Opus Dei: "It is Gruesome"

Should Christians emulate the Muslims? Should they tear the place up and burn a few multiplexes when Hollywood produces a blasphemous movie like The Da Vinci Code?

Mary Wakefield went to see the movie and found herself cringing after about fifteen minutes.

Five minutes into the film, I began to squint with embarrassment, and after 15 I slid down in my seat so as not to catch a Christian eye. The flick itself is daft... but the attack on Christianity is breathtaking.

After the movie she exchanged a couple of words with Jack Valero, PR man for Opus Dei, “for once without his trademark grin.”

"It is gruesome to see my brothers and sisters represented in this awful way, it bears no relation to reality," he said.

Hollywood is, after all, just a bunch of artists. They get their anti-religious bigotry because it is in the air. Anti-religious bigotry is in the air because believers in our modern secular religions higher up the food chain, the MSM and the universities, fill the public square with their secular culture and their secular religion. Hollywood types pick it up and turn it into movies.

How can you blame them? They experience their anti-religious art as an enlightened and creative challenge to a backward superstition. They want to enlighten the world and convert it to their secular religion of government-run compassion and sensitivity and individual creativity, and they are completely right to understand Christianity as a stake poised above their beautiful prostrate bodies, about to be driven into their enlightened secular hearts.

(Yes, of course history is witness to countless religious wars conducted in the name of God. But what do you think the great wars of the twentieth century were all about? They were wars provoked by militant secular religions.)

The culture war is a religious war. It is a war between a God-based religion and a secular religion. It probably won’t come to an end until one side wins.

Nobody can know who will come out on top. But there is this to think about. The secular world view may be helpful and beneficial to an educated, creative elite. It is, after all, their religion. But the record shows that it is utter ruin to the folk trying to make it in the city. That is why the welfare state has made the inner city into a war zone of joblessness, helplessness, and hopelessness—and brutal violence. The people who have just arrived in the city need not so much material as spiritual aid.

That is something that our secular elite just cannot understand.

Put a Stake Through Freud's Heart

What should we do about Freud to celebrate his 150th birthday? Dig him up and “put a stake through his heart,” writes Spengler in Asia Times.

No one did more than Freud to reduce women to sexual objects, a condition against which women rebel by seeking to destroy the objectified body.

That’s why there’s an epidemic of eating disorders and “self-harming,” the practice of cutting yourself with razor blades.

But why? “Freud claimed to have discovered the source of all neurosis in the repression of the sexual impulse, or libido.” This seems to be harmless enough on the face of it. But today

Women enter adolescence with the expectation that they will be used but not loved. Men no longer need to feign affection to receive sexual favors; they merely need ask. It is no surprise that young women have come to despise their bodies, some to the point of destroying them.

So the old system whereby women gave sex to receive love is broken. And not just that.

All the major religions of the world attempt to sanctify the family; Freud sought to expose it as a hypocritical viper's nest of neurosis. Religion, he taught, totemized power relations; God was the projected form of the castrating father.

On top of that, the mother gave sexual pleasure to the infant through the breast, the father repressed the son’s interest in his mother, and the daughter bemoaned the lack of a penis. Ever seem a family like that? No? Really.

The indesdructible fact that we moderns have rebeled against is that marriage is society’s clever little dodge to keep men attached to the mother of their children way after the collapse of their physical beauty.

The love of a life partner, the shared love of their children, the honor of the community and the knowledge that the human life cycle is linked to something eternal are the consolations to women for the loss of their beauty.

We’ve thrown all that away, and none more completely and more emphatically than secular, liberal women. And then we wonder why girls are cutting themselves up.

Read the whole thing.

Opus Dei Finds Coded Message in Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown must be laughing all the way to the bank. His Da Vinci Code has got everyone talking, and that is what you need to sell books and movies.

To all those out there outraged by the eruption of the Arian heresy, Fr. John Wauck (of Opus Dei!) says to cool it. Writer Dan Brown obviously doesn’t take himself too seriously, so neither should we. On the contrary, a coded look at DVC shows that Brown is having a grand old time with his book, even laughing at himself as a hack writer.

He sits his hero Robert Langdon down to a power lunch with his editor Faukman (an anagram of Brown’s own editor Kaufman) who is worried about whether Langdon’s book about the divinity of Christ is real scholarship. The editor,

worried by the manuscript’s daring conjectures about Jesus, Mary Magdalen, and the Holy Grail, wants to make sure that Langdon has scholarly support for his theory, so he reminds him: “You’re a Harvard historian, for God’s sake, not a pop schlockmeister looking for a quick buck.”

Ahem. No professional writer of thrillers could doubt what business he was in. And it does not take a genius to figure out that secular educated women, the major buyers of fiction, would could easily warm to a novel about the sacred feminine that interprets 2,000 years of history as a male patriarchal conspiracy. So Fr. Wauck advises us all to lighten up:

Brown is clearly a good sport who knows perfectly well what he’s up to, and he can’t resist tipping his hand to let us in on the joke. So hats off to an author who’s not ashamed of coming across as a “pop schlockmeister looking for a quick buck” — and, as we now know, finding it with a vengeance — literally.

But the big question is really, will the movie sell tickets? The schlockmeister made his quick buck, and good luck to him. But can Hollywood make its buck too?

South Americans Wary of Chavez

How dangerous is Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez? Everybody is suddenly getting anxious about lefty dictators taking over in South America. But one result of his saber-rattling is that other South American leaders are moving closer to the United States, according to Martin Krause.

South American leaders have been meeting in Vienna to negotiate with the European Union about a free-trade pact. And it turns out that many of the leaders are less than elated with the Venezuelan’s bully-boy tactics.

Chávez did a great job breaking up the Summit of the Americas in November 2005, but the result seems to have been to encourage leaders to move more towards a private economy and expanded trade. Writes Krause:

The socialist Chilean president Michelle Bachelet continues and deepens the reforms of past decades, they are now even considering the privatization of jails. The socialist Uruguayan president is asking for bilateral trade negotiations with the US.

The Peruvians sent home the Venezuelan ambassador for meddling in their election. And the Brazilians aren’t too happy about Bolivia expropriating their state oil company, Petrobras.

And what happens to Venezuela’s big stick when oil prices go back down again?

It's the Law and Order, Stupid

The boast of Tony Blair’s New Labour Party was “joined-up” government, a government that would communicate with itself and get things done.

And the British people believed it.

Unfortunately bureaucratic organizations are designed for precisely the opposite purpose, for imposing top-down strategy. It is like an army. The general at the top issues the order and the underlings all execute his plan.

That means if you want to do something more flexible than fight battles and march from A to B, the bureaucratic model is not the best fit.

If you want a flexible, responsive system then you must choose the market as your organizational model. A market, need we add, in which people spend their own money buying goods and services. Other Peoples’ Money need not apply.

The ruin of New Labour was inevitable. You can’t make government bureaucracies into flexible, responsive, “joined-up” organisms. And the more you try, the more the bureaucracy just slows down to a stop, and ceases doing anything.

So now, nine years after being swept into office on a platform to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” and after egregious failures to keep the peace, Blair is reduced, according to the London Spectator, to asserting that

the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’.

Well, do tell. The criminal justice system is just about the only thing that government should be doing.

But modern progressive government doesn’t care about that. Its bureaucracies are too busy handing out loot to the government’s supporters in the name of compassion and sensitivity to care about law and order. Anyway, you can’t do anything about crime until you have corrected the root causes of crime in poverty and alienation.

So Britain is sitting about where the US was back in 1990 when 30 years of liberal policing had reduced the inner cities to a violent hell.

On Immigration, Just Keep the Economy Growing

So which is it? Robert Samuelson says that immigration is a problem because there’s a conflict coming between a burgeoning Hispanic immigrant population of the less-educated and retiring baby-boomers who are going to want their benefits.

The American Immigration Law Foundation says that the Hispanic immigrants are doing fine and that

Latinos experience substantial socioeconomic progress across generations compared to both their immigrant forefathers and native Anglos.

Let’s face it. There has been a conflict between established Americans and immigrants since the founding. The common school movement was founded in part to force assimilation of the dangerous Catholic Irish that were emerging in the 1830s. Then we were worried about Jews in 1900, blacks in the 1960s, and now Hispanics in the 21st century.

The problem is always the same. Will the uneducated, unadapted immigrants trash the America that we higher-toned Americans have so tenderly built?

Then answer always is: We can’t be sure. Up to now, immigrants have always assimilated into the spirit of democratic capitalism, more or less, sooner or later. But will they assimilate this time?

In The New Americans Michael Barone shows how Jews, Italians, and Irish were the problem immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, just as East Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks are the problem now. Their success in assimilation depended upon their exposure, before arrival in the urban economy, to the culture of the rule of law.

Then as now the Democrats latched onto the new immigrants for their votes and also because Democrats believe in race, class, and ethnic politics.

What will happen this time? We don’t know. But we can help things along by making sure that there are jobs, jobs, jobs. As long as there are jobs, then people can rub along.

It is when the economy goes seriously south, as during the Great Depression when the suits totally screwed things up, that you need to watch out.

So while it is sensible to worry about resentful immigrants and selfish baby-boomers, the big thing is to keep the economy in good shape. You do that and a lot of problems just look after themselves.

Bush Signs Tax Cut and Market Falls Out of Bed

President Bush signed today the tax cut extensions recently passed by Congress. At the signing ceremony he said that

Our pro-growth policies stand in stark contrast to those in Washington who believe you grow your economy by raising taxes and centralizing power.

Meanwhile the stock market fell out of bed with the Dow declining by over 200 points to 11,205.61, down over 400 points since May 10. And the dollar has declined. And interest rates are going up.

Is this the end of the Goldilocks economy of the last three years? Or is the market testing new Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who has waffled about future interest rate increases.

In the United Kingdom, Anatole Kaletsky thinks the problem is that Bernanke has been too clear about his policy, reversing the deliberate obfuscation of Alan Greenspan.

He started off by emphasising, quite rightly, his strong belief in the Fed’s dual mandate: to maintain price stability and achieve the highest possible rate of economic growth. He then promised to call a halt to monetary tightening and do everything to keep the economy growing, even if inflation continued to accelerate “temporarily” in the months ahead. When currency and bond investors, whose wealth is decimated by inflation, quite predictably took umbrage and started selling their dollar holdings, Mr Bernanke quickly changed his tune and started presenting himself as an aggressive inflation-foe. He then “clarified” this apparently hawkish message by repeating that he might call a “pause” in the Fed’s rate hikes if that was what the economic statistics dictated.

Is that clear?

The truth probably is that the runup in oil prices has finally started to bite on economic growth. People at my local Arco gas station aren’t quite as eager to fill ’em up as they were back in January.

Could it be that investors are looking at future earnings and don’t think the future is quite as rosy as it was a few months ago?