Culture

Tales From The Safe Space, Part 45 – Puppy Therapy Session Arranged For Stressed Cambridge University Students

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

cambridge-union-puppy-therapy-therapets-mental-health-stress-infantilisation

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Et tu, Cantabrigia?

It is sad to see Cambridge University, my first alma mater, playing host to one of these infantilising “student puppy therapy” sessions. But after the Rhodes Must Fall nonsense at Oxford, it was only a matter of time before Cambridge started displaying more symptoms of the Adult Infantilisation Virus rapidly tearing through academia.

The advertisement reads:

Whether you have a deadline looming, are worried about your workload or are stressing over the number of societies’ you signed up to at the Freshers’ Fair, what better way to take a break than with a puppy therapy session, organised with the kind help of volunteers at Guide Dogs UK. The Union welcomes the volunteers and their canine counterparts for a relaxed afternoon of socialising which forms part of the puppies’ Guide Dog training. Donations for the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association welcomed.

Now, to be fair: this is a slightly more laudable event than some other puppy therapy sessions we have seen on other university campuses. In many cases, the puppy therapy has been presented entirely as a student service (like a dining plan or library facilities) but at least in this case there is a clear and worthy charitable connection. Any harm that attending students may do to their own future emotional resilience will at least be balanced by a well trained new generation of Guide Dogs for the visually impaired.

But this could have been sold to students just as effectively by calling it “puppy socialisation training”. This being Cambridge, they probably still would have had a line out the door had they named it “Canine-Human Familiarisation and Interaction Practice in a Social Setting.” But they didn’t, because puppy therapy is now all the rage on college campuses, and because the prevailing culture tells us that we are all only one unexpected bad grade or nasty personal remark away from a nervous breakdown, and so are in constant need of institutional hand-holding.

It is the same corrosive worldview which gave us “Inner Child Day” at Cardiff University earlier this year, and the introduction of “Therapets” sessions at Edinburgh University. Therapy animals have traditionally been used to help PTSD sufferers such as returning armed forces veterans, children with severe autism and hospice patients undergoing palliative care for terminal conditions. Are we really now including “two essays due on the same day” or “signed up to too many societies” in this list of severe mental stresses?

The danger of doing so is that we wrongly exceptionalise the normal stress of everyday life, putting relatively pedestrian problems on a pedestal and making it seem as though the sufferer is truly benighted and in need of external aid. This just about works so long as the student remains within the infantilising university setting and part of the noxious Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics. But when these links are severed and the real world beckons, students who have been encouraged for years to celebrate and exaggerate their own fragility are opening themselves to incurring real trauma when they have their first less-than-pleasant contact with an indifferent world.

Most employers – excepting some of the large or wealthy technology companies, who were some of the first to be infected by the virus raging through academia – will not provide a puppy room for harried employees under tight deadlines. And while HR departments are scrambling as they (rightly) respond more positively and proactively to mental health issues among their employees, they will never be able to be the overbearing, protecting, auxiliary parent in the same way that universities are now becoming.

If universities are to have a pastoral role beyond pure academia, surely they should see the nurturing of anti-fragility (the quality of absorbing negative impacts and becoming stronger as a result of them) among their students as far more valuable in the long term than pandering to students’ largely imagined sense of vulnerability.

Throughout their storied histories, Cambridge University has provided Britain with 14 prime ministers while Oxford has supplied 27, including Theresa May. These illustrious records will likely soon begin to wither if future Oxbridge graduates are conditioned to reach for the puppy videos every time there is a crisis.

The Cambridge Union – of which I am a disappointed life member – should strongly look at rebranding their puppy therapy event, now and for any future events. The time has come for the university and its associated institutions to take a brave stand and become part of the solution to the rise in victimhood culture, rather than a collaborator in feeding the problem.

 

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Top Image: Pixabay

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Tales From The Safe Space, Part 44 – The Suffix “-phobic” Is Now Considered Oppressive Against People With Phobias

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

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The social justice movement, long ridiculous, has now disappeared so far up its own backside that it is quite simply beyond parody. These warped, self-righteous posers will weaponise anything and infantilise anyone to burnish their own right-on credentials

When faced with the latest example of SJW posturing and weaponised victimhood, one wonders just how much further these baby-faced tyrants can possibly go in policing our language and behaviour to make us conform with their ever-shifting conception of what is good and what is deplorable.

But in truth, they will never be satisfied. In SJW-land, the power and social standing of a Social Justice Warrior activist is derived entirely from “points” that they accrue defending their new orthodoxy and persecuting heretics simply trying to exercise their free speech. A diligent SJW can pick up points for riding to battle against something “offensive” written by a perfect stranger on social media, but they accrue even more kudos within their cult by accusing a fellow member(s) of heresy. We may be the usual targets, but the SJW cultists themselves must always look over their shoulders for fear of attack by an overzealous rival. The social justice / identity politics revolution loves to devour its own.

This manifests itself in all kinds of ways – witness the case of student union official Fran Cowling, who declared in a blaze of self-publicity that she would not share a stage with Peter Tatchell because he dared to take the side of free speech over SJW “no platform” policies designed to shut dissenting viewpoints out of university campuses. Never mind that Tatchell has done more for minority rights in a typical weekend than Cowling will likely manage her entire wretched life – Cowling cynically attempted to position herself as a better and purer cultist, and so leapfrog the many levels separating her own unscrutinised place in history and Tatchell’s far more tangible contribution.

But what if one enterprising SJW found a way to imply that nearly every other social justice cultist in the world is being inadvertently oppressive all the time, while they alone were enlightened enough to recognise the error of their ways? That SJW would then be able to claim the mantle of Most Compassionate Person, and accrue incredible kudos within that ridiculous community.

Well, it turns out that one such SJW – Denarii Monroe, writing at Everyday Feminism, the motherlode of idiotic social justice, victimhood culture nonsense – is attempting that very feat.

Monroe writes:

For years, through to today, we have named these oppressions as homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, or queerphobia. Other movements use phrases such as xenophobia, fatphobia, and Islamophobia.

It’s important to put a name to the systemic structures that marginalize us and have effects on our day-to-day living. This language is essential in the fight for liberation for all marginalized groups. I remember how empowering it was to have a name for the specific experiences and needs of the bi+ (plus) community.

Naming, well, just about anything in life – a spoon, a tree, a breed of dog – allows us to identify it. And in the case of oppression, being able to identify it allows us to tackle it head-on.

Unfortunately, in our quest to do so, we have chosen language that isn’t just problematic, but downright oppressive.

And I get it. Most of us were born into this language. Whether we belong to the communities who use this language or we’re just allies, it has informed much of our experiences – how we began to understand inequality, how we talk about the discrimination we experience, and how we relate to others with similar oppression.

But Islamophobia, transphobia, and other constructions that use “-phobia” as a suffix erase the fact that “phobias” are a real thing that happen to real people. Those of us who use these terms know all too well the damage that erasure can do in the fight to achieve liberation and social equity.

Regardless of good intentions, at the end of the day, it’s not okay to build our righteous movements on the backs of other marginalized people. Further, in choosing inaccurate, inadequate language, we harm ourselves as well.

Original emphasis in bold.

In other words, using the suffix “-phobia” when describing real or imagined acts of prejudice – as in Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia – is itself “oppressive” because apparently it appropriates the language used to describe recognised phobias like claustrophobia, thus somehow erasing or denying the lived experience of claustrophobes, agoraphobes and assorted other phobics.

So according to the new draconian standard set by the Social Justice Warriors, this anti-Donald Trump meme (expressing a sentiment which they would otherwise doubtless support) is itself ableist and oppressive to those who suffer from traditional phobias:

phobias-are-oppressive

A year ago, this might have been regarded as an entirely legitimate form of anti-Trump protest. But so far have things moved in the space of twelve months that the cutting edge SJWs of Everyday Feminism would now regard references to “homophobia” as an unconscionable assault on the daily suffering and lived experience of people with medically recognised phobias.

Yes. To speak about Islamophobia or transphobia is now ableist – that is, oppressive towards those with disabilities – because it supposedly makes light of the “disability” of having a phobia. Denarii Monroe has essentially declared that nearly every other Social Justice Warrior, by virtue of still using the suffix “-phobia” as part of their daily activism, are in fact part of the oppressive, neo-colonialist masses. They are all part of the problem. She alone is part of the solution.

This is the social justice equivalent of the launch of HMS Dreadnought back in 1906. With the launch of the steam turbine-powered warship Dreadnought, every other battleship in every navy around the world was instantly rendered obsolete, giving the Royal Navy an immense strategic advantage and setting off a new arms race. And now, in a dismal pastiche of history over a century later, Denarii Monroe is essentially declaring that the language of every other Social Justice Warrior – people who spend their whole day festering in this fetid swamp of identity politics and weaponised victimhood – was oppressive all along, unbeknownst to them.

But why should we go to the effort of completely overturning the language that nearly all of us – not only SJWs – use to talk about prejudice and discrimination?

Phobias aren’t really something you hear much about, except as an exploitative tabloid episode on shows hosted by the likes of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer.

Like all marginalized groups, disabled folks have little representation in the media and in real-life institutions. This is reflected in how we are portrayed, talked about, and treated. Mental disabilities – from schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder to bipolar disorder and generalized anxiety disorder – are particularly notorious for being misconstrued and inaccurately and harmfully portrayed, usually just for ratings (read: money).

[..] Phobias are virtually invisible in society outside of the aforementioned daytime talk show segments.  But the fact of the matter is that we are real.

We exist. We navigate this world, to the best of our abilities, every single day. We’re on disability. We work. We find love and sex, if we desire those things. We have dreams. We struggle.

And our lived experiences and truths deserve dignity and respect, not the further erasure and trivialization that phrases like “-phobia” actively perpetuate.

Good grief. Has any person suffering from a legitimate phobia ever been upset, outraged or “harmed” in any way by the fact that we also use the word for their condition to describe people who are prejudiced against certain groups? Of course not – just as if I were to say (as I believe) that the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics is a cancer on our society, people currently suffering from cancer will not suddenly wince in pain when I hit “publish”. It would be clear to any reasonable person (thus excluding the SJWs) that the cancer I speak of is metaphorical, and entirely different from the actual disease, just as it is clear to legitimate phobia sufferers that nobody is seeking to diminish their suffering when we speak of “xenophobia” or “homophobia”.

And mark this:

The use of “-phobia” as a suffix erodes the dictionary meaning of the word, but more importantly, it is one tool that helps society forget that phobias are real phenomena that affect real people every day, some of whom, like myself and my friends, are queer and trans.

It is as though the author is laying each one of her oppressed identities before us, to add weight to her specious argument.

Queer? Check.

Trans? Check.

Phobic (and thus disabled)? Check.

This is how you win an argument in Social Justice world. Not by appealing to facts, reason or evidence but rather by pointing to your identity in terms of race, gender and sexuality, and trying to claim the highest possible position on the Hierarchy of Oppression. Denarii Monroe knows that few people will be able to outdo the triumvirate of queer, trans, and phobic. And because the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics dictates that those lower on the hierarchy must defer to those who can claim greater victimhood, Monroe has carte blanche to change the terms of discussion and literally remove words from the permitted vocabulary of other SJWs.

Monroe does, however, eventually cut to the chase:

That is to say, while fear is behind much of the oppression we face, it’s not the whole story. It’s not even the primary story. The language we use should reflect that.

When we say what we’re actually talking about, it paints a more accurate picture for our movements and our allies of our needs. It makes our goal clearer, which makes it that much easier to accomplish.

Further, “-phobia” as a suffix ultimately centers the oppressor instead of the oppressed. The language becomes about their fear instead of our struggle.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m quite tired of privileged people being the center of attention.

Ah, there it is. All of this overwrought discussion of language and oppression, when in actual fact this whole article is borne of Monroe’s jealousy that using “-phobia” as a suffix puts the emphasis on the supposedly prejudiced person when in fact it should really be on her. Monroe doesn’t want “privileged people” to be the centre of attention because she doesn’t actually want us to focus on prejudice or do anything meaningful to tackle it – rather, she wants to revel in her own victimhood and be sure that we all acknowledge it so that she remains the centre of attention.

This is a sick, warped way of looking at the world. But it is also absolutely required behaviour among Social Justice Warriors and identity politics cultists the world over, who are intent on turning daily life into one great big collective group therapy session, in which those at the top of the Hierarchy of Oppression are free to unload on those further down, blaming them for their troubles all day, every day.

Denarii Monroe didn’t get so upset that she wrote an article in Everyday Feminism because she has legitimate, heartfelt concerns that saying words like “Islamophobia” or “transphobia” actually causes mental distress to people with real phobias. She wrote the article in triumph because she found yet another way to claim that other people – people on her own side! – were inadvertently transgressing one of the key tenets of social justice. Which, even though everybody was using this language a year ago without issue or complaint, is now a tremendous issue. And as a totally (ahem) unrelated bonus, it also just so happens to give Monroe heightened status and more power over her peers.

To slightly amend something I recently wrote on the same subject:

If all of this seems ludicrous and a million miles away from doing anything which might conceivably affect or help actual black disabled people in America, you would be right. Because at its dark, festering core the Social Justice movement is not about delivering justice, equality or doing any other kind of social good. Social wrongs are merely the fuel which power the machine to perform its true purpose – controlling the language and the thinking of society in order to establish beady-eyed little zealots like Party Island Denarii Monroe as the indispensable clerisy who tell everyone else what to say and do.

Social Justice is, above everything else, about the acquisition and exercising of power. Victimhood is actively sought and eagerly weaponised by members of this Social Justice clerisy in their scramble for status amongst their peers and contemporaries. The legitimate problems and grievances of minority communities become irritating background noise, a distraction from what really matters – this finickity, juvenile, university campus parlour game in which casting oneself as the most vulnerable, oppressed but simultaneously tolerant person imaginable confers tremendous power, while the slightest slip (such as accidentally using the wrong word) can lead to immediate excommunication from the group.

Monroe concludes by lecturing us that we should immediately replace the “-phobic” suffix with the much more clunky “-antagonistic”, as in “trans-antagonistic” or presumably “Islamo-antagonistic”:

From the queer and trans communities to Muslims and fat people, that is literally our experience. Our existence and identities cause the majority culture to be hostile toward us and, as a result, we struggle against them – for our humanity, our dignity, and our liberation.

But we can never be free until we’re all free – and this includes folks with disabilities. So it’s imperative that we begin to deliberately abandon “-phobia” once and for all.

The mind boggles. I would write that the social justice movement cannot possibly lose the plot any more than it presently has, but we all know that in a week’s time I will be back with another piece about some even more outrageous claim to victimhood or demand for censorship. The world record for Most Stupid Thing Said By An SJW is now being broken almost daily.

And this is because at its dark, sulphuric heart, the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics is an arms race, in which cultists have to continually invent new vulnerabilities and injuries just to maintain their position in the social hierarchy.

SJWs have perhaps marked what is happening in Britain, where the National Union of Students decreed that university LGBT societies should no longer allow “white cis gay men” to have their own representation on diversity committees because they are not sufficiently discriminated against. Being a gay man is apparently no longer enough to command even the lowliest of positions in the Hierarchy of Oppression. So all of those SJWs only slightly higher up on the hierarchy are desperately casting around for additional traumas and vulnerabilities that they can plausibly exaggerate just to keep themselves in the game.

Social Justice is about power, plain and simple. And while its cultists may preach rainbows and unicorns and solidarity, in practice it is a brutal club to suddenly find oneself excluded from. This is why the arms race has now decreed that saying “-phobic” is oppressive, and it is why next week we will be back here, marvelling that something even more vacuous and self-indulgent has occurred.

 

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Brexit Catastrophisation Watch, Part 8 – A Song For Europe

Samuel Hooper24 Comments

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When all else fails, sing a song for Europe

From a Remainer perspective, the drawbacks and perils of honouring the unexpected EU referendum result and actually leaving the European Union, as demanded by the British people, are endless.

Already we have heard that Brexit will leave elderly people housebound and uncared for (though perhaps the old gits deserve it, for not appreciating the EU enough), prevent artists from collaborating across borders, herald the triumph of “post-factual politics”, endanger the nation’s fluffy kittens and lead to people being lynched for speaking German in London.

Given the harsh, fascistic dystopia in which EU supporters now find themselves, one might fully expect many of their number to feel depressed, hopeless, withdrawn and resigned to defeat. Not so, though. One woman is fighting back, through the medium of music. And her latest weapon is a cover of Mariah Carey’s classic, “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, reimagined as a wistful ode to the European Union.

The singer is one Madeleina Kay, an “an artist, writer, musician and social activist from Sheffield” who is “committed to using the arts to address important social and political issues and challenge destructive ingrained cultural attitudes”. Yes, she’s a Social Justice Warrior.

We’ll be generous and ignore the fact that the track Madeleina Kay hopes to make Christmas #1 sounds like a worn-out cassette recording of Zooey Deschanel’s inexplicably tone-deaf ghost playing on a battered Sony Walkman with dying batteries running at half speed deep underwater – let’s take a look at the lyrics:

I don’t want a lot for Christmas

There just one thing I need

I don’t care about the presents

In a country fuelled by greed

I just want for us to remain

Yeah, I want things to stay the same

Make my wish come true –

Baby all I want for Christmas is EU.

Because today’s generation of coddled, entitled millennials are actually profoundly conservative, inasmuch as they “want things to stay the same”, preserve and protect their own entitlements and value stability over opportunity.

A country fuelled by greed? Would that be the greed of young people brainwashed into believing that international travel and careers are possibly only through the munificence of the EU, and who then voted to Remain based purely on material concerns affecting them? The young people who claim to be citizens of the world but who make wretched citizens of their own country?

oooooh yeeeeah

I don’t want a lot for Christmas

Especially any new trade pacts, oh

I won’t be deceived by lies

I’m only concerned with the facts, oh

I don’t want my stocking filled with

A gift from Theresa May

Santa Claus won’t make me happy

With another border on Christmas Day

I just want for us to remain, etc.

And here is the customary allusion to the idea that Remainers voted in the EU referendum based on a high-minded, dispassionate review of the facts, basing their decision based on pure reason, while Brexiteers supposedly voted based on ignorant, racially-tinged superstition and emotion.

You and I may have blundered blindly into the voting booth, heads stuffed full of lies told by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, but Madeleina Kay and her Remainer friends painstakingly considered every piece of available evidence, every testimonial and every possible angle (economic, diplomatic, political, cultural and historical) before deciding that the European Union is just super, and that Britain should remain a member state forever.

And Kay clearly hates the Evil Tor-ees so much (more on that later) that she would refuse a gift from Theresa May if one were offered. We are clearly dealing with a young lady of great wisdom and principle here.

I won’t ask for much this Christmas

I won’t even ask Jeremy Corbyn to go

I just want to share the love so

I’ll wait beneath the mistletoe

I won’t make a list of demands

To send to Boris Johnson or Saint Nick

I won’t even try to chase away

Nigel Farage with a large stick, oh

For the sake of peace I will fight

Until we have seen the light

What more can I do?

Baby all I want for Christmas is you.

Okay, so Madeleina is a trendy lefty, but not of the Corbynista variety. Good to know. And it is also encouraging to know that the songstress intends to wage unrelenting war in the cause of “peace” – the peace that only the EU can give.

Oh the red bus driving

Spreading lies everywhere

And the sound of NHS patients’

Crying fills the air

And everyone is doubting

The lies they kept on shouting

Santa won’t you bring me the things I really need?

Like compassion, tolerance, multiculturalism

And a fair democracy?

Obligatory reference to Our Blessed NHS (genuflect)? Check.

Because of course every single patient in the NHS is lying in their hospital bed, their kidney transplant utterly dependent on the instant £350 million windfall that we all totally believed would land in our laps the moment we voted for Brexit, weeping at having been so cruelly betrayed by Vote Leave. And again, the only lies uttered in this campaign were those told by the official Leave campaign. Remainers possessed a virtuous monopoly on truth at all times.

And who can argue with Kay’s assertion that compassion and tolerance have been sucked out of Britain ever since the EU referendum? Personally, as a Brexiteer I delight in witnessing the suffering of others and adding to it wherever possible, and am incredibly intolerant of dissenting viewpoints, seeking to squash free speech, shame and intimidate people into fearful silence – quite the opposite of enlightened Remainers.

I don’t want a lot for Christmas

This is all I’m asking for

All my European friends singing

Stille Nacht outside my door

Oh I just want for us to remain

Yeah, I want things to stay the same

Make my wish come true

Baby all I want for Christmas is you.

Well, at least Madeleina correctly recognises that Germany is the dominant force within the European Union, that community of (ahem) equals based purely on “friendship” and “cooperation”.

But it gets better. It turns out that Madeleina Kay is also a rather prolific cartoonist, expressing many of her stridently superficial pro-EU sentiments through numerous political cartoons. Much of her artwork seems to channel a bizarre Wizard of Oz obsession, in which EU supporters are portrayed as childlike innocents while any conservative or pro-independence politician is generally depicted as a snarling, fanged monster (Theresa May becomes the Wicked Witch of the West):

And no prizes for guessing who this X-Files monster is supposed to be:

I am strangely drawn to Madeleina Kay’s art because it represents very simply and honestly the simplistic thinking of leftists and Remainers alike. When she draws winged demons snatching the “Future Opportunity”, “Life Chance” and “Hope” from helpless children, she reveals how leftists genuinely see the British people – as feeble lemmings in need of constant nurturing and support from government, utterly adrift when faced with separation from the European Union which seeks to be an auxiliary parent to us all.

So this is much less a criticism of Kay, and more an attack on the stunted, juvenile thinking of those politicians and commentators who frequently express in words the same ideas and sentiments that Madeleina renders in crayon. Kay, after all, is young and naive.

I myself was a drooling europhile in my student days only a decade ago, a committed euro-federalist with an EU flag adoring my university dorm room. Wider reading and real life experience eventually disabused me of these dangerous notions, and Madeleina Kay may yet go through a similar conversion and learn to put down the guitar and the Crayolas in pursuit of something more worthwhile.

But until then, at least we can sing along to “All I Want For Christmas Is EU” – either wholeheartedly or ironically, according to our position. And to be fair, it’s no worse than that ghastly, sycophantic NHS worship song we bizarrely saw fit to make Christmas #1 last year.

 

Postscript: Now you can buy anti-Brexit Christmas cards designed by Madeleina Kay. An essential purchase for all virtue-signalling Remainers who don’t have the first clue what the EU is or how it works, but who need to show their friends that they are very much against leaving.

 

Hat tip: Pete North

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Bottom Image 1: Madeleina Kay / Twitter

Bottom Image 2: Channel 4

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Music For The Day

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Something suitably brooding for a cloudy, unrelentingly grey autumnal Sunday

The third and fourth movements (Passacaglia and Burlesque) from Violin Concerto no. 1 by Dmitri Shostakovich, performed by Hilary Hahn with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Mariss Jansons.

Michael Steinberg gives us this analysis:

Almost anyone, seeing a piano reduction of the third movement, would suppose the fanfares at the beginning to be trumpet music. It is in fact the horns who play them, another instance of a certain muted quality. This movement, the concerto’s great center of gravity, is a passacaglia, a series of variations over a repeated bass. Like his friend Britten, but arriving at the idea independently, Shostakovich found the passacaglia with its stubborn reiterations to be a marvelous device for creating slow movements of great mass and power.

The bass here is long—seventeen measures of Andante—beginning and ending on the keynote, F.

Here is an outline of what happens:

Variation 1: Low strings play the bass, horns add stern fanfares, timpani support both lines. (In most passacaglias the composer introduces the bass by itself, but here Shostakovich in effect starts with the first variation.)

Variation 2: English horn, clarinets, and bassoons play a chorale while bassoon and tuba take the bass.

Variation 3: The bass is in low strings again and the solo violin, after its first minutes of respite in the concerto, enters with an expressive counterpoint.

Variation 4: The bass stays in the low strings, English horn and bassoon repeat what the violin played in the previous variation, and the solo violin continues its meditation.

Variation 5: A solo horn plays the bass, the violin becomes more passionate and forceful, low strings add a new counterpoint, woodwinds bring back their chorale.

Variation 6: All the horns, tuba, and pizzicato low strings play the bass, the violin adding increasingly impassioned commentary in triplets.

Variation 7: With a rich string accompaniment, the solo violin plays the passacaglia bass in fortissimo octaves.

Variation 8: The bass goes back to bassoon and tuba, the violin adding a song, molto espressivo, on its lowest string.

Variation 9: Timpani and pizzicato low strings take the bass, the violin recalls the horn fanfares of the first variation.

With timpani, cellos, and basses on a long-sustained F, the music dissolves. The violin plays wide-ranging arpeggios and, as the orchestra falls silent, begins an immense cadenza. This is the bridge to the finale.

The violin begins with the fanfares from the passacaglia. As speed and intensity build ideas from the first two movements recur as well. After scales in fifths and octaves, the orchestra comes crashing back in for the Burlesca, a torrential finale.

 

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Donald Trump, World’s Best Christian

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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If you seriously believe that Donald Trump understands the Christian faith, has read the Bible or would choose the defence of religious values and freedom over some other passing whim while serving as president, then I have a bridge across the River Thames to sell you

Eric Zorn has a great column in the Chicago Tribune in which he systematically takes apart Donald Trump’s pretence that he is a Serious Christian and the default choice for those voting with their Christian faith foremost in their minds.

Zorn writes:

Nothing illustrates what a flim-flam man Donald Trump is better than his frequent and oily allusions to the Bible.

It is his favorite book, he tells the credulous masses at his rallies. Nobody reads it more than he does.

But a review of the record suggests he may not have read it at all.

During a televised interview with John Heilemann and Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics in August 2015, Halperin noted Trump’s frequent professions of fondness for Judeo-Christian scripture and said, “I’m wondering what one or two of your most favorite Bible verses are and why.”

“I wouldn’t want to get into it,” Trump said, “because to me that’s very personal. You know, when I talk about the Bible it’s very personal so I don’t want to get into verses. The Bible means a lot to me but I don’t want to get into specifics.”

“Are you an Old Testament guy or a New Testament guy?” Heilemann asked.

“Probably equal,” Trump said. “I think it’s just incredible, the whole Bible is incredible.”

How utterly convincing. Zorn continues:

That unfamiliarity showed up again in April when host Bob Lonsberry of WHAM-AM in Rochester, N.Y., broached the subject in a phone interview: “Is there a favorite Bible verse or Bible story that has informed your thinking or your character through life, sir?”

“Well, I think many,” answered the would-be exegete-in-chief. “I mean, you know, when we get into the Bible, I think many, so many. And I tell people, look, ‘An eye for an eye,’ you can almost say that.”

You can, sure.

But not only is “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” an Old Testament verse that condones barbaric vengeance (“… hand for hand, foot for foot,” it goes on, “burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise”) it was also expressly repudiated by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” (Matthew 5:38-39).

I get it. Actually making time to sit down and read the Bible every day while trying to internalise parts of it is tough. Particularly, I imagine, when you are rich and famous and your free time is largely given over to grabbing women “by the pussy”. Personally, I have only read the entire Bible cover-to-cover once, when I was eighteen and preparing for my adult confirmation into the Roman Catholic church after converting from Anglicanism. More than a decade later I am now finally trying to do so again, with the help of a great online Bible app which comes with a manageable “Bible in a year” reading plan.

The point of which being that it is fairly easy to spot someone who has actually attempted the feat and possesses a genuine (if still somewhat patchy, like mine) familiarity with the Bible, and somebody who is just putting on an act, attempting to fake religious observance as a kind of cultural marker. And Trump clearly falls into the latter category.

Eric Zorn concludes:

Is Trump the first politician to exaggerate his piety in order to win favor with the American public, 70 percent of which identifies as Christian and 6 percent of which identifies as belonging to another faith tradition?

No, but he’s the worst at it — the most transparent — that we’ve ever seen on the national stage.

It’s not just that he’s a brazen Bible huckster, it’s that he’s really bad at it.

Those who put their faith in him should prepare to have it shattered.

This is depressing for all those Christians who have been taken in by Donald Trump’s false displays of piety, as well as those resigned Christians who recognise that Trump is a charlatan but feel that Trump represents a better bulwark against attacks on their values and way of life than Hillary Clinton.

But it is also darkly amusing. Because for eight years it has been the habit of more than a few Republican Party politicians to insinuate that President Barack Obama is somehow not a Christian, or even that he is a closet Muslim, despite endless evidence of the Obama family attending church and Obama himself being capable of speaking about his faith without getting completely tongue-tied or reporting to bland banalities. Some Republicans stood up to the “Obama is a Muslim” hysteria – notably John McCain at a town hall meeting during the 2008 presidential campaign. But many others remained cynically silent, allowing prejudice and misinformation to take hold, thinking that it would advantage them politically.

And now it is the GOP’s turn to field a presidential candidate who doesn’t merely “exaggerate his piety” but effectively invents it from thin air to get himself out of a tight spot in a TV interview. Of course, the Democrats are in absolutely no position to take advantage of this fact – Hillary Clinton is a Christian, like Obama, but has chosen to downplay her faith in this election because many of her supporters place more faith in the god of Social Justice and Identity Politics than the God of the Old and New Testaments.

As Ben Wolfgang notes in the Washington Times:

Hillary Clinton’s Christianity, which she wielded as a political weapon in her 2008 Democratic presidential primary campaign, largely has been missing in this year’s election.

She hasn’t hidden her Methodist upbringing, but scholars say it’s not front and center. And where in the past she used it as a window into her character, this year she’s deployed it as a debate tactic to push criminal justice reform and other policy goals.

Church attendance also has been all but absent from Mrs. Clinton’s schedule, except when she’s turned up behind a pulpit to stump for votes, particularly in predominantly black churches, where her appearances focus largely on how she intends to work with religious leaders to accomplish shared political objectives.

Since 2008 she’s also abandoned traditional Christian positions on issues such as same-sex marriage, coming in favor of the practice in 2013 after years of opposing it.

The reason for the shift, analysts say, is twofold. Mrs. Clinton is taking on an opponent, Republican Donald Trump, who is seen as one of the most nonreligious presidential candidates in modern history. Pew polling from earlier this year found that just 30 percent of American voters say they consider Mr. Trump religious, while 48 percent said the same about Mrs. Clinton.

Perhaps more importantly, she now leads a party that, among its white base, if not its core black and Hispanic members, has become an increasingly secular institution. Recent polling shows the Democratic Party includes in its ranks nearly four times as many atheists and agnostics as the GOP.

Ultimately, the “Donald Trump is a better Christian than Hillary Clinton” argument comes to the two candidates’ respective positions on abortion. And if abortion is a deal-breaker for you then yes, Trump’s currently stated position on abortion (which has certainly changed since his liberal days of a few years back, as well as during this campaign, both without satisfactory explanation) is more in line with Church teaching about the sanctity of life.

But as with all of Donald Trump’s other stated policy positions, there is absolutely nothing to give confidence that his current position either represents his true beliefs on the subject, or that he would not flip-flop on the issue without a second thought if he saw political value in doing so.

Christians – particularly Evangelicals – should really be used by now to cynical Republican politicians who have trained themselves to speak the language, say the right things and push all the right buttons on social issues in pursuit of the evangelical vote, only to sell out the movement once safely ensconced in power. George W. Bush won a tough 2004 re-election campaign against John Kerry in spite of his disastrous mismanagement of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath largely by switching the focus to social issues, namely gay marriage, in order to motivate his base. And in nearly every election before and since, evangelicals have been flattered, threatened and otherwise called upon to support the Republican candidate only to have their causes betrayed or ignored after election day once their usefulness was over.

Donald Trump is doing exactly the same thing all over again. But he is so inept and transparent in his attempt to feign Christian piety that a fool should be able to see through his cynical machinations. And yet many bright and decent people are taken in by Trump’s amateur act.

Don’t get me wrong – Hillary Clinton, largely beholden to the Cult of Social Justice and Identity Politics, will be no great defender of religious freedom or interests. But Donald Trump will be little better, as Christians should realise from bitter past experience and Trump’s unique untrustworthiness when it comes to holding true to his stated beliefs on fundamental issues.

Neither candidate, in office, would be a great friend of religion, though Donald Trump would likely continue to pay more lip service to Christian priorities thanks to the composition of the Republican Party. But both options are pretty bleak, and Christians seeking to vote based on their faith would actually be well advised to admit defeat and make their choice based on some other criteria.

Whoever wins this election, it looks quite safe to say that Christianity will lose.

 

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