"The shooters who turned Columbine High School into an unspeakable
landscape of carnage yesterday were members of a small clique of
outcasts who always wore black trench coats and spent their entire
adolescence deep inside the morose subculture of Gothic fantasy, their
fellow students said." -Media report
Ok, that's it. A doctor who had worked in Benin today told me that he
and other doctors started killing the snakes that have been killing the
children in the village. Then the villagers started killing the
doctors. Why? Because they worship the snakes.
That's it. Friends of mine who spend their last pennies to fly to Peru
to cosset up to Aztec shamans tell me they have at last found the true
spirituality. But anthropologists have just unearthed the frozen
bodies of children who were buried alive as part of Aztec religion.
That's it. When I saw Dragonheart, a fantasy movie of a few years ago,
I complained that dragons are evil, not good, and are images of the
devil, not misunderstood nice guys. My friends made fun of me, told me
to straighten up, and went on wondering why their children "act out"
strange fantasies and scream during nightmares.
That's it. That's what Michael O'Brien, Christian artist and novelist,
said when he wrote "A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your
Child's Mind" (Ignatius, 1994). Damn it, dragons are evil, serpents are
evil, and there is objective evil in the world. Movie after movie, toy
after toy, and book after book try to convince children that evil is all
just a big case of misunderstanding and dragons and serpents are just in
need of a pet and a hug.
That's it. A big lie, the biggest of all: the snake told it to Eve,
and Eve told it to Adam, and so it has come down, the promise of godlike
power if only you accept the devil's view that good is relative, depends
on your point of view, and God just doesn't want you to know freedom.
Yes, that's it, the lie bought by the Trenchcoat Mafia, who followed a
disgusting creature (I use the word advisedly) named Marilyn (a him)
Manson (a name to conjure with). Marilyn Manson fields something called
shock rock, which is inspired by Marilyn' first love (after
himself)--the church of satan, the Serpent and Dragon Supreme. In ugly
lyrics, Marilyn reveals the true source of his inspiration, Friedrich
Nietszche, the philosopher who taught that God is dead and everything
is, therefore, permitted. Manson's latest album is "AntiChrist
Superstar."
That is it, my friends. There is objective evil in the world, the evil
of principalities, powers, and dominions, the evil of satan's rebellion
against God. As I say that, I can almost feel the horrid shock that
runs down the spines of liberal modernists and liberal Christians of
every stripe. You're saying that! You're really saying that! You're a
fundamentalist!
Yes I am, as fundamental as Paul, Peter, Augustine, Aquinas, and a long
list of those who understood what the old priest understands at the
beginning of the film version of "The Exorcist," when he sees the
dog-god of Egypt in a statue-that there is an ugly demon that he must
face and conquer with Christ's heroic love.
That's it--that's it with political correctness, liberal stupidity,
rationalist illusions, relativist education, amoral art and culture and,
yes, pointy-headed intellectuals.
As I write this I am listening to the endless gibbering of the concerned
specialists the media drag out whenever something like the Littleton
carnage happens, especially if it happens in our schools. If it were
not so serious, it would be funny to listen to therapists and educators
and commentators telling us that we simply need to understand and hug
each other and whistle a happy song. "We have to bring children into
the mainstream," a congressman says. Into the mainstream? With
Clinton?
These, my friends, are the rhetorical suppositories of script writers
who have brought us where we are. Though they decry violence in the
films, they don't see the deeper evil--the evil that comes from not
believing that there is evil roaming about seeking the ruin of souls.
It is, by the way, particularly laughable to hear Billy Boy explaining
that violence is not the answer . . . . that the culture of death is not
the answer . . . that honesty is the answer . . . .bla bla bla . . . .
What is the answer? First, we have to deal with the biggest lie of our
culture (other, of course, than the "I never" of Billy Boy). The answer
is that we must go back to teaching that language actually means
something other than a statement about our feelings. As long as we
teach children that there are nothing but feelings and that each one of
us is simply a feeling-container, we are setting them up to be
manipulated by the manipulators, beginning with satan, who was the first
of the serpentine rationalists.
Now take Eve again. Eve wants so hard to believe that what God said
about moral law is just His feelings, and if she will rebel, all that
awful stuff about obedience will go away. As C.S. Lewis points out so
powerfully at the beginning of "The Abolition of Man," modernist
educators saturate children with the notion that a statement about
something is really a statement only about our feelings. "That sky is
beautiful" means only "I am looking at the sky and I am having beautiful
feelings." Once the connection between objective reality and language
is cut, no true education can take place. And there can be no talk of
good and evil, as Plato demonstrated long ago. And there can be no
teachers.
Lewis said that education is the education of "chests"--of hearts and
emotions--but education in relation to the perennial moral values that
are brought to perfection in the Gospel and the mainline tradition of
the Christian West. And that would include, by the way, using violence
when it is necessary to protect our families and countries. What would
Lewis say, face to face with Marilyn Manson?
He'd simply say, I thought so, and he would remember that Milton's God
laughs in Satan's face. In his space trilogy, he contemplated what
would happen to society when it was surrendered to "the Conditioners,"
the modernist liberals who think that man is simply a biochemical
substance we can reshape into--what? Whatever it can be shaped into.
The problem is that the "whatever" keeps assuming the shape of a Dragon.
More money for the schools, anyone?