CULTURE WAR IS NOT OVER, IF YOU WANT IT OR NOT. Digging through some of my back numbers this evening, I came across old posts about World magazine, the rightwing Christian pub balls-deep in the culture war, which told readers that Prince was only okay to listen to if your English was so poor that you couldn't make out his sexy lyrics, that "baseball fosters the right mentality for sustaining a war on terrorism," and other gibberish.

These days I keep hearing that the Right is soft-pedaling such cultural issues in favor of a Tea Party anti-socialism pitch. I wondered if World had gotten the message. Thankfully, it appears they have not.

Take Marvin Olasky's Easter column. First he fills in the back story, Anne Rice style: In New York in the 1870s, a famous abortionist lived on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, enjoying "immense dining rooms and parlors furnished in bronze and gold" -- a clear victory for Satan. Then St. Patrick's was built, giving Jesus the upper hand. But then John D. Rockefeller, in an obviously Satanic challenge, built his Center:

At ground level the face-off has also been apparent: A two-ton statue of Atlas, the god in Greek mythology who carries the heavens upon his shoulders, faces the doors of St. Patrick. What holds up the world -- the economic and technological power housed in the skyscraper, or the faith of the cross?

Most people don't contemplate such questions...

But Marvin Olasky does! For years the Easter Parade has been a big deal on Fifth, and despite its Godless nature -- Irving Berlin certainly wasn't writing about Jesus -- Olasky approves; but this year the Parade wasn't all it might be, permanent-things-wise:

This Easter the mixture of refinement and ostentation that defined earlier parades was gone. Many women wore flowery hats, but men on display were less Hello, Dolly! and more Salvador Dali dada: They wore three-foot-high apple blossom branches, or tuxedo coats with shorts, or multi- colored bushy beards accompanied by white dresses.

Bearded men in dresses! What would Bing Crosby say? But it gets worse:

I wondered about the absence of the young: On a perfect-weathered day, sunny and 70, why were 90 percent or more of the strollers over 40?

Were the kids all in McCarren Park worshiping the vaginal tree? Well, on the plus side, Olasky saw a lot of them at Mass in the Hunter College auditorium; but on the down side, many cleaved instead to the latest ally of the abortionist and the Rockefellers: "I saw many other 20-somethings lined up to enter a glass cube: the above-ground part of Apple's flagship store on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th."

How will Jesus and Olasky be rescued from despair? By war on Muslims!

Will the Easter battle for the future feature not the cathedral and the statue, but the auditorium and the glass cube?

Maybe, but here's an O. Henry twist to this column: Will those latter two form an alliance against the Kaabah, an ancient granite cube in Mecca that is the center of the Muslim world? The cathedral and the skyscraper won World War II. What can the auditorium and the glass cube do?

And once their combined forces destroy the infidels, the auditorium and the cube can duke it out for supremacy! I'm surprised he didn't work in an NBA Finals theme.

Please remember that however the conservative spin doctors try to spruce up the public face of their movement, these guys are still back there being absolutely mad.

UPDATE. Commenters are especially excited by Olasky's symbology. "Wasn't it an apple that brought about the Fall from Paradise?" asks Halloween Jack. "(The company's symbol, after all, has a bite out of it, and always has; oh, and hey, it used to be rainbow striped, and we all know who's got that symbol these days, eh?)" Wheels within wheels, people!