When l googled “Ross Douthat” and “C.S. Lewis”, the first thing that popped up was a recent column claiming that elites are leading stable married lives and having arguments that pit C.S. Lewis against Phil Pullman (I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about in this part of the column), while the plebes are having babies out of wedlock because they don’t go to church anymore. Some of this may be true, even if the evidence is taken from a Newsweek article about a group that calls itself the Marriage Project, and I’m sure Times readers like being told that they are temperate, law-abiding Pullmanians.
But sometimes I wonder….what is the point of newspaper columns that lament how everything is going to hell because nowadays people get tattoos/spend too much time texting/listen to Carrie Underwood songs/don’t go to church? Is there any chance that someone will read a Richard Cohen column and rethink the wisdom of using emoticons or listening to hip-hop or whatever it is that people are doing this week that will destroy our civilization?
ed
Dude, you should totally Google “C. S. Lewis, Jr.” It’s way funnier.
beltane
Pardon my ignorance, but who is Philip Pullman?
Almost all of the young evangelicals I know have had their children out of wedlock, usually with a different partner for each child. Their churchgoing teaches them that as long as they throw stones at gays and liberals it’s all good.
Short Bus Bully
So was Ross born a cranky old man or did he take some pills for that or something? Revenge of the social outcasts…
jwb
It seems to me that the likes of Richard Cohen and Ross Douthat and their enabling of our current political situation have done far more to destroy civilization than any of the cultural practices they complain about.
Bnut
Ross Douthat’s birthdays are so awesome because his wife actually takes off the rubber glove when she jerks him off.
Roger Moore
Conservatives like to be told that everything is going to hell in a handbasket because it confirms their belief that change is bad. Newspapers that tell them that will sell better than ones that say kids today are pretty much OK. And since it’s mostly old fogey conservatives who read the paper anymore, you can see which side their bread is buttered on.
The Grand Panjandrum
My hypothesis is that we will know human beings are a sustainable species when we can go for ONE generation that doesn’t actually start bitching about how bad things are getting and that if only we [would/wouldn’t/should/shouldn’t do more/less] of some particular activity. Until then I have little hope for the species. It has something to do with becoming parents, or maybe just getting older but not much wiser. Hard to say. Until we overcome this penchant for sounding like our parents when we become parents we are doomed.
Chris
@beltane: Pullman is the guy who wrote the Golden Compass trilogy.
Pullman himself is an atheist, although in Golden Compass, the guy we call “god” really does exist (and is quite the jerk / pitiful loser / whatever).
tweez
Pullman wrote very anti-church based fantasy novels.
Oh for the old days of the Ozzy and Harriet 50s, when everyone knew their place, God was in His heaven, and giants walked the earth…
jwb
@beltane: Pullman did the Dark Materials trilogy, which are often called the anti-Narnia or anti-Harry Potter depending on the critic.
fucen tarmal
i believe his fans refer to themselves as pullmaniacs, that is all.
freelancer
@ed:
‘Cause you don’t mess around, with God’s America!
some other guy
And don’t forget George Will’s scathing attack on the evils of wearing jeans. Fogeyism at its finest. There’s even an Edmund Burke reference!
c u n d gulag
Baby Bobo missed out on the cultural changes of the ’50’s, ’60’s, and ’70’s, and now is trying to show his Doddering Old Man bona fides to appeal to Dean Broder.
On the plus side, he’s a better writer than the guy he replaced, Kristol. But then, I’m sure there’s a chimp out there with a keyboard who could be better still. And any chimp could write better than Bloody Bill. And be right more often. Hell, that World Cup octopus was right everytime! And Kristol – NOT ONCE!!!
FlyingToaster
Phillip Pullmann wrote the “His Dark Materials” Books: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass, as well as the “Sally Lockhart” books. These works are rather critical of organized religion, and the protagonists don’t get married. Heh.
Douthat? What a maroon.
tweez
@Chris: IIRC, in the Pullman trilogy it turns out God is like a withered old man in an iron lung or something.
Roger Moore
@beltane:
Pullman is a well known atheist author most famous for writing a trilogy of childrens fantasy novels. I think Douthat thinks of him as something like the atheist equivalent of C.S. Lewis.
WereBear
@c u n d gulag: My kitten’s behind, randomly bouncing on the keys, makes more sense than Bobo.
jwb
@c u n d gulag: On the other hand, Kristol had the redeeming feature of being hackishly clear and reliably wrong about everything. It takes a lot more effort to cut through the knots and contortions of the Bobos.
Fuck U II: The Duckening
Hey, I heard somewhere that kids these days are wearing funny-looking glasses and doing things that I think are stupid, so fuckyeah! Also, too, their music sucks, and they all say ‘have a good one!’ and ‘no problem!’ and shit like that.
DougJ
I didn’t know who Phil Pullman was either. For a minute, I thought we might have another Baldwin family situation on our hands, but I’m relieved to see that we don’t.
cthulhu
Pullman, an avowed atheist (or at agnostic, not sure what he labels himself), wrote the Golden Compass series which includes themes against religion even going as far to go to war against God. But as the fantasy elements are similar (e.g., intelligent talking animals, etc.), there tends to be a lot of comparison between the two.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
As a warning for those of you who haven’t read the Pullman books: Do not see the movie. Whereas the Harry Potter movies follow the spirit of the books, they butchered The Golden Compass.
Which is a shame. I wanted to see them make the last book into a movie.
Jewish Steel
Doug, are you implying that one of the functions of our media is to confirm the biases and prejudices of its middle class readers?
((spits out Chardonnay))
jwb
@Fuck U II: The Duckening: Yes, and I’m sure some plebe somewhere is having fun, too, and we certainly can’t have that.
Short Bus Bully
Wasn’t part of what Plato wrote about along the lines of “… damn kids these days…”?
Nothing new here.
Dennis SGMM
I’m so damned old that I can remember when rock and roll was going to rot away the moral fiber of the youts and thus enable the godless Commies to just waltz in and take over.
It’s always something.
Joey Maloney
@FlyingToaster:
And the sun is rather warm.
Not only that, their unmarried (and underage!) non-procreative shameless-fun-for-everyone sex act is a key plot point in the, you should excuse the expression, climax of the trilogy.
WyldPirate
@Bnut:
Funniest scene in Animal House, Bnut.
Kevin
Part of it is old fogeyism, a disease endemic to the human race.
Part of it, though, is to de- legitimize their opponents. When secular people are held up as the sign of the end times (more people are having out of wedlock babies because more people avoid church!), for example, it has two effects the power toadies like Douhat want:
1. It obscures the real forces, forces that often have more to do with the effects of capitalism than with culture.
2. It makes the secular not just wrong but deadly, and so makes it easier to dismiss legitimate complaints those people might have (such as being forced to say a prayer at public events) and solutions that they might have (like universal, free day care).
Douhat and their ilk are good propagandists, and these kinds of the world is going to hell in a hand-basket pieces are essential for helping to keep people from asking “wait, who put us in this hand-basket” and coming up with inconvenient answers.
jwb
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Yes, not sure who greenlighted that project because it should have been clear to anyone with a brain that there was no fucking way that Hollywood could even pretend to stay close to the spirit of those books.
beltane
Thanks to you all for enlightening me about Philip Pullman. Now I can go back to ignoring the always irrelevant Ross Douthat, a hack so unremarkable that he didn’t even make the 30 hackiest pundits list.
Karmakin
@Roger Moore: Not only is it a cliche comparison (there are a lot of children’s books out there with spiritual undertones), people making the argument usually don’t know what the hell they’re talking about anyway.
Very few people actually read the whole Narnia collection. Lots read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. And the Prince Caspian/Dawn Treader are pretty popular as well. Past that? People don’t read, because the known characters are really not there for the most part outside of cameos where they are the knights in shining armor or whatever.
So they don’t know that the entire series breaks down in a glorification of religious war/genocide that’s really really ugly. Not that by most accounts C.S. Lewis believed in this stuff..it’s just that some of the basic Christian tropes are really quite ugly that when you try to use the same tropes in a different context it’s a serious case of What The Hell, Hero
Dave
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Making the last book into a movie…seeing the culture war around that would have been epic.
TooManyJens
Uh, Ross? Do you know where they have lots of babies out of wedlock? In the Bible Belt, that’s where.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Joey Maloney: Sex between adolescents saves the multiverse. Why wouldn’t they want that as a message?
Bobby Thomson
DougJ, chunky Bobo’s point is that those with a college degree are more likely than in the past to have conservative viewpoints. No, he doesn’t cite anything to support that. Yes, the Pullman example is ironic because Pullman, who is positioned as the “liberal” counterpoint to a “conservative” C.S. Lewis, wrote his trilogy after the period when the college educated class was supposedly more liberal.
Dennis SGMM
Douthat is one sick waste of meat. Google “chunky reese witherspoon” for a flock of take downs.
Fax Paladin
Ohhhh… kay… Pullman is an atheist who wrote the “His Dark Materials” trilogy as a sort of anti-Narnia. For what that’s worth.
arguingwithsignposts
I got out of the boat. What a wankfest of nothingness in search of a point about … nothing.
I’m sure he means fundamentalist Christians, but whatever. There are liberal Christians who call themselves evangelicals too.
Tom Levenson
Douthat’s biggest problem ISTM is that he is beginning to see that he is failing on a very big stage. He isn’t sufficiently smart/hardworking/striking enough in his prose enough (take you pick) to achieve BoBo’s status of being an always-wrong go-to pundit. And he hasn’t got a real beat, some knowledge of anything in particular, politics, economics, sociology etc. to do anything like even a McArdle move. He’s not terrible (except as a thinker, at which he blows yaks). He’s a reasonably smooth sentence monger; he gets through 850 words with the appearance of a logical structure and so on.
He’s just not got anything in particular to distinguish himself. It’s like that old physics critic: “he’s not even wrong” — which in this case needs to be rewritten as he is boringly wrong.
Hence this kind of weirdness: sexy time for the unbelieving poor is the signifier of something or other.
Sex and God. When you got nothing else, trot those out and see if anyone notices.
Nope. If I’m Douthat, I’m getting bummed. If I’m the NYT, I’m wondering what the hell I was thinking when I hired a 20-sommat merely-clever guy with no actual experience of the world.
David
There were people who were saddened by the bustle going out of fashion but somehow managed to carry on.
ed
@ freelancer
That Mr. Show C. S. Lewis, Jr. bit was genius funny. But was it outright parody or mere rock-solid imitation? That’s for History to decide.
James Gary
I have nothing much to say on the topic of Ross Douthat.
However, I knew if I persevered reading Balloon Juice long enough, I’d eventually be the the first commenter in the thread to acknowledge the song-lyric reference in a DougJ post title. This one is from “Teen Age Riot,” by Sonic Youth.
Unfortunately, I can’t seem to come up with a clever gloss on offer on “Sonic Youth,” or the song title, in reference to Ross Douthat either. Although “Teen Age Riot” is a great song, one of my all-time favorites.
Pamela F
I’m just so sorry but I will not concede C.S. Lewis to Sarah Palin and her ilk. I thoroughly enjoyed the books as a child and thought the (recent) movies passable/mildly enjoyable. I understand C.S. Lewis’s christian symbology but the same symbols were adapted from older, more pagan “religions”. Good vs. Evil is not solely the provenance of Christians.
McWaffle
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): I cried at the end of that one as a kid, and was pretty profoundly moved after rereading it as an adult. An absolutely beautiful ending though; I urge anybody who liked the f’in Harry Potter ending (and doubly urge those who didn’t) to read those books and learn what a real conclusion is meant to be.
Shout out to the Mulefa, too. Keep on rollin’, little buddies.
Dennis SGMM
@Pamela F:
These days, Good vs Evil is the sole province of Republican Christians.
Culture of Truth
What happened when you Goggled “Ross Douthat” and “stupid shit” ?
DougJ
@James Gary:
Yeah, love the song too.
El Cid
Written records from thousands of years ago had this same sort of ‘today’s youth don’t have the values their elders had,’ hell in a handbasket and so forth. Ancient Greeks, for example, had the same whippersnapper warning.
WyldPirate
@Dennis SGMM:
Fix’t.
John PM
Carrie Underwood is the reason everything is going to hell? And, what, is Reba McIntyre the anti-christ? WTF?
cthulhu
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Despite the movie not dwelling the key themes in the book, I recall the standard collection of Christian whining groups protesting the movie. Of course, as always, this was before they had even seen it.
But I agree, the movie was a disappointment. I believe there are plans for the second movie but I think they are basically shelved. It would be better to do a reboot in a few years and start from scratch with someone more committed to the base material.
licensed to kill time
Douthat just wants to be the Beav.
Bnut
@WyldPirate: It’s how I picture most married 30-40something “conservative” couples.
cthulhu
@Karmakin: Whereas Pullman does look toward the ugly, vicious side of religious zealotry (sort of the anti-Lewis, anti-Crusade part), he also posited the notion that religion is a basic foe of knowledge, individuality, and personal happiness. That it is presented in the context of an action adventure directed at pre-teens and above doesn’t much make the classic religionists too happy.
Butch
I have 12 tattoos but I never really thought of them as “bristling” from my biceps. What an odd visual.
Bill
http://www.pbs.org/pov/shelbyknox/
Never mind that the fundies have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases and their own out of wedlock births. The sand is a nice safe place for them to stick their heads
Cat
Isn’t most MSM centrist crap written to reinforce the Middle classes opinions of themselves as being awesome?
Sort of a pundit version of “post-purchase rationalization” or “escalation of commitment”.
Wrye
The servants of Tash are well known for the shallowness of their discourse.
WyldPirate
@Bnut:
Well, speaking as a former, but liberal, member of that demographic, that would have been an orgy in my experience of much of those years. And I don’t think it is that all too uncommon of an experience, either.
Big part of the reason why I’m a former member of that demo.
cleek
Sonic Y FTW
one of my top 5 favorite songs
Tax Analyst
@Kevin:
The better question is “If douchebags like Douthat are going to be in heaven why would I want to be there?”
Although it might be OK if everyone else there was allowed to kick him in the nuts at least one a day.
The University of I-da-ho
Hmmm. I thought neoconservative demonology held that elites were perfidious and librul while the proles were virtuous and God-fearing. I guess I missed the new memo.
Hawes
I know who BILL Pullman is.
He was Preznit when the aliens invaded and he KICKED ASS!
I think before that he was a park ranger when the alligators invaded Lake Placed and he KICKED ASS!
So I’m totally down with discussing Bill Pullman.
SectarianSofa
@Pamela F:
Well, there is the grown-up author CSLewis as well, still in vogue for the older PBS set, er, 10-20 years ago. Sarah Palin doesn’t read even the CSLewis children’s books. And if Niebuhr or Buber or Kierkegaard had written children’s books, she doesn’t read those either.
Tax Analyst
@Butch:
But then you must keep in mind that you are NOT Ross Douthat. After which you should thank God or Your Lucky Stars. If you don’t believe in either of those feel free to go ahead and fill in your favorite personal Cosmic Spiritual icon, deity or legend.
Tax Analyst
@Bill:
The downside is that it’s got a lot less “fudge” than their usual head-sticking location.
SectarianSofa
I liked the Pullman ‘Dark Materials’ books. I read them not too long ago. Very, very anti-organized religion. It would take almost nothing to read them as anti-Catholic. Which would bother Chumpy Bobo, I imagine.
Wile E. Quixote
@DougJ
When I first read this I read it as “When I ogled “Ross Douthat” and “C.S. Lewis””, and the image that popped into my head was so traumatic that it made me realize that I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
4jkb4ia
@Bobby Thomson:
Ironically, Phillip Pullman supports the limited point that Douthat made about conservative views about marriage. If you did not have enduring love between Lyra and Will, the multiverse would have lost consciousness. If Lyra or Will will marry in either of their worlds, they won’t settle for anything less than the highest ideals about marriage, and they won’t believe that it’s a sacrament.
SectarianSofa
@Pamela F:
Yeah, but Lewis *meant* it as christian symbolism, and the function of the books was, as I understand it, essentially evangelistic.
SectarianSofa
@Short Bus Bully:
I thought he was twelve. Is he older than that?
4jkb4ia
Difficulties:
Mary Malone did not marry the person who took her out of being a nun and eventually left him.
Lyra is Lyra because her parents couldn’t be married. If she had lived her entire life with Mrs. Coulter she might have cared more about having conventional forms of power.
CaptainFwiffo
The Pullman books are good, everybody who likes fantasy should read them, and it’s unfortunate to pigeonhole them as anti-religion diatribes. Yes, they’re pretty anti-church (more-so anti-authority, but what good children’s’ book isn’t?) but there’s a lot more too them than that.
And, hey, spoiler warning for everybody who hasn’t read them.
It was more of tameish makeout session. Pullman is pretty explicit about everything he’s talking about throughout the books and doesn’t pull punches. If the characters got past second base, it didn’t happen in the book. Their love saved the universe, or possibly the makeouts, but they didn’t have sex.
Butch
@Tax Analyst: Four of the 12 are dragons. I’ll go with that.
themann1086
@cthulhu: I really need to re-read that series. I almost did in preparation for the movie, but then I heard what they did to it…
4jkb4ia
@John PM:
Reba McEntire, now “Reba” for record purposes. Otherwise this I had to see, but it was behind the NYT firewall. Jon Caramanica, of all people, saved Carrie Underwood by calling her a country traditionalist belter in the tradition of Martina McBride.
The very existence of Ke$ha is evidence that Carrie Underwood cannot be the reason the country is going to hell. (Ke$ha started her career in Nashville BTW)
Wile E. Quixote
@Tom Levenson:
Corrected, because Tom’s a better person than I am and assumes the best about people.
*Douthat’s flabby man-hooters don’t count.
SectarianSofa
@CaptainFwiffo:
Agreed — and for my part I didn’t mean to imply that Pullman’s books were anti-religious diatribes. Like saying Surrealism as a movement was just about kicking clergy.
matoko_chan
@Tom Levenson: Douthat is a toxic
personmisogynistic creeper that spreads eumemes.He is intellectually dishonest.
No one should google him.
Tim
Douthat is a dumbass douchebag, but would anyone argue that people DON”T spend too much time texting? Or babbling incessantly on their cellphones in inappropriate locations?
OR…my personal pet fogey peve: fuckwads who text or talk or look at the screens of their “devices” during movies in theatres. FUCKHEADS.
I don’t understand why movie theatres don’t simply jam the signal inside individual theatres to take care of that problem, btw. Nowadays, I generally weigh my desire to see a particular film against the chances fuckwads will be there using their “devices.”
The prevelance of theis phenomenon is definitely effected by the type of movie: I saw “Black Swan” in a packed theatre here in Boston last weekend. There were ZERO issues with cellphone use or talking. Heaven.
Wile E. Quixote
@Butch:
Douthat had to use “bristling” because his editors at the Times no longer let him use the word “throbbing”. He’s also no longer allowed to use the words “pulsating”, “turgid”, “erect”, “tumescent” or “semprini” in any of his columns. MoDo however is still allowed to use any of these words in her columns as well as the phrase “towering, veiny, purple-headed fuck-muscle”, but only if she’s writing a column about Bill Clinton or President Obama.
Wile E. Quixote
@Tim:
FCC regulations as well as the fear that if they jammed cell phone signals they could be held liable if there were an emergency in the theater. There was an article about this a few years back. A company had come up with a cell phone jammer that was really brilliant, it didn’t swamp the radio signal the way regular jammers do, it broadcast a signal that told cell phones that this wasn’t a tower they could connect to, so the phones went into a loop searching for a signal and couldn’t make or receive calls.
But I’m with you on this. I wonder if thuggish ushers are the solution. Perhaps we could hire the Black Panthers as theatre ushers. I mean now that the election is over and they’re not intimidating white folks they’re probably looking for something to do.
ed drone
@Dennis SGMM:
Well, I’m so old that the only time I was ever a “man on the street” on TV was when Billy Graham did the same schtick about how the world was going to hell, what with the free-speech movement and rock ‘n roll and kids doing the nasty without a preacher’s pronouncement or anything.
I had to tell the interview man that Graham was totally wrong, and that the kids of the day had more integrity than their McCarthy-HUAC-loving elders. In those days, TV wasn’t regularly preserved, so I never got to see myself, which is probably good. I got so tongue-tied they probably thought, “That kid is on something, Marge. High or drunk, sure as you’re born! Can’t talk straight. Must be a Soshulist or Commie.”
Of course, I was only having trouble with my syntax, since the answer I had prepared didn’t fit the way they phrased the question (before the interview, he told me what the subject was, but asked it a different way when we went live). That aside, I was a social-ist, but it didn’t really show.
Ed
Wile E. Quixote
@Hawes:
Yeah. Bill Pullman is really inspiring. The way he overcame being dumped by that shallow bitch Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle and went on to defeat those alligators, become president and kick alien ass is truly inspirational though.
Lysana
I am a big fantasy fan and I loathed Pullman’s trilogy at the end. He chickened out completely with Yahweh and several of his adult characters went off the plot. Also, how he handled his young lovers made me want to rip his hair out by the roots.
Wile E. Quixote
@Tax Analyst:
You know, I was kind of bummed out this morning. It was pissing down rain in Seattle, traffic was horrible and the centralized logging system I set up at work with rsyslog was failing hard. But now the weather’s cleared up, I think I might have fixed the rsyslog problem and I realized that I’m not Ross Douthat.
Tim
@Wile E. Quixote:
Do you mean that theatres could be held liable if someone had a personal emergency and couldn’t be reached? Ridiculous.
Even worse are the shits who ANSWER their phones vocally and then run out of the theatre while talking to go to the hallway. The spell has already been broken.
Yes, agreed too: I have often wondered why theatres don’t have ONE usher in each showing at all times to deal with this problem. Seriously, how much would it cost? I’d pay a buck more willingly if I knew there would be no fucking “devices” going off. Thuggish ushers would be best of all!
Leah
Kay, I’m curious as to the general reaction in Ohio; what kind of editorial response is there? What kind of response when regular folks realize this money and the jobs went elsewhere? I understand that there is a general tendency to back a Governor that has just won his office; I guess what I’m trying to say is that i think Ohio is an interesting case where regrets might at some point set in, in response to seeing what Republican governance really means, so I hope you’ll keep us informed about what’s going on there. (BTW, I really enjoy your posts)
4jkb4ia
OK, I found it. This character that David Brooks is up in arms about predates “Before He Cheats” by years. Beyonce has played her.
Robert Waldmann
Quit using emoticons :-S
Hey I can quit using emoticons :-) :-) !!!
Richard Cohen is my savior !!!!
heckblazer
My father retired from being a law partner this year, and to celebrate he got a tattoo. And because he’s a Republican, it’s of a rattlesnake with the motto “Don’t Tread on Me.”
Geez, old folks these days…
Donald Johnson
Someone might have explained this already, but Pullman’s anti-God fantasy series was written in part as an answer to Lewis’s Narnia books–Pullman thinks Lewis’s outlook on life in those books is creepy and anti-life. (They end happily in the last series when everyone dies and finds himself or herself in the Narnian heaven after the Narnian version of Armageddon.) He also thinks Lewis is bad on several other issues. I think Pullman has a point here and there, but mostly he’s overwrought. What bothers me most in the Narnia books is his Orientalism–the Calormene scenes make me wince.
Evangelicals, otoh, usually love the Narnia books, except maybe the extreme fundies who probably think fantasy itself is bad, even Christian fantasy. So that’s the alleged culture conflict. I’m not sure where people like me fit in, who liked both series (but thought Pullman was, if anything, more annoyingly preachy than Lewis at his worst.)
This is probably more information than you wanted.
EmmATX
@Wrye: WIN.
The bolt of Tash falls from above!
The Raven
On the attractions of Lewis, I like Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book. Lewis had a clear concise style, a vivid visual imagination, and a love of and grounding in mythology; he was a English classicist. Philosophically…ah, thereby hangs a tale. He was a neo- (that is, Christian) Platonist, or perhaps just a Platonist. There is a huge and powerful admixture of ancient pagan philosophy in the works of this very Christian writer. A later book of Lewis’s, Till We Have Faces, is probably his most powerful fictional treatment of Platonism.
Oh, BTW, there is little religion in Lord of the Rings because Tolkien feared committing blasphemy and, indeed, wondered about the moral legitimacy of his work.
Probably as well the fundies don’t seem to have noticed Garth Nix yet.