Monday, June 09, 2008

BOOK YOUR OWN FUCKING LIFE. At National Review, Mary Eberstadt does a riff on the Screwtape Letters, in which the atheist-demonic correspondent A.F. Christian (get it?) admits that godly "Dulls" made all the great art, no matter what Christopher Hitchens says:
Again with all due respect, it doesn’t help with this aesthetic problem to have Mr. Hitchens diss it by saying that “we [atheists] have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.” Never mind the first problem here, i.e. how many of those names on his greatest-hits list were Dulls themselves. And never mind, or try to anyway, the question of what explicitly atheist music and art and literature actually look like — I mean, it’s not as if Futurism and Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism and Performance Art never existed!! BTW, we’d be much better off if they hadn’t.
It's very cute, unless you consider that Eberstadt is the author of Home-Alone America: Why Today's Kids Are Overmedicated, Overweight, and More Troubled Than Ever Before and editor of Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys. I haven't read them, but on the evidence of this piece, I'm guessing they're no Middlemarch or Henry V.

I love the old books and cathedrals too, but I'd give more credence to Eberstadt and scolds like her if they were producing something like those. Or could even point to anyone else who was. Good Charlotte doesn't count.

No comments:

Post a Comment