A Liberal Jew Becomes a Conservative Christian and Writes a Book about Poetry and God

 

The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus is an April, 2022 Zondervan book by conservative author Andrew Klavan. The book is personal, idiosyncratic, witty, and charming. Klavan talks about the Romantic poets, painting, travel, family, personal religious experience and Biblical interpretation. Reading this book felt like I was spending a rainy afternoon chatting with Klavan in a plush library, fully equipped with leatherbound classics, a fireplace, and brandy snifters. We'd eventually head out for an excursion to this or that garden, stream, or industrial waste site, while chewing over this or that line of poetry. These strolls would feel like tangents, but eventually we'd return to the library, and tie our conversational strands back together. Given that impression of this personal book, it's important to know exactly who Andrew Klavan is.
 
Andrew Klavan is a 67-year-old, award-winning, crime and suspense novelist. He has also worked in Hollywood. His father, Gene Klavan, was a prominent New York City area radio personality. He grew up in a comfortable secular Jewish home. He has since become a conservative Christian. He jokes, "My wife married a liberal Jew and ended up with a conservative Christian. She’s very patient about it."
 

"We were raised in the Jewish faith but without faith. We were told, 'This is nonsense, but you must learn it. It is part of the tradition.' … My mother was the most committed atheist I've ever met," Klavan says. He experienced this disconnect between an insistence on claiming Jewish identity while rejecting faith as a "rotten foundation." He clarifies that he means this only in reference to his own family's situation and not as a general comment on Judaism.

 

He was forced to become bar mitzvah and to say things that he did not believe; in fact he invented Hebrew words during his ceremony to fill in the blanks when he forgot what he was supposed to say. He received thousands of dollars worth of gifts. He was disgusted by his own hypocrisy; the gifts were "ill-gotten gains." He felt "A crushing sense of dishonesty and shame … I didn't want to be involved with anything that made me feel that dishonest, that inauthentic." He "stuffed the gifts into the garbage." "That was meant to be the end of my religious life."

 

Klavan knew he wanted to be a writer, and, "As I studied literature, I realized that Jesus was at the center of all Western literature." When his father caught him reading the Gospel of Luke, "Rage bubbled out of him like hot tar." "If you ever convert, I will disown you!" his father threatened.

 

Klavan went to UC Berkeley, in California, at least partly to get away from his New York home. There he experienced the first of his depressions. He calls these depressions "bola," after the rope-like weapon, fixed with heavy weights on the ends, that is swung, thrown, and entangles and chokes the prey. He interpreted his own mental illness as the price he paid for being an intellectual. "It's hip to be miserable when you are young and intellectual," he says. Klavan's internal struggle worsened till he became suicidal.

 

Gary Carter, a favorite baseball player, was a Met catcher with bad knees. Even so, Carter was able to run fast enough to beat a ball to the plate. In a post-game interview, Carter said he was able to run so fast because, "Sometimes you just have to play in pain." Klavan took this as his motto; he soldiered on and did not kill himself. Later, Klavan interpreted his hearing that line from a favorite player as God's reaching out to Klavan at a moment when he might have jumped off his apartment building's roof.

 

Things began to look up. One night Klavan said a three-word prayer, "Thank you, God." The next morning, he reports, "I was suddenly more alive. I suddenly saw everything more clearly … As a writer, as an artist, I was looking to be directly connected to life. You can't be directly connected to life until you are connected to God. God is the source of life. You can't know God. He's just too big, unless you know him through Christ, who is a man like you."

 

A significant theme connects Klavan's religious and political conversions. That theme is Klavan's relentless focus on truth. The hypocrisy of his childhood household's approach to religion alienated him. Just so the disconnect between objective reality and leftist ideology. The left, Klavan says, under the influence of philosophers like Michel Foucault, has rejected even the concept of truth. The left has replaced the concept of truth with power. People believe something is true because powerful people have told them that it is true. The left imagines that only white, heterosexual, Christian, Western men exercise power. Thus, dismantling any truth accepted by such men has become a focus of the left. Those truths must be replaced with the superior truths of opposite groups: black, non-Western, female, and LGBT people. Klavan relates the left's focus on power to Foucault's personal obsessions. Foucault was a practitioner of sadomasochistic sex. Foucault allegedly sexually abused pre-pubescent Arab boys in Tunisian cemeteries.

 

Klavan explains how he could have recognized the flaws in the left-wing worldview, and yet still consider himself a liberal. "I was always a disgruntled liberal. I always knew that something was wrong … but it never occurred to me that the air I was breathing was wrong." In other words, the hegemony of the leftist worldview was so pervasive that it took great energy to overcome it and see things afresh and for himself. Reasoning that objective truth exists, Klavan eventually applied that insight to both politics and to God, as he outlines in a 2019 speech to the Acton Institute.

 

In academia, the publishing world, and Hollywood, Klavan was surrounded by creative people who were immersed in leftwing ideology, even as a fish is immersed in water. Klavan received a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, and he married the daughter of a prominent professor. He discovered, though, that "The university misuses reason to destroy reason."

 

Moving on to Hollywood, he discovered new forms of hypocrisy. "When I hear artists today talking about speaking truth to power, I ask, 'Who is the power in your life?' Is it a Republican politician, or is it rather the artist infrastructure that gives them praise, work, awards, respect? It really is these people who have confined them to their straightjacket of ideology. That they never challenge."

 

Hollywood bigwigs, he says, are living out a narcissistic fantasy when they make propaganda films serving the needs of enemies killing Americans. They think they are doing something heroic. "To make films that are beautifully done propaganda instruments for the enemy is an act of wickedness," he says. Klavan is less angry about the films Hollywood does make than about the films Hollywood doesn't make. Hollywood could make films that depict soldiers as patriots striving to do the right thing; for the most part, it does not.

 

"There is an ideological fight that has to be fought. But we conservatives have let them [the left] get away with this. If you win the White House, if you win the Congress, if you win the Supreme Court, and you lose the culture, you will lose the country. [Poet Percy Bysshe] Shelley was right. The poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. If you let them [leftists] drip this poison into the consciousness of America, they will win."

 

In a 2007 City Journal article, Klavan writes, "The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same … that failed or oppressive cultures are as good … that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one … I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace … Leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen."

 

"Materialist, communist, atheist governments destroyed more lives than all religions put together in a single generation … You either have to look in the mirror and say 'Uh oh I've missed the target,' … or you have to create an illusionary world in which what you are saying makes some kind of sense …  In a world where individuals are respected it is urgently important that authenticity is respected. A man should be what he appears to be. Political correctness legislates inauthenticity."

 

Klavan's insistence on truth, authenticity, and an accurate relationship with objective reality fueled his reading and his religious and his political conversions. He read the infamous Marquis de Sade, an 18^th century French nobleman who rejected religion, morality, and law, and insisted on absolute freedom. Sade, an aristocrat, felt free to kidnap and sexually torture poor women and children. Klavan says that Sade was the most honest philosopher he read. In other words, if man is going to reject God, all bets are off concerning morality.

 

"I loved books. I studied Western literature. I found everything that was true or beautiful somehow related back to the Gospels," Klavan says. In Western culture, he writes in his new book, "are embedded that portion of the Western vision that is the simple truth not just for westerners but for humankind altogether. And it came to seem to me, as a matter of simple integrity, that I had to believe in the Singer if I wanted to sing that true song."

 

Culture and politics, Hollywood, academia, and Washington, DC are alike in that all are engaging in the same argument. "We're in an argument about spirituality … We're in an argument about God." Klavan's choice to believe, and to become a Christian, improved his psychological life, his political life, and his creative life. "Having made the decision to believe, I feel that I understand reality far better. I feel that my insights are closer to the bone." (Quotes above are from interviews with Andrew Klavan found here, here, here, here, and here, and from the City Journal article here.)

 

Klavan's new book, The Truth and Beauty, is a lot like Klavan's autobiography. It's about literature, culture, politics, and faith, not as separate entities, but as interlocking, mutually influential aspects of the same organism, human life. Truth is the overarching animating spirit and test. Poetry matters to politics and politics matters to poetry and faith underlies them all.

 

The book is divided into three parts: "The Problems of a Godless World," "The Journey toward Solutions," and "Reconstructing Jesus." In part one, Klavan records some of his own struggles with the faith that came to him late in his fifth decade. There are weird passages in the New Testament, Klavan confesses. For example, Jesus cures a blind man by placing spit in his eyes. Reading the Gospels through the lens of England's Romantic poets, he reports, helped him to understand both better.

 

The Romantic poets, Klavan argues, lived in an era like our own. The Enlightenment's glorious revolution in France turned out not to be so very Utopian after all; all those beheadings and such. The Romantic poets, at least long-lived ones like Wordsworth, had to figure out how to reconcile their early support for revolution with its excesses. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" Wordsworth wrote about the French Revolution that ended with streets flowing with blood. Just so, today's left must confront (or at least paper over) its own spectacular failures, for just one example, the fall of the Soviet Empire beginning in 1989. During the Romantic Era, as well as our own, "feminists sought to dismantle gender roles, sexual mores, and the institution of marriage." In another parallel between the Romantic Era and our own, both the Cold War and the Napoleonic era involved proxy wars.

 

In his chapters on the Romantic poets, Klavan focuses on William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron. Klavan humanizes these figures with anecdotes. Wordsworth could be a pompous ass; Coleridge was a motormouth, one of the last Renaissance men, and a drug addict, Byron and Shelley were free-love-spouting woman-abusers whose abuse rendered them quite literally lady killers. Shelley's wife, Harriet, whom he abandoned for 16-year-old Mary Godwin, for example, committed suicide over him. Shelley had been expelled from Oxford for distributing atheist pamphlets. "I can scarcely set bounds to my hatred of Christianity."

 

Claire Clairmont, Mary's stepsister and a member of these authors' free love circle, wrote, "The worshippers of free love not only preyed upon one another, but preyed equally upon their own individual selves turning their existence into a perfect hell … Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love, I saw the two first poets of England [Shelley and Byron] … become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery."

 

Klavan also selects key passages from these authors' works that help to advance his theme. Coleridge's poem "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Mary Shelley's groundbreaking Frankenstein, considered the pioneer science fiction novel, are treated in detail. Klavan also draws in more recent works, for example James Whales' 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. Klavan also talks, at length, about Shakespeare's Hamlet, obviously not a product of the Romantic era – it was completed two hundred years before the Romantic Era began. But Hamlet, Klavan argues, helps the reader to understand his themes of individual authenticity vs. the individual as an actor performing a part. Always, truth is a unifying theme for Klavan.

 

Hamlet begins, "Who's there?" The true Westerner, Klavan concludes, must decide that the who that is there is God, the Christian God. "There are those today who call themselves Christian atheists, who want the values of Christianity but can't believe in the religion itself … It won't work. It can't work." "We need God to give us ground to stand on, and not just God, but our God, the Christian God, who will confirm the good values the generations of the West have discerned and learned to live by over time. But we can't just choose belief if we don't, in fact, believe. We need God truly … When we cry out to the universe, 'Who's there?' we need to be able to hear the voice of some essential reality respond to us, I AM."

 

Part three, "Reconstructing Jesus," was the most difficult part of Klavan's book for me. I do not do well with allusive writing heavy on abstract nouns. Klavan writes, "flesh is a language, a word, it speaks of a meaning, right or wrong, good or evil, our selves, our souls." I don't understand that sentence, or others like it. I wish Klavan had followed up his more rarified pronouncements with concrete examples. Given my lack of understanding of this final portion, I am not equipped to assess whether or not Klavan adequately drew together the diverse strands of the book. In this section, too, though, there are some of Klavan's gems that reach me, for example this observation on Utopianism, "In order to make society perfect, you really have to kill all the people first."

 

My biggest problem with Klavan's book is in its treatment of women. Klavan writes about seventeenth-century poet John Milton, who, like Shakespeare, was very much not of the Romantic Era. Milton was born roughly two hundred years before the Romantic Era began. In his long poem "Paradise Lost," Milton reflects the "Great Chain of Being." The "Great Chain of Being" was a hierarchy that medieval philosophers believed structured the universe. God was at the top; inanimate matter was at the bottom. Humans occupied the middle of the chain because humans are both material – made of flesh – and spiritual – endowed with an immortal soul. Adam, that is man, was higher in the hierarchy and closer to God. Eve, woman, was farther away from God than Adam, and closer to earth. Thus, women require men to mediate for them to God.

 

Any undermining of this hierarchical structure results in catastrophe. Women should submit to men, and allow men to conduct their spiritual lives. Women who upset this natural order destroy society. In "Paradise Lost," men are made "For contemplation" and "absolute rule." Women, Milton says, are to be "attractive," "soft," with golden hair that extends "as a veil, down to the slender waist." Her hair "curls …which implied subjection … coy … submissive." Women offer "sweet, reluctant, amorous delay" of access to their "mysterious parts." This isn't just a soft-porn, it's also, to Milton, high theological truth. "He for God only, she for God in him." Adam connects directly with God. Eve worships Adam, and that worship of a mortal man brings her closer to God.

 

Klavan writes, "Without submission to the natural order, there is nothing left but to create new orders by Jacobin force." "Jacobin force," of course, is an allusion to the French Revolution. Klavan says that Milton's poem "is meant to depict that power structure against which no rebellion can succeed: the world's God-made and therefore absolute hierarchy … the rule of the sacred. The holy order of things." Man "naturally rules" and woman "naturally obeys." After all, as Klavan points out, Ephesians 5:22 says, "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord."

 

Klavan's allusion to the Jacobins as ushering in chaos by championing women's equal worth to men is inapt. Jean Jacques Rousseau was a favorite philosopher of the French Revolution. Rousseau was a critic of Christianity. Nevertheless, Rousseau's attitude toward women is all too similar to Milton's. Given that women are a "source of danger," without men's ruling hand, Rousseau wrote, "men would be tyrannized by women. For, given the ease with which women arouse men's senses … men would finally be their victims and would see themselves dragged to death without ever being able to defend themselves." Women must, therefore, be trained "to serve man." "Woman was specifically made to please man … it is the law of nature … woman is made to please and to be subjugated to man … she ought to make herself pleasing to him." That's not from the Bible. That's Rousseau.

 

Rousseau's pupils, the Jacobins Klavan mentioned, abolished women's clubs, and "sought to exclude women from political and intellectual life." The Jacobins dismissed women's intellectual abilities and emphasized women's role as mothers (see here, here, and here). Among the Terror's guillotined victims were Carmelite nuns. Last time I looked, Maximilien Robespierre was, as we now must say, a "biological male." Jacobin Deputy Andre-Amar assessed women as "ill-suited for elevated thoughts and serious meditations." "Women were 'destined by their very nature' in all its expressions – biological, psychological, intellectual, moral – to engage in 'private functions' (like caring for their households, supervising their children's education, counseling their husbands.) 'Each sex … is called to the kind of occupation which is fitting for it; its action is circumscribed within this circle which it cannot break through because nature, which has imposed these limits on mankind, commands imperiously and receives no law.'" Andre-Amar voiced the Revolutionaries' majority view. Women were not suited for full citizenship. Only men were.

 

Jacobins were hardly the only leftists or "liberators" who would agree with Milton about women's appropriate place in the "great chain of being." That place, of course, is below man, pleasing him. Milton said this in poetry; Stokely Carmichael was less poetic. Carmichael famously said that the position of women in the Civil Rights movement is "prone." Fidel Castro allegedly slept with 35,000 women. "I wash myself inside the bodies of my women," Mao Zedong said. Otherwise, he never brushed his teeth or washed his genitals. Imagine being one of his many-at-once young bed partners. The USSR's Lavrentiy Beria was a serial rapist. "Scream or not. It doesn't matter," he told one victim he raped and then sent to solitary confinement in the Gulag. Saintly Gandhi slept with naked girls sixty years younger than he was in order to prove to himself his own spiritual superiority. Leo Tolstoy had a child by a serf on his estate, a woman in a slave-like position. He treated his wife shabbily. The more politically radical Tolstoy became, the worse he treated his wife. Then there's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and the credible allegation that Martin Luther King laughed and egged on a colleague who raped a woman right in front of him. All these diverse men have been celebrated as famous liberators. All used women. Klavan's fear that "Jacobins" would overturn society with the express purpose of elevating the status of women is not born out by history.

 

There is a text and a movement that offers an alternative view of women and their place. That book is the Bible, including passages that Klavan does not mention. Rebecca takes it upon herself to transfer the firstborn blessing from her older son Esau to her younger son Jacob, thus writing Jewish and Christian history. Naomi instructs Ruth to engineer Ruth's marriage to Boaz. Ruth becomes an ancestress of Christ. Judith decapitates Holofernes. Esther defies Haman and manipulates Ahasuerus. Jochebed and Pharaoh's daughter disobey multiple men to save Moses. Shiphrah and Puah disobey Pharoah to save Jewish babies. Rahab, a prostitute, defies soldiers of her own people to save Jews. Mary confers with no mortal man in her direct communion with the divine; her conversation with the ultimate gives us the Angelus, a prayer said daily. Mary voices the Magnificat. Mary orders Jesus to perform his first miracle. Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others enable Jesus' ministry by underwriting it financially. Mary Magdalene is the "apostle to the apostles," and is the first to share the good news. The Woman at the Well is also a preacher of the good news. Jesus has his longest conversation with the Woman at the Well; there is no husband there to provide Miltonian mediation between her and the divine. Junia and Priscilla are leaders in the early church. I wonder what Bible Klavan, C.S. Lewis, and John Milton have been reading that is full of meek little women, with slender waists and long blonde hair, who require men to do their spiritual work for them.

 

In contrast to these powerful Godly women, the Bible is unstinting in its depiction of the destructive power of male lust and contemptuous men who hope to dominate women. David suffers greatly for his lust for Bathsheba. Jacob suffers for favoring his hot wife, Rachel, over the plain one, Leah. According to Jewish tradition, Leah is the first person ever to say the prayer that Klavan says changed his life: "Thank you, God." Daniel champions Susannah in defiance of the elders. Abraham's exploitation of Hagar ends badly. Eli is contemptuous of Hannah, but Hannah's prayer gives the Jews the prophet Samuel. The widow, by donating a mite, gives more to God than the richest or most powerful man. Nor does every Christian read Ephesians 5:22 as does Klavan. Marg Mowczko's reading is much more egalitarian and respectful of women.

 

Klavan says the only happy marriages he knows are marriages in which women submit to men. Once, in a tiny, remote Polish village, I met a woman without a single tooth in her mouth. Her husband had knocked all the teeth out of her head in successive beatings. She did go to the priest; he offered no support. I met such women in remote Muslim villages in Africa and Buddhist and Hindu villages in Asia. I mention the remoteness of these villages because Klavan seems to think that modern capitalism or pervasive cultural leftism have caused all problems between men and women. The problem here is not "Jacobins" or the free market but misogyny, and there is nothing Christian about it.

 

If we are going to champion the West and the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is important that we not distort the unique gift that the West and the Judeo-Christian tradition have offered women. My ability to write this review is part of that gift.

 

Don't let my insistence on the equal worth of women to the God of the Bible dissuade you from reading The Truth and Beauty. Andrew Klavan is a gifted writer, very funny, and insightful. Reading him really does feel like engaging in a conversation. My comments here are merely an extension of the conversation I had with him while reading his enjoyable book.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

Anxiety in America: A Text about Birds Pushes Me Over the Edge

Anxiety in America
A Text about Birds Pushes Me Over the Edge

 
"I want to run away," I posted on Facebook after I heard about the white supremacist Buffalo, New York, grocery store shooting, followed quickly by the shooting in a Laguna Woods, California, Taiwanese Presbyterian church. These shootings took place on Saturday, May 14, and Sunday, May 15, 2022.
 

As horrible as these are, shootings are part of daily life for many Americans. I live in Paterson, New Jersey, named one of America's most dangerous cities in April, 2022. During the May 14-15 weekend, ABC news reports, thirty-three people were shot, five fatally, in Chicago. These weren't headline hate crimes; they were just the drumbeat of daily life for many of us.

 

"I want to run away," and I'm not alone. I think we've all been a bit tense lately. There was the COVID pandemic and shutdown, and the U.S. death toll of one million, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, inflation and high gas prices.

 

I don't know how people economically better off than I am are experiencing inflation. For those of us who had, previously, just been getting by, inflation isn't an inconvenience. Inflation is the monster under our beds. I had a panic attack in a supermarket parking lot the other day. At first, I had no idea what was going on. I texted a concerned friend. "My chest is suddenly tight. Finding it hard to breathe. Don't know why." I gave it some thought, and I realized. I used to feel so grateful that I lived in the U.S., where food is cheap. I had lived in countries in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe under Communism, where food was hard to come by and it took up a big percent of available income. In America, even though, as an adjunct professor, I was one of the "working poor," I could afford, not just enough to fill my belly, but enough to be healthy, and to allow myself treats like the occasional Lindt dark chocolate bar with roasted almonds.

 

I'm not good at math, but, without trying, I memorize product prices. Aldi's pretzels are now twice the price they used to be. Aldi's hummus, previously a staple midday snack, is now beyond my pocketbook. It's been a while since I could find, as I used to, good apples for less than a dollar a pound. I grew up among Eastern European peasant immigrants, and they passed down to me their fear of hunger. That fear has morphed, in recent days, from the villain of the occasional nightmare to a stalking specter. I keep telling myself that I'm being irrational. I am not so sure.

 

The comments I hear from the current White House about inflation do not inspire confidence. I am told that Joe Biden's strong points are his relatability and his compassion. I have to disagree. I keep trying to reassure myself that competent people are in charge. I can't find any support for this reassurance. The administration's handling of the baby formula crisis isn't helping.

 

I've been poor all my life and those Democrats who anoint themselves as my spokespersons and saviors do not represent me at all. Bernie Sanders is a shameless, criminally dishonest snake oil huckster and I yearn for the day when someone takes him down on camera, merely by confronting him with simple truths. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is a hot former bartender, a poseur from comfortable suburbs who pretends to street cred, elevated by leftist male fans' lust and female fans' delusion that if they purchase her lipstick they, too, can share in her Kardashian-esque fifteen minutes. Contrary to wealthy and powerful would-be saviors, I know from a lifetime of experience that "a rising tide lifts all boats." When the American economy is humming, life is better for me. Having lived in the Soviet Empire, where smalec – lard – was one of few reliably available foodstuffs – I witnessed firsthand the collapse of government efforts to make everyone economically equal.

 

On May 2, Politico leaked a SCOTUS draft document overturning the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. Even if this leaked document proves accurate, the overturn of Roe v. Wade will not result in abortion becoming illegal. Abortion will remain legal in many states, states with large populations and distributed across the map, on the east and west coasts, in the South, north, and Midwest. Even so, hysteria followed the Politico leak. Democrats blatantly pretended that abortion would become illegal; abortion advocates on social media spread the same "fire in a crowded theater" falsehood.

 

Social media posts targeted Catholics for abuse. Ruth Sent Us, an activist group, called for attacks on Catholic churches, and vowed to "burn the Eucharist." This scapegoating of Catholics reminded me that KKK used to stand for "K---s, Katholics, and Koloreds." "My mother's earliest childhood memory is of the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in her front yard. My mom's parents were Irish Catholic … Grandma was home with her four young children listening to hateful yelling and banging on the house," Iowa doctor Charlotte A. Cleavenger wrote in 2017.

 

Merely visiting my Facebook page, I could hear echoes of those Klan members banging and snarling. People I had previously thought of as friends were sharing noxious hatred against one of the most precious things in my life, my faith. As they posted one bigoted meme after another, as they denigrated, ironically enough, specifically, not Catholic men, but Catholic women as beneath contempt, I could feel shrink rapidly the already small circle of human beings around whom I share any sense of community. In the midst of all this, though, a devoutly Jewish friend popped up to say, "I'll happily buy you rosary beads to celebrate your faith and I find anti-Catholic bigotry despicable." And he did! God bless him.

 

Polls indicate that Democrats may experience a major loss in the November midterm elections. The New York Times and National Public Radio both report that Democrats hope to exploit abortion to win in November. Democrats, fomenting hysteria over a lie, set one American against another for their own selfish gain. Meanwhile I keep waiting for the Democrats in power to say something serious about inflation or gas prices or the rising crime that menaces poor, majority-minority cities like mine. I wait in vain.  

 

"Shared joy is double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow." When I was growing up, Lindt chocolate bars were not a possibility. We were poor, and so was everyone around us. One winter day Regina, Irene, and I went out to play. We had one sock we took turns wearing on our hands. It was our only glove. But you know what? We had fun. And we had no idea how poor we were. In our small, factory hometown, full of immigrant parents and underfed kids, we shared joy; we shared sorrow. How about in current America? Are we halving our sorrows by sharing them? We've got social media, right? Where we can share joys and sorrows? Are we responding to our fellow citizens with patience and compassion, and a focus on our shared humanity? Alas, not so much.

 

Our political leaders, for their own gain, encourage us to think of each other as members of enemy camps to be defeated, rather than as fellow citizens to be lifted up. Mayor Andre Sayegh just rechristened Paterson's Main Street as "Palestine Way." Of course Paterson already has Bangladesh Way, Jalalabad Street, and Peru Square. I see more and more women in full niqab – only their eyes are visible – and more and more women walking several steps behind the Islamically-mandated male guardian. Muslim women in Paterson have complained to me of hijab forced on them by male family members, of unhappy polygynous marriages, forced child marriages, and threats of honor killings. There are lots of Muslims in Paterson who tell me privately that they want America to be America for them, not a carbon copy of the homelands they left for good reasons. Politicians, though, cater to identity extremists in every group.

 

When Governor Phil Murphy came to Paterson to campaign and tell us what he'd do if elected, he outlined goodies he'd distribute, specifically, to black Patersonians, Muslim Patersonians, and Hispanic Patersonians. I stayed for his entire talk and he never mentioned ever treating us all as Americans. So much for e pluribus unum. Robert Putnam's research shows that emphasizing difference, rather than shared American identity, drives people apart.

 

I'm not just anxious – rather, terrified is a better word – about crime, inflation, division and war. There's another Apocalyptic horseman stalking the land, one John of Patmos never got around to naming. I don't know this horseman's name, but it goes by many: Orwellian codes; thought police; Woke. A beloved, veteran teacher refers to a female student as "her," and is fired. A teacher refuses to indoctrinate his students in racist ideology, and is forced to leave his job. A student makes a transparently false accusation of racism, and innocent, blue collar campus employees suffer grievous harassment. A university attempts to force a professor to use inaccurate pronouns to refer to a male student; the professor must sue for justice. A Wisconsin middle school accuses a 13-year-old boy of a Title IX-violation, that is, "sexual harassment," because the boy referred to a fellow student by an accurate pronoun.

 

Is this mass hysteria? Am I surrounded by people obsessed with Woke cleansing of my brain, body, and soul?

 

In a May, 16 broadcast, Matt Walsh shared screencaps of what appears to be a McLaughlin and Associates opinion poll. According to this poll, when asked, "Do you believe it is possible to distinguish between men and women?" 93% of respondents said, "Yes." Their response violates Woke; they could be fired for such a response on many campuses. When asked if transgenderism is a healthy human condition, 64% said "No." When asked if they felt safe expressing this opinion publicly, 34% of these respondents said, "No." When asked if elementary schools should teach sexual identity, 42% said "No," and 30% said that such instruction was not only "inappropriate" but also "dangerous." Should minors undergo so-called "transitioning" medical treatments? 90% oppose it. I don't know the accuracy of this poll, but if it is accurate, many Americans disagree with our Woke overlords, but they are afraid to speak up.

 

"I want to run away." I love nature. I live for the end of the workday when I can go for a walk, even if only on a garbage-strewn highway margin here in Paterson, where I might see an oriole overhead. Birdwatching transports me. I forget about whatever was troubling me. I am woven into the miracle of creation. I tread to the edge of Eden.

 

I have been without a camera most of my life, for multiple reasons. I don't like to own a lot of things, and cameras cost money, and I am not technically oriented. But I admire photography, and when a Facebook friend kindly sent me her old camera, I had fun with it. I have just purchased my first phone that comes with a camera, and I'm having fun with that, too.

 

Photography has progressed leaps and bounds since my childhood. When I was a kid, photographers could not capture crisp images of hummingbirds in flight, because their wings move too fast – up to eighty beats per second. Now, such photos are common. The bird photography I see shared on Facebook is higher quality than the bird photos in the 1964 National Geographic bird books that my mom gave me one Christmas – and that I still have. (Best. Gift. Ever. Thanks, Mom!) I know I can't take photos that compare, at all, to the breathtaking close-up and action shots that I see on Facebook. I can't afford a telephoto lens or to spend all day waiting for that perfect moment. But "a joy shared. " As amateurish as my photos are, I crave to share my joy with others.

 

Again, I used to think of cameras as luxuries, and my own life as one of Christian simplicity, but I've since learned, late in life, that my monkish judgment was wrong. Cameras aren't luxuries. Cameras capture and share beauty and life and doing so is a necessity. So many times I have felt despair, or even just the leaden feeling of a late winter day, when slush and mist, overcast skies and early sunsets, conspire to bar my door and nail my butt to my chair. I force myself to gear up, to pocket the camera, and step outside, and determine to find some image I must share with others. No matter how low the day, I always do, and sharing that image lifts me above my own inertia and narrow vision. This process underlines Genesis better than any sermon I've ever heard. "And God saw that it was good," Genesis repeats again and again, as God creates his world.

 

"I want to run away," and I did, on Sunday, May 15. That is, I went for a walk to look for birds, my camera/phone in my pocket. I wanted, I needed, desperately, to escape the grief that current events are causing.

 

I spotted a black vulture spreading his wings and jumping up and down atop the remains of a 125-year-old water tower. The water tower had served a former silk mill, one of the mills that once gave Paterson its nickname, "Silk City." Paterson is, now, alas, "Heroin Heaven." Drug addicts camp out in abandoned silk mills and set fires for warmth. Two years ago, most of the water tower and the mill it once served burned down. The ragged hulks of these two mementoes of American manufacturing might crumble slowly into dust along McBride Avenue.

 

The heroin users I see in Paterson are majority white. Online mugshots of addicts arrested for heroin possession support this impression. The other day I passed four feet away from a young, attractive, well-dressed white woman, crouching between two cars in a parking lot, injecting herself. The image was so disturbing that I immediately texted "Rick." Rick is one of those rare good people with whom I feel comfortable sharing my joys and sorrows. In the ensuing text conversation, I groused about white people coming from better-off suburbs to buy heroin in Paterson. One such person I mentioned to Rick was a young white girl from an utterly gorgeous New Jersey town studded with million-dollar homes. A couple of months ago, she killed herself with heroin purchased in Paterson. If I meet that girl in the afterlife, I will want to swat her.

 

When I saw the black vulture preening and posing like a runway model atop the remains of the water tower, I pulled out my phone and snapped a few photos. I was thrilled. The photos captured the vulture's gymnastics and the evocative setting. I immediately texted the photos to beloved Rick and two other friends with whom I was eager to share my joy. I captioned the photos, "Black vulture on what's left of an antique water tower burned by drug addicts."

 

Three minutes later, Rick replied. "Where's the black culture? Or do you mean that burning by drug addicts is an expression of black culture?"

 

I panicked. I felt my circle of community constrict. I felt the grip of Woke close around me. I had tried to share my great joy, birding, with someone I hold in high esteem, my friend Rick, whom I thought to be totally above Woke and its policing of speech.

 

I began to text frantically.

 

"Vulture."

 

"Vulture not culture."

 

"It's a bird species."

 

I went on to explain why black vultures are especially intriguing to me. When I was a kid, there were no black vultures in New Jersey, I explained. The only vulture species in New Jersey was the turkey vulture. Then black vultures moved up from the south. They are more aggressive …

 

And suddenly I looked at my text with the eyes of the thought police, and realized that everything I was saying might appear as some racist code. "Not native … moved up from the south …  more aggressive."

 

Oh. My. God.

 

"They've possibly moved north because of climate change."

 

And again panic. Climate change is politically controversial. Would Rick yell at me for mentioning climate change? Anything was possible at this point. Perhaps he'd "unfriend" me because of that vote for the Green Party that I cast in the 1980s.

 

I found the Cornell University "All About Birds" page for Coragyps atratus, the black vulture. I texted the link to Rick. This page, I wanted to shout (in all caps), backs up everything I said! They are indeed called "black vultures!" They do indeed come from the South! They are more aggressive!

 

I realized that Rick would never look at the page. The point was not to share information; the point was to "correct" a "friend" for a "racist" statement. In any case, "The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other," as Kafka wrote in The Trial.

 

Rick responded to my texts. He pointed out that he had, indeed, received a message that read "black culture" rather than "black vulture." The implication was that I'd made a Freudian slip.

 

No, I said. The pictures are clearly of a vulture, I said. In fact Rick knows that I use the voice function for texts. That is, I don't type into the phone; I speak into it. The voice function is a blessing for someone with dyslexia. I don't have to worry. Except, now, of course, I do.

 

I pointed out to Rick that he knows I use the voice function. He has received multiple texts from me that show that. For example, when I talked to him about New York City media personality John Catsimatidis, the voice function wrote "Catch My Titties." Rick and I laughed over such misspellings. And yet, though I'd griped to him repeatedly about white drug addicts, he jumped, within minutes, to an accusation of racism.

 

After we'd sorted all that out, Rick did not apologize. Rather, he simply said, "Better proofread a little better my dear Danusha; a comment about birds was misunderstood in the worst way."

 

I said I never proofread texts to friends. "I rely on the intelligence and goodwill and knowledge of me in my recipients."

 

"Sounds risky," Rick replied.

 

Douglas Murray, who rails against Woke in books like The Madness of Crowds, sometimes describes himself as a "Christian atheist." In a recent interview, he said, "What I try to urge people to do is just in general, to try to hear other people's speech in the way they would like their own speech to be heard. Which is not waiting tensely to spring having found the erroneous word. But listening in a spirit of generosity." That's what happens in community. People share joys and double them; share sorrows and halve them. They are heard with the "spirit of generosity" encouraged in Christian scripture.

 

On Sunday, a tough enough day in a tense enough time, I tried to share my joy with someone I trusted, and I was reprimanded for a non-existent thought crime, one I did not commit, from which I was not allowed to defend myself. This was a thought crime I would not commit. I would never imply that "black culture" burned down that water tower, and anyone who has known me for years, as Rick has, knows that. I don't think that Rick mistook my character. I think that Rick saw a chance to elevate himself, and denigrate another, using current forms of thought policing as his weapon. My assessment of Rick on this matter is unflattering, but I don't know any other way to interpret what transpired. My sense of community shrank.

 

"I want to run away." Where? I would like to return to a time when I didn't feel this way. I ask myself, was I naïve, sheltered, ignorant, when I thought that the people around me were even-tempered, rational, not out to convict me of crimes I did not commit? Maybe so. What changed? Social media. Suddenly I can see into others' private thoughts. I see "friends" fomenting hatred against persons of my faith. I see political leaders practicing "divide and conquer" more aggressively than any foreign enemy. I see people trading community for perpetual, low-level online warfare, whose only reward is whatever pleasure comes from screaming abuse against those with whom one disagrees over matters neither party exercises any control over.

 

I think back on that winter day when Regina, Irene and I shared one sock, handing it off after feeling had returned to our hands, so that another could be warm, as we dug snow forts and rode sleds and dodged snowballs. We kids had so little, but we shared, not just warmth, but something precious, something that was once very American, and that is possibly irreplaceable.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

 

 

I Am a Woman and You Do Not Speak for Me: A Former "Unwanted Fetus" on Abortionists' Bigotry, Hypocrisy, and Misogyny

 

Jeenah Moon Bloomberg Getty Images Source

"I Am a Woman and You Do Not Speak for Me."

A Former "Unwanted Fetus" on Abortionists' Hypocrisy, Bigotry, and Misogyny  

 

This essay is not an argument for or against legal abortion. I think, for reasons I won't detail here, that abortion should be legal. Even if Roe is overturned, abortion will be legal in many American states in the east, west, Midwest, north, and south. These are heavily populated states: California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Team Pro-Abortion is fomenting coat-hanger hysteria for Machiavellian reasons. "Democrats, looking to hold on to their slim control of Congress, are hoping that abortion will galvanize their voters in an otherwise tough year for the party," reports the New York Times.

 

This essay does not address abortion in the case of rape, incest, maternal or fetal health. Statistics show that the vast majority of American abortions are performed for parental convenience, rather than for rape, incest, or maternal or fetal health. In any case, Team Pro-Abortion wants abortion on demand, without reference to the reasons for the abortion, right up to the moment of delivery (see for example here, here, here, here, here.)

 

This essay does not condemn anyone, male or female, for the sole reason that he or she has chosen abortion. 

 

This essay does not debate feminism. I started working for a salary outside the home before I was legally old enough to do so. I've been working ever since. Unlike many pro-abortion scolds, this feminist has never lived off a husband's earnings. I've traveled the world, gotten a PhD, published books, and taken a risky public stand against gender apartheid.

 

In Asia, I and fellow female aid workers formed an organization we laughingly dubbed "RIFT" for "Radical Insurgent Feminist Terrorists." We defied our male colleagues, our superiors, and village custom, and we took great risks thereby, by addressing the deadly misogyny in the Hindu and Muslim subcontinent, for example: through chhaupadi, the custom that demands that menstruating females sleep outside; the families that keep their daughters out of school; forced marriages; and child sex slavery. We took action in remote outposts where the powers that be could destroy us. No keyboard scold who fantasizes herself an "activist" can lecture me about feminism.

 

Though I think abortion should be legal, I recognize that abortion ends a human life. I think that ending a human life entails a moral cost. My wish would be that those of us who feel this way educate the young.

 

To lower the number of abortions, girls need to be taught, not just about birth control, but also how to say "No." No student has complained to me that she felt too constrained to have sex. Many girls came to me to weep about feeling forced into sex that they didn't want, and didn't know how to get out of, and that they later regretted. Girls wept about being too fat, about not being pretty enough, about thinking that he really loved them and then he walked away. Suddenly alone, they aborted the baby of a boy they couldn't keep because, as society told them, and as they told themselves, they were not hot enough, and they were, therefore, worthless, as was their baby.

 

We need to teach the difference between the word "boy" and the word "man" and the word "responsibility" that separates the two. We need to teach about the importance of fathers to children, and what happens to kids without their biological father present in their childhood.

 

We need to teach young people about the miracle that transpires in the womb of a pregnant woman. Let us communicate this: life is sacred, and a woman's body and her unique, mysterious power command reverence and awe.

 

We have to cultivate a sense of wonder. Our culture really doesn't want us to regard nascent human life as a miracle. Our culture violates women's bodies every second of every day, with violent and degrading internet porn, school bullying, music lyrics, and cultural products that exploit titillation for cash. Kim Kardashian's latest makeup trick is a miracle. Human life is disposable. A woman's body, stripped of any shred of clothing or dignity, is on the auction block in every public forum.

 

What, then, is this essay about? After the May 2, 2022, Politico leak of a draft majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade, my Facebook page, as well as mainstream media, was flooded with a volcanic lava flow of hate-mongering, masochistic whining, stinking hypocrisy, and manipulative lies.

 

This essay is my rant against the hate, the lies, the hypocrisy, the misogyny, and the cowardice of Team Pro-Abortion.