Childermas

 

With much feasting they fared the first and the next day,and as heartily the third came hastening after:the gaiety of Saint John's day was glorious to hear;[with cheer of the choicest Childermas followed,]and that finished their revels, as folk there intended,for there were guests who must go in the grey morning.

As a boy in his early teens, St John the Beloved Disciple was of course the youngest of the Apostles. 'Now', says Guéranger, 'just as St Stephen is looked upon as the type of Martyrs, St John is honoured as the Prince of Virgins.'

Martyrdom won for Stephen the Crown and palm; Virginity merited for John most singular prerogatives, which, while they show how dear to God is holy Chastity, put this Disciple among those who by their dignity and influence are above the rest of men.

[Guéranger]

The line in square brackets in the first, verse quotation above is in fact Tolkien's own "reconstruction": he notes that his author seems to have missed out 28th December from Sir Gawain's busy schedule, but it is possible that he has misconstrued the mood of the day. There are in fact two traditional characteristics associated with the feast commemorating the Church's earliest and youngest martyrs - specifically tragedy and (as Roud puts it) 'a particular regard for children'. Fasting and penance on the part of adults would go hand-in-hand with a certain degree of licence for young ones, Boy Bishops, and so on.

[The Church] sanctions the practice, observed in Cathedrals and Collegiate Churches, of allowing young boys to share in the duties of the Choir, and blend their innocent chanting with that of the Ministers of God. She grants them several privileges, and takes pleasure in seeing the delight wherewith these children perform the several functions entrusted to them. This joy, this simplicity, this innocence, all add a charm to the divine Service; and through these youthful Choristers the Church pays honour to the Infant Jesus, and to the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem.

[Ibid.]

The Hatred that Dare Not Speak its Name

Parentline Plus reports that 'Fathers are refusing to talk to their children [i.e. boys, presumably] about sex in case it spoils the limited amount of time they spend with them', according to The Times.

Bullshit! Men like sex. They just don't like children. End of story!

UPATE: Except of course that it isn't. The old leftwing saw that hatred only leads to more hatred may be hackneyed and cliched, but it is nonetheless true as well. Abused children are becoming abusive children, and they're becoming abusive adults as well - as the BBC reminded us last Thursday. (See here - though it's pretty disturbing stuff.)

And still politicians refuse to "preach" about family values.

UPDATE II: And of course it's not just men either. That most despised of Daily Mail hate figures, the working mother, is contemned most of all, apparently, by working non-mothers. And of course young mothers are still the most discriminated against minority in Britain.

UPDATE III: Well, just to round the week off as it began, The Times today has this story and this story. It's been one those weeks, and I dare say that the first week back at work after a holiday is normally fairly difficult. But this post started as a one-line online snarl about sex education but has been growing and weighing on my mind for several days.

How can I explain it? Men like sex but they don't like morality, and they certainly don't like children. To be honest, I don't think modern men particularly like women, except as completely perverse sexual objects, and women seem to have taken that on board, considering how completely de-feminised most women seem to have become in the last thirty years or so. But the thing that is fundamentally irksome about children is that they're very existence in the first place is an affront to the very principle of "free love" (and what Pope Paul VI perceptively called the "contraceptive mentality").

The overwhelming majority of children born in the world today are conceived as a result of "unsafe" sex. Every child that lives and breathes, whether mewling and puking in the nurse's arms or whining on his way to school with his shining morning face, is a warning to the world that the primary purpose of sex is not recreation, although Larry Flynt and Peter Tatchell would agree in insisting that it is, but procreation. The primary purpose of marriage, moreover, is not love, even though David Cameron and thousands of old ladies who grew up reading Jane Austen or Mills and Boon would say that it is, but rather, and as even the arch-heretic Cranmer himself put it in his Prayerbook, 'the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name'.

And then of course there is more to morality than only the Sixth Commandment, and there most certainly is the real rub. There is a disgusting new television programme in America on CBS called Kid Nation. It's supposed to be a Lord of the Flies-version of Big Brother, and, like everything that is truly vile about American culture, "Europeans" will inevitably want to copy it. Like all "reality television" it is of course no more real than a Blue Peter phone-in competition, but that presumably is part of the programme-makers' ulterior motive. When Auntie did a Big Brother-version of the Stanford prison experiment, the intention seemed to be to prove that "that sort of thing" either "could never happen here" (rubbish!) or "wouldn't happen nowadays" (crap!). The point of this new show, apparently, is to prove that children don't need adult-supervision, that man does not need morality in order to get by, and that all society needs is a bit more "freedom" and things will just be fine.

A good answer to this drivel is of course still William Golding's original fable itself. Since it has first published it has lost none of its grim beauty and very little of its power to shock, and for all its lack of apparent realism its fundamental truth, that men are born with evil in their hearts, is just as brutally striking today as it has always been. I recently heard an interview with Peter Brook, who directed the first of two unsuccessful attempts to bring the work to the screen. (As with Conrad's great short novel about inner human savagery, Heart of Darkness, it is a story that seems to stick in the throat of Hollywood.) Brooks commented on the massively hostile critical reaction his film had received in France, his analysis being that French people believe that children are innocent, and that this is because of French people's terribly old-fashioned, Catholic attitudes to sex. (The thesis here is that children don't like sex, and thus they are "innocent" until they "lose their virginity": the protasis and the apodosis are of course both flawed, although anyone who thinks that French people have old-fashioned attitudes to sex can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that France is a Catholic country.) What is more telling, in my opinion, is the persistent influence in French culture of the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which have thankfully never really caught on in England beyond the warped vision of A. S. Neill.

Another answer is of course the chaos with accompanying misery that is unfolding all around us on an almost daily basis. Hatred leading only to hatred, violence leading only to violence.

"What is the meaning of it, Watson?" said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever."

Why do they REALLY hate us?

Mark Steyn is brilliant as usual, although for once he may actually be wrong. His review of Dinesh D’Souza’s new book is, at the time of writing, still here. Here though he wanders off-key a little.

Where I part company is in his belief that this will make any difference to the war on terror. In what feels like a slightly dishonest passage, the author devotes considerable space to the writings of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual progenitor of what passes for modern Islamist “thought”. “Qutb became fiercely anti-American after living in the United States,” writes D’Souza without once mentioning where or when this occurred: New York in the disco era? San Francisco in the summer of love? No.

It was 1949 – the year when America’s lascivious debauched popular culture produced Doris Day, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and South Pacific. And the throbbing pulsating nerve center of this sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, where Sayyid Qutb went to a dance: “The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips…”

As I wrote in Maclean’s a couple of months back: “In 1949, Greeley, Colorado, was dry. The dance was a church social. The feverish music was Frank Loesser’s charm song ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’…” Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban introduced it in the film Neptune’s Daughter.
Look, if it would persuade ‘em to hang up the old suicide-bomber belts, I’d lay off the Tupac CDs and Charlie Sheen sitcoms and Britney Spears navel piercings. But you’ll have to prise “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. As I said back then, “A world without ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ will be very cold indeed.”

From a sophisticated writer, the central proposition of this book is absurd - that western conservatives should make common cause with “moderate Muslims”. That would be merely the inversion of the freakshow alliance between the godless left and the jihadists embodied bythe participation in one of the big “anti-war” rallies of a group called “Queers For Palestine”.

“Moderate” Islam is preferable to jihadism, has many admirable qualities and many less so. But attempting to align our social values with theirs would be the right’s strain of appeasement and just as doomed. The reality is that Islam sees our decadence not as a threat but as an opportunity. For the west to reverse the gains of the cultural left would not endear us to Islam but would make us better suited to resisting its depradations. We should reject Britney because she’s rubbish not as a geopolitical strategy.

I somehow doubt D’Souza is quite right to blame the American cultural Left for 9/11. Ditto President Bush though, when he claims that Islamists attack the West because they hate "freedom". It’s true that they hate the so-called “Free World”, and for them “freedom” means the selfishness and immorality of the Kafir. But it’s not the freedom per se that they hate. Stalin hated the Free World as well, but he ended up hating Hitler more simply because Hitler was nearer. Contrary to what both the Left and the Right will say about most issues, if you want to understand politics and religion and the roles they play on the global stage in the world today, don’t think ideologically but strategically.

On the other hand, I’m fairly sure I’d have found sexual mores in the 1940s and ’50s in America and in Britain fairly appalling. It’s one thing to compare the old maids of the post-War era with the porn-peddlers of the MSM today, and to be fair things did change quite a bit for the worse in a period when Mary Whitehouse went from being a rightwing busybody to being a universal figure of fun and then of scorn, fear and loathing, to finally being dead (as she remains to this day!). But the Sexual Revolution didn’t start in the post-War era, let alone in the 1960s. Rather its modern intellectual and activist roots go back to the late Victorian period, and its big break came with the Great War. Though there was a conservative backlash in the 1930s (and in some places then some – Germany for example!) it was more a “cultural” phenomenon than a societal rejection of the new freedoms (suffrage for women, and so on) and the New Morality. (The Catholic Legion of Decency was founded in 1933, for example, and lasted until it was effectively abolished by Vatican II. The Hays Code started to be enforced at about the same time, and continued until it too was abolished in the 1960s. Both were concerned with Hollywood’s output, and have done much to sanitize our views of the interwar years, but in the long run they achieved not much else besides.)

Would I swap Britney Spears, or even Mae West, for the sake of a quiet life in the face of Muslim terrorism? You betcha, baby!

I just don’t think it would work.

UPDATE: The Ricardo Montalban in the video is of course the same Ricardo Montalbán who went on to become both Khan Noonien Singh and a papal knight.