Three Montreal churches

 

Having some time to spare Friday before my flight home, I spent most of it visiting three of Montreal's notable churches. I'm not a churchgoer myself, but I find that sites for worship are usually worth seeing, sometimes inspiring. That doesn't leave much time for souvenir shopping, of course. Guess whether I care.

One of the city's most celebrated shrines, Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, happens to be across the street from the hotel I stayed at. The cathedral was designed as a sort of scale model of St. Peter's in Rome, and even has the same kind of high-Baroque canopy over the main altar. (Oddly, it's laid out on a north-south axis, rather than the traditional east-west.) I stopped by at about 10 a.m.; there were three or four worshipers in the pews; otherwise I had the place to myself.

Replica or not, the Mary Queen of the World is large and impressive. Also a little stern: all that marble suggests the no-nonsense God of the earlier generation of Roman Catholics who had the place designed.

Faded wall paintings in the transepts depict incidents in the Catholic Church's history in Quebec. One politically incorrect mural is of two martyred missionaries being burned at the stake by Huron Indians. Now that we know the Native Americans were all Boy Scouts oppressed by the savage whites, it's surprising the diocese hierarchy hasn't ordered it whitewashed. Maybe they've forgotten it's there.

I walked to Vieux Montréal, the oldest part of the city, and revisited the 19th century Notre Dame Basilica. It's one of the two loveliest Gothic Revival churches known to me. (The other is Saint Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.) Notre Dame's exquisite proportions, heavenly blue apse, and medieval-style detailing can't help lift flagging spirits and overcompensate for tired feet.

Only thing was -- last time I went there, maybe a dozen years ago, I just entered and drank it all in amid near-silence. This time, there was a $5 admission charge, posters pitching regularly scheduled sound-and-light shows inside, and a dozen tour groups being lectured on what they should point their cameras at.

The upkeep on these historic buildings must be costly. Still it saddens me when spaces formerly addressed to God are turned into tourist catchment areas. But French Canada seems no different from Europe in its modern skepticism and indifference to religion.

Back to downtown. St. George's Anglican Church, also Gothic revival of approximately the same period as Notre Dame, is now surrounded by our new high-rise temples housing financial institutions and the law firms that buttress them. It's currently surrounded by fencing and hemmed in by scaffolding, undergoing what is probably a much-needed renovation. At least it isn't being torn down, like the many similar churches that a plaque informed me had once dominated the area.

Although the main entrance was blocked by the fence, a sign directed me around to the back. I was admitted by a woman working in the church office. The interior is somber, but its dark old woodwork hints at time-defying continuity. Not surprisingly, the style is English Victorian (the Anglican church is the New World offshoot of the Church of England). Its current congregation has probably signed on to the social reform/aid to the Third World gospel, but as long as its interior is left intact, "the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection" will cling to its surfaces.

When I flew home that night, the air was marvelously clear. As we climbed to cruising altitude, the light-map of Montreal receded; soon we were over the Adirondacks, invisible in the darkness, with only a few scattered drops of illumination below signifying small towns. After a while, the great urban patches of the East Coast appeared. From 32,000 feet I observed the white and amber electrical embroidery, sectioned by veins of red tail lights. Soon it was almost like one continuous city, broken only by rivers and lakes, jigsaw-puzzle pieces of night under the wing, matching the night above.

Bonjour, hello

Montreal (or Montréal if you're Francophone) is the ultimate Boolean logic city; every communication is a study in or/and/not. French and English speakers cohabit; most French speakers also speak English in varying degrees of fluency; many English speakers also know enough French to get by with. I'd think it's almost impossible not to be bi-lingual to some extent, since almost all signage and official pronouncements are in both languages.

After a few days in Montreal this week on a business trip, I seemed to hear a simultaneous translation running in my head, regardless of whether I was speaking in English or my mediocre French. How do you know in which language to address someone you are not acquainted with? I asked a (native English-speaking) Montreal resident. "Bonjour/hello," he said. Yes, but what then? Well, presumably you get in return either a "bonjour" or a "hello." But if you pronounce "bonjour" correctly -- the "n" barely sounded -- the other person might assume you are Francophone when you're not really; likewise, I suppose, "hello" might mean "I am trying to be polite, but I'm not comfortable in English."

Montrealers or Montréalais seem to have more or less devised an unwritten code about the language situation that works for them. I often heard people switching from French to English and vice versa several times in the same conversation.

The system doesn't work flawlessly. For instance, the hotel I stayed at can't decide if it is The Queen Elizabeth (as the sign on the facade indicates, and as it has been known throughout its lifetime) or Le Reine Elizabeth. That too is an anomaly. Le is the masculine article, while Reine (Queen) is, obviously, feminine. To anyone who knows French, le reine sounds bizarre. Presumably it is considered that le refers to hotel (actually, hôtel in French).

I think the people of Montreal or Montréal must have a good  sense of humor about the whole business.

While it's tempting to say that this relative linguistic peace shows that bi-lingualism is no big deal and we Yanks shouldn't make a fuss about our government rulers demanding that Spanish be a second American language, you have to remember that English speakers and French speakers have lived side by side in Quebec (or Québec) for 300 years. That's a long time to learn to adjust, and it's been a painful process, with plenty of tension even in recent years. We're insane to invite similar problems.

One other thing. It's often said that French Canadians speak "bad" French (a patois, or with a grating accent). That may be so outside of sophisticated Montreal, but to my ear the speech was close enough to classic French. And the Canadians are more conservative about their French than the supposedly fussy French themselves. In Montreal it is stationnement, please, not le parking. And they are very precise, even in the words crawling at the bottom of the TV screen, concerning accent marks -- as in dépôt -- which I understand the French French are increasingly careless about.

More observations from Montreal in the next posting. Stay tuned.

Is Le Pen mightier than the sword?

The last time I wrote about Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's Front National who is seeking the presidency, I suggested that "France -- yes, France -- will be the first to stop Islamization."

Will Le Pen turn out to be mightier than the sword of Islam and Europe's ruling class?

I can hardly lay claim to deep knowledge of France's politics, nor do I follow its developments closely, so take this with due caution. Now and then, however, I check what the English-language media report.

Here's a story published a few days ago in The Telegraph, which is what passes for a conservative paper in Britain -- a little less cultural Marxism, please.

To the Telegraph, Le Pen is "the devil's daughter" ("as she has been called," in the reporter's weaselly formulation). It would probably call her the devil in female form, were the devil's title not already assigned to her father, the sourly nativist Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The devil's daughter is quoted:

Miss Le Pen's election strategy is to deflect from traditional Left-Right arguments. Today, she says, the only sensible division is between those who believe in national interests and those who believe in globalisation. 

"The Left/Right division makes no sense because they both think the same way – about the euro and the European Union for example – and they both have the same solutions that don't work," she said.

Touché. One of the strangest, and most alarming, signs of our times is that political left-right distinctions have become almost meaningless, as have political party differences. In the United States, there is one party with an Evil wing and a Stupid wing. In France -- Marine Le Pen aside -- it's More Left and Less Left.

"I say the euro is dead. The euro is a stalemate and has brought nothing but pitiful results in both the economic field and the social field in the last ten years. The current sovereign debt crisis means we are called to show solidarity with countries that we cannot bail out because we don't have the means. It's not possible. I would prefer to anticipate our exit from the euro and prepare for it than to wait for it to happen and suffer it. If we wait for the euro to collapse it will be an economic and social catastrophe."

The euro very likely will collapse. The banking cartel that owns the governments will put off the day of reckoning with loans, schemes, agreements, and fantasy, but that will only supercharge the eventual blow-up. Imagine, a politician who wants her country to face reality instead of playing let's-pretend. 

"I believe the people are with me on this. The French are against the bail-out plan, so are the Germans and Italians. There will come a moment when people will take power from their leaders." 

As far as the EU seigneurs are concerned, what the people want is none of the people's business. The Eurocrats would rather the reap the whirlwind than allow one micron of the EU's centralized, undemocratic power to be lost.

Asked what she believes is the greatest menace to France, she is quick to respond and unequivocal: the European Union and immigration.

"The greatest threat is the loss of our freedom as people because we can see that in reality the European Union has become another Soviet Union constructed without the people and sometimes against the people. It makes decisions and our democracy has disappeared; we French people cannot decide on our own future, it's a bureaucrat or technocrat who decides in our place.

"The other great danger is massive immigration that will result in the loss of our identity. I am madly in love with the idea of there being a diversity of nations, but for nations to be diverse their people have to stay together. It is not a lack of respect or hatred for foreigners, but I want Malians to remain Malians and defend the language and identity of Mali, Americans to stay Americans, the Chinese, Chinese and the French, French." 

For the international Leftist Establishment, such talk is straight out of a horror film. It would probably get her arrested in the U.K., Sweden, Norway, Austria ...

"There will come a moment when people will take power from their leaders." But what will happen when the Eurocrats sense the inconceivable happening: the end of their regime? How far will they carry their repression? Will they speed up the conveyor belt of Muslim immigration to improve their odds against the French French? Criminalize Marine Le Pen? Criminalize all the French who aren't part of the globalist elite?

Marine Le Pen has two things going for her. First, she speaks her mind without the usual politician's equivocation, a quality people are starved for. Second, she's good looking. Don't underestimate the importance of that.

Wash your mind after reading this posting

When did this obsession with hand washing start? Grocery stores offer some kind of disinfectant to spray on your dainty paws. Every public restroom now seems to have a sign reminding you to purify yourself. They're like World War II posters, "Loose lips sink ships." Dirty fingers are where disease lingers!

Not just after using the toilet, mind, but on divers occasions. Yesterday I saw a notice urging the ritual under half a dozen circumstances -- when you've sneezed, when someone else has sneezed, coughed, &c. Finally, so help me, "After touching a doorknob."

[Knock, knock.]

"Come in."

"Ah, Jarvis. At ease, corporal. I have a little job for you -- "

"Pardon me, sir, with respect, I need to go wash my hands. Nothing personal, sir, just trying to stop disease in your tracks, I mean in its tracks. Don't mind if I leave the door ajar, do you, sir? Just be a minute."

How about a poster for theater restrooms:

"Listen up, folks! If you murder someone, wash your hands again and again! Lady Macbeth here, with a word to the wise."

At a public library I frequent, not only is there The Sign of the Wash, there's another asking patrons to throw used paper towels (of which there are none; this is an advanced, Green, blow-drying facility) in the "receptacle," not on the floor.

What kind of library patron needs to be told not to throw used paper towels on the floor?

Most of these health propaganda posters surely are required by law, and their content devised by government (local, state, federal or all three) health offices. Somewhere there are cubicle farms of public servants whose job is to warn the public of disease hazards lurking everywhere. 

Like all bureaucratic organizations, they must expand or die -- and they never die. So it won't do just to tell the punters to wash up after using the restroom. New threats must be regularly identified and warned of, and hosannas sung to the glories of prophylaxis.

Could it be that this hygienic busybody industry has something to do with our masters' campaign of population replacement? Our new vibrancy surely includes many hard-working family-valued legal and stealth immigrants who failed Hand Washing 101 in their native environments. I understand certain "developing" world airlines play videos that not only instruct passengers in the finer points of seat belts, oxygen masks, and evacuation, but also explain how to use the toilet.

Diversity is our strength. Now, go have a wash.

Philip Roth's plot against America

I've read a shocking novel by Philip Roth. "So what else is new?" Hasn't he been the literary enfant terrrible at least since Portnoy's Complaint? So he has, but The Plot Against America (published in 2004) shocked me for a reason I never would have expected: it's bad. Really.

As anyone who has followed Roth's writing career probably knows, Plot has a big "concept" (often a sign of a writer who's stuck). Set in the early 1940s, it's fictional alternative history. Charles A. Lindbergh is drafted by the Republicans to run for president in 1940 ... and wins. That's when serious trouble starts for the narrator, a nine-year-old named (wait for it) Philip Roth. His previously more or less normal youth and his family's life in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, is turned upside down.

Lindbergh, you see, is a terrible anti-Semite. So is his vice president, Burton K. Wheeler (an actual U.S. senator of the period). Lindbergh and Adolph Hitler reach an understanding -- Hitler can have free rein to gather Europe, including England, into the Third Reich in exchange for leaving America neutral and at peace.

Roth describes the growing persecution of American Jews. It starts fairly innocently, with a program through which young Jews are temporarily resettled in the American heartland, the better to be assimilated. Philip's -- the character's -- older brother goes off for a stint with a Kentucky farm family. He returns as a Lindbergh spokesman, to the horror of his relatives.

As things develop, pogroms erupt in a dozen American cities, and it's touch-and-go whether Newark will be among them. On October 15, 1942:

Just before dawn Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf [a Lindbergh supporter, married to Philip's aunt] is taken into custody by the FBI under suspicion of being "among the ringleaders of the Jewish conspiratorial plot against America." ... Others arrested in the early-morning roundup include Governor Lehman, Bernard Baruch, Justice Frankfurter, Franfurter protege and Roosevelt administrator David Lilienthal, New Deal advisers Adolf Berle and Sam Rosenman, labor leaders David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman, economist Isador Lubin, leftist journalists I.F. Stone and James Wechsler, and socialist Louis Waldman.

Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist turned Lindbergh basher, is assassinated. Martial law is declared throughout the country. "Under martial law, America remains calm, though the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and the leaders of the American Nazi Party have jointly called upon the acting president 'to implement extreme measures to protect America from a Jewish coup d'état.'" And so on.

Although the novel is explicitly the drama of a family under the shadow of persecution, large patches of it read like a history book, at times like an old newspaper.

I was waiting for Roth to let us in on the joke. Surely he had something up his sleeve. He must be planning to kayo us with irony. If any irony was there, it was too subtle for me. Roth seems to have meant for us to take his American Jewish Hell literally.

How could the great Philip Roth have sunk to this?

I mean great. I admire Roth's work tremendously, even though some of it is uncomfortable to read. He's a superb stylist -- not in the whiz-bang colorful manner of Updike or Nabokov, but elegantly spare. He simply has the right word for every purpose. Often the words are plain, sometimes slangy, but they convey exactly what he wants to convey, with what overtones, in what mood.

Roth's detractors say he's always writing about the Jews. Well, Dickens wrote a lot of novels about the English. But part of what makes Roth's books -- his other books -- so entertaining is that his central characters are ambivalent about their religious culture. His Jews carry on their ghetto mentality in the United States where there are no Jewish ghettos, just neighborhoods. They are alienated from the goyim, yet want to be part of the gentile smart set.

This can result in terrific dialogue, of the kind Roth is famous for, between Jews with opposing views of secularism, Israel, assimilation, anything Jews can debate (which is anything). I don't know that Roth would agree with it, but he'd probably appreciate one of G.K. Chesterton's typically paradoxical quips: "It is strange that the Jews should be so anxious for international agreements. For one of the few really international agreements is a suspicion of the Jews."

The Plot Against America includes some of Roth's choice language and moments of lovely empathy. It contains a few brief arguments -- father vs. older son, principally -- about "President" Lindbergh. But compared to the intellectually rambunctious verbal fencing matches in, if I remember right, The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, those in Plot are perfunctory remnants. Roth's heart isn't in them.

Only a few years after the publication of the masterly, psychologically acute American Pastoral, Roth has devolved into something very like paranoia. He's so serious about the U.S., of the 1940s anyway, as a seething pit of anti-Semitism that he actually includes several appendixes citing what he thinks is evidence.

I'm not that familiar with all the details of Lindbergh's life, but he showed bad judgment in allowing himself to accept awards from the Nazi German hierarchy, for which he was something of an apologist (before World War II). Having your only child kidnapped and murdered can perhaps cloud your perceptions for you. Roth includes in the appendix as exhibit A for the prosecution Lindbergh's (actual) speech to the America First Committee, dedicated to keeping the country out of the European war, in September 1941. Here's the money quote from Lindbergh's address:

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make them bitter enemies of any race.

No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. ...

[The Jews'] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people [whom he also accused of luring the U.S. into the war]. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

In hindsight this seems mistaken, of course. "Both races, I admire" is disingenuous, not to mention incorrect in its use of "race." For all that, it seems to me essentially a political argument, and within the realm of legitimate discourse in its own time. It is hardly a call for anti-Semitic frenzy of the kind Roth describes in the "Lindbergh" administration and the following "Wheeler" administration.

I read -- once again, this is from real, not "alternative," history -- about an American army unit that liberated the few survivors of a Nazi concentration camp (whose inmates were mostly Jews) in 1945. That same American army had doubtless suffered many casualties as it fought its way through Germany. General Eisenhower ordered every man, woman, and child in the next-door German village to march through the concentration camp and view the corpses and emaciated victims. That act, by Philip Roth's reckoning, was performed by the army of a country that wanted to kill its own Jews.

Roth remains on my short list of brilliant contemporary novelists, for what he produced before Plot and probably later (I haven't read anything more recent from him). So this is written more in distaste than anger. But a little anger, yes.

Smashed

In other fields, when bridges do not stand, when aircraft do not fly, when machines do not work, when treatments do not cure, despite all conscientious efforts on the part of many persons to make them do so, one begins to question the basic assumptions, principles, theories, and hypotheses that guide one's efforts.

-- Professor Arthur Jensen, psychologist and psychometrician

Theories about genetic intelligence differences and economics have this in common: when they don't work according to the prevailing ideology, practitioners aren't inclined to question the theory. They just act on the idea that what hasn't worked before will work if tried again, because, well, the alternative is out of bounds.

As I write this, the markets are in a ghastly sell-off largely because the quacks controlling the U.S. government economic policy can't help repeating themselves. IBD says:

After meeting for two days to discuss the economy, the Fed announced it would "twist" long-term rates relative to shorter ones. That entails buying $400 billion in 6-year to 30-year Treasuries by June 2012, while selling $400 billion of Treasuries maturing in three years or less. This would be the Fed's third major bond-buying program in less than three years. This program is similar to the "Operation Twist" that the central bank undertook in the early 1960s.

"Further aggressive moves are likely. The Fed is likely to expand its balance sheet again later this year, in another round of quantitative easing," wrote Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics for Moody's Analytics, in a note. "The central bank could even move beyond purchasing Treasuries, to purchasing corporate debt and even equities. It could also reduce the interest rate on reserves in an effort to encourage bank lending."

Since the 2008 debacle, the Fed has pursued an almost uninterrupted policy of pumping "liquidity" into the market while keeping interest rates so low that they are effectively less than zero when inflation is factored in. All that pumping seems only to have flooded the carburetor. Liquidity may have been a problem in 2008, but the system is today full of money (albeit much of it created ex nihilo by the Treasury); it just isn't being used by the private sector for what the government wants it used for, making loans and hiring people.

Ben Bernanke is famously a student of the Great Depression and has "learned" one thing from it: the crisis was caused by money supply drying up. It's possible that if he stepped into a time machine and went back to 1932, he might have succeeded in stopping the bleeding. But this isn't 1932. It's a different world and a different kind of financial rout. That doesn't stop him from doing the only dance steps he knows.

A downside of the zero-interest-rate religious belief is that it leaves savers high and dry. People who've worked and invested to make money over the years, and would now like to protect its purchasing power, have no riskless option left. Treasury bonds won't lose their nominal value if held to maturity, but they aren't earning any significant yield meanwhile and their real-world value is liable to be trashed by inflation.

But that's par for the course. The Fed and the Treasury have convinced themselves that the world will end if any large institutions, particularly banks, fail regardless of how worm-eaten they are. If conservative investors, especially those who are retired and who can only earn from their savings, get whacked -- too bad, collateral damage.

Our "leaders" are trapped in a tape loop. Endless minor variations on the same theme. I can't stand to listen to Obama's speeches, but from what I read of them, each is a cut-and-paste job, a new slant on his basic idea that "the rich" (anyone with an income of more than $200,000) is robbing the poor box. (Lest you think this is self-serving, I can assure you that I make well under $200,000 a year.) Bernanke and Geithner have only a Pavlovian response that the worse things get, the more government intervention is called for.

I'm no apologist for corporations; they have plenty to answer for, and reasonable regulations (such as those for worker safety and environmental responsibility) are, well, reasonable. But they aren't hiring, and in some cases actually moving operations out of the country, because they are over-regulated, know not what loony government law will hit them next, and above all, they understand that they have an enemy in the White House. The Fed and the Treasury may not be their enemies, but they deeply believe in central control of the economy. They're trying to stimulate the economy while micro-managing it. To return to the automobile metaphor, it's like flooring the gas pedal while keeping a heavy foot on the brake.

When treatments don't cure, can't any of our economic mad scientists acknowledge that the assumptions behind them might be wrong?