Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, wrote about the bevy of new books promoting atheism and decrying the evil of religion in the Opinion Journal yesterday. His monicker for Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and the rest of the godless gang -- the new new atheists -- is a bit of clunker, but he does a concise job showing what rubbish today's top dogs of atheism are peddling. I never cease to marvel at the obtuseness of allegedly educated men on this topic.
Robert Miller posted this note today at the First Things website. He describes how postmodernist artists (or should that be "so-called artists"? or maybe just "poseurs"?) roar about their courage to speak truth to power, yet quail when that power is something other than tolerant of their posturing. For instance, a German opera house shut down a postmodernist production of Mozart's Idomeneo, rewritten to end with a display of Mohammed's severed head (among insults to other religions), fearing violent reaction by Islamic jihadists. Miller sums up this shining example of postmodernist courage: "Postmodern art can exist only in a tolerant, liberal society of the kind postmodernists affect to criticize but are actually parasitic upon."
I want share with you an interesting discovery I made. Many have made a great mystery out of the origin of Ayn Rand's name. Rand said she derived it from her Russian surname, Rosanbaum. Of course, she would know.
Back in the bad ol' days I was a Russian linguist, and I still practice writing and speaking Russian to maintain a threadbare competency in it. For some odd reason while doodling in that tongue a few days ago, I wrote out "Rosanbaum" in Russian. This meant using the Cyrillic alphabet. Cursive Cyrillic is quite distinct from print Cyrillic (which most English-speakers who recognize that alphabet are familiar with), and it is "Rosanbaum" in cursive Cyrillic that supports Rand's straightforward explanation of the origin of her name.
Take a look ... 
Now this ... 
"Ayn", a Finnish first name, clearly comes from the last half of "Rosanbaum". With a little imagination regarding the "R", "Rand" comes from the first half. Voila!
P.S. One can quibble that the Cyrillic character "3" should be a "c". Indeed, the "c" may make a better tail to turn the Cyrillic "P" into a Roman "R". Either way, the result is the same.
"Relapsed Catholic" Kathy Shaidle is always good for a laugh.
Yesterday in her blog she had a few acerbic remarks about Rod Dreher and his crunchy cons. I too haven't been very high on the crunchy conservative aesthetic, even though I like bleu cheese, live downtown, and cross myself with the "Holy Ghost". But I couldn't quite put my finger on why until I read Kathy's post. We're both from the same generation, so she hit the nail on the head when she wrote: >>... being an ex-punk means I hate hippies.<<
I don't think being authentically Catholic means sticking a plastic St. Christopher's statute on the dash of my Impala, so I won't go quite as far as Kathy does to say that Catholicism is the antithesis of crunchy conservativism. But I do share her "punk" sensibility for the artificial. After all, what is artificial is what has been wrought by the hand of man who, other than God, is the only creator in the universe.
(Yes, I know. Nice tie in with yesterday's essay.)
For my beautiful Bridget, the woman who completes me …
Squalid were those days of thuggish delight
When the fat land's spirit the small Goths stole;
Joy was a thirst slaked, forever a night,
In that corpulent desert of mean soul.
But pastel virtue slowly starves a man
To walking death lest spurred by hunger's throes;
Standing apart I shunned the dead hearts' Pan
And found you, the last lover of heroes.
Of fleshy spirit living colors bold
You nourished me on the ripe joys to come
When truth and beauty are wrenched from lust's scold
And repatriated to love's kingdom.
Now together gray at time's ragged edge
With your love to the morrow I still pledge.
Hard-chromed and brutally alloyed
he fed the scrapyard hurricane.
Melting metal, his brawn enjoyed
the splash of sweat cooling the pain.
The weight of the world discarded
at the foot of his furnace lit,
he struggled to make soon parted
its history -- hard and fast writ
in twisted iron and mangled steel.
Stoking the fire, hellishly hot,
a cauldron of memories once real,
he freed the souls of things forgot.
Now thick from his lethean flame,
smelted loose of its heavy years,
the once plucky metal flowed tame,
shiny new without smiles or tears.
[Note: The painting to the right is "The Forge of Vulcan" by Luca Giordano, late 17th c. It is part of the collection at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.]
