Strip Football

STRIP FOOTBALL

Jerry Harkins

On September 5, 1998, the University of Southern Mississippi Golden Eagles seemed to lose its season-opening football game to Penn State by the score of 34 - 6.  The Nittany Lions went on to post 8 more wins and 3 losses that year and then defeated Kentucky in the Outback Bowl. 

Not so fast my friend, the story was not over.  On July 23, 2012, the National Collegiate Athletic Association declared that Southern Miss had actually won that game and Kentucky had prevailed in the bowl game.  In fact, Penn State was declared the loser of every single game it had played in the 14 years following its loss to Mississippi.  (But see Subsequent Note 2.) In the technical parlance of the sports world, the NCAA “vacated” 112 victories.  This was meant to “strip” Joe Paterno of the title of “winningest coach in major college football history” for the crimes of one of his assistants.  Those crimes, centered around a long-running pedophilia scandal, were horrendous.  The punishment, however, requiring the re-writing and falsification of history, made a mockery not only of the sanity of the NCAA--nothing new there-- but also the probity and integrity of the academic enterprise.  If a university does nothing else, it must be undeviating in the pursuit of truth, as elusive and frustrating as that pursuit often is.  Penn State, however, meekly bowed to a travesty.  They might as well have closed their doors and thrown the keys away.  Instead, early the day before the NCAA announced its decree, the school blanketed the stadium plaza with blue construction tarps to hide what was going on, called in the police to guard the site from crazed fans and removed a 900-pound bronze statue of Mr. Paterno to a secure but undisclosed location.  He thereby became an official non-person six months to the day after he had died.  He was suddenly one with the legion of Russians obliterated by the censors of the old Soviet Union.  He had been disappeared, turned into a non-person by the Penn State Thought Police.

Organizations that govern sports tend to be staffed by low life ne’er-do-wells, has-beens who never rose above the second string but played just enough to get a letter and keep a tenuous grasp on their athletic scholarships.  Universities, on the other hand, tend to be run by academics who are bored by sports except for their salutary effect on alumni loyalty.  This is a lethal combination.  Not only does it confer power on the otherwise inept, but it provides them a platform on what they perceive to be the moral high ground.

In the interests of this higher morality, the immortal Jim Thorpe was “stripped” of his gold medals from the 1912 Olympic Games.  Seventy years later, the International Olympic Committee admitted its mistake.  It didn’t do much good for Thorpe who had died in poverty thirty years earlier.  The redoubtable Tonya Harding was “stripped” of her 1994 national figure skating championship but not her 1991 title.  It was never clear exactly what her crime was other than extremely bad taste in ex-husbands but one thing led to another and she did jail time including service on what passes for a chain gang in Oregon for offenses committed in Detroit. Lance Armstrong was “stripped” of all his cycling victories including his seven consecutive victories in the Tour de France. He was accused of doping and investigated many times at the behest of his opponents and the French racing authorities but never convicted or even charged in a court of law. Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived was declared a “permanently ineligible” non-person for gambling.  The penalty means that he cannot be elected to the Hall of Fame which, like the Methodist Church, does not approve of gambling.  (Rose also did six months in the federal pen and 1,000 hours of community service for failing to report income from, among other things, gambling at race tracks.)  Marion Jones was “stripped” of her five Olympic medals for committing perjury about performance enhancing drugs.  She did six months in some federal medical lock-up and a half-way house because the judge thought she was a chronic liar.  The athletic bureaucrats (Pooh-bahs) also tried to strip her teammates in the 100 X 4 and 400 X 4 relay races but the accessory malefactors prevailed on appeal.  So, as things stood, three fourths of the American team won those events and one fourth did not.

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, said he was disappointed by the arbitrator’s decision.  Dr. Rogge is a physician and sixteen-time winner of the Belgian national yachting championship.   As Patrick Sandusky, a spokesperson for the United States Olympic Committee (and no relation to the Penn State child molester Jerry Sandusky) said, “Although we continue to believe that the U.S. medals in the 4 x 100 and 4 x 400-meter women’s relays were unfairly won due to Ms. Jones’s doping, we have always recognized that the athletes who made up the U.S. teams might have a legal basis on which to defend these medals.”  In his youth, Mr. Sandusky who had been a long snapper and reserve center for the Northern Illinois Huskies, turned out to be right.  The court ordered the I.O.C. to pay the athletes 10,000 Swiss francs, about $9,500, toward their legal expenses.  The women are currently  pursuing a case against the U.S.O.C. arguing that in failing to support them it breached a contractual duty. A decision is pending in that case.

“Stripping” has been imposed by The International Olympic Committee 55 times since 1968.  Somehow, though, the Committee never noticed the East German “Doping for Gold” program which involved thousands of athletes over a period of at least 24 years.  But no matter.  The idea is to get ink for the enforcers and you don’t do that by going after non-celebrities.

Let us be clear that we do not approve of child molestation or the use of performance enhancing drugs or, in Ms. Harding’s case, hanging around with unsavory boyfriends.  We regret that such offenses are widespread in our culture and understand that their prevalence does not excuse them.  We are, however, not overly worried that such offenses threaten the very fabric of civilization.  Moreover, we are dismayed by persecutors, inquisitors and prosecutors so desperate for public notice that they seize  upon any opportunity to make life miserable for celebrities.  We are also dismayed by the hypocrisy of the sports bureaucracy and the media.

In announcing its decision the NCAA said, “These events should serve as a call to every single school and athletics department to take an honest look at its campus environment and eradicate the 'sports are king' mindset that can so dramatically cloud the judgment of educators.”  From now on, educators will share the vision of the NCAA in which 7-foot tall basketball players win graduate fellowships to pursue their love of ancient Greek poetry and/or superstring theory.  As punishment for their past failures, the educators will be stripped of their Ph.D.’s.  In keeping with the theory that history is malleable, I have decided to strip Adolph Hitler of the Chancellorship of Germany he acquired on January 30, 1933.  While I’m at it, I hereby vacate Bobby Thompson’s home run, the so-called “shot heard round the world,” of October 3, 1951.  Henceforth, the record books will record that the Dodgers won that game and went on to beat the Yankees in the World Series.  As a result, they never left Brooklyn.

What bothers me about these scandals is that they bring out the worst in the moralistic classes including the press which treats them like the end of the world.  The New York Times is one of the worst offenders.  On October 10, 2012, its lead headline screamed, “Details of Doping Scheme Paint Armstrong as Leader.”  The story was about accusations made by United States Anti-Doping Agency.  That name suggests an official government agency but USADA is actually a private organization dedicated to the purity and integrity of the Olympic movement.   According to is web site, its “Vision/Mission” is, “To be the guardian of the values and life lessons learned through true sport.”  Which is to say, it can destroy careers and reputations without reference to anything so gooey as due process of law and can do so on the basis of testing programs that are of doubtful reliability.  Of course it could not do this without the active cooperation of the vast consortium of sponsors, regulators, promoters, governing bodies and media pundits that lives parasitically on sports.

Obviously sports contests require rules.  Obviously someone has to set standards.  Thus, in baseball there is a rule against pitchers throwing spitballs.  Why?  Well, to make a long story short, because a moistened ball moves erratically and is hard to hit.  Which, of course, is the basic intent of all pitching.  A spitball is not immoral or even unfair;  it’s just a rule we have agreed to in order to encourage more hits.  We draw a line between a spitball and a knuckle ball which is equally hard to hit but a lot more difficult to pitch.  The justification for anti-doping rules is slightly different.  The purpose is to assure a level playing field by eliminating artificial means of enhancing skill.  But make no mistake:  anti-doping rules require the drawing of arbitrary lines.  For example:

·       Millions of Americans take perfectly legal prescription medications to relieve anxiety and thereby give them a competitive edge in their business and other dealings.  Should we “strip” them of their MBA’s?

·       Many more millions of people drink alcoholic beverages to relax and perform more easily in social situations.  This was illegal in the United States for thirteen years and is still illegal in some places, notably (and laughably) in some parts of Texas.  But prohibition did not work and now our rules specify permissible levels of alcohol in the bloodstream.

·       Thousands of musicians smoke illegal marijuana to help them chill out and improve their performance skills.  Should we fill the jails with jazz players?

·       One of the crimes Mr. Armstrong is accused of is drawing his own blood, chilling it and returning it to his body.  This apparently increases its oxygen content which leads to improved performance.  Why is that different from eating a candy bar in the middle of a marathon?  Why does anyone think of Mr. Armstrong’s blood as an illegal substance?  Or, for that matter, oxygen?

The fact is Mr. Armstrong has never failed a drug test.  But the Doping Agency and The Times report that he once withdrew from a competition.  He said it was because of an injury.  They said he was afraid of failing their tests.  How they know that?

These and thousands of other questions are complex and decent people can differ on all of them.  Some people, however, find them so difficult that they are happy to have other people make the decisions for them.  Those other people—famously called the “deciders” by George W. Bush—include the Pope, Pat Robertson and the editors of The New York Times.  The Times churns out some fifteen hundred editorial opinions a year, providing moral guidance to anyone or any institution they think needs their help.  The scope is breathtaking.  The most common action verb is must.  The President must to this, the banking industry must do that, the trustees of Yale University must do the other thing.  Not only does The Times know better than you do, it is better morally and in every other way.

I do not know what Lance Armstrong did or did not do and neither do you.  Nor do I know what Marion Jones did or did not do.  I think Ms. Jones must have lied at one point because her stories seemed to contradict each other.  But if we’re going to put people in jail for lying, there’ll be nobody left on the outside.  I do know people do foolish things.  But I also know people like Mr. Armstrong and Ms. Jones do a great deal of great work for society—work that needs to be done but no one else seems interested in.  On net, I’d rather have a beer with either one of them than with an editor of The Times or a bureaucrat of some private sports-policing authority.  I admire Jim Thorpe a lot more than the modern day witch hunters.  Mr. Thorpe’s crime by the way was playing baseball for money.  Horrors!  He thereby violated the purity standards of the wealthy Olympic Pooh-bahs who never had to work a day in their lives.

In many cases, the actual crimes people go to jail for are not doping itself or knee-whacking but the allegation that they lied about their wicked behavior.  They lied to a federal agent, in Barry Bonds’ case to FBI agents.  Well, he didn’t really lie.  He gave an “evasive” answer.  They tried Roger Clemens for a similar offense of lying to Congress which, given the intelligence of Congresspersons, must be at least as heinous as stealing candy from a child.  They couldn’t convict him but the baseball Pooh-bahs will keep him and Barry Bonds out of the Hall of Fame until hell freezes over.  Add them to the Pete Rose scandal.  Three of the best baseball players in the history of the game.  At least we know Pete really did bet on games.  Gambling:  a clear sign that the Antichrist is at hand.

But lying.  That’s the really infamous crime.  A sin that cries to heaven for vengeance.  Lie under oath and you clearly place yourself with the guys on Arlo Guthrie’s Group W bench.  They had to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his sex life, for God’s sake.  Anyone who fails to tell the whole truth about his or her sex life is spitting in the face of the public’s right to know and the right of the press to expose every scandal of the day.  They should be branded with a big L on their foreheads so mothers can keep them away from their children.

Bill Clinton went on national television and proclaimed, “I did not have sex with that woman.”  Not a single human being in the whole world believed him for a nanosecond.  He knew that at the time.  He never intended to deceive anyone.  He was only saying what any other male would have said, indeed what any male would be expected to say.  It wasn’t even a real lie, just a misleading little fib.  As anyone educated by the nuns will tell you, there is a clear line between sex and other scandalous activities.  The key is penetration however slight.  But, you say, he lied under oath and that, by God, is perjury!  Maybe, but if so the law has not kept up with the latest discoveries of the medieval philosophers.  A “lie” is something you say that is known by you to be untrue.  But you can only lie to someone who has a moral right to the truth.  And for a lie to be perjurious, it must also be material to the matter at hand.  No one, including the court in the Paula Jones matter, had any right to the truth in the Clinton case.  Only the President’s wife had a legitimate claim.  Furthermore, his behavior had absolutely nothing to do with the Jones case except in the perfervid imaginations of red meat Republicans.

The sins discussed in this essay exist along a spectrum of heinousness and the worse they are the more careful we should be in denouncing the alleged perpetrators.  We need also be very careful before equating a lie with a crime.  If I’m forced to admit doping, for example, to an FBI agent, I am very, very close to being compelled to be a witness against myself in a criminal matter.  I know all about the Fifth Amendment and the first thing to know is that anyone who expects the world to suspend its disbelief has got to be one of God's innocents.

H. L. Mencken said, “The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.”  Americans still think we should all think like Puritans and act as they imagine the Puritans might have acted.  The witch trials of Salem are not quite finished business.

Subsequent Note

Shortly after this essay was posted, Lance Armstrong confessed to Oprah Winfrey that, yes, he had used performance enhancing drugs, essentially saying everybody did it.  It's a safe bet that he's wrong about everybody but, if it's true, then we still have the right to ask what all the fuss is about.  The playing field would have been even and the only ones hurt would have been the athletes.  Of course, it's almost certainly not true which means that he cheated and is still lying about it.  A sad story in the life of a man who has otherwise done a great deal more good in this poor world than those who have been hounding him for years.

Subsequent Note 2


On January 16, 2015, the NCAA settled a suit brought by a Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader,  Jake Corman, and the State Treasurer, Rob McCord accusing it of stupidity (my word not theirs).  Senator Corman said, "Clearly the NCAA looked to make their own name on the backs of Penn State University instead of doing their own internal investigation or any sort of due process to find out what happened."  The 112 vacated games were "restored" making Mr.Paterno once again college football's "winningest coach."  The fate of the Paterno statue is not yet clear but it will probably be restored if the University can remember where it put it.

WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN? 

 Jerry Harkins

“DO YOU KNOW ME?” Thus asked William E. Miller in a famous American Express commercial only ten years after he ran for Vice President of the United States on the ticket headed by Barry Goldwater. No one did remember him. It was not surprising. Republicans specialize in nominating obscure right wing politicians. Think of Spiro Agnew or J. Danforth Quale. And, unlike Miller, they were winners.

The election of 2012 will long be remembered for the losers. The Republican primaries came across as a casting call for “America’s Got Clowns!” The Litany of Losers included Michelle Bachman, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Gary Johnson, Thaddeus McCotter, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry, Buddy Roemer, Rick Santorum and Donald Trump. The big loser, of course, was the poor bastard that came out on top of this pile of monkeys, Mitt Romney. Had he thought to ask “What’s second prize?” he might have opted for two weeks in Philadelphia. Actually, second prize went to the doctrinaire reactionary, Paul Ryan. Ryan may be Sarah Palin with lipstick but at least he has a measureable IQ. He is a small government conservative who has never worked in the private sector except for some part time jobs when he was in school. He used to be a disciple of Ayn Rand but now claims he gets his political philosophy from Thomas Aquinas who was an early proponent of the divine right of kings.

To be as fair as possible, a few of these seekers were credible representatives of quirky but authentic political philosophies. Ron Paul is a serious libertarian, Jon Huntsman is a serious if eclectic conservative and a successful former governor of Utah, and Gary Johnson is Ron Paul Lite. Tim Pawlenty, a former governor of Minnesota, is another interesting case, moderately conservative, moderately libertarian and a deeply committed evangelical Christian. Of course being an interesting person isn’t enough to impart credibility as a presidential candidate. After all, Paris Hilton is an interesting person. The rest of the Republican pack was comprised of angry ignoramuses with a collective IQ hovering around room temperature. That doesn’t count The Donald, perhaps the scariest presidential hopeful in the history of the Republic. His big issues were President Obama’s birth certificate and the Air Force’s cover-up of the alien landing at Roswell. Romney was the only one of these candidates that could claim to be electable and even he had a lot of baggage. The Republicans flirted with each of his opponents in their turn trying to avoid the obvious but, finally and reluctantly, they settled on him even though many of them considered him far too liberal and some were convinced that he was a member of a religious “cult.”

Like his father before him, Romney is a serious person. He is often inarticulate but nowhere near as goofy as George W. Bush. As President Obama said, he is a generous citizen and an outstanding family man. In fact, had he not been saddled with the inane, demagogic Republican platform, he might have won. As it was, things were close. Still, there was a distinct progressive tone in the results especially in various referenda on issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Moreover, the conservatives took a worse beating than the raw numbers suggest. Retrograde ideas are almost always on the wrong side of history.

One of the more interesting losers was Bibi Netanyahu who campaigned aggressively for Romney and who lost no opportunity to speak of the President in insulting and derogatory terms. He keeps insisting that Israel is the only friend we have in the Middle East. To which I reply America is the only friend Israel has in the world. But most Israelis think Americans are all fat, ugly and stupid and can be easily duped. Bibi would make an interesting case study for one of the Freudian journals. His conservatism seems to derive from a compulsive pursuit of his father’s approval. The father was the late distinguished scholar Benzion Netanyahu who often expressed a preference for his older son Jonathan, the hero/martyr of Entebbe. Come to think of it, something similar could be said about Romney.

Bibi leads a nation that has long been suffering from a Wonderland syndrome in its attempts to govern itself. All decisions are subject to the veto of a small minority—about 11½% of the citizenry—called the ultra orthodox or Haredim. The great majority of these people will not serve in the Israeli Army and do not even accept the legitimacy of the Israeli state but insist on being paid by that same state all their lives to study Torah. They constitute the largest segment (about 40%) of residents of both the “legal” and “illegal” West Bank settlements. They account for far more than their fair share of the Israeli budget mostly because of welfare payments and their need for protection. For a variety of complex reasons, they enjoy strong support in Israel and by the leadership of American Jews. These same leaders spent lavishly to defeat Obama, supporting Santorum and Gingrich long after they crash landed. The money was wasted: ultimately 70% of American Jewish voters went for Obama.

But the biggest and dumbest losers of all were the members of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops especially its leader Cardinal Timmy Dolan of New York. They bet the farm on Romney and waged total, unrelenting warfare on Obama, denouncing him incessantly from the pulpit. Their message was clear: you can’t be a Catholic and vote for a candidate who questions our infallibility on matters of sexual morality and who threatens our religious freedom. If you’re not a Catholic in good standing with us, you can’t receive the sacraments and can’t go to heaven. Bishop after bishop took to the hustings to excoriate the President as a moral degenerate out to promote abortion, stem cell research and, horror of horrors, contraception. The National Catholic Reporter had it exactly right the day after the election:

The self-indulgent tantrums of some bishops—comparing the president to Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, warning Catholics that their souls are in danger should they mark their ballots for certain candidates, grossly overstating the threat to religious liberty and playing loose with such terms as “intrinsic evil” and “prudential judgment”—became public embarrassments. 

These men—these elderly celibates in their medieval finery—failed utterly in their attempt to elect Romney. In pressing their extremist rhetoric, they relinquished whatever credibility and integrity they might have had as well as any claim they might have had to a place at the decision-making table. The Catholic vote turned out to be pretty much a mirror of the national vote. The bishops aligned themselves with the born again Protestants for whom no indictment is too scurrilous, too vituperative, too fraudulent to broach. These are the people who truly believe that God hates fags and loves rapists. You expect such bombast from the likes of Donald Trump, Fred Phelps or Pat Robertson but not necessarily from those professing a respect for the ten commandments. Perhaps it is only sad to hear Billy Graham endorse Mr. Romney and the red meat Republican platform. But it is unforgivable for his son, Franklin, to say he was not sure that Mr. Obama was a true Christian and that he could not definitively say that the President was not a Muslim. Wink, wink!

One more thought.  Whatever else you think of him, President Obama is a pretty smart guy. (Do you think Michele would have married a dummy?) So it is eminently possible that he and his team picked their fights early in the campaign. On the issue of providing contraceptives as part of the health care reform, he could have avoided trouble by offering Timmy Dolan a more appealing compromise. He has often said government is the art of compromise, a position that has cost him the enthusiasm of the leftie ideologues. So he could have shut Timmy’s war down. But he didn’t. I can easily imagine a meeting at which he said, “Let’s see if we can sucker the Catholic hierarchy into a hissy fit about contraception.” He had nothing to lose as conservative Catholics weren’t going to vote for him anyway. By exposing the extremism of the bishops, he made it easier for the laity to laugh at them and vote for him. If so, it was like shooting sitting ducks. The bishops screamed, ranted, foamed at the mouth and pronounced their collective anathema while the electorate was treated to a Loony Tunes episode of Elmer Fudd’s rage. Given their edifying antics, the President is now free to proceed with his agenda without regard to the delicate sensibilities of the bishops.

There is a cancer eating at the heart of all the Abrahamic religions, a yearning for ancient verities that is often prosecuted with violence. The Catholic hierarchy, the Haredim, the Taliban and the Christian fundamentalists are more alike than different. Arrogant, intolerant, hypocritical, cynical, sanctimonious. They will oppose anyone or anything that they imagine competes with them for absolute power over the lives of the unannointed. In a wealthy and religious country like America, there is more a stake and their pursuit has become obsessive to the point of self-destruction.

It is revealing that the religionists find themselves in league with the Masters of the Universe, the Wall Street malefactors of great wealth who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Obama with attack ads that would make Vlad the Impaler blush. They don’t like his attitude toward regulation. They believe they should be free to perpetrate any damn thing they want. They pine for the good old days when they could turn subprime mortgages (pigs’ ears) into investment grade securities (silk purses), peddle the result to chumps (clients), bring the global financial system to its knees and make obscene fortunes for themselves in the process. This particular group may have been the only non-Mormon cohort of voters who were actually enthusiastic for Romney. After all, he was one of their own. The happy days of laissez faire seemed just around the corner.

As the votes were being counted on election night, a group of hedge fund managers and private equity investors were celebrating Romney’s victory at Del Frisco’s steakhouse in Boston. It was a private affair, a sort of pre-party for the election post-party. Fully 107 men (of course) had flown into Boston in private jets to mark the occasion. To everyone else watching the returns, it was obvious that they had nothing to celebrate but, like their friend Karl Rove, they were in denial. They cheered when Mr. Rove went into melt down on Fox Television. Like the bishops, they had persuaded themselves that victory was merely a matter of manipulating the unwashed masses. As teenagers, both groups seem to have been mesmerized by George Orwell’s, 1984, and its ideology of the Big Lie. War Is Peace. Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. They really did not believe the economic meltdown was caused by Obama’s policies just as the bishops really did not believe that Obamacare would render Catholicism illegal. The prelates were worried about losing the remnants of their power and were driven to squander whatever moral influence they still had. The Wall Streeters were worried about staying out of jail, a prospect that has seemed more imminent ever since Bernie Madoff drew a sentence of 150 years and a $17 billion fine. With so much at stake, it’s really not immoral to lie or, as Frank Rich wrote in New York, to enlist in “the post-fact alternative universe.” As Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative himself, once said, “…extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And...moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

In recent days there has been much soul searching among those who lost so much on November 6. Although some leaders have suggested it might be time for the Republicans to come to grips with the issues of concern to women and Latinos, the predominant reaction has been finger pointing. There are also claims that the Democrats “suppressed” voter turnout in Ohio which would be laughable if it were not another example of the Big Lie at work. Then there are those who are bravely asserting that nothing has changed. Senators McCain and Graham announced that any nomination of Susan Rice to be Secretary of State would be dead on arrival in the Senate. Rejecting a nomination before it is made is business as usual. Mr. Romney himself is complaining about “gifts” the administration “gave” to various constituencies, including women and young voters. He counts health care reform complete with free condoms as such a gift. It is a sobering thought that, in spite of such patent nonsense, 59,189,598 Americans voted for him. It may be, as Sophie Tucker had it, “Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong,” but fifty-nine million Americans made a terrible mistake on November 6. Add to that the ninety-three million eligible voters who didn’t bother to vote and you could get pretty depressed. Given the alternative, however, we can take comfort or, at least, refuge in Shakespeare’s insistence that all’s well that ends well.

The election of 2012 did not end well for the Republican party and its supporters. Obviously, it will require several more doses of shock therapy before there is any hope of intelligent debate among the losers. It is hard to know where GOP should begin which, I freely admit, makes me happy at least for the moment.

TRAGEDY OF THE CONDOMS

Jerry Harkins

For their own inscrutable reasons, the American Catholic bishops have decided to fight the forthcoming presidential election on the issue of contraception. As usual, they yearn to see the White House occupied by someone three goose steps to the right of Vlad the Impaler but even they understand that Rick Santorum and his ilk can’t win. The true believing right wing crazies agree with the bishops on several issues involving the evil of sexual activity. They disagree on a long list of other things including war, the death penalty and the social safety net but, in the minds of our senior celibates, these are all trumped by sex. So once again they will have to settle; last time it was for John McCain, this time it will be Mitt Romney who at least agrees with them about abortion on Mondays, Wednesdays and alternate Fridays.

If you are one of the few Americans who still pays any attention to the bishops, it may seem refreshing to hear them talk about something other than abortion but the problem is contraception is just not an issue. Pretty much everybody, including probably you and 98% of other Catholics, agree that it is morally acceptable and, in fact, laudable. Even the bishops approve of “natural” contraception otherwise known as Vatican Roulette. They have somehow persuaded themselves that the use of thermometers, mathematical formulas and elaborate charts is a virtuous form of foreplay. Of course, their sexual experience is limited to raping altar boys who do not require foreplay and can’t get pregnant. They know they can’t win a direct attack on contraception so they are framing their argument as being about freedom of religion. The President’s insistence that health care insurance cover contraceptives is said to be a grave threat, the first step on a slippery slope that eventually leads to legislation prohibiting Sunday mass, Ash Wednesday rituals and the death of God. Their rhetoric is so patently absurd that even moderately skeptical people must wonder what compels them.

They say it’s simple: they do not wish to be forced to pay for something they consider gravely immoral. That would be, they think, tantamount to requiring Jews to serve cheeseburgers in Yeshiva cafeterias or Mormons to serve those same burgers with coffee. The brief against contraception is, they claim, so fundamental to the Catholic faith that the government’s proposal represents what Cardinal Dolan called a “radical intrusion into the internal life of the Church.” He and his colleagues have repeatedly threatened to close down all Catholic social service institutions if such legislation is enacted. Not likely but it is a plucky assertion of their absolute right to make foolish statements. Fee, fi, fo fum! God bless these clowns. They really do think certain forms of contraception are “gravely disordered” but, aside from a few vague notions about God’s authorship of life, they’re not about to tell you why. They may have a martyr complex but they have no desire to be laughed out of town. So they leave it up to me. It’s embarrassing but someone has to explain matters.

This is not the first time I have attempted to deal with the moral theology of contraception. In an earlier essay [1] I discussed the emergence in the twentieth century of the notion that contraception is evil because it destroys an imagined “inseparable bond” between the reproductive and the unitive functions of sex as designed by God. In 1930, Pius XI issued the encyclical Casti Connubii which, for the first time, took notice of the obvious fact that sex tends to bring people together and that this function was acceptable as long as the lovers always put reproduction first. Gradually, the new idea morphed into the notion that the two functions are inseparable. John Paul II came very close to saying that trying to force them apart was the heart of the contraceptive evil. He did not actually go quite that far because he was smart enough to realize that separating them was precisely the objective of Vatican Roulette which he still professed to think was “natural.”

The church summons up nature in another guise to explain its teaching on contraception, relying on what it thinks of as “natural law.” This is an ancient and respectable theory but, as Garry Wills has written, “The cartoon version of natural law used to argue against contraception, or artificial insemination, or masturbation, would make a sophomore blush.” [2] It is not clear to me whether Professor Wills actually believes in any version of natural law theory. I do not because I cannot accept that anything is eternal and unchanging. If the Dodgers could leave Brooklyn in 1957, then nothing is sacred. The church, however, promotes a version of natural law based on Aristotle’s Politics as interpreted by the medieval scholastics, notably Thomas Aquinas. Recent Popes, confronted by moral questions not addressed in revelation, turn to it as an anchor for their teaching of almost anything.

However distinguished the proponents of natural law have been, their writing about it always seems to have a penumbra of desperation. It’s as though they suspect there is no such thing but they cannot imagine a decently functioning world without it. In this way, it is similar to the secular theory of the social contract or the nineteenth century Missing Link of human evolution. It seems needed to fill a gap in theory but it raises huge questions of its own. Natural Law is full of contradictions which are apparent even to a young child. It posits an especially poignant version of the problem of good and evil. If nature is not evil and did not create evil, it must at least be indifferent to its presence, hardly a function of law. For nature, unlike God, is not endowed with intelligence never mind morality. As Alfred Lord Tennyson put it, “Who trusted God was love indeed /
And love Creation's final law /
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw /
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed.” [3] Even Thomas Jefferson’s invocation of “unalienable Rights” and his appeal to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” seem contrived to avoid the necessity of proving or even debating them. Which, of course, is exactly what appeals to the Catholic hierarchy. If contraception is proscribed by natural law, no further discussion is needed. We simply assert that our Magisterium anoints us as the sole legitimate interpreters of natural law. It is the perfect argument: because I say so.

But one plus one does not equal three and if what you say is absurd then there is a problem somewhere in your logic. In the case of natural law, the fallacy may be that there is no such thing. Certainly, in the minds of all religious people, there is divine law but, while divine law and natural law would necessarily be consistent, they are not the same thing. [4] There are laws of nature such as the Law of Gravity but that, too, is not what is meant by “natural law.” The literature on natural law is opaque and often ambiguous but whatever it is, natural law must be eternal and universal and its dictates knowable to all through reason alone (or reason guided by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church). This suggests that reason is the ultimate test of whether an act is or is not moral under natural law.

But the notion that certain forms of contraception are precluded by natural law is unreasonable on its face, indeed it is irrational. To begin with, “universal” and “eternal” are very high barriers to acceptance. Quite the opposite appears to be the case. A huge majority of people, Catholic and otherwise, easily accept what the church thinks of as unnatural contraception. It would appear that the God worshiped by the Catholic hierarchy speaks only to the Catholic hierarchy. Second, the distinction the church makes between “natural” and “unnatural” contraception is ignorant and, in a frightening way, bizarre. The very thought of elderly celibates purporting to give advice on marital intimacy is as rational as referring patients to a vampire for heart surgery. Again then, the question: why do they bother? Why do they obsess about sex in the first place and why do they hone in on contraception after forty years of unsuccessful agitation on abortion?

The answers lie very deep in the psyche of western religion. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all have important strains of misogyny which they all vehemently deny. But conservative hierarchs universally despise femaleness. They are revolted by it. They fear women and, at least in the Catholic tradition, have gone to great lengths to exclude them from their lives. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger ruled that little girls could not be altar servers because little boys would not be willing to serve with them. Thus the church would lose its best source of new priests. Wunderbar! Wonderland! Women, beginning with Eve, are seen as God’s test of the male’s ability to resist sin. Woman is the temptress and sex is the lure. Anything that enhances the pleasure of sex by, for example, separating it from its natural consequence of reproduction is evil. Except, of course, Vatican Roulette.

But it goes deeper still. Mainstream Christian theology from the time of Augustine has glorified suffering and condemned all pleasure. Until quite recently, the church prohibited any medical attempt to relieve pain on the theory that it interfered with God’s salvic plan. Suffering was seen as a way to atone for sin and thus gain eternal life. This has softened somewhat but not entirely. In 1984, Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical, Salvifici Doloris of which this is the introduction:

Declaring the power of salvific suffering, the Apostle Paul says: “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.”

These words seem to be found at the end of the long road that winds through the suffering which forms part of the history of man and which is illuminated by the Word of God. These words have as it were the value of a final discovery, which is accompanied by joy. For this reason Saint Paul writes: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake,” The joy comes from the discovery of the meaning of suffering, and this discovery, even if it is most personally shared in by Paul of Tarsus who wrote these words, is at the same time valid for others. The Apostle shares his own discovery and rejoices in it because of all those whom it can help—just as it helped him—to understand the salvific meaning of suffering. [Emphasis in original.] [5]

Note especially the theme of the joy of suffering. The day before he died, John Paul himself was in terrible pain, but his spokesman only said his “biological parameters are notably compromised.” Later, he was said to be in “very grave” condition but, “…is still lucid, fully conscious and extraordinarily serene.” The implication of lucidity and full consciousness is that no pain therapies were given to the dying man. Of course, he was by no means still lucid and fully conscious. Two days earlier a permanent nasal feeding tube had been inserted when it was found he could no longer ingest food or liquids. The Vatican was walking a fine line between its vehement opposition to anything hinting of euthanasia and its desire to depict a great man bearing great suffering with equanimity and heroic virtue.

Given the salvic value of suffering, it is not surprising that the church is not enthusiastic about earthly pleasure of any kind. This rose to the level of dogma in the fourteenth century during the reign of the second Avignon Pope, John XXII, and is the central motif of Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose. The murder mystery revolves around the search for the long lost second part of Aristotle’s Poetics, the Tractatus Coislinianus which dealt sympathetically with comedy. Comedy in philosophy is happiness of any kind, the antithesis of pain. It may or may not involve humor or laughter. The fictional monk Jorge of Burgos who turns out to be the murderer represents the Augustinian, anti-pleasure faction of the church. The Aristotelian/Thomistic position is represented by the protagonist Brother William of Baskerville and his scribe Adso. Speaking of comedic metaphors, Jorge points out, “Our Lord did not have to employ such foolish things to point out the straight and narrow path to us. Nothing in his parables arouses laughter, or fear.” [6]

Pleasure is always suspect and is portrayed as one of the Devil’s wiles as in the case of Dr. Faust. Sexual pleasure is the ultimate enemy. God invents sexual attraction (Genesis 3:16) to punish Eve for successfully tempting Adam. Thus, the church cannot simply denounce it as inherently evil. For most of its two thousand years, it has taken the position that marital sex open to conception is participation in the divine work of creation and is therefore good. However, care must be taken to experience only the minimum amount of necessary pleasure and that pleasure must never be sought for its own sake. Until recently, sexual activity was prohibited on Sundays, on many important feast days, during Lent, Advent, a woman’s menstrual period, pregnancy and the twenty days before Pentecost. The church taught that children conceived during these periods would be born blind or crippled or with such serious diseases as leprosy. Obviously this was not true but truth has no place at the table of Vatican dogma. Oral and anal intercourse were considered more sinful than murder and intercourse between elderly or sterile couples was forbidden entirely.

The church has never really approved of sex. Saint Paul began the attack by saying it was all well and good for men who found it impossible to remain as pure as he was but obviously virginity was to be preferred. Saint Jerome said several times that the only reason he thought marriage was a moral enterprise was that, without it, there would be no new virgins. The problem for this kind of thinking is that, in many places, the Bible celebrates sexuality. Most notably the Song of Songs is explicitly erotic in its glorification of the entire range of male and female sensuality. The apocryphal Book of Tobit is more subtle but no less sensual in depicting romantic love and its relation to other forms of love including filial piety and works of mercy such as burying the dead. Historically, the church has tried to finesse the issue by making a distinction between agape, an exalted, idealzed love that transcends the physical and eros, the passionate pursuit of sexual and other carnal pleasures. Referring to sexual pleasure in the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI asks a rhetorical question, “…doesn’t the church with all her commandments and prohibitions turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life?” The truth would be a simple yes but the Pope’s answer is directed at the extremes of eros, as though the extreme is the representative case. He says that when it is used as a means of arousing “divine madness” it exploits lovers. He is talking about what he imagines to be a Bacchanalian orgy of excess. This intoxicated and undisciplined eros is, he says, “…not an ascent in ‘ecstasy’ towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man.” He appears to believe that Bacchus is the great role model in human bedrooms but refrains from describing what he would consider to be sober and disciplined eros. It is fair to be curious about the images going through his head when he is writing such nonsense.

It is often difficult to discern exactly what the Vatican is driving at with it convoluted prose and cryptic logic. It seems the American bishops have come to the conclusion that their best hope for defeating President Obama is to paint him as an anti-Catholic, anti-religion, Bacchanalian bigot because he disagrees with them on contraception. Such a position is good political theater but terrible political strategy. It attracts attention but at the cost of making the bishops look foolish. It is not the first time. The church had little public role in the great obscenity and contraception debates that led to the federal Comstock Act of 1873. The Comstock movement began as an evangelical crusade and gradually attracted support from most other Protestant denominations. The bluenoses did not want Catholic support any more than they would later in the drive toward Prohibition. [7] However, the Catholic bishops ultimately became the law’s principal defenders even as its provisions began to be repealed in the 1930’s. The bishops remained steadfast, still opposing repeal in 1983 when Congress removed the last vestiges of birth control prohibition. Once again, they are fighting a rearguard action. Even if they are successful, condoms and birth control pills will not disappear from the nation’s shelves which is their ultimate goal. Victory would not mean the use of one less contraceptive in America or elsewhere. But they have learned from the abortion battles the strategy of chipping away at the edges of a policy they oppose and they hope thereby to develop momentum.

The Catholic hierarchy has reached a pathetic juncture. Their absolute power no longer evokes fear and trembling in the pews. Since the Council of Trent, they have been whining about the decline of morality by which they mean the rise of modernism. They are men who have given up much for a share of divine power and it has all turned to bitter ashes. Pope Paul VI agonized about contraception and appointed a blue ribbon commission to advise him. They voted decisively for change but Paul lacked both courage and intellectual integrity. In his introduction to the disastrous encyclical Humanae Vitae, he wrote about the challenges of modernism:

“But the most remarkable development of all is to be seen in man's stupendous progress in the domination and rational organization of the forces of nature to the point that he is endeavoring to extend this control over every aspect of his own life—over his body, over his mind and emotions, over his social life, and even over the laws that regulate the transmission of life.”

Poor Paul. Change happens. He inherited the joy, hope and optimism of Vatican II, without doubt the most promising moment in the history of the church. He blew it away with a stroke of his pen in order to preserve Vatican power for his successors. They—John Paul II and Benedict XVI—proceeded to do their best to extinguish all joy and hope by casting his timid ruling in definitive concrete. They issued the apostolic letter Ad Tuendam Fidem in 1998 which vastly expanded the range of subjects about which no disagreement would be tolerated. But the fault is Paul’s. His predecessor, John XXIII had known of his tragic fault, calling him “mio amleto.” Paul knew it too. As he told Cardinal Suenens, “Yes, pray for me; because of my weaknesses, the Church is badly governed.”

Notes

1 See, “The Theology of Contraception” jerrysfollies.blogspot.com/2009/02/theology-of-contraception-jerry-harkins_11.html.

2. Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, Doubleday, 2000, p. 5.

3. “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” Canto 56. As used here, “ravine” means violence.

4. Aquinas has it that natural law is, “nothing else than an imprint on us of the Divine light. It is therefore evident that the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature's participation of the eternal law” (Summa Theologica, First Part, Book Two, Question 91). He says eternal law is God’s plan for the governance of the world and we “participate” in that by understanding our place in the world. There are many fallacies in his analysis not the least of which is the idea that natural law does not apply to irrational creatures. His entire distinction between Eternal (divine) Law and Natural Law is perfectly circular.

5. Both quotations from St. Paul are taken from his first epistle to the Colossians, 1:24. Neither I nor the Pope knows what Paul meant about completing what is lacking in Christ’s suffering.

6. The Name of the Rose, Harcourt Brace, 1983, p.81.

7. In some ways, Prohibition was part and parcel of the anti-Catholicism that swept America from the 1840’s through the 1930’s. Know Nothings, Republicans and other anti-immigration nativists finally linked their causes in the slogan “Rum Romanism and Rebellion” in which the latter word conjured up the anarchist movement that began during the Civil War and developed into the labor wars.

ERIN GO BRAGH!

Jerry Harkins

My friend Hugh Kearney is an Irishman. He lives in the north and, like many people in this post-global economy, engages in several different trades to earn his daily bread. Among other things, he owns a small knitwear factory and a one-horse taxicab service in Derry. I met him a couple of years ago when Joyce and I engaged him to show us around neighboring Donegal, one of the twenty-six traditional counties of the Republic. [1] He is smart, well informed, articulate and charming. One afternoon, we were driving along the A5 near Lifford. I knew we had crossed the international border but had seen no sign of any kind. During the second round of The Troubles, roughly the 30-year period beginning in 1969, Lifford had been an IRA staging area. It is a town of fewer than fifteen hundred souls but enjoys a strategic location at the juncture of two rivers which come together to form the River Foyle which flows into Lough Foyle and thence into the North Atlantic. I asked Hugh where the checkpoint had been during The Troubles. After giving it some thought, he said, “You know, I don’t remember.”

Amazing. After 827 years of English colonial rule, Irish independence had come at great cost. The endgame—the final bloody 83 years—began on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916 and finally died of exhaustion on the effective date of the Good Friday Agreement, December 2, 1999. In the intervening years, the people suffered through two long periods of guerilla and civil war—The Troubles. The first eruption of violence was mostly in the south, the more recent in the north. From 1969 to 1999, the fighting was about whether the six counties of Northern Ireland would continue to be part of Great Britain or would be reunited with the Republic. Protestants account for about 46% of the population of the six northern counties and Catholics for about 40%. The Protestants have been living there in large numbers since the early years of the seventeenth century when their ancestors were “planted” in confiscated lands in the aftermath of the Nine Years War and the Flight of the Earls. Violence then became the order of the day for four hundred years. In the final phase, three thousand were killed, most of them innocent by-standers. Relative to the population of Ireland, that’s the equivalent of about 350,000 deaths in the United States, roughly equivalent to the death rate from AIDS in the United States since 1981. Most of the casualties on both sides were innocent civilians. IRA and Unionist raids were routinely launched through the no man’s land between Lifford and Derry. And now Hugh couldn’t remember where the border was and, of course, still is. For the first time I thought maybe the Agreement will hold. The picture of President McAleese and Queen Elizabeth shaking hands in Dublin on May 17, 2012, was a moment of hope for the whole world. Coincidentally, it was National Famine Memorial Day. The following month, the Queen shook the hand of Martin McGuinness, a former leader of the Provisional IRA, in Belfast. Maybe.

I love Ireland and all things Irish. I think I know its agonizing history as well as anyone born in America. I accept unconditionally the heritage of its saints and scholars, its bards and poets. I understand the evils of English imperialism. I can recite fifteen hundred years of betrayal by the Roman Catholic Church. I rage against the pretensions and affectations of the Orange heirs of Cromwell’s genocide and that of his successors during the Great Hunger of 1845-52. In my heart of hearts, I also sense the flaws in the Irish soul that contributed mightily to Irish unhappiness.

Elsewhere I have written [2] “Irish-Americans tend to come in two flavors: those who know and care little about the heritage and those who possess vast amounts of misinformation to which they are ready to swear.” The Irish themselves know more but they work hard to suppress it. They often project the image of a hail-fellow-well-met complete with ruddy-cheeks, a huge smile and sparkling eyes. This is far from the truth even if it is infinitely to be preferred to the nineteenth century No Nothing version of a stoop-shouldered, unshaven hooligan, half man, half ape, dragging his knuckles behind him. The real Irish persona is more nuanced and much less accessible. Even the immortal Eugene O’Neill had trouble describing the Irish character. Two of his best efforts are Con Melody (A Touch of the Poet) with his delusions of ineffable sadness and James Tyrone (Long Day’s Journey Into Night), the tinker’s King Lear betrayed by cardboard children. Both are simultaneously petty and grandiose, melancholic and phlegmatic, victimized by life and circumstance. They are not appealing characters but are sympathetic nonetheless. You can’t help loving a barkeep with illusions who moans, “I’m done — finished — no future but the past.” O’Neill had a rococo fascination with disintegration and decay. His Irishmen are simply observing what they see as a great universal truth that others, those with lesser histories, cannot bear to reflect on. William Butler Yeats said it explicitly. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” [3] The gleeman in his poetic short story “The Crucifixion Of The Outcast” dies horribly for the crime of telling truth to power. The gleeman is, of course, Every Artist and especially Yeats himself who wrote his own epitaph. “Cast a cold Eye
/ On Life, on Death. /
Horseman, pass by!”

Neither O’Neill nor Yeats were scientists although both often seemed to be adherents of a theory of social entropy, the idea that social systems tend to decay toward anarchy. The former’s “The Emperor Jones” is an example of Irish disillusion even if its protagonist happens to be an African-American con man. Jones is a Faust figure who announces, “I’se after de coin, an I lays my Jesus on de shelf for de time bein’.” There is no evidence that O’Neill ever had an interest in Irish history or politics but Jones does bear a striking resemblance to Éamon de Valera who, at the time O’Neill was working on Jones, was in the United States, supposedly raising money for the IRA. De Valera, too, sold his soul to the devil in the form of the Catholic hierarchy to promote his turgid fantasy of Ireland as a pastoral Utopia. Yeats’ young man/old man O’Driscoll of “The Host of the Air” is a very different treatment of a similar theme. The subject is an elderly Irish Everyman overwhelmed by the forces of mythic religion. He dreams of gaining and then losing a beautiful young bride before he awakes to find the piper still piping away. [4] “And never was piping so sad, / and never was piping so gay.”

It is a constricted view of life which is not present in the ancient mythology nor in what we know of either the old Druidic religion or the Pealgian Christianity that prevailed in Ireland until the twelfth century. I might like to think the gene came from the sun-deprived Scandinavian berserkers who raided the Irish coasts from 795 until they were finally defeated by Brian Boru at Clontarf in 1014. One thinks of the Norwegian Ibsen and the Swede Strindberg. In his Nobel Prize lecture, O’Neill refers to the latter as the “greatest genius of all modern dramatists.” Good Lord, that’s a depressing thought even if O’Neill was being uncharacteristically polite to his hosts in Stockholm. Ibsen, of course, invented the tragic melodrama and was an influence on all the modern Irish writers, not only O’Neill but also on Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and that quintessential Irishman, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce.

The Irish persona begins with a moral view of the world that holds optimism to be a mortal sin. When an Irish person comments on the fine weather, the proper response is “Aye, we’ll surely pay for it tomorrow.” The more glorious the weather becomes, the more dour the forecast. The Irish understand perfectly why the Holy Inquisition hanged Dr. Pangloss. That this is the best of all possible worlds is not so much false doctrine as it is simply too depressing to contemplate.

It is not a clinical depression. Rather it is a matter of establishing a psychic distance from the rigors of life about which nothing can be done. It is a curious blend of the melancholic and the phlegmatic arising from powerlessness. As Yeats put it, “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.” To understand this, you must know the kind of suffering the Irish endured for most of a millennium. A good example: on the morning of December 15, 1882, the English hanged Myles Joyce for a murder he had not committed. Everyone involved knew he was innocent. The Police Supervisor and the Crown Prosecutor, Peter O’Brien, were notorious liars, the Judge was a political hack, the witnesses were paid perjurers, the first court-appointed defense attorney was a drunk, the second a decent man but one who lived in fear of the authorities. Neither spoke Irish and Joyce spoke no English. The interpreter was a fool. He would listen to a long, detailed answer given by the defendant and simply report, “He says ‘No’ Your Worship.” Even the hangman, one William Marwood, was incompetent. Having incorrectly placed the noose, he tried to reach down through the trap and kick the victim in the head. When that didn’t work, Joyce took several minutes to strangle to death. A grisly end to an entirely grisly affair.

And typical. British justice in the colonies was never inhibited much by scrupulosity. And in a nation that executed men, women and children for 220 different crimes, a certain ennui attends even the most egregious of injustices. The martyrdom of Myles Joyce is important not because he was innocent which, of course, he was but because his case was so typical. The system of justice in the colonies was built upon a foundation of capriciousness. Your overlords could do anything they wanted for any reason or no reason whatsoever. You are living in a Wonderland where the Queen can issue her death warrant, “Off with his head!” at random or can order Alice to play a game of croquet with live flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls. It is both effective terror and deliberate strategy. Yes, deliberate. England, after all, invented the common law; it just never bothered with it in governing its colonies.

Take another example, the hanging of Kevin Barry, an 18-year old member of the IRA. On September 20, 1920 he participated in an attack on an armed British truck in order to gain the weapons it was carrying. Three British soldiers were killed in an ensuing firefight and Barry and his comrades were captured. No one ever claimed he had fired the fatal shots or, indeed, any shot. But he was not an innocent bystander like Myles Joyce. Under torture, he refused to cooperate with the authorities and said he was ready to give his life asking only that he be shot like a soldier. Because of the worldwide condemnation that followed the execution of the 1916 rebels, the English had actually commuted many death sentences in the previous four years. The Irish public expected the same clemency would be granted to Barry. But no. As part of a keep-them-guessing strategy, they hanged him on November 1. They said he was a murderer not a soldier. A minor indignity you may think until you know that the British Parliament had passed the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act in August, effectively declaring martial law throughout the country. The insurrection was explicitly recognized as a war and the IRA as an army.

To the Irish, that war had been a constant fact of life ever since King Henry II had conquered it in the twelfth century. At first, he sent over his lieutenant, Richard de Clare, Strongbow, who conquered Cork easily and promptly seized 70 Irish defenders, broke their knee caps and tossed them into the Celtic Sea. When Strongbow proved less than reliable, Henry made a personal appearance in 1171 and forced the Irish church to bow to Canterbury and Rome at the Council of Cashel the following year. All this may have had something to do with Henry’s need to placate Pope Alexander III who was still vexed over the death of Becket two years earlier.

This sad story gives rise to the question of why the English ever thought they had a right to rule Ireland. The answer is simple: the Pope, Alexander’s predecessor, Adrian IV, had issued a bull giving Henry the right to hold Ireland and “secure” it in order to, “... teach rude and ignorant peoples the truth of the Christian faith against heresy.” He didn’t say exactly what heresy but it may have been related to the fact that Adrian was an Englishman, the only English Pope in history. In case you wonder why he thought he had the right to give Ireland to England, he was relying on the Donation of Constantine, a fourth century document in which the Roman Emperor had declared every Christian island to be the property of the Papacy. The so-called donation was a twelfth century forgery and Adrian certainly knew it. [5]

One more example before we return to the effects of British barbarity. Between 1787 and 1868, 161,000 human beings, almost all of them Irish Catholics, were “transported” to Australia, mostly for life, for crimes ranging from petty theft to murder. Another 60,000 were sent to Barbados and a relative handful were sent to Canada. Many wives committed small thefts in order to be transported and have a possibility of finding their previously transported husbands. The women and their children would spend seven years in Her Britannic Majesty’s Female Factory in Paramatta outside Sydney. They were rented out to settlers as slaves, in the fields and in the master’s bed. Again, the worst of it was the capriciousness. A crime might or might not be prosecuted. No actual crime was necessary, only the government’s need to set an example of its power. Everyone had a brother or sister or friend who had been extracted from the community and it was, as it was intended to be, demoralizing. Often, the British targeted victims specifically to create maximum misery. Not knowing when, where, why or against whom the law would strike made transportation one of the most sophisticated forms of terrorism. At times, the rumors and myths exceeded even the worst of the actual products of English ingenuity.

We will skip over the genocide committed by Oliver Cromwell and the ensuing 200-year reign of the penal laws which, among other things, made it a capital offense to be a priest or to teach a Catholic child to read. We will not discuss the land “clearances” under which Irish farmers were evicted from their tiny sharecropping tenancies so British overlords could enhance their hunting preserves. We will take it for granted that the English government deliberately exacerbated the potato famine by requiring Irish farmers to export virtually all other cash crops and seeking to prevent the donation of American corn. Suffice it to note that British colonialism everywhere was barbaric, nowhere more so than in Ireland. But the difference in Ireland, was that it lasted four hundred years longer than it did anywhere else. It was not The Holocaust. Nor was it the ten million Africans taken into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But it was massive, indisputable, egregious evil and it had an incalculable effect on the Irish psyche.

It is why the Irish allowed their clergy to abuse thousands of their children and young people, sexually and otherwise, for a hundred and fifty years. Everybody knew something was very wrong. Men, women and children routinely “disappeared.” Even the clergy who did not participate in the debauchery knew. The bishops were addicted to the cash flow.

Colonialism explains, too, the estrangement between the people and their civic institutions. The history of modern Ireland is very largely the history of government blundering, sometimes comical, sometimes serious, sometimes tragic. [6] In the 1920’s, one faction assassinated Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins, the only two leaders who had the courage, intelligence and skills to lead a successful transition from colonialism. They turned to de Valera who led them from one economic disaster to another. His insistence on Irish neutrality during World War II was a moral failure of epic dimension. His obsequious subservience to the teaching of corrupt bishops stifled social development down to the present day. The citizenry accepts all this either because they are tired of turmoil or because, after so long a time, they simply do not know how to govern themselves. It is said that after centuries of serfdom Russians yearn for strong government and strong moral guidance from the church. In Ireland, most people seem not to care one way or the other.

Stereotyping is a seductive fallacy. It is both a cause and an effect of bias and it supports distortions of both evidence and common sense. It is therefore important to note that there are obvious exceptions to every allegation in this essay. The Irish political class and the electorate have, for example, produced several recent Presidents that have performed brilliantly on the world stage. The arts continue to flourish as they have for millennia. Today’s young people are among the best educated on earth. The workforce is highly productive and, during the era of the Celtic Tiger of recent memory, the country had a higher standard of living than did any nation in the E.U. except Germany. It has at long last risen up in outrage against the sexual abuse of its children by the clergy and has begun the process of breaking the bonds of subservience to the ungodly church of Rome. Thus, perhaps, the Irish are at a hinge of their history.

C. G. Jung wrote about a “collective unconscious” that operates both universally in the community of all humans and particularly within cultural and national populations. Eugene O’Neill was much taken by this theory. The Emperor Jones is a precise if fictional treatment of it. As Jones tries to escape from those rebelling against his rule, he regresses through the history of his people, exposing one layer after another of the African experience from slavery all the way back to the formless fears of pre-history. It is a compelling and frightening journey. I take Jones as the original inspiration for O’Neill’s projected but not completed nine-play series A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed. What might an explicitly Irish version of Jones have experienced? A reader gets tantalizing hints in the two and a half plays he did finish, plays that introduce us to both Con Melody and James Tyrone, those much-beset Irishmen mentioned above. Melody’s refrain about having no future but the past takes on new poignancy in light of Jones’ encounter with the past. If you listen carefully, unlike Jones, the poor dumb sot likes it that way. His mantra expresses his understanding that perhaps he shouldn’t but he can’t help himself. All the alternatives, especially the future, are confusion and humiliation.

But now the Irish are legally free and, to some extent at least, emotionally free. Free of London and free of Rome, they are on their way to writing their own history and shaping their own future. They can look with pride and hope to what their diaspora has achieved. They can take heart and instruction from what South Africa has wrought from its Truth and Reconciliation Commission and what they themselves have learned from their Good Friday Agreement. That Hugh Kearney has forgotten where the checkpoint was is living proof that Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

Erin go bragh!

Notes

1. As with so much of what is Irish, the number of counties in the Republic is a matter of some dispute. Twenty-six is the number mentioned in the 1921 treaty but apparently both sides forgot that County Tipperary had been split in two in 1838. In 1994, the government struck Dublin from the list and added three new counties. In 2001, it decided to elevate five city councils to the rank of county councils. Naturally the five included Dublin. In any event, it now seems there are two County Corks one of which is the county seat of the other. Or maybe not. Maybe also the right number is thirty-three.

2. “Greenhorns and Narrowbacks,” jerrysfollies.blogspot.com/2009/07/greenhorns-and-narrowbacks-jerry.html

3. “The Second Coming,” 1919. He is talking explicitly about the effects of World War I but, to an Irish poet, the main effect of the war was the glorious folly of the Easter uprising of 1916. The Host of the title is the “piper piping away” which, I believe, is a metaphor for the church beguiling poor O’Driscoll with visions of a wife and a life he never had a chance of living.

4. The whole scheme with the exception of the actual forgery may have been the work of John of Salisbury, a scholar who desperately needed to get back into the good graces of King Henry. It worked. John went on to a notable career as Secretary to Thomas Becket and, later, the first bishop of Chartres.

5. These are fighting words and not necessarily entirely objective ones. Interested readers will have no difficulty tracking down a full range of opinions. They could do worse than to begin by consulting Tim Pat Coogan’s books, especially Eamon de Valera: The Man Who Was Ireland (Barnes & Noble, 1999) and Ireland in the Twentieth Century, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

6. Jung wrote, “In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.” See:  The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London 1996) p. 43 Princeton University Press, 1981.

NEVER MIND JOHN STOTT,
WHO, DEAR GOD, IS DAVID BROOKS?

Jerry Harkins

The short answer is David Brooks is the anointed successor of the late William Safire as the house conservative of The New York Times. He is the voice of what passes for right wing reason, not as witty as William F. Buckley, nor as experienced as George F. Will, but presentable enough to be invited to dine with the Sulzbergers. Most public conservatives are loud-mouthed hypocrites: the adulterer Newt Gingrich, the drug addict Rush Limbaugh, the gambling addict William Bennett, the idiot Sarah Palin and, of course, the entire cast of sociopaths who contended for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Some, like Mr. Safire, are loud-mouthed libertarians who occasionally cross back over to the normal side of the MMPI. Mr. Brooks, however, is none of these things. He abjures almost all right wing craziness in favor of a thoughtful Hamiltonian understanding of politics and governance. He is, in short, one of those peculiar intellectuals regularly produced by the University of Chicago—intelligent, articulate but sometimes a bit careless or perhaps lazy. He is attracted to the slightly offbeat perspective. For example, he shares the conservative objective of doing away with social security. However, he recommends a gradualist approach. Step One would be for the government to open tax deferred savings accounts for all American children, depositing $1,000 at birth and $500 a year for the next five years. This he says would give everyone a nest egg of over $100,000 at retirement, that is 65 or 70 years later. But here’s the part where a bit more analysis might have been helpful. Even if there were only an annual average of 3% inflation, $100,000 isn’t going to be a hell of a lot in 2075 and the purchasing power in current dollars is likely to be about $3,500. Some nest egg! Some conservatism! The government gets to spend billions in current dollars and the retirees get to collect an almost worthless pourboire at retirement.

Even Congress would be unlikely to fall for such flimflam so to really understand Brooks, you have to follow his line of thought on a more obscure subject. After the 2004 elections, he set out to instruct Democrats on which religious conservatives they should court. Begging the question of why the Democrats should be interested in any such thing, he counseled that there is no need to deal with the “Elmer Gantry-style blowhards” like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, [1] but rather they should make their pitch to the John Stotts of this world. [2] Stott was identified as “…the framer of the Lausanne Covenant, a crucial organizing document for modern evangelicalism.” Brooks says, “[His] is a voice that is friendly, courteous and natural. It is humble and self-critical, but also joyful and optimistic.” In short, Stott’s conservative Christian voice is not unlike Brooks’ own conservative political voice. Indeed there are similarities, but they are not flattering to either party. Stott who died last year was, as the highly liberal Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong once said, “Jerry Falwell with perfume.” By that standard, David Brooks is Rush Limbaugh with a brain.

The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 is one of the most ridiculous documents in the history of Christianity—right up there with its more famous first cousins, Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864), Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam (1302), and Adrian IV’s Laudabiliter (1155). Here is its key pronouncement:

We affirm the divine inspiration, truthfulness and authority of both Old and New Testament Scriptures in their entirety as the only written word of God, without error in all that it affirms, and the only infallible rule of faith and practice. We also affirm the power of God's word to accomplish his purpose of salvation. The message of the Bible is addressed to all men and women. For God's revelation in Christ and in Scripture is unchangeable. Through it the Holy Spirit still speaks today. He illumines the minds of God's people in every culture to perceive its truth freshly through their own eyes and thus discloses to the whole Church ever more of the many-colored wisdom of God. (II Tim. 3:16; II Pet. 1:21; John 10:35; Isa. 55:11; 1 Cor. 1:21; Rom. 1:16, Matt. 5:17,18; Jude 3; Eph. 1:17,18; 3:10,18)

As I read this statement, it makes seven explicit claims about the Bible, all of them demonstrably foolish. It is said to be (1) divinely inspired, (2) truthful, (3) authoritative, (4) infallible and inerrant, (5) addressed to all people, (6) directed to their salvation, and (7) unchangeable but also capable of being “freshly” perceived by different cultures. In support of these claims, it provides ten biblical references, which is to say it quotes the Bible to establish the Bible’s validity. [3] This is rock solid, because-I-say-so Christian fundamentalism and the fact that its principal author is soft-spoken and polite does nothing to mitigate the fact that anyone whose rhetoric is so impaired is also a zealot, a wild-eyed fanatic and a religious bigot. Anyone who purports to believe that the Bible is, “the only infallible rule of faith and practice” must stand foursquare for the death penalty for homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13). Stott must also think it licit to whip his male and female slaves as long as he does not kill them in the process (Exodus 21:20-21). These and a long list of other psychopathologies and moral abominations.

One of the most amusing things inerrancy demands of its servants is belief in a literal reading of the Book of Revelations. Now here is how John describes the God who appears to him:

His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.

Or consider this lovely passage from Chapter 17:

Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a desert. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. This title was written on her forehead: Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Prostitutes, and of the Abominations of the Earth. I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.

Do you think Stott believes the Mother of All Prostitutes was or will be drinking his blood? Nah! No more than he believes Scotland Yard would let him own a single slave, never mind whip one (more the pity). He is, you see, a hypocrite, preaching the inerrancy of the Bible while ignoring anything that is intellectually inconvenient. It is a joy to watch him weaseling his way around whatever it is he means by the “many-colored wisdom of God.” In a masterful display of such equivocation, he once wrote, “However strongly we may disapprove of homosexual practices, we have no liberty to dehumanize those who engage in them.” This may sound pretty high minded until you realize it doesn’t mean anything. Dehumanize? How do you do that? Branding them with a scarlet letter I for inhuman? Of course, he may mean it literally, but even Pat Robertson would stand up and admit that turning gays into frogs is, sadly, beyond his ability. What Stott is doing is throwing a meaningless bone to moderate Protestants—people who don’t have the stomach to stone gays and adulteresses.

In another place, Stott writes, “Thus, homosexually-oriented individuals must choose whether they will submit to the lordship of Christ, with the loving support of the church community, or to the messages of contemporary culture. Furthermore, faith accepts grace; therefore, celibacy is possible!” That’s his exclamation point, not mine, but I endorse it wholeheartedly. Now it is not useful to burden the Christian right with the discipline of logic for the same reason that you can’t fault an elephant because it can’t fly. [4] So we can ignore his earlier admission that the Church is nowhere near being a loving community for gays. (If they do go looking for such a community, what they will find is the cult of what is called “reparative therapy.”) But you can’t let the man get away with an inanity like the idea that celibacy is possible because faith accepts grace. As recent events have once again made clear, celibacy—abstention from sexual expression—is exceedingly rare even among those who have vowed to be celibate. Either faith or grace needs to do a better job.

The Bible is a very complex book. Anyone who purports to believe that it is the inerrant word of God has a very dim view of God’s IQ not to mention his Rorschach profile. Of course, such people are not talking about God God so much as about themselves. It’s their understanding of the Bible that is inerrant, their favorite translation. “I know the mind and meaning of God” is not all that far from “I am God.”

Okay, do you remember David Brooks? I assure you he thinks all this Christian fundamentalism is gaga preached by people who were educated somewhere other than the University of Chicago. It’s a good bet he’s never read the Book of Revelation with all its nonsense about multi-headed, fire-breathing monsters and The Rapture so beloved of evangelicals. [5] He knows that people like Fred Phelps, Jimmy Swaggart and John Stott do not have God’s unlisted phone number. What he seems not to know is that Fred, Jimmy and Johnny are birds of a feather—there’s not a hair of difference between them except that one has a better vocabulary and speaks with an upper class British accent. Not for Stott the word of the Lord as preached recently by the pornography addicted, prostitute using Reverend Bubba:

I get amazed. I can't look at it but about ten seconds, at these politicians dancing around this, dancing around this -- I'm trying to find a correct name for it -- this utter, absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died. Case anybody doesn't know, God calls it an abomination . It's an abomination . It's an abomination! These ridiculous, utterly absurd district attorneys and judges and state congress. 'Well, we don't know.' They oughta -- they oughta -- they oughta have to marry a pig and live with them forever.

John Stott has enough sense not to say this kind of thing out loud in public. But there isn’t a single idea (I use the word loosely) in that diatribe that Mr. Stott would say is not supported in the “written word of God.” Well, maybe the good book would not recommend bestiality as a substitute for sodomy, but you see my point. My father always warned me not to discuss cosmology with anyone who believes the moon is made of green cheese. So why do I want to deal with a mad priest who is utterly convinced that David Brooks is going to hell because he is not born again of water and the spirit? Can I hope to change his mind? David, David! Were you paying attention to W’s rants about John Kerry’s “flip-flopping?” Bush knows everything in his gut and has never felt the need to change his mind about anything. At least, not since he stopped drinking and found Jesus. He doesn’t read newspapers. I have as much hope of changing John Stott’s mind about the absurdities he purports to believe.

More to the point though, why does David Brooks think Democrats ought to reason together with John Stott? Perhaps he thinks he’s doing them a favor, increasing their chances of ousting the dangerous radicals now controlling the federal government. Maybe he’s embarrassed that it’s his side that’s sucking up to the Yahoos. Or maybe he sincerely feels that Democrats will be morally if not electorally superior people if they somehow come to terms with the moral majority by adopting their crazy social agenda. For my money, though, his motive is a lot simpler. He had a deadline approaching and nothing to write about. So he retrieved an essay he had written as a sophomore at old UC and made a few changes without giving it much thought. Which may be unfair of me but has the virtue of being consistent with longstanding tradition at The New York Times.

Notes

1. This is what I mean by “careless.” I suspect Mr. Brooks saw the movie and was too busy falling in love with Jean Simmons (surely not Shirley Jones) to pay much attention to what, if anything, Sinclair Lewis was getting at. Elmer Gantry was many unattractive things but he was never a blowhard. Like the Revs. Robertson and Falwell, he was a charlatan but unlike them he was not a simple-minded hypocrite. He would never have taken notice of the homosexual conspiracies of Squarebob Spongepants and Tinky Winky Teletubby. Elmer, a fictional character, is pretty much the most reasonable of Evangelicals.

2. “Who is John Stott?” The New York Times, 11/30/04. Brooks doesn’t tell you this but Father Stott is an Anglican priest who identifies himself with the reactionaries of the African church. He is a best selling but mediocre popularizer of orthodoxy who, through his voluminous writings, is almost single-handedly responsible for the low estate of Evangelical homiletics. For more than forty years, he was the Queen’s confessor which was probably not as interesting as it sounds. In fairness, it should be said that he has many admirers and even acolytes among the clergy. And, of course, he is very popular at The Times. Ninety days after Brooks’ encomium, the Metro section did an adulatory puff piece occasioned by Stott’s visit to New York. When he died in 2011, The Times ran an adulatory obit complete with sidebars. Sadly, the praise of Brooks and his colleagues is offset by Brooks’ correct observation that practically nobody else ever heard of him.

3. The biblical references are only marginally related to any of Stott’s claims and appear to be there mainly as window dressing. However, I will let you judge for yourself. In several cases, I have included surrounding verses to give you a sense of the context. In two cases, I have put a period at the end where the sentence went on in the following verse. The citation from Jude is taken from the New Oxford Bible. All others are from the New International Version.

2 Tim 3:16: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
2 Peter 1:21 For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

John 10:34-36: Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are gods.’ If he called them 'gods,' to whom the word of God came--and the Scripture cannot be broken, what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son?”

Isaiah 55:10-11: As the rain and the snow / come down from heaven, / and do not return to it / without watering the earth / and making it bud and flourish, / so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, / so is my word that goes out from my mouth: / It will not return to me empty, / but will accomplish what I desire / and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

1 Corinthians 1:21-25: Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.

Romans 1:16-17: I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."

Matt 5:17-18: Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

Jude 3: I have no idea where Stott came across this reference. There is no Jude 3. Jude has only a single chapter of 25 verses, the third (i.e., 1:3) of which is, “My friends, I was fully engaged in writing to you about our salvation—which is yours no less than ours—when it became urgently necessary to write at once and appeal to you to join the struggle in defense of the faith, the faith which God entrusted to his people once and for all.” Sounds more like a right wing fund raising letter to me.

Ephesians 1: 17-18: I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.

Ephesians 3:10-18: His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence. I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.

4. Logic has never been a strong point of the right wing, especially when the subject turns to sex. When, for example, Mr. Brooks writes, “Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide,” you have to accept that he has no rational basis for thinking so. Not even the Bible condemns polygamy. Do you think he believes that masturbation will make your palms turn hairy?

5. Here is how John describes Jesus in Revelation 5:6: “Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. He had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. He came and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song: ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God …’” I love it. Not that I know what a dead lamb with seven eyes would smell like, but you’ve got to be impressed by living creatures and elders holding bowls of incense while playing the harp. Unless, of course, they had three hands. Of even greater interest is what the writer of such fantasy was smoking.