Posted on 04/04/2005 9:31:01 AM PDT by quidnunc
At any given time in human history, there are always among us great men and women whose lives pass before us like magnificent spectacles, fabulous morality tales, heroic epics. None of them, however, appear to write for the Guardian.
At the best of times, the Guardian in full-rant is rarely burdened with good sense or good taste. Its twisted left-wing moralizing is often absurdly Pythonesque, sans laughs, and dully predictable, so most Britons shrug it off and buy another paper instead. But today’s issue puts the limbo pole of editorial wisdom flat on the ground and still manages to wiggle under it: There is apparently something about the death of John Paul II that has driven the paper mad. Crazy, too.
Take, for example, Terry Eagleton’s nasty obituary describing the pope as a "political operative" and a criminal with "blood on his hands." This kind of talk might seem a bit hyperbolic even for a well-known "professor of cultural theory." Still, being a cultural theorist only partly explains this kind of anti-cultural insight: "The Pope's authority was so unassailable that the head of a Spanish seminary managed to convince his students that he had the Pope’s personal permission to masturbate them…" The bloody hands? The result of the pope’s refusal to endorse condoms as a way of preventing AIDs in Africa. Never mind that distributing cheap condoms is a great way to encourage the kind of behavior that leads to AIDs. To Eagleton, John Paul II’s disinclination to ditch church teaching is tantamount to slaughter. "The Pope goes to his eternal reward with those deaths on his hands. He was one of the greatest disasters for the Christian church since Charles Darwin." Darwin? You’d think the pope had banned DDT or something.
Oh well, if you need more, the Guardian obliges: It takes two women — Sandra Laville and Suzanne Goldenberg — to point out what a terrible disappointment the pope has been to gay-rights activists, stem-cell researchers, feminists, abortionists, and disgruntled, liberal Catholics who don’t go to church. The paper’s editorial points out the "incomprehension and loathing" John Paul II inspired — and adds a little incomprehension of its own: "More divisive was his concept of a ‘culture of death’ as he lambasted both the death penalty and abortion, which alienated many potential allies for social justice."
-snip-
John Paul II became Pope in 1978, just as the emancipatory 60s were declining into the long political night of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. As the economic downturn of the early 70s began to bite, the western world made a decisive shift to the right, and the transformation of an obscure Polish bishop from Karol Wojtyla to John Paul II was part of this wider transition. The Catholic church had lived through its own brand of flower power in the 60s, known as the Second Vatican Council; and the time was now ripe to rein in leftist monks, clap-happy nuns and Latin American Catholic Marxists. All of this had been set in train by a pope — John XIII — whom the Catholic conservatives regarded as at best wacky and at worst a Soviet agent.
What was needed for this task was someone well-trained in the techniques of the cold war. As a prelate from Poland, Wojtyla hailed from what was probably the most reactionary national outpost of the Catholic church, full of maudlin Mary-worship, nationalist fervour and ferocious anti-communism. Years of dealing with the Polish communists had turned him and his fellow Polish bishops into consummate political operators. In fact, it turned the Polish church into a set-up that was, at times, not easy to distinguish from the Stalinist bureaucracy. Both institutions were closed, dogmatic, censorious and hierarchical, awash with myth and personality cults. It was just that, like many alter egos, they also happened to be deadly enemies, locked in lethal combat over the soul of the Polish people.
Aware of how little they had won from dialogue with the Polish regime, the bishops were ill-inclined to bend a Rowan-Williams-like ear to both sides of the theological conflict that was raging within the universal church. On a visit to the Vatican before he became Pope, the authoritarian Wojtyla was horrified at the sight of bickering theologians. This was not the way they did things in Warsaw. The conservative wing of the Vatican, which had detested the Vatican Council from the outset and done its utmost to derail it, thus looked to the Poles for salvation. When the throne of Peter fell empty, the conservatives managed to swallow their aversion to a non-Italian pontiff and elected one for the first time since 1522.
-snip-
(Terry Eagleton in The Guardian, April 4, 2005)
To Read This Article Click Here
I wonder what the Grauniad's circulation figs are in comparison with its peers. Still, their attitudes seem to fit many in today's UK unfortunately.
dislake=dislike
Try the DUmmie alternate universe. As for now, I've reported this post to the mods.
As of last year, The Guardian's daily circulation was about 345,000.
But that doesn't tell the whole story since it marches almost in lockstep with the BBC.
The two of them are force multipliers for each other.
Terry and his fellow liberal pirates have a bad case of the red#%s because they just figured out how few people would bother to show up for their funerals in light of their leaving no legacy (OK, I admit it's really hard for nihilists to leave a legacy) in comparison to the well beloved John Paul.
Sick, sick people.
... who died in 972. Well, this is at least a remarkably broad historical analysis. Maybe it was pressure from the Holy Roman Emperor which led to Vatican II.
And lest I be accused of speaking out of turn, once again, the proof you are petty bigot.
Ivan
If anyone did not realize what a left-wing hate rag the Guardian is, this removes all doubt. PJPII was a beloved man, and to attack him so viciously on his death is in unbelievably bad taste.
Are you saying that, figutatively speaking, The Guardian and the BBC aren't kindred spirits?
If so, somewhere on my old computer I have a couple of op/eds from British papers which talk about this.
I could go ferret them out if it were worth my while, which it isn't.
I'm beginning to get the notion that your problem over in the UK is not so much a matter of Little England, but of little Englishmen.
Thanks for posting that damning indictment. I've been on the receiving end of Quidnunc before as well.
Enjoyed Mr. Patel's wittering on that thread as well. Pity he's been zotted.
Yes they are. No arguments there. Don't anybody start a flame war on this thread please.
That's not what you said - you spouted this crap about them being a force multiplier, as if to damn the British nation more widely. You've done your level best to try and suggest we're all a bunch of anti-American brainwashed robots, a thesis which falls down as soon as one sees who is doing the fighting and the dying alongside Americans. And for what - to what end are you pursuing this bigotry - as the link I posted shows, it's because someone hurt your feelings on some board you visited.
Little Englishmen? Hardly. Your character is so small not even an electron microscope could discern it. All that is great about you is the levels of bile you generate in the pursuit of your relentless xenophobia.
Ivan
I've absolutely had enough of his bigotry. And as the link shows, he's doing this out of pure, petty spite. Enough!
Well, MI, I'm bound to tell the truth.
To steal a line from Harry Truman, I'm not giving Brits hell, I'm just telling the truth and you think it's hell.
Spare me the martyr act. The link I posted shows what you're doing and why.
To steal a line from Harry Truman, I'm not giving Brits hell, I'm just telling the truth and you think it's hell.
It's hardly hell. You're spouting rubbish. The problem is the uninitiated may think you're some sort of expert, because you post links from foreign newspapers. It's my pleasure to tell the truth of living here - something which you haven't a clue about.
Secondly, there's a principle involved - bigotry is there to be stood up to and stood against. Bigotry as petty, petulant and frankly, as disgusting as yours is there to be shown up for what it is.
Ivan
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