Spare Us Such Love, Give Us More Tom Lehrer!

The local fishwrap carried this column by Charles Krauthammer (Pulitzer Prize for Political Commentary, 1987) yesterday. Mel Gibson hated Vatican II. He ought to lighten up and listen to a little Tom Lehrer: "The Vatican Rag." Lehrer savaged Vatican II in his "That Was The Year That Was" album in 1965.

Tom Lehrer: "The Vatican Rag"
Another big news story of the year concerned the ecumenical council in Rome, known as Vatican II. Among the things they did, in an attempt to make the church more [uh] commercial, was to introduce the vernacular into portions of the Mass to replace Latin, and to widen somewhat the range of music permissible in the liturgy. But I feel that if they really want to sell the product in this secular age, what they ought to do is to redo some of the liturgical music in popular song forms. I have a modest example here; it's called The Vatican Rag!

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison,
Doin' the Vatican Rag.

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional.
There the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.
If it is, try playin' it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!

So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman;
Ave Maria,
Gee, it's good to see ya.
Gettin' ecstatic an' sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag!

If this is (fair & balanced) theological mockery, so be it.

[x Washtington Post]
Gibson's Blood Libel
By Charles Krauthammer

Every people has its story. Every people has the right to its story. And every people has a responsibility for its story.

Muslims have their story: God's revelation to the final prophet. Jews have their story: the covenant between man and God at Sinai.

Christians have their story too: the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Why is this story different from other stories? Because it is not a family affair of coreligionists. If it were, few people outside the circle of believers would be concerned about it. This particular story involves other people. With the notable exception of a few Romans, these people are Jews. And in the story, they come off rather badly.

Because of that peculiarity, the crucifixion is not just a story; it is a story with its own story -- a history of centuries of relentless, and at times savage, persecution of Jews in Christian lands. This history is what moved Vatican II, in a noble act of theological reflection, to decree in 1965 that the Passion of Christ should henceforth be understood with great care so as to unteach the lesson that had been taught for almost two millennia: that the Jews were Christ killers.

Vatican II did not question the Gospels. It did not disavow its own central story. It took responsibility for it, and for the baleful history it had spawned. Recognizing that all words, even God's words, are necessarily subject to human interpretation, it ordered an understanding of those words that was most conducive to recognizing the humanity and innocence of the Jewish people.

The Vatican did that for good reason. The blood libel that this story affixed upon the Jewish people had led to countless Christian massacres of Jews and prepared Europe for the ultimate massacre -- 6 million Jews systematically murdered in six years -- in the heart, alas, of a Christian continent. It is no accident Vatican II occurred just two decades after the Holocaust, indeed in its shadow.

Which is what makes Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" such a singular act of interreligious aggression. He openly rejects the Vatican II teaching and, using every possible technique of cinematic exaggeration, gives us the pre-Vatican II story of the villainous Jews.

His Leni Riefenstahl defense -- I had other intentions -- does not wash. Of course he had other intentions: evangelical, devotional, commercial. When you retell a story in which the role of the Jews is central, and take care to give it the most invidious, pre-Vatican II treatment possible, you can hardly claim, "I didn't mean it."

His other defense is that he is just telling the Gospel story. Nonsense. There is no single Gospel story of the Passion; there are subtle differences among the four accounts. Moreover, every text lends itself to interpretation. There have been dozens of cinematic renditions of this story, from Griffith to Pasolini to Zeffirelli. Gibson contradicts his own literalist defense when he speaks of his right to present his artistic vision. Artistic vision means personal interpretation.

And Gibson's personal interpretation is spectacularly vicious. Three of the Gospels have but a one-line reference to Jesus's scourging. The fourth has no reference at all. In Gibson's movie this becomes 10 minutes of the most unremitting sadism in the history of film. Why 10? Why not five? Why not two? Why not zero, as in Luke? Gibson chose 10.

In none of the Gospels does the high priest Caiaphas stand there with his cruel, impassive fellow priests witnessing the scourging. In Gibson's movie they do. When it comes to the Jews, Gibson deviates from the Gospels -- glorying in his artistic vision -- time and again. He bends, he stretches, he makes stuff up. And these deviations point overwhelmingly in a single direction -- to the villainy and culpability of the Jews.

The most subtle, and most revolting, of these has to my knowledge not been commented upon. In Gibson's movie, Satan appears four times. Not one of these appearances occurs in the four Gospels. They are pure invention. Twice, this sinister, hooded, androgynous embodiment of evil is found . . . where? Moving among the crowd of Jews. Gibson's camera follows close up, documentary style, as Satan glides among them, his face popping up among theirs -- merging with, indeed, defining the murderous Jewish crowd. After all, a perfect match: Satan's own people.

Perhaps this should not be surprising, coming from a filmmaker whose public pronouncements on the Holocaust are as chillingly ambiguous and carefully calibrated as that of any sophisticated Holocaust denier. Not surprising from a man who says: "I don't want to lynch any Jews. I mean, it's like it's not what I'm about. I love them. I pray for them."

Spare us such love.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

We're So Full Of It!

I love Brooks' lead line. The perfect summation of our time. All of the breastbeating over the sanctity of marriage and the divorce rate exceeds 50%. All of the breastbeating over the right to life and we execute children and idiots without a blink. All of the breastbeating about the war on terror and it's all about the next election. Now, we have the prospect of Bush v. Kerry; distant cousins—9 times removed. We're so full of it. If this is (fair & balanced) cynicism, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Clash of Titans
By DAVID BROOKS

We're so full of it. We pretend to be a middle-class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. We love our Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, Bushes, Deans and Gores. We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before the New England summer homes. How else can you explain the Bush vs. Kerry matchup that confronts us this year?

In Britain neither of these guys could lead a major party. Their upper-crust pedigrees would be disqualifying. But here in the land of Ralph Lauren wannabes, one all-scion campaign follows another. Here in the land of middle-class self-loathing, we want to make sure that the guy we elect to the White House has lived a life nothing like our own.

So you have one party, the Republican Party, the so-called party of the heartland, which won't nominate a guy unless he has a ranch the size of Oklahoma. Republicans don't think you're fit to govern unless you're on the north 40 every summer clearing brush. And then you have the Democrats, the so-called party of the people, who won't nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflower.

This year's nominee, John Kerry, is almost a parody of the East Coast establishment. He's descended from John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his mother is a member of the famously haughty Forbes clan. He spent part of his childhood at a boarding school in Switzerland before his aunt, whose estate included a bowling alley inside the barn, sent him to then-snooty St. Paul's.

In 1962, Kerry sailed with President John Kennedy while visiting the Auchincloss estate. Then it was off to Yale, Skull and Bones, and Vietnam.

When he returned, he testified before Congress, and his accent was still so plummy he sounded like an antiwar version of Thurston Howell III. He went on to marry Julia Thorne, a jet-setting heiress with a family fortune of about $300 million, whose grandfather kept the entire island of Hilton Head, S.C., as a hunting preserve.

Kerry's second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, is worth over $500 million. Between them they have a $4 million mansion in Georgetown, a $6 million townhouse on Louisburg Square in Boston, a $6 million summer home on Nantucket, a $3 million estate in Pittsburgh and a $5 million ski lodge in Idaho, which is a 15th-century English barn that was disassembled and imported to the U.S.

Most Democrats have trouble affording one home, so when they search for a leader who shares their values, of course they nominate a guy who is running for his sixth. Of course they nominate a guy whose 42-foot powerboat, the Scaramouche, sells for upward of $700,000. Of course they choose a guy famous for his Christophe haircuts and his Turnbull & Asser shirts. Of course they choose a couple who paid to have an unsightly fire hydrant moved from the front of their Boston house, and who sought to divert huge amounts of river water to supply their sprawling Idaho lawn.

This is the land of "Masterpiece Theatre" liberals and Town & Country conservatives. Sure, we want our toffs to flatter us, and abase themselves while campaigning at our diners and cheesesteak counters. We want our Republican candidates to embrace the cultural populism of the Bible Belt. We want our Democratic candidates to embrace the economic populism of the working class. The Democrats even have a campaign consultant, Bob Shrum, who has made a large fortune taking multizillionaires like Al Gore, John Kerry and others and making sure that they run for office as born-again proletarians.

But we don't actually want to be governed by people like ourselves. We want the bloodlines.

The anthropologist Lionel Tiger points out that in many primate communities, the offspring of high-status females are immediately accorded membership in the troop's elite.

Tiger points out that politics is a visceral business. It's a tremendous advantage to have been instilled with the habit of self-assertion since infancy. If you can project a physiological comfort with power, others around you will begin to accept your sense of self-worth.

There aren't too many normal people waking up in normal suburban split-levels assuming they should rule the world. But God bless the upper class. They've lost their legitimacy, but they haven't lost their self-confidence.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company