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ROYAL, VA — When Al Matt asked me some ten years ago to take over Joe Sobran’s
column in The Wanderer, I made it clear that,
while I’d be honored to have my column appear in the same space, there was no
way I could pretend to replace Joe Sobran.
No one
could replace Joe Sobran. And now you won’t have to: You can have the original
in time to celebrate Christmas with the latest collections of his columns and
essays (Subtracting Christianity: Essays on American Culture and
Society and Hustler: The Clinton Legacy.)
Reading Joe Sobran is like reading Shakespeare; savoring each
line, followed by a string of accolades like those wine reviews (“hint of the
cask, with a swarthy aftertaste of the husk of peach….”). I’ve spent these past
few months enjoying an essay or two a day, because Sobran’s vintage writing,
like fine wine, must be sipped, contemplated, and appreciated.
Joe
memorized all of Shakespeare, but I can’t memorize all of Joe. So I welcome
these volumes that truly form an indispensable part of the historical and
critical record of an intellectual giant. Joe read his favorite books again and
again, and you’ll feel the same way when you begin reading these. Here and
there you’ll recognize a pivotal passage. I sure have.
Here’s one: “Most people merely drift with their times, and they
readily accept evil so long as it wears the guise of normality and convention.”
Yes, and while history drags its anchor ever further toward the evil abyss,
most folks still feel right at home. Not Joe.
Joe’s gaze rested on higher truths, but his anchor was always
lodged in solid ground, beyond the times and above them. His clarity of vision
and his simplicity of expression make writing seem so easy. Again and again,
reading Joe, one realizes, “ there’s simply no better way to say it.”
Because
his writing is timeless, now, more than ever, we should read it. While Subtracting Christianity surveys a vast realm of
literature, theology, psychology, and philosophy, Hustler reveals those principles, and their
perversion, in action.
With the Clintons, Joe watched publicly sanctioned evil sink to
new depths: “Never mind adultery, perjury, high crimes, and misdemeanors: human
behavior just doesn’t get any more rotten than that,” he wrote of Bill Clinton’s
lustful crimes. “Move over, Iago.”That’s why Joe’s view of the Clintonian 1990s
are as timely today as his views of Shakespeare: Human nature never changes,
and the Devil is lazy: He always tempts the same old way.
Summarize Sobran? Impossible. How does one “ explain” how he
eviscerates feminists? “Mrs. Clinton is playing a curious role,” he writes. “
She is the senior wife in what amounts to a walk-in harem. As long as she
retains her primacy, she appears not to be jealous of the other women. . . .”
Now we know those “other women” make her seethe. But only
because she lost.
And yet feminists applaud her — and even her rapist husband. But
wait — didn’t feminists create the charge of “sexual harassment”? Yes indeed.
But in its uniquely politicized form, it is a charge levied only at ideological
enemies. Bill Clinton, Carlos Danger (Mr. Huma Abedin), and their sordid ilk
are merely exemplary public servants attacked by bitter losers (yes, like their
wives).
By the time Joe wraps up “sexual harassment,” little remains
except for the empty husk of a febrile epithet designed to absolve the left of
any blame for feminism’s floundering failures.
Come to
think of it, in the fatuous feminist mind, Donald Trump’s decisive defeat of
Hillary undoubtedly constitutes the greatest instance of “sexual harassment” in
the annals of crime.
Too bad Joe isn’t here to say it better.
A welcome
dimension of Subtracting Christianity introduces
Joe’s childhood and the very concrete experiences (rather than fanciful
imaginations) that led him to love books, consider politics curiously, and
embrace his faith seriously. Here he outlines the coordinates by which he
steered his mind, soul, and pen over the years.
And they are surprisingly timeless: Fidel Castro’s death brings
to mind Joe’s musings about the liberals who fawned over the bellicose butcher
for decades: “I don’t think I’d have really minded an out-and-out Communist who
admitted being one. But the liberals who equivocated about it, jeering at
anti-Communism while never declaring themselves, affecting a superior irony to
the most basic moral challenge of modern politics — them I despised.”
And immigration, and the blind eye our bishops turn to the rule
of law and the crimes of illegal aliens? “A few years ago, when I noticed that
words like ‘nativism’ have no counterparts on the other side of the equation, I
coined the word ‘alienism’ to fill the gap…. We have reached a point where
alienation and envy have actually become normalized and idealized, especially
when they occur among social minorities.”
Alas, our complaisant bishops soothe the suffering of minorities
by stoking their envy as though it were a precious natural right. Ah, so many
sins that our shepherds can no longer condemn because the wrong people (pro-
abortion pols and illegal aliens) just keep on committing them!
Reading Joe stirs more than a modicum of nostalgia, but he would
call it a sense of history.
About that culture, Joe observes, “secularized culture, being
negative, is only legalistic. It can’t move the heart or filled the
imagination. It merely encourages grievances about an ever-widening range of
supposed civil wrongs; under the general heading of ‘discrimination,’ all
social relations become legal and political relations.”What begins as a waltz
down Memory Lane quickly morphs into a vivid MRI that reveals all the fractures
and fissures of what is peddled as “the current wisdom” amidst the cacophony of
the secular culture.
About that culture, Joe observes, “secularized culture, being
negative, is only legalistic. It can’t move the heart or filled the
imagination. It merely encourages grievances about an ever-widening range of
supposed civil wrongs; under the general heading of ‘discrimination,’ all
social relations become legal and political relations.”
Hmmm. What was that Shakespeare said about lawyers?
Joe would know.
That’s what happens when we “ subtract Christianity.” But why
would our secular age attempt such cultural vivisection? We are never afraid to
read Socrates or Aristotle, says Joe, and we aren’t tempted to resist them as
we are tempted to resist Christ.
“But what greater proof of his divinity could there be than the
fact that he is still resisted, even hated, after 2,000 years? Nobody hates
Julius Caesar anymore; it’s pretty hard to even to hate Attila the Hun, who
left a lot of hard feelings in his day. But the world still hates Christ and
His Church.”
Joe loved Christ and His Church, and many in “the world” hated
Joe for it. Some still do, among them a few who wallowed in war and cash and
corruption and lies. Their careers are now ruined, their credibility shredded,
but their invective was as violent as it was vile: to them, Joe was an
“anti-Semite,” a word whose definition the leftist dialectic has turned upside
down. “An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews,” he observes. “Now it
means a man who is hated by Jews.”
This unhappy (and quite ecumenical) band of haters insisted on
branding Pat Buchanan, Russell Kirk, Joe Sobran, and anyone else dissenting
from their foreign policy priorities as anti-Semites, as casually as Catholic
bishops lapse lazily into tarring all whites (minus themselves, one assumes) as
“racists.” There is no definition, only a disgruntled scowl, hoisted with ample
contempt and certified by a certain sense of unassailable superiority.
Joe is gone now but the credibility of his critics is in ruins,
the chaos spawned by their illegal wars now engulfing the Middle East and their
heroes in hiding or skulking at the edges of public life in deep dudgeon.
Time has vindicated Joe Sobran’s work, and you can celebrate
that victory by reading him yourself. It will make for a Merry Christmas indeed.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/12/christopher-manion/joe-sobran-christmas/