muslims as "terrorist" activities by a few
4. He at times blames the jihadist behavior of Muslims to foreign activities. But jihadist Muslim activity has always occurred whether Muslims were being oppressed, whether there is regional war in the Middle East, or if the West somehow insults Islam.
Other than that, I think it is as straight forward an article we can get from apologist western journalists.
How the Muslim world is being left behind
Scott Gilmore
Macleans Magazine
January 14, 2015
July 2013: Damaged buildings in front of the Khaled bin Walid mosque, Homs, Syria (Sam Skaine, Getty)
On the morning of the shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, Maclean’s contributor Scott Gilmore filed this column. In the Jan. 29 issue of the magazine, he expands on his argument:
On Jan. 7, Islamist gunmen ran through the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo screaming “The Prophet is avenged!” By coincidence, at the very moment they were killing the journalists, the International Space Station passed silently over Paris.
Consider that for a moment.
As terrorists committed a primitive act of tribal savagery in the name of a prophet who lived 1,400 years ago, right above them, orbiting through space, was the most sophisticated expression of mankind’s ability to transcend ignorance and fear with hope and reason.
Twenty-five nations from around the world have come together to build the space station. They include old enemies who fought each other for centuries over God and gold, Cold War rivals, small countries and large. But none are Islamic nations.
It has become a cliché to point out that science and reason once flourished in the Islamic world. Nonetheless, it is true. While Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages, Islamic scholars made dramatic advances in every field of science including mathematics, optics and experimental physics. Our modern world was built on the scientific breakthroughs of Islam. From the eighth century, mathematicians such as Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who helped develop algebra, there is a direct line of progress that ends with the space station itself. But we no longer associate Islam with progress. In fact, a Muslim astronaut would surprise us as much as a non-Muslim terrorist (although there are many examples of each).
When the Parisian police siege ended on the blood-smeared floor of a kosher supermarket, the Prophet had not been avenged. He was diminished. This terrorist attack, and the others before it, merely isolated the Islamic world further from the global mainstream. In its aftermath, we and our leaders repeat, again and again, “Not all Muslims”—and yet we collectively treat Muslim nations as a threat that must be contained. Equal members of the global community? No. Partners in the space program? Impossible.
The Islamic world is in relative decline. Or, more precisely, a large number of countries with a Muslim majority are not developing as rapidly as the rest of the world, and in some cases, like Syria, they are even regressing.
This is a golden age for most. In the last 100 years life expectancy has more than doubled. In the last 50 years the poverty rate has fallen by 80 per cent. During that same time, the number of wars fell by a similar figure and the number of nations governed democratically tripled.
But, while the global community leapt forward, Islamic nations (as defined as members of the Organization of Islamic Co-operation) have progressed at a much slower pace. This is the case across a wide variety of metrics.
The Social Progress Index, a comprehensive measurement of a nation’s well-being, which includes everything from access to water to freedom of movement, ranks Islamic countries behind every other region in the world, including non-Muslim African countries. The Muslim world does even worse on Transparency International’s Perceptions of Corruption Index. Life expectancy numbers are among the world’s lowest, more than 15 years fewer than North America. And, not surprisingly, on a per capita basis, Muslim nations publish scientific papers at less than one-tenth the frequency of Europeans.
If we are surprised by these numbers, Najmuddin Shaikh is not. The former foreign secretary of Pakistan recently lamented, “The Islamic world is in disarray and decline and that Muslim communities find themselves under siege-like conditions in the West and elsewhere is perhaps an understatement.”
Why has the Muslim world been unable to keep pace? Why is it besieged? The easiest response is to say they did this to themselves. The evidence of this is so pervasive it is hard to refute. For example, just last week alone, while the world was focused on France, there were dozens of other terrorist attacks where Muslims killed Muslims.
In Yemen, a large group of young men were applying for entry into the police academy. They were queued up along a stone wall, which intensified the blast of a car bomb - 33 died.
In Iraq, a wholesale market is held every Saturday morning in Baghdad’s western district of Baiyaa. There a bomb killed five. Later that morning another blast killed three more people in the nearby town of Madian.
In Lebanon, on the same day, a suicide bomber walked up to the crowded Omran Café in Tripoli and triggered his vest. Bloodied survivors were pulling themselves out of the rubble when a second bomber stepped in amongst them. There were nine dead and 37 injured.
In Pakistan, as people gathered to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday by distributing alms at a mosque in Rawalpindi, a bomber pushed his way in. The blast shattered all the nearby windows and killed seven.
In Nigeria, militants wrapped explosives around the midriff of a small 10-year old girl, and told her to walk into the market. When she reached the stalls where the chickens are sold, it went off, killing 19.
This is an incomplete list, from just last week, but it illustrates the broader story well. Internecine conflict in the Islamic world is endemic. The unrelenting Shia and Sunni schism dominates it, but it also includes tribal and ethnic divides. In 2013, there were 12 Western victims of terror attacks compared to 22,000 non-Western fatalities. These do not include those killed by the barrel bombs that Syrian President Assad dropped on his own people, or civilians killed by warfare in Afghanistan or Iraq. From the jungles of Sulawesi to the deserts of Libya, Muslims are killing Muslims at a rate that dwarfs the more highly publicized conflict with the West. In that light, it is hard to subscribe to the theory this is a clash of civilizations. Rather, it is one culture turning on itself.
The self-inflicted wounds are not always violent. The Taliban banned girls from being educated. In Syria, Islamic State closed all schools. In 2013, militants in Mali burned the fabled and ancient libraries of Timbuktu. In a speech just days before the Paris attacks, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi pleaded for an end to this self-destruction: “The Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost. And it is being lost by our own hands.”
Focusing just on the violence does not take into account the broader context, the economic and geographic circumstances in which these countries find themselves. The Maghreb (northwest Africa), the Arabian Peninsula, the Central Asia steppes, the Gulf of Guinea, the Indus valley, the Indonesian archipelago: each of these presents different but equally daunting barriers to building modern economies and functioning states. Whether it is drought or monsoons, a lack of harbours or impassible mountain ranges, the Islamic world was not dealt the best geographic hand.
It has faced economic hurdles, too. The international demand for heroin has created a lucrative but destructive poppy trade that the United States and all its allies could not even slow. Similarly, but perhaps less dramatically, the oil reserves of the Middle East and West Africa have been both a blessing and a curse, fuelling building booms, corruption and instability.
There are also the historical circumstances that must be acknowledged. The legacy of disastrous foreign intervention is everywhere. For hundreds of years the Dutch treated Indonesia as a warehouse, merely to be raided for its wealth, forestalling the evolution of local institutions. When independence came, dictators Sukarno and Suharto merely perfected what the Dutch had begun.
Bangladesh faced a similar colonial legacy, but one that was followed by partition and a brutal civil war. The elites who emerged redefined corruption, and it is difficult to judge which has done more damage: the typhoons or the politicians.
Further west, the arbitrarily drawn Durand Line was established in the 19th century to separate Pakistan and Afghanistan by cutting right through the Pashtun homeland. This colonial relic has remained a festering wound that makes both countries virtually ungovernable.
A similar exercise produced a comparable result in the Middle East. The secretly negotiated Sykes-Picot Agreement, creating spheres of influence for the Great Powers during the First World War, produced fractious borders and lit a bonfire of ethnic and sectarian violence that this week burned the Baiyaa market and the Omran Café.
Even recent history has been unkind to the Islamic world. The U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan exploded into regional instability. repeated conflicts with Israel have drained meagre budgets from militaries who spend most of their time blaming Zionist conspiracies for the repressive chaos they themselves create at home.
When one considers the heavy weight of these extenuating circumstances, it is easier to see that the terrorism of the last 20 years is not the reason the Islamic world has been left behind. But it is perhaps the reason it is staying there.
Lockerbie. Embassies in Africa. Sept. 11. Subways in London. A memorial in Ottawa. A café in Sydney. A magazine in Paris. We have witnessed a steady series of attacks against the West. Some of these were large and well-organized conspiracies, others lone-wolf attacks by mentally unstable men with tenuous connections to Islam. But they had the same effect: to provoke a fear in the West that Islam is a threat, and the impression that the Muslim world is not a partner, but a challenge to be managed.
We, and our governments, don’t say this. In fact, we do all we can to make it appear otherwise. We talk about engagement and launch various initiatives to build “constructive dialogue.” These are just euphemisms.
President Barack Obama wanted to use the space program as a tool to engage the Islamic world. He instructed NASA to help Muslim nations “feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.” In Canada, we reached out by, among other things, naming a special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Co-operation (OIC) and by sending its member countries over $12 billion in aid since 2002. During that same period, the United States sent $137 billion.
These efforts were not about expanding mutually beneficial relations with peers to create new opportunities. They were about preventing problems and neutralizing a threat. Most of our energy has gone into isolating, not engaging, the Islamic world. Compare, for example, what has been spent on intelligence, homeland security and military operations. Since 9/11, Canada tripled its spy budget and spent $18 billion sending troops to Afghanistan. The United States spent between $4 trillion and $6 trillion on military campaigns (including Iraq)—over 25 times more than they spent on engaging through aid.
With every act of terror, we push the Muslim world farther way. We launch more drones. We deploy more troops. We fortify more embassies. We watch more mosques. We accept fewer refugees. We issue fewer visas.
A passport from an Islamic nation is less welcome than one from any other region of the world. Citizens of the OIC enjoy visa-free travel to fewer countries than anyone else. This small fact tells a much larger story about the lack of interpersonal contact between Islamic nations and the rest of the world. It illustrates the fear that some of us feel when we see that the man boarding the flight ahead of us is wearing a shalwar kameez. It highlights the difficulty any of us have had bringing Muslim colleagues to international conferences, or transferring money to business partners in the Middle East. It makes us realize we can’t remember the last time someone talked about going to Egypt to see the pyramids. And it explains why last year less than two per cent of the visitors to Canada were from the Islamic world, despite those countries comprising 25 per cent of the world’s population.
It is not just the West. Russia, China, India: all the global powers have developed similar postures toward the Islamic world. Occasionally, although less frequently than the West, they talk about engagement. But really, like us, their strategy is primarily focused on containment.
The isolation also exists at the multilateral level. Only 19 per cent of global economies are not members of the World Trade Organization, but that short list is dominated by Islamic nations. The centrally important Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has only one Islamic member: Turkey. Canada belongs to 207 international organizations. The average Islamic nation belongs to about half that, making them less connected and included than are European, Latin American, Caribbean and Asian countries.
Of course, it is not all containment. The international community does engage more constructively with some Islamic countries than with others. For example, while Malaysia is not a member of the International Space Station partnership, it did second an astronaut to Russia, who then sent him to the space station. Turkey is not only a member of the OECD, it is also part of NATO. (But is hard to imagine it being invited to join today, given that just this week the United States cancelled the transfer of two frigates to the Turkish navy, due to growing concerns about its Islamist tendencies.)
The United States and Canada are negotiating with Indonesia so that we can enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. And Western oil companies are deeply entrenched in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. But these exceptions prove the rule. Unless you are among the most moderate members of the OIC, or drowning in oil, the international community is not interested.
Ironically, this isolation may be what the extremists actually want. Many of the terrorist attacks were meant to drive a wedge between the Muslim world and the West, to eliminate the degenerate influences of the outside. They want to be left behind, or at least left alone.
Can we change this dynamic? Will we continue to pull back from the Muslim world? It is difficult to find signs that this pattern can be broken. Our economies now depend on trillion-dollar industries whose sole purpose is to protect us from the Islamist threat by building better body scanners and faster cruise missiles. Our own governments have restructured themselves as vigilant watchdogs, safeguarding us from terror. Even as the Paris attacks were still unfolding, the Canadian government was announcing even more anti-terror legislation. And our political institutions have been rewired, dramatically shifting the balance between our personal freedom and our collective security. All of this is intended to build blast-proof walls between us and them.
But perhaps, if we realize that with every terrorist attack our collective instincts to contain the Muslim world grows stronger, we can change this. It would take some patience and courage on our part, and a few leaps of faith, to increase the free flow of our peoples and in their wake, perhaps ideas and values. Of course, it would also require an effort on the part of Islamic nations to reach out, too. We can’t drag them into the OECD.
Terrorists like those who captured our attention in France are not responsible for the relative decline of the Islamic world, but they are prolonging its isolation. This attack and all the others before it have compelled the international community to instinctively respond by containing the threat. But this is merely palliative. As the Muslim world is further contained, it becomes further alienated from the global community, and it falls further behind. This trend must change. We must recognize that as mankind moves further into space, some of us are being left behind.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Monday, January 19, 2015
Atheist Parasites
Charles Wild (1781–1835)
The Choir of Amiens Cathedral, c. 1862
Hand-colored aquatint mounted on heavy card stock
16 3/8" x 21 1/2"
2008 Photograph of the Choir of Amiens Cathedral
In this time of religious existenialism, this is what I wrote about secularists (i.e. atheists) here in Camera Lucida in 2009.
Heather MacDonald, who writes for the group blog Secular Right, and who participated in a video-taped dialogue entitled "God and Man on the Right", had this to say about religion:Secular Right has also been arguing that morality comes out of a human, innate moral sense...and religion is parasitic on humans' own moral sense [this is around 3:30 mark and goes on until around 4:00].Part of her argument is that she doesn't think it is necessary to bring "any kind of appeal to revelation" to support and argue for morality, since morality is grounded on "reason, observation of human nature and evidence."
Of course, that begs the question that an "appeal to revelation" is also grounded on "reason, observation of human nature and evidence."
Since humans innately managed to conjure up all these moral codes, who is to say that they couldn't have the innate ability to appeal to revelation, and interact with whoever manages this revelation to produce to those moral codes? Perhaps believers are the folks really grounded in reason.
There is a supreme arrogance in MacDonald's soft-spoken voice when she equates religion as parasitic on humans' moral sense. So, religious people steal from those hard-working secularists (to eventually destroy them, since that is what parasites do) all the morality they've innately developed, and turn around and attribute them to divine revelation.
I've never heard of this argument before. But, it shows a closed-mindedness and dearth of imagination that MacDonald must have that she can't even speculate that just as morality is innate, appeal to revelation is equally innate and acts as precursor to those moral values she thinks she plucks out of the independently working human mind.
In my bias and ignorance, I know that it is secularists who are killing off Europe, which has given up on an "appeal to revelation", as MacDonald so cleverly puts it. Whatever moral codes they have inherited came from this appeal, while their secularists friends thought otherwise. So, who are the parasites now?
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Sunday Gentleman
Photographic Portrait of a Victorian Gentleman
Failte Irish Pub
[Photo By: KPA]
This photograph hangs in one of the alcoves in the Failte Irish Pub and Restaurant. It may be hanging in a pub, but it surely merits a Sunday post. This gentleman looks kind enough not to scare away little children, but firm enough to get things straight. He may have a pint (but not two), but won't have any qualms over others (men, of course) doing so.
Here is a photo I took of the alcove at another time. The room is, appropriately, called "The Victorian Parlour."
Failte Irish Pub, The Victorian Parlour
[Photo By: KPA]
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Camel at the Cloisters
Wall Painting of a Camel, first half 12th century (perhaps 1129–34)
From the hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga
Fresco transferred to canvas; 65 x 134 in. (165.1 x 340.3 cm)
The Cloisters Collection, 1961 (61.219)
[Photo By: KPA, December 13, 2012]
I just found a way to get to my XD-Picture Card files, from my old Olympus camera. Apparently, this card is pretty much out of date now, but I managed to find a memory card reader, which allows me to download a variety of files.
This is not a great photograph (my camera then was having problems with interiors and using a flash would produce too much glare). I only recently found it (or was able to find it due to the reader).
I took the photograph in August 2012, when I came to New York for a brief summer trip. I met Larry Auster for several outings, despite his ill health, and we went to the Cloisters together. I went twice, (the first time is when I took the photograph). The second time, I went with Larry, having figured out that it would be possible for him to make the trek all the way out there.
I think this photograph is symbolic of our times, and also symbolic of the battle Larry was fighting. It is a reminder not to stop, and not to lapse into complacency. We may stop, but this hard and determined enemy doesn't. I will explain below.
For some reason, I didn't take any photos of Larry. I think I was just being polite. But below is one of him taken at the dinner planned for (and by) him, to celebrate Christmas together with his friends.
He sent me the photo with these remarks: "A photo of me at the dinner with my little pig eyes... My eyes are already small, and when I haven't had much sleep they get even smaller."
Larry was never one to fall to vanity, nor was he one to mince his words. I think he looks cheerful. We came from far and wide to celebrate Christmas with him. He was happy to be amongst friends.
Larry Auster
Kennedy's Pub and Restaurant, New York City
December 8, 2012
Now back to the camel.
Here is how the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes this wall painting:
The hermitage of San Baudelio de Berlanga was constructed in the beginning of the eleventh century at the heart of the frontier between Islamic and Christian lands. Its interior was transformed 150 years later with the addition of two cycles of vibrant wall paintings. The upper walls of the church were decorated with a series of scenes from the life of Christ, while the lower sections include boldly painted hunt scenes and images of animals, all of which derive from earlier Islamic objects.We are back again in that fascinated mode of the medieval Christian kingdoms. Camels are desert creatures, belonging to their Muslim masters. The medieval artist who created this wall painting didn't quite know how to depict the camel's hooves. He cleverly made them flat and wide, suitable for travel along unstable desert sands. But why create camels in the first place, other than a desire to bring the exotic closer? It was this openness, and "tolerance" that eventually led to the Islamic conquest of Spain.
Associated with aristocratic power and pursuits, the camel was a subject often seen on the courtly fine arts of the Umayyad caliphate and Ta’ifa monarchies. Islamic court art was known and admired by inhabitants of the Christian kingdoms for its costly materials and unparalleled craft. Though the Christians under Alfonso VII had definitively wrested Berlanga from Islamic forces in 1124, the paintings in the hermitage suggest that they continued to rely on Islamic motifs and the style of the Islamic court when seeking to create a luxurious setting.
In our eagerness to experience the exotic, we contemporary folk have made our cities dangerous for conquest once again. It seems that we in the West will always have this perennial cycle of openness, then conquest (by those we opened our doors to), then war, then freedom once again. But this time, it may not have that desired ending.
Larry spent a good deal of his time writing about this civilization we might lose. He exhorted us to stop our lazy ways and not to neglecting this civilization. And he warned us about the dire consequences if we did.
In view of the recent shocking events in France, where armed Jihadis were in the middle of the streets of Paris with sophisticated weaponry, I say that we pay especial heed to his words.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
The Poor, Discomfited George Clooney
The usually debonair George Clooney looks discomfitted, here with his new wife, Amal Alamuddin
I wonder why?
Here's the scoop on her, from last March 2014 (I collected these from a variety of sources - there may be more to add):
- She’s Druze, which is an offshoot of Islam.
- She is defending Julian Assange, of the Wikileaks fame in his extradition case with Sweden
- Her mother, Baria, is a foreign affairs editor at Al Hayat, a Lebanese newspaper
- She attended NYU School of Law
- After graduation, she joined the New York firm Sullivan & Cromwell, where she worked for three years before moving to London
- She clerked for Sonia Sotomayor when the future Supreme Court justice was a judge at the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, which covers New York
- She's worked as an adviser to the UN Special Envoy, Kofi Annan, on Syria
- She has been been Counsel to the inquiry launched on the use of drones in counter-terrorism
- She's the legal advisor to the King of Bahrain
- Sh has written on international criminal law
- She has edited a book entitled The Law and Practice of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon
- At the Doughty Street barristers' chambers, she represented Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian Prime Minister
- She represented Abdullah Al Senussi, former Libyan intelligence chief and Muamar Gaddafi’s right-hand man in a case of alleged crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court
Alamuddin with Julian Assange
Clooney looks peaked and stressed. I don't think it is the new life as a married man, as the new life as a man married to Alamuddin. I wonder what they talk about? The terrible United States, with all those war criminals? The wonderful Middle East, blighted and maligned by the West?
Alamuddin looks like she's close to her family. Family dinners must be something special. Debbie Schlussel writes this about her experience with the family:
Over the past few months, actor George Clooney’s been photographed all over the place with Amal Alamuddin, a very anti-Israel Lebanese Arab who worked for the United Nations and represented Wikileaks’ anti-American former chief, Julian Assange. The Lebanese legal book she authored is extremely anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. Alamuddin, who was Clooney’s date to the Obama White House last month, is not Muslim. I’m familiar with Ms. Alamuddin (pronounced “Ah-lah-muh-DEEN”) and her family because I met her and them at the wedding of her cousin in the mid-1990s. They are extremely anti-Israel, and I was subjected to their absurd, non-stop anti-Israel questions and comments as the only non-Arab (other than the bride and her family) at a dinner the night before the wedding.Clooney, I think, is in over his head. His Druze-lawyer-anti-Israeli wife will be nothing but a handful. What a stupid man.
I went to law school with Alamuddin’s cousin (who has the same last name) and the cousin’s wife. I was friends with the cousin’s wife (who is not an Arab), and when they were dating in law school, I repeatedly heard from him about how he hated Israel and sided with the Palestinians and the P.L.O. Later, when I was invited to the the Alamuddin wedding, I was on the receiving end of more of that. As I noted, I was the only non-Arab at the pre-wedding dinner at Chicago’s now-defunct “Uncle Tonoose” restaurant. They all knew I was Jewish, and the conversations and questions directed at me were a mix of myself as both Jewish museum exhibit and target of anti-Israel questioning. Clooney’s future girlfriend was there, too, and she was in her late teens at the time (I was in my mid-20s).
The situation with the Alamuddin family was surreal, as I was asked repeatedly about “Jewish Europeans” “invading” Israel, er . . . “Palestine.”
And one strange thing. He wore the same suit he wore to his wedding at the Golden Globes. Yes he was there for Golden Globes' lifetime achievement award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, but doesn't that warrant its own "special" suit?
This is the confident and debonair Clooney of a couple of years ago.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Creepy Eyes Win At The Golden Globes
Director Tim Burton next to one of the "Big Eyes" illustrations
Big Eyes is a true story about an "artist" who makes creepy, cartoonish illustrations of little girls with giant eyes.
Who are these drawings for? Young children would be creeped out, and older people, well, why would they want such juvenile art adorning their walls?
This is what Burton says about these paintings, which he saw all over the place as a young child:
“At my doctor’s office, there was a big-eyed girl with a poodle. At my dentist’s office, there was a series of kids with cats. When I went to the market, there were greeting cards with Keane ballerinas, Keane waifs, Keane cowboys, and so on. I was fascinated by their huge, sad, Big Brother–ish eyes. I loved that these strange children always seemed to be watching me. It was like being in a bizarre, captivating dream.”And now, Burton is directing a film based on these images.
But who would want to star in it? Well, one actress, at least: Amy Adams.
Burton continues:
“I happened to be standing next to her at the luncheon for the Academy Award nominees. I was there for Frankenweenie, and Amy was there for The Master. We chatted, and she called me the next day and said she had read Big Eyes. She wanted to play Margaret.”Actresses all want to look glamorous, a la Old Hollywood.
But, none of these contemporary actresses are making films worthy of those classic times. Instead, they are quite happily playing ghouls, vampires, and now creators of ghoulish art.
Adams was all set on making a movie on Margaret Keane, as Tim Burton recounts:
“I happened to be standing next to her at the luncheon for the Academy Award nominees. I was there for Frankenweenie, and Amy was there for The Master. We chatted, and she called me the next day and said she had read Big Eyes. She wanted to play Margaret.”
Creepy-eyed girl in Margaret Keane's 1963 In the Garden (there are many variations to the tile and date of this image, but here seems to be an authentic one).
Here is Adams as Margaret Keane, next to one of the creepy eyed "Big Eyes":
And here is Adams, in her Versace and Tiffany's:
Amy Adams in her lilac Versace gown
at the Golden Globes on Sunday
Adams was fully decked in Tiffany's at the Golden Globes, according to this site, with:
...drop earrings, a platinum and diamond five-row bracelet and a platinum and 2.12-carat square cushion modified brilliant diamond ring.None of the major film critics are talking about the creepiness of Margaret Keane's illustrations (I cannot call them paintings). But a few dare to voice the obvious (albeit in single lines, or as their article heading).
Here's a review at the Nashiville Scene:
If you’re like me, perhaps you saw the trailer and groaned, “Why why why Margaret Keane?! Yack.”...What [Burton] can do is tell a stranger-than-fiction story about a creepy man who pretended to paint his wife’s creepy kid art.
Detail of Our Children, painted by Margaret Keane around 1960
In 1961, The Prescolite Manufacturing Corporation bought Our Children and presented it to the United Nations Children's Fund. It is in the United Nations permanent collection of art.
Here is the website of the artist, Margaret Keane.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Monday, January 12, 2015
It's All About the He
Bay of Pigs is an essential part of your Up Your Alley® weekend [Source]
Audience member: My fiancée and I are allergic to dogs, so we're thinking of getting a pig.
(At this point I assumed this fiancée was a "she.")
Wendy (of the Wendy Show): How about a cat?
Audience member: He's allergic to cats.
There you have it (it's all about the"he"...).
I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise, but each time I am surprised, when the hes, shes (and maybe some day the its) are all mixed up.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Richly
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom
Colossians 3:16
[Photo By: KPA]
Failte Lights
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Saturday, January 10, 2015
Birthdays
[From my post last year]
The source of these images, as far as I can find, is "an illuminated manuscript Book of Hours on vellum. - Paris, ca. 1485."
Sanderus
...specialise[s] in antiquarian books, medieval manuscripts, antique maps and prints from the 15th to the 18th centuries.The company is named after the Flemish scholar Antoon Sanders (who "Latinized his name to Antonius Sanderus").
It looks like Sanders sells original books, which I deduced from the price of the book, which is about US$3,000.
I also did a preliminary transaction to authenticate the site, and they have sent me a username and password, with the name of print I sent in.
So, I can say with almost 100% certainty that this print is an original 16th century print. But, I would have thought that it would have been purchased by a gallery or a museum.
Books of Hours were:
...richly illuminated...form[ing] an important record of life in the 15th and 16th centuries as well as the iconography of medieval Christianity. Some of them were also decorated with jewelled covers, portraits, and heraldic emblems. Some were bound as girdle books for easy carrying, though few of these or other medieval bindings have survived. Luxury books, like the Talbot Hours of John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, may include a portrait of the owner, and in this case his wife, kneeling in adoration of the Virgin and Child as a form of donor portrait. In expensive books, miniature cycles showed the Life of the Virgin or the Passion of Christ in eight scenes decorating the eight Hours of the Virgin, and the Labours of the Months and signs of the zodiac decorating the calendar. Secular scenes of calendar cycles include many of the best known images from books of hours, and played an important role in the early history of landscape painting.Many astrological explanations focus on the "goat" of Capricorn, but there is also the tail:
[W]hile Capricorns are able to climb life’s mountain peaks and succeed, they’re also able to plumb the emotional oceans of life and one of the least known qualities about a Capricorn, is how spiritually in tune they are. Many Capricorns have an inexplicable sixth sense that comes from this aspect of their nature. Capricorn is a complex and contradictory Sign and this comes from it being part goat, part fish.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Friday, January 9, 2015
Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie!
Look at this pathetic collection of westerners, Parisians, FRENCH, who have Général De Gaulle in recent memory, standing there with their little signs!
This is what is going to "set them free?"
Geert Wilders posted this statement on the jihad in France and the murder of the French journalists, at his website, and also the video below:
The West is at war, and should de-Islamize
The assassinations of ten journalists and two policemen today in Paris serve as a warning to all the countries in the free world. We are at war. Charlie Hebdo was under police protection following numerous threats because of its outspoken criticism of Islam. Despite the protection by the police, terrorists were able to murder their opponents.
Western governments have to realize that we are at war. We should no longer show any respect for an ideology that rejects our fundamental values. The only way to defend our democratic values and fundamental freedoms is to start the de-Islamization of our societies.
We have to close our borders, reinstate border controls, get rid of political correctness, introduce administrative detention, and stop immigration from Islamic countries. We must defend ourselves. Enough is enough.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Thursday, January 8, 2015
"I couldn’t give a damn if you offend my religion!"
A Muslim would never say this. Trust a Christian to do so. This is what Michael Coren says in an interview here on his book Hatred: Islam's War on Christianity:
In the modern West, we are all to be equal offenders and equally offended: Christians, Muslims, Jews, and so on. But the reality is that very few cultures are willing to allow their sacred things to be tarnished, and least of all by outsiders. That is why Muslims behave the way they do.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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LOPEZ: People understandably don’t want to offend people and their religion. Is that the wrong way to be looking at things?This is false and wrong. How can anyone stand by and let something sacred to him be desecrated? I have a whole section on "Desecration" in Reclaiming Beauty, where I discuss various artistic attempts at destroying that which is beautiful, and Godly.
COREN: Why? Why, why, why? I couldn’t give a damn if you offend my religion! I am a Catholic and my beliefs are far too strong to be damaged by some cartoon or joke or argument in a book. This fatuous modern notion of “being offended” is a moan, an annoying weep. I am offended, therefore I am. If you don’t like something, don’t read it or watch it. We are not made of glass and we won’t break. All I ask for is an even playing field. What happens now is that it’s fine to offend Christians but not to offend other religions. We have to be careful here. What matters in a healthy democracy is not the protection of feelings but the right to speak one’s mind. Remember, it’s the Left who tend to complain about being offended while habitually abusing the Right.
In the modern West, we are all to be equal offenders and equally offended: Christians, Muslims, Jews, and so on. But the reality is that very few cultures are willing to allow their sacred things to be tarnished, and least of all by outsiders. That is why Muslims behave the way they do.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Cause Célèbre!
Does this look like a Cause Celebre to you?
An email I sent to a correspondent:
Dear...Correspondent:
[H]ere is an email I sent to Michael Coren, who has written a new book titled Hatred: Islam's War on Christianity, and whose lecture I attended last week at the Jewish Defense League. I wrote this reply to his email after he told me to say he cannot find any way to have me on his nightly show.
I gave him good reviews [here and here] for his book at my website, since I didn't want to pick too much at the details.
But, unfortunately, he is of the same ilk as Robert Spencer, Jamie Glasov, David Horowitz, et al. The Islam apologists/Islam destroyers, who never quite took it seriously enough to take what the Koran said as what Muslims really do believe, and who would say things like "destroy radical Islam."
It was a long shot, trying to contact Coren, and perhaps to guage if he really can go the distance with Islam, conservatism, etc, since I really do need supporters here in Canada, and links to publishers. But, it looks like I will have to keep focused on what I'm doing, and doing it as authentically as possible.
Best,
Kidist
I don't know much about this Coren fellow, but much of what drives commercial broadcasting, Tv, and print, is very specific and needs to fit their niche and attract viewers. Perhaps you're viewed as not controversial enough, or too controversial, or too-much-this-and-not-enough-that. It's hard to know. You're not famous and controversial, two things which can help drive media attention. But do keep plugging away. Recall those authors who submitted their book to 30 publishers and were turned down by all, and then one publisher picks it up and has some success. Persistence pays off. Your follow up to Coren is very good. Maybe you could get yourself arrested, or something, to drive some media attention. Just kidding. It is difficult to penetrate the media barrier....Kidist:
I think I'm TOO nice and proper! When I breach out of that, people are actually surprised. Even Laura (of The Thinking Housewife) once said to me that I was full of surprises, and someone else said (it was actually at Jim's (Kalb) dinner) that I don't look like my blog...And here, my correspondent goes through my email, giving his views, and advice:
Yes, I will start to be difficult, obnoxious etc. I thought of reporting Coren for "racism" or better "discrimination" or something. He is discriminating against me because I dare to say that Islam has no place in Canada. He daren't have me say what I think we should do about that (i.e. present Larry's carefully outlined program for how to deal with immigration and Muslims, and Islam). Coren has all kinds of other "minority" groups on his show. How about an Ethiopian, Christian, Westerner!!! I will send an email to that Jamie Glasov of Horowitz and Frontpage Magazine, and other pseudo conservative sites which Coren idolizes.
Now that I'm over the disappointment, I will just "have fun," as the saying goes. And keep on plugging.
KPA:
I think I'm TOO nice and proper!Correspondent:
You do come across as being nice and proper, and a fine thing it is, too, in our liberal culture of abrasive and improper women. I wouldn't like to see you as yet another loud-mouthed, obnoxious chick. A proper conservative man, in a proper conservative society, would properly deplore that. But then, this is hardly a proper conservative society. And then, there was Joan of Arc. And I think Phyliss Schlafly is a fine model of a woman who stands up for civilized values against the rising tide of liberation.KPA:
When I breach out of that, people are actually surprised. Even Laura [of the Thinking Housewife] once said to me that I was full of surprises, and someone else said (it was actually at Jim's [Kalb] dinner) that I don't look like my blog...
Yes, I will start to be difficult, obnoxious etc.Correspondent:
I think you can be effective without having an obnoxious manner. Larry was a good example of that. He always (well, almost always) said what he had to say in a calm, deliberate voice, reasonable, factual, and with great conviction.KPA:
I thought of reporting Coren for "racism" or better "discrimination" or something. He is discriminating against me because I dare to say that Islam has no place in Canada.Correspondent:
We shouldn't try to use illegitimate leftist arguments like "discrimination" against our opponents. It would look like a cynical ploy.KPA:
He daren't have me say what I think we should do about that (i.e. present Larry's carefully outlined program for how to deal with immigration and Muslims, and Islam). Coren has all kinds of other "minority" groups on his show. How about an Ethiopian, Christian, Westerner!!! I will send an email to that Jamie Glasov of Horowitz and Frontpage Magazine, and other pseudo conservative sites which Coren idolizes.Correspondent:
You're at the place Larry arrived at long ago -- the greatest obstacle to defeating liberalism is our own so-called-conservatives, who accept liberal principles like diversity and non-discrimination and merely try to ameliorate the worst symptoms rather than opposing liberalism on fundamental ground.KPA:
Now that I'm over the disappointment, I will just "have fun," as the saying goes. And keep on plugging.Correspondent:
You do have the unique advantage of being a non-Westerner, and a woman, who opposes liberalism. We tend to feel guilty when one of our own, a white man, tries to defend us. But people will be more open to listening when one of the "other" -- a chick! an Ethiopian chick!! -- says non-liberal things. Say it in a quiet, yet firm voice of conviction -- "you so-called-conservative leaders are one of the reasons we're losing". Unfortunately, you'll find the liberals are especially hate-filled towards anyone they perceive to be one of "their own" (and that includes Ethiopian chicks) who goes off the reservation and starts denouncing them and their false religion. It really gets under their skin. Oh, you could get yourself arrested on hate charges, don't you think, in Canada?KPA:
Agreed, 100%.Correspondent:
Thanks for the reality check.
Getting arrested in Canada for hate charges? The sheer confusion would just kill everyone!
"The sheer confusion would just kill everyone!"-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yeah, and you'd probably get a lot more hits at your blog! And then Coren and the rest would be falling all over themselves to get you on their shows. Asrat, La Cause Celebre!
:-)
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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