[Editor's note:
We thought that today -- this day of fasting on the Seventeenth of Tammuz -- would be an appropriate time to offer this essay by Dr. Pence.
(It commences three weeks of mourning, leading up to the "saddest day in the Jewish calendar": Tisha B'Av.)
What does the Fast of the Tammuz commemorate? The breaching of the wall of Jerusalem which led to the destruction of the Temple and the dispersal of the Jews.
When the walls of the city crumble, the family is left unprotected and the Temple for worship is laid waste. Those sacred spaces (home and Church) need the masculine wall around them which is the city or nation. It is built on man's natural attraction to sociability with other men.]
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| "The splendor of Jerusalem is a thing of the past" |
by David Pence
Our all-male Catholic high school in 1960 taught us to be Knights. That was our school name. There were posters in the hallways that upheld the categories of maturation: Spiritual, Intellectual, Physical, and Social. Catholic men in public life made the posters flesh and blood. Vince Lombardi, a daily communicant, was coaching the Green Bay Packers. Mayor Richard Daley, another daily communicant, was building Chicago. John Kennedy was the Catholic alpha male who wrested political leadership from the Brahmins of Massachusetts; and then broke open the Protestant lock on the American Presidency. There were Catholic Republicans in the countryside, but most Catholic political culture was urban, union, and ethnic. Police and fire departments were Democratic cauldrons that molded Catholic ethnics into local patriots. The Democratic Party was not just a civic platform for the individual Catholic; it was a confederation of tribes, and our tribe had its home there. We were a Catholic school, not a prep school, so at least half our students were not headed to college -- but they were being formed as men in full, as Catholics, as Americans, as literate workingmen and soldiers.
A Catholic man was trained to be a morally disciplined warrior, first on school playing fields and then on national battlegrounds. Notre Dame established the American Catholic synthesis on the gridiron before the classroom. A Catholic man respected the codes of combat, but was also taught a reverence in the sacred space of Church. He crossed himself with holy water on entry and went fully to his knee in acknowledgement of a Presence in the golden tabernacle on the high altar. No adult had to be in the church to silence a young male or force his genuflection. Someone Else was watching and the red light on the altar meant He was there. We understood what it meant to be knights. We were building a social order because we were part of a sacred order.
We were shaped to be intellectually alert, physically fit, spiritually disciplined, and ready to play a role in a group endeavor. A few men were natural leaders, most men played other roles; all men needed the group. There was a book called The Authoritarian Personality (which was all the rage among enlightened atheists after WWII) that basically blamed the pathology of Nazism on cultural formation that looked a lot like our Catholic high school. We, of course, thought this kind of manly corporate formation led to NFL championships after years in the desert; to cities with big shoulders; to a president who saved his men in the Pacific and led his nation in the Cold War. Maybe to the university crowd, cultures extolling authority and group identity led to fascism; we thought it was just such cultures that formed the men who beat the Nazis.
What does the JFK/Mayor Daley Catholic man see when he looks at today’s Democratic Party? Does any man who works with his hands think the great economic injustice of our time is that women are not being paid enough for indoor work? Does any young male who needs to learn a trade in high school believe that college prep schools and more subsidies for feminist-dominated universities are the agenda of the working man? Does any Catholic man not recognize the immigrant who harvests our food and roofs our houses as a working brother? And, yet, what Catholic man will not enforce the borders that define us as a territorial nation with armed force? And won’t a Catholic man who still opposes the burning of our flag view the coupling of Old Glory with the rainbow emblem at our embassies as a desecration of our nation’s most sacred symbol? Is this really the ordered American liberty of Catholic political theory and American military history, or its betrayal to license?
As religious men ourselves, Catholics understand that other men will fight for their religion. As Catholics we remember Oliver Cromwell who said he spoke for all of Christianity as he butchered the papists and “moderate” Christians who did not join him. We have seen purification movements try to assume the mantle of all Christianity. We have seen our altars, statues, convents, and Eucharist made physical targets for death and defilement. We have learned how to fight religious battles, and we know the importance of isolating the force you fight from the larger religious group the extremist is trying to lead. Extremist religious movements depend on the cultural ignorance, religious prejudice, and military clumsiness of their foes who strike members of the whole religion when aiming at the extremists. Blanket acts of violent overreaction link the extremist and his co-believer by an experience of common suffering. Religious men who fight religious terrorists must take seriously the religious differences -- not just between us and our foes -- but between the extremists and their coreligionists who are being dragged into a war against us that they do not desire. The strategic task is to define the enemy narrowly to isolate him while widening the circle of allies who oppose him. This demands religious, historical, and geographic literacy.
President Obama, not out of religious acumen but a propensity for caution, has discouraged our entering the wrong side of conflicts with both Syria and Iran. In each case, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain would have enrolled us on the side of Sunni extremists against states who should be our most natural allies. Neither of his old election opponents understands the role of religion in the social organization of fighting men any better than he does. But the president's caution has spared our nation the disaster that their leadership would have imposed. The emotionally careening veteran and the emotionless female careerist carry no historical map in their heads nor religious compass in their hearts. Gender violence theory from State Department feminists is not clarifying our situation. Pique, bravado, and insults to the presidents of both the U.S. and Russia is not a thoughtful critique from a loyal opposition.
The absence of a post-Cold War strategic national consensus forged by a masculine synthesis of civil and military leaders is not the fault of President Obama. All of us -- from religious thinkers to military generals to journalists to academics and, especially, our national senators -- have failed in the strategic task of defining the role of America amidst the nations. We have been living in a fantasy world created by the sexually inverted baby-boom culture, and it is time to grow up and enter the real world of religion, nations, and armed men. Baseball got a lot better when black men, and then Latinos, were fully integrated into the game. Has the affirmative action plan to feminize our military and diplomatic corps yielded similar fruits? Does anyone think our State Department -- from Albright to Rice to Clinton -- has been elevated in our geo-strategic clarity by the plethora of female spokespersons trying to explain the world to the very good-looking but equally perplexed ladies of Fox News?
The fighting male Sunni purification movement is the enemy of our nation. The movement has been empowered by the passing or killing of secular leaders from Ataturk to Hussein to Khadafy. All in the path of the Wahabi Sunni movement are its natural enemies (and our potential allies). That includes Shiite Muslims, Sunni nation-states, Jews, Christians, Hindus, and the nations who represent them. Why hasn’t a Catholic warrior emerged to chart a proper definition of our foes and friends to lead his countrymen in clear speech and measured deed? This is no time for the Unitarians of the Adlai Stevenson mold. An Andrew Jackson Protestant, a Catholic Kennedy, a Deist Washington, or a scriptural Truman would all do fine. Where are such men in the Democratic Party of manual laborers, citizen soldiers, and religious patriots? Have the suburban committeewomen and gay blades really taken over?
Let us propose a biology thesis. A nation is both a spiritual and biological organism. Among the social insects such as bees, the queen bee puts out a chemical message called a pheromone which signals to all the females in the hive: Do not ovulate! This is not simply a restriction on pregnancy or rebellion -- it is a chemical command against ovulating. It isn’t an argument -- it is something in the air that never lets the hive even have an argument.
Sometime about a decade ago the cigars came out of the smoke-filled backrooms of the Democratic Party, and the feminist pheromones filled the air. Some call it the "feminist implant" that we are all carrying in our brains and speech patterns, implanted by English departments that quit teaching grammar to devote decades to eliminate the masculine representative personal pronoun in thought and speech. In a televised twisting of sexual reality as the first baby boomer took office, the national imagination was filled with a lying male performing counterfeit sex acts with a servant girl. The privately humiliated wife was transformed into a socially dominant figure of sympathy. The servant girl was abused by all and discarded. Feminism showed her true face not as the sweet sister of solidarity but as the craven crone of careerism.
When the aggrieved wife reappeared on the national stage, all the old rules of battle were declared invalid. Men, especially from Texas, would come on the new stage and appear as fools. Their language and thought patterns could not adjust to the new milieu. There was a message to the males -- you may file for office, but do not run as a man. You are not establishing yourself as the alpha male among the warrior males who must protect the nation. Now, it turns out, if a woman runs as a woman and a man runs as a gelding -- the woman will usually win.
In 2008 one man didn’t get the intra-party memo; a black man could still run as a man, and he did. He upset the Queen-designate. He was the black man who had the usual claims to be militant, but had enough Asian training in public manners to not threaten. He was embraced. Catholic men voted for the black man who said he was the new Joshua to Martin Luther King’s Moses. But he did not bind the men together, as Joshua had in fighting as one nation for the Promised Land. He inaugurated the confusion of the sexual revolution in a far more definitive way than a female ever could. For he had a secret bankroll: the large reservoir of social capital won by the Christian brotherhood movement of fifty years ago. He spent that social capital as we (myself included) proudly voted him our first black president. But he was not what he seemed. He didn’t come from the black churches, though he knew their language. He was not a child of the Third World national liberation. He is the softer child of black entitlement, the sexual Left, and the university faculty lounge. He didn’t support the African Christians beset by Muslims from the north. He didn’t defend Nigeria from the European atheists from even farther north. He has never defended the global South from the atheist North -- the Christians of color from the white bureaucrats. In every forum he was the son of his white anthropologist feminist mother, and no president has better waged the war against patriarchy than he. Still, in God’s Providence, it was he who protected us from the wrong wars of the queen bee and the intemperate veteran senator from Arizona.
But for the Catholic men who made the old Democratic Party, there was a deep problem. Catholic workingmen are not against patriarchy. We were taught to pray for the Father’s rule on earth as it is in heaven. And so we must look again for a more fitting leader. We do not apologize for seeking a leader. That is how nations act -- under good leaders. We will not hate President Obama, as we did not hate President Bush. We will scapegoat neither man. The Presidency is a tough job, and if our policies have been confused so has been our whole culture. In the next election we will look for a new national leader. Parties are meant to help us find and coalesce behind such a man. We look for a man to stick a world map on the wall, and explain how he will lead us in this new landscape suddenly war-strewn. No man will figure this out alone, but some man must be able to convoke a body of advisors to strategically assess our international situation. His best advisors may be one religious/political wise man, two military regional commanders, five top ambassadors, seven State Department officials, or ten good Senators. As Moses was told: no man can lead alone. But, as of now, no man is putting up a map and giving the history-geography-religion lesson necessary. We ask why are we not hearing such a lesson? Why is such a statesman not emerging to lead?
The pheromones fill the air. These are not the pheromones of the queen inside the hive against the estrogen of females who might be mothers, but an outside signal to block the testosterone of any male contesting to lead the group. There are many good, strategic, patriotic, and religious military men who could lead the Democrats -- but there is a paralysis.There is no staging ground where the bulls can fight hard, and then shake hands and accept the winner. The rules are different -- there are no rules -- just a chemical in the air, an implant in every head.
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| Mayor Richard Daley in 1966 |
The Queen looks out and warns: "Do not run as a man. You are not going to lead your brother countrymen in a time for war. The patriarchy is dead, and so is the masculine fraternity that always supported it. We don't talk like that anymore. You are allowed to talk with each of your fellow country persons in the language of the drawing room. Do not speak in declarative sentences. That doesn’t mean you can’t shout against the rich or denigrate the servant girls or roll your eyes at the too pious. We prefer our older male veterans a bit impaired, and we paint the younger ones in need of counseling and benefits. As for us healthy leaders who have never been damaged by the battlefield, we will all run as feminists."
This is coming from a woman who in her time of crisis was “too exhausted” to speak clearly to her nation. A woman who several weeks later could not speak to the Senate because she had fainted and hurt her head. She described her State Department office in Washington D.C. as befuddled by the fog of war for weeks after the real fog of war had filled a room during a single night of smoke when our ambassador was slain.
For now, the Queen has paralyzed the religious men, as well as the fighting men, as well as the men of the cities, and the men of manual labor. If Democratic males file for office, will they look like the forlorn drones that filled the stage six years ago with their queen? This time, there will be no “first black President” to break the spell. No man will break the spell until he understands this is not about political fights for leadership among men; this is about pheromones and queen bees. The nation needs the men of both parties to put forth their best men. This is about mustering men for duty, not clustering around celebrities. Real arguments must be made about why we are seeking a godless, anti-nationalist, military alliance called “the West” against the Orthodox Christians of Russia. An open well-attended Senate floor session, and a full campaign evening debate, must address why we still ally with the Saudis -- who bankroll the deadly variant of global Sunni jihadism which has targeted our country. Before the maps will be displayed and arguments can be made, the chemical must find its antidote and an implant must be extracted.
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| Our 7th president |
Andrew Jackson and John Kennedy faced tougher foes than these. Hubert Humphrey, and the ADA Democrats in the post-war years, rescued the compromised Democratic party from the pacifists and Leftists who really did think that the Soviet Union was the inevitable face of the future. Old Hickory, HHH, and JFK were all told (as those of us who cannot drink the Kool-Aid of the sexual Left have been told) that their opposition to the spirit of the times would put them on "the wrong side of history." But there is a deeper sacral order which Christian men must always obey over the fads of any age. Let the fighting liberalism of those happy warriors rise again. May that true and beautiful rainbow of interracial colors which marks the Democratic Party form a national brotherhood again in service to God and country.
"In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah:
'We have a strong city;
he sets up salvation
as walls and bulwarks.
Open the gates,
that the righteous nation which keeps faith
may enter in.' " (Isaiah 26)
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