Dear Spengler, I
lead a church whose priests are pledged to celibacy.
Nowadays we seem to get no one but gays, and the
situation has gotten out of hand. Lawsuits about sex
abuse are driving parts of my organization into
bankruptcy, and now there are pictures all over the
Internet of priests fondling each other at an Austrian
seminary. What can I do to keep the gays
away? Red-faced in Rome
Dear Red, Have you
considered giving the Church an anti-queer makeover?
Lose the chic black outfits, and instruct your priests
to wear plaid polyester instead. No self-respecting gay
male will go near you.
If you don't want gay
priests, why go out of your way to recruit them? I refer
to a report that appeared on April 29, 2000, in The
Guardian of London under the headline "Vatican takes a
walk on the wild side":
"The Vatican has
announced that rock music is not diabolical on the eve
of a May Day concert headlined by Pope John Paul II and
the embodiment of sex, drugs and walking on the wild
side, Lou Reed. Signaling detente after decades of
mutual loathing, the Vatican will on Monday allow a
papal Mass in Rome to mutate into a rock concert."
The Guardian referred, of course, to
Lou Reed's signature song, "Walk on the Wild Side", whose
subject is transsexual prostitution. An excerpt from the
text follows:
"Holly came from Miami
f.l.a. Hitch-hiked her way across the
u.s.a.
"Plucked her eyebrows on the way Shaved
her leg and then he was a she She says, hey babe,
take a walk on the wild side Said, hey honey, take a
walk on the wild side
"Candy came from out on
the island In the backroom she was everybody's
darling
"But she never lost her head Even
when she was given head She says, hey babe, take a
walk on the wild side."
If you need that sort of
thing to lure young people to Mass, what do you expect?
As ye sow, so shall ye reap. Christianity cannot swallow
the camel of popular culture without busting its
innards. I have argued the same thing in the case of
American evangelicals' embrace of Mel Gibson's The
Passion of the
Christ film (Mel Gibson's lethal
religion , March 8). To
Muslims, the pictures from St Poelten Seminary suggest a
senescent civilization ripe for
conquest. Spengler
Dear Spengler, I do the hiring
and firing for a global hyperpower. Last year I invaded
an Arab country in order to build the first Arab
democracy, but what do I get? They shoot at my soldiers,
they set off bombs, they shoot at each other - they
are driving me crazy! How can I achieve my dream of
building an Arab democracy? Puzzled on the
Potomac
Dear
Puzzled, You seem insensitive to
cultural differences. Not everyone does things the way you
do. Have you ever seen an Arab democracy? How do you
know what you are looking at is not an Arab democracy? If
you call it an Arab democracy, can anyone prove that
you are wrong? The European governments insist that the
Palestinian Authority is an Arab democracy, for example,
and honor Yasser Arafat as an elected head of state. Why
not follow their example, and declare victory? Perhaps
this is as good as it gets.
Spengler
Dear Spengler, Recently I
became prime minister of a Middle Eastern country that
had just undergone an invasion by a hyperpower. Soldiers
of the hyperpower and its allies still occupy us.
Everywhere I look, I see chaos. Where should I
begin? Muddled in Mesopotamia
Dear Muddled, Learn from the
experts, of whom Yasser Arafat is the most sage. Chaos
is your friend, and no one swims more adroitly in
troubled waters than the Palestinian leader. An enemy's
praise is sweet, and here is high praise to Arafat from
an Israeli intelligence site, www.Debka.com:
Three abductions were staged in the
Gaza Strip in a 10-hour period on Friday, July 16 -
first the venal and hated Gaza police chief Ghazi
Jebali, followed by the southern military coordinator,
Khaled Abu Aloul, and lastly, four of five French aid
workers ... They were all freed within hours and none
hurt.
The next day, as [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel]
Sharon's office crowed that these events proved how
necessary it was to speed up his unilateral
evacuation, Arafat struck with lightning speed: he rid
himself of Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia,
who had been forced on him in the first place, purged
the top ranks of Gaza Strip national security and
installed his own men.
By nightfall Saturday,
Arafat was in absolute command of the territory. His
nephew, Mussa Arafat, chief contractor of the Rafah
smuggling tunnels from Egypt, was named head of
national security forces in the Gaza
Strip.
When he handed in his cards at the
emergency cabinet session in Ramallah Saturday, the
second short-lived Palestinian prime minister
complained that the chaos in the Gaza Strip was
unprecedented. For Arafat, this milieu is meat and
drink.
Stability, I long have argued, is a
mirage in your part of the world, and those who pursue
it will perish. Arafat has survived longer than any
other leader in the Middle East because chaos is
his natural element. As Mephisto said to
Faust,
"... all things you have rendered By
terms like sin, destruction - evil, in brief Are
my true element-in-chief" (Walter Arndt's
translation).
The old imperial powers understood
this; a proverb on the Euphrates once had it, "If two
fish fight in the river, the English are behind it."
Chaos lurks at the heart of imperial rule, and the true
imperialist employs it to his advantage. Americans are
not imperialists by nature; that is, they are both too
generous and too ignorant to run an empire. Do not count
too much on them. At some point they will declare
victory and go home. Spengler
Dear Spengler, I have done
my best to emulate Yasser Arafat, and all I get for my
troubles is a lousy cave in western Pakistan. As the
chief executive officer of a global conspiracy to
restore the Islamic caliphate, I have had to kill a few
thousand people here and there, but Arafat has killed
far more people than I have. He is treated like a head
of state, while I am hunted like a criminal. Where did I
go wrong? Worried In Waziristan
Dear Worried, Your error is
obvious. Arafat only kills
Jews. Spengler
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