Conservative Donnybrook

Daniel Larison, as usual, that is. Here’s a little background on Professor Bacevich and his late son. Eternal rest grant unto him, Father.

Here, Joseph Pearce of Ave Maria University has an insightful essay on George Bush’s invocation of Graham Greene’s Alden Pyle, the quixotic but destructive antagonist of The Quiet American.

Graham Greene never much cared for the label of “Catholic novelist,” instead preferring the more ambivalent ”novelist who happened to be Catholic.” Despite Greene’s insistence on only a subconscious Catholic influence, a majority of his canon - from Brighton Rock to The End of the Affair - deals with the ambiguities of faith that fed his own psychomachia: good vs. evil, carnal vs. spiritual, religious vs. modern. For Greene, the sinner and the saint were inextricably bound; neither could exist without the other’s presence. In a sense Greene was the anti-Waugh. Whereas Waugh was quite at home with his faith, Greene struggled with his faith throughout most of his adult life, personifying the ongoing process of conversion that is essential to a true understanding of Catholicism.

The Quiet American was Greene’s most overtly political novel. Here, he displaces his religious leitmotifs in the political arena. The narrator of the story, Fowler, is a cynical English journalist whose objectivity underscores the romanticism of the American Pyle, a covert agent hellbent on ousting the communist government that controlled 1950’s Vietnam. In order to accomplish this task, he oversees a series of false flag bombings that will be blamed on the communists. The end result will be the installation of an equally corrupt military junta, one evil replacing another. Continue Reading »

This past March marked the two year anniversary of the death (some might say murder) of Terry Schiavo. Since then several individuals who were once thought lost like her, with helpful ardent advocacy by ones who loved them (much like Ms. Schiavo’s loving parents), have survived serious brain injury only to get progressively better. It is a shame that these stories have not made nearly the same amount of headlines that Ms. Schiavo’s situation made. Maybe then people across this country would see that even individuals who are seemingly all but dead can and do survive and get better and we can replace the culture of death with one of life. These people cannot and should not be simply eliminated when hope is lost. Such is the hallmark of the culture of death. Rather, their inherit human dignity demands that, in the absence of a personal request to pull the plug, every opportunity be given to them to recover.

Sorry, I went all Bono there. Anyway, Richard (from Whiskey Tango Foxtrot… over) describes Dr. Ron Paul as an “isolationist,” “wack job,” and essentially incompetent. (Blind Hog Finds Acorn, film at 11:00.) I am hoping that someone with as much respect for our Constitution as a self-described “retired military” man will back off the usage of “strict Constitutionalist” as an epithet or pejorative. Continue Reading »