The Frankenstein’s Monster of Science

 

Mary Shelley, the author of the gothic horror/sci-fi novel Frankenstein, could be said to have been a child of the Modern Age in more ways than one.   Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792), one of the first modern feminists, if not the very first, as well as a defender of the ideology of the French Revolution who deliberately ended her history of this event in its first year in order to avoid talking about how the Reign of Terror had ensued from it.   Shelley’s father, William Godwin, had been trained as a Nonconformist clergyman, but seduced by the antichristian doctrines that had been brewing in the salons and cafes of eighteenth century France, turned to a career in writing, in which he enthusiastically endorsed every new philosophical idea and the most radical form of republican liberalism, while long labouring to destroy the Christian faith he was once appointed to preach.

 

Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin was truly her parents’ daughter and embraced their radicalism from her earliest childhood.   When she was seventeen, she began an affair with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a disciple of her father’s, Lord Byron’s best friend, and a Romantic poet in his own right.  Nineteenth century Romanticism was primarily a rejection of the classicism that had undergone a major revival in Europe during the Renaissance, and then again in the eighteenth century.   In the eighteenth century, classicism reached its apex, being embraced both by the orthodox, such as Dr. Johnson, and by the radicals of the Enlightenment.   Similarly, Romanticism had both its left and right wings.   The latter included those who started out with radical religious and political sympathies but who matured into Tories – the Lake Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and William Wordsworth come immediately to mind – as well as life-long reactionary Tory Sir Walter Scott.   Shelley, like Byron, most definitely belonged to the other side of the movement.

 

When Shelley met Mary Godwin, his first wife Harriet was pregnant with their son, but this did not prevent him from seducing Mary, using the blackmail of empty suicide threats to do so.   They would meet in secret at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, which most people would regard as rather morbid, until William Godwin found out about it.   Then they ran off to France together, taking Mary’s stepsister Claire along as an interpreter, and embarked upon a tour of Europe, returning home when they ran out of money, with Mary now pregnant.   Their daughter was born premature and died within two weeks.   After Mary, whose health had been weakened by the pregnancy recovered, they took off again, this time to join Lord Byron at Lake Geneva, Switzerland for the summer.   By all accounts it was a miserable, rainy, summer, but it was an incredibly productive one for the trio of writers.   Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Percy Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all had their origins in that summer together, although only the second of the three was actually completed that year and none were published prior to the following year.   Upon their return to England after that trip. Mary’s older sister Fanny and Shelley’s first wife Harriet, both killed themselves, (1) and the couple celebrated by getting married.

 

What’s that?   I don’t think much of the Shelleys?  I don’t know where you would have gotten that idea. 

 

Mary Shelley’s first and most famous novel was first published in 1818, two years after the summer at Lake Geneva where she first conceived the idea.   The title was likely taken from Frankenstein Castle in Germany, which the Shelleys would have seen, if they didn’t actually visit, when travelling down the Rhine on their first trip to Europe.   In the novel Frankenstein is the last name of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, who belongs to a wealthy and noble family from Geneva and studies science at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, where he becomes obsessed with the idea of artificially creating life.   Constructing an oversized human body he successfully brings it to life, but immediately rejects his creation because of its ugliness.   The monster responds to this rejection, by murdering his brother.   The monster confronts his creator, relates his experiences since awakening and his rejection by everybody due to his hideousness, and demands that Victor create for him a bride.  Victor initially agrees to do so, but at the last minute reneges and the monster responds by murdering Victor’s own bride Elizabeth on their honeymoon.  Victor then pursues the creature, seeking its destruction, all the way to the North Pole, only to succumb to the elements after being found by Captain Robert Walton to whom he relates his story.   Walton also encounters the monster, repentant over the fate of his creator, who vows to rid the world of his own existence.   The story is told in the form of a series of letters from Captain Walton to his sister.  

 

The story has been adapted numerous times.   The image we all have of what Frankenstein’s monster looks like comes from the 1931 Universal Studios film in which Boris Karloff portrayed the monster.   It is from the same film that we get the idea of Frankenstein robbing graves, stitching the parts together to form the body, and animating it using lightening.   Shelley was much more ambiguous, although the filmmakers expanded upon some hints she had dropped here and there.   My favourite “adapation” is Mel Brooks’ 1974 Young Frankenstein, featuring Gene Wilders as Frederick Frankenstein, the American grandson of Victor, initially embarrassed at the association, but who later re-creates the experiment at the family estate (relocated to Transylvania).   Marty Feldman steals the show with his performance as Frederick’s hunchbacked assistant Igor (“It’s pronounced Eye-gore”).  

 

Did Shelley intend any particular message by her story?  Is there any larger significance to it than what she did intend?

The subtitle of the novel would seem to suggest that the answer to the first question is yes.   That subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus.”   Prometheus was a figure in Greek mythology.   He was one of the Titans, the race that had overthrown the Elder Gods, before themselves being overthrown by the Olympians.   In the war between the Titans and the Olympians, Prometheus, foreseeing that the Olympians would win, sided with Zeus.   Later, however, he would perform a series of tricks on Zeus, each of which benefited mankind in some way.   In the last of those tricks he stole fire and gave it to man.   Zeus then chained him to a rock, where a vulture would pick away at his liver, which would regrow each day.   Hercules eventually sets him free, and he reconciles with Zeus by providing him with the information that the nymph Thetis, whom Zeus and Poseidon have been competing for, is destined to give birth to a son who will overthrow his father, as Zeus had overthrown Kronos, and Kronos had overthrown Uranus. (2)  

 

What did Mary Shelly mean by giving her novel this subtitle?   Who is the “Modern Prometheus” alluded to?

 

It seems fairly obvious that Victor Frankenstein is the character who is supposed to correspond to Prometheus.   The structure of the title certainly indicates so, and the parallels are striking.   As the original Prometheus gave fire to mankind, so Victor Frankenstein gives life.   The original Prometheus trespassed against Zeus to do so, Victor Frankenstein commits a form of blasphemy by taking upon himself the divine prerogative of giving life.   Both figures bring torture and anguish upon themselves for their hubris.   In this, Mary Shelley, despite her associations with the leading figures of the Romantic Movement, was a classicist, for her Victor Frankenstein is Aristotle’s tragic hero, brought down by his own arrogance.

 

One interpretation which seems to jump out from all of this is Frankenstein as a kind of warning against the attitude towards science on display in Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis.    In this unfinished utopian novel, a scientific foundation which has as its end or purpose “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” by the pursuit of the same end creates an ideal society on the island of Bensalem.   Frankenstein seems to present a scenario in which someone with very much the same ideas and attitude as Salomon’s House in Bacon’s novelette, brings about his own destruction.

 

Yet it is hardly likely that Mary Shelley had any such meaning in mind when she wrote the book.   Such an interpretation would run contrary to the entire way of thinking that she had imbibed from her father and shared with her husband.      

 

Consider how Percy Shelley had himself handled the myth of Prometheus in a play he was working on when Frankenstein was first published, and which came out two years later. He took the title of Prometheus Unbound from a non-extant play of Aeschylus, one of a trilogy of tragedies of which only one, Prometheus Bound, survives.    Only fragments of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus The Fire-bringer have come down to us, but we know more-or-less, the story they tell, including Prometheus’ eventual reconciliation with Zeus.   Shelley presents a story that is the direct inversion of this.   In his play, Jupiter (Zeus) is challenged and defeated by Demogorgon in the third Act, bringing about the release of Prometheus.   While the inversion of Aeschylus is in part a reflection of Shelley’s politics, a revolutionary radicalism as opposed to Aeschylus’ conservatism, his meaning was more than just political.   His Prometheus represents the human will and spirit, and the message of his play is that of the Modern Age – the triumph of the human will and spirit over all that would bind and confine it, especially the divine.   The same message is evident in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which ends in the Ragnarok of Gotterdammerung with the burning of Valhalla, as man takes the place of the gods. Even Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his poem Ulysses, takes the tale of Ulysses’ last voyage, as first recounted by Ulysses himself in the torments of hell in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno, and portrays what in Dante was the hubris that brought damnation down upon Ulysses’ head in a heroic light.   What is being lionized in all of this literature, is the driving spirit of the Modern Age, the idea that knowledge serves the human will, and that man should recognize no limits in his pursuit of that knowledge and the triumph of that will.   This is the spirit of modern science, which is why Oswald Spengler correctly identified the spirit of Modern Western Civilization as Faustian, after Goethe’s version of Faust, the scholar who sold his very soul to obtain boundless knowledge (in Goethe’s nineteenth century re-telling of the story, Dr. Faust gets a happy ending, unlike Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth century play which ends with his dismemberment and damnation). (3)

 

Since the Shelleys shared a similar, Modern, progressive, outlook, it is unthinkable that the author of Frankenstein intended a message so contrary to that of Prometheus Unbound.   Nevertheless, the message that man should beware scientific hubris because his own inventions may turn on him and destroy him, is the message that has come across to a great many readers.   Without endorsing the postmodern deconstructionist total divorce of a text from its author’s intent, this is, perhaps, a case of a story with a meaning much larger than what its author could see.

 

The view that science was the path to a man-made Paradise on earth was strong in the nineteenth century and even up until World War I.   This optimistic view was shattered by the atomic bombs which brought the Second World War to an end.   At that point, the message which Mary Shelley had not intended, but which many have derived from her best-known novel, began to resonate with people, and the concept of a world devastated by man’s scientific and technological hubris, became a standard feature of dystopian literature.  

Today, all those who want us to obey every draconian and totalitarian “public health” order issued in the name of saving us from the Bogeyman of COVID-19, which orders are turning our countries more and more into something that resembles Orwell’s 1984, tell us to “follow the science”.  

 

What if the science they are telling us to follow turns out to be Frankenstein’s monster?

(1)  Harriet Shelley was found drowned.   The inquest ruled suicide and that is the most likely explanation, considering that she left a suicide note, although there is some slight evidence of foul play on the part of William Godwin.   In the case of Fanny Imlay, Mary’s older sister from an affair Wollstonecraft had with an American diplomat before meeting Godwin, there is no doubt that it was suicide by laudanum overdose, although her motivation for doing so has been the subject of endless speculation.

(2)  This is the beginning of the background story of the Trojan War.   Zeus and Poseidon, based upon Prometheus’ information, agree to give Thetis up and marry her off to Peleus, king of Thessaly.   This is the wedding, to which all the gods except the goddess of discord are invited.   She shows up anyway, and tosses the apple of discord between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena which starts the chain of events that eventually leads to the Trojan War.   Thetis does indeed give birth to a son destined to be greater than his father – Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes of said conflict.

(3)   The legend is based on an actual person, a German parlour magician, alchemist, and astrologer who lived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and whose end, at least in terms of how he departed this earth, without speculating as to where he went after, corresponds more closely with Marlowe’s account rather than Goethe’s.

The Bogeyman

A few years ago, when the progressive commentariat was going on and on about the evils of “homophobia”, before that became old hat and they turned to the new bugbear of “transphobia”, there was a man who happened to catch the end of one of their sermonettes warning about homophobes.   Now this fellow was a little hard of hearing and he mistook the word for “homophones”.   Consequently, he began avoiding the dance hall like the plague.   He didn’t want to run in to the Boogie Man.

 

Now that you are all groaning over that exceedingly dreadful double-pun, allow me to say a few words about the Bogeyman.  

 

The Bogeyman is a figure who has appeared, under one name or another, in pretty much all of the world’s folklore, in all places and all times.   He can be regarded, in a sense, as the standard to which all other legendary spooky monsters are to be compared.  The details about his nature and appearance vary considerably, except in that they are usually quite vague, much more so than is the case with most other legendary beings.   It is the purpose he serves that is consistent.   He serves as a warning to children against bad behaviour.   Behave yourselves or the Bogeyman will get you.   In the cultural traditions in which Saint Nicholas or whoever else has been assigned the role of bringing gifts to the good children around Christmas time is accompanied by someone whose job it is to deal with the other kids, that someone – Black Pete, the Krampus, Knecht Ruprecht, whoever – is essentially a Bogeyman, certainly in function, often in description as well.

 

While frightening children into good behaviour is the primary and universal purpose of the Bogeyman, a notable secondary purpose for his legend can be found in the song “The Booger Man” which is the second track on the 1989 studio album, I Never Made a Record I Didn’t Like, by the “Clown Prince of Country Music”, Ray Stevens.   The song, co-written by Stevens and his longtime friend and song-writing collaborator, C. W. “Buddy” Kalb, the alternate spelling in the title of which reflects a Southern regional variation rather than the reference to mucus that would probably be the first thing it brings to mind for most others, involves a narrator boasting about how he is not afraid of a long list of monsters, movie and otherwise, all of whom he dismisses as nothing in comparison to the Booger Man, who “don’t need no other makeup/no fancy Hollywood name/his mangled bloody victims/are his only claim to fame.”   Towards the end of the song, it is revealed that the narrator is a young man, parked with his date in Lovers’ Lane.   “Listen, did I hear some scratchin’, outside your side of the car?”

 

There are those these days who object on moral grounds to telling children scary stories to frighten them out of misbehaving.   I am not going to pass judgment on this one way or another, and bring it up merely to note the irony that these are often the same people who buy completely into stories that are clearly designed to frighten the entire populace, adult and child alike, into obeying some set of, usually ridiculous, new rules.

 

That there is nothing sadder than an adult terrified of the Bogeyman was well illustrated by The Simpsons in an early episode.   The tenth episode of the fifth season was entitled “$pringfield (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling), in which Mr. Burns builds a casino and Marge becomes addicted to the slot machines.   Since Marge is now spending all of her time in the casino, Homer is the only one home one night, when Lisa, woken by a nightmare, wakes him up and tells him “I know its absurd, but I dreamed the Bogeyman was after me” at which she is interrupted by a screaming Homer “Aaarggh.   Bogeyman!   You nail the windows shut, I’ll get the gun.”   Homer then wakes Bart, saying “Bart, I don’t want to alarm you, but there may be a Bogeyman or Bogeymen in the house.”   When Marge finally returns home, a gun shot blows a hole in the door of the house, which, when she opens, she finds it barricaded with Homer, hiding behind a mattress with the kids, aiming his shotgun at her.  “What happened here?” she asks, to be told “Oh nothing Marge, just a little incident involving the Bogeyman.  Of course, none of this would have happened if you had been here to keep me from acting stupid.”

 

A truly pathetic number of adults have been behaving just like Homer this year.   Just last week, Donald the Orange, was asked by both his opponent in the televised popularity contest by which our American friends and neighbours foolishly choose their head of state rather than rely on the time-tested, God-honoured, tradition of royal lineage, and by debate moderator Chris Wallace, to denounce the Bogeyman.   Granted, they called the Bogeyman “white supremacism”, but actual white supremacists have not posed a real threat to law, order, civilization, rights, and freedoms, anywhere in the Western world for decades now.   White supremacism is now merely another name for the Bogeyman.  Donald the Orange did not, contrary to the lying left-wing newsmedia, refuse to make the worthless ritual denunciation.  He has, in fact, gone through with this stupid ritual many times in the past, and agreed to do so this time as well.  He asked for specific names, and all he was given was the Proud Boys, a multi-racial organization this is not, and never has been, white supremacist.   By contrast with the lies told by CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and even liberal newspapers and the Crown broadcaster up here, it was Joe Biden who refused to make a denunciation.   Except that in his case he was asked to denounce a real, present day, menace, Antifa, the well-organized groups of mask-wearing, far-left, thugs who have been going around beating people up, shutting down events and speeches they disapprove of, and terrorizing university administrators and hotel managers into giving in to their demands for years now, and this year, have been aiding and abetting Black Lives Matter, in their spree of looting, vandalism, violence, and destruction.   Indeed, rather than denounce these bastards, Biden denied their existence, saying that “Antifa is an idea not an organization.”   No, Mr. Biden, despite what you and that wretched, vile and contemptible nincompoop Christopher Wray have to say, the burning cities and toppled statues, all across the United States and the larger Western world, demonstrate Antifa to be an extremely real threat, unlike the Bogeyman of white supremacism you keep going on about.

 

Of course the biggest Bogeyman of this year has not been white supremacism but SARS-CoV-2.   This coronavirus produces mild to no symptoms in over 80% of those who come in contact with it.   It can produce the very painful and potentially fatal form of pneumonia dubbed SARS when the first coronavirus to produce it made its appearance twenty years ago, but for people who are under 65 and have no complicating chronic health problems, the survival rate is well over 99 percent.   Even for those who are at a higher risk, their chances of surviving are still pretty good, even more so now than in March and April when the virus was first making the rounds of the world, after escaping the confines of Wuhan.  Back in March, when the World Health Organization pressed the panic button, and governments around the planet took the unprecedented and insane step of shutting down their economies and ordering their entire populations, healthy or sick, into quarantine, we were seeing a rise both in the number of people testing positive for the presence of this virus, and in the number of people experiencing symptoms ranging from cough and shortness of breath to full-blown, death-dealing, SARS.   We have again this fall, seen a rise in the number of people testing positive, which, plotted on a graph, looks very similar to the one we saw in late winter-early spring.   We have not been seeing a similar rise in the number of people hospitalized and dying.   Indeed, plotted on the same kind of graph, the hospitalization/death numbers appear as a flat-to-declining line from the beginning of summer onward.

 

Sane, grown-up, people will recognize that if there is no drastic rise in people getting sick, being hospitalized, and dying, then the rise in the number of people testing positive is no cause for alarm.   Viruses have been present with us since the beginning of time and will be with us until the end of time.  To lock ourselves away in our houses, refuse all contact with other people, and worse, to demand that other people be forced to do the same, is to behave out of irrational fear, to be frightened, as it were, by the Bogeyman.  

 

The media is intentionally trying to frighten us in this way.   Note how they are constantly reporting about the “alarming” rise in the numbers of those who test positive.   As Karen Selick pointed out in The Western Standard about a week ago, this number is meaningless when it is not presented as a percentage of tests given.   The number of tests given has been going up steadily and is much higher now than it was back in March and April.    To emphasize only the number of new “cases” – or, more precisely, new “positive results”, for the tests give false positives all the time – without also emphasizing that they are out of a much larger number of tests being given, and that the number of people getting sick, requiring hospitalization, and dying of SARS has not been commensurately rising, but, indeed, has been remaining steady and even declining, is to engage in dishonest scare-mongering.

The “Wizard’s First Rule” in Terry Goodkind’s novel of that title, the first in his Sword of Truth series and the last in the same series worth reading, is “people are stupid” and we have certainly been living down to that this year.   Despite everything pointed out in the previous paragraph, we have been putting up with our governments’ responding to the rise in numbers by slapping more restrictions down on us, and even calling upon them to do so.   Here in the Province of Manitoba, we are now in the second week of a four-week period of heightened restrictions in Winnipeg and the surrounding region, that Dr. Brent Roussin, the public health officer who has given every evidence of having gone mad from the dictatorial-level powers given him during this scam of a health emergency, slapped down on us a couple of Fridays ago, to start from last Monday.   Earlier in the week in which he announced this, Roussin was publicly pressured to do this by Brian Bowman, the clown of a mayor that this city elected, and re-elected, although about the only thing that can be said in his favour is that he is a look-alike of television actor Jon Cryer, and even then I would have preferred Charlie Sheen any day.   Among the new restrictions a return to the limiting of gatherings to ten or under, and a new mandatory mask policy for all public indoor places.

 

The mask policy is especially indicative of the infantile, afraid of the Bogeyman, mentality that has infected the thinking of our adult populace.   The pores of cloth masks are 200+ times larger than the virions of SARS-CoV-2.   Anybody with an ounce of logic and who is willing to actually use it, ought to be able to deduce from this that the virus will have no difficulty passing through these masks.   Youtube videos, showing that cloth masks can lessen the spread of visible particles, hardly constitute proof to the contrary, at least to anyone aware that viruses are too small to be visible to the naked eye apart from very powerful magnifiers.   Nor do scientific research studies purporting to show that masks are effective at reducing COVID-19 transmission constitute such proof.   There is no dearth of such studies demonstrating the exact opposite, and these are more consistent with logic.   While I reject the modern consensus that logic and science trump tradition and divine revelation, I will say that between the two former, logic trumps science, and that thinking otherwise is the ultimate formula for allowing oneself to be duped.

 

The mandate to wear masks everywhere is essentially a mandate to wear a talisman, a magic symbol to ward off the Bogeyman.   It is very ironic, therefore, that in the popular culture of recent years, the Bogeyman has been the mask wearer.

 

Think back to the film that launched the plethora of serialized slasher-film franchises that glutted the cinema in the 1980s.  In 1978, John Carpenter co-wrote, directed, and composed the music for the film Halloween.   At the beginning of this film, the six-year old Michael Myers – the character’s name, not to be confused with the actor who portrayed Wayne, Shrek, and Austin Powers – wearing a Halloween costume, complete with mask, stabs his older sister to death.   The film then jumps ahead fifteen years to when Michael, who has spent the whole time in a mental hospital under the care of Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence) (1), escapes and makes his way to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, stealing a bleached Captain Kirk mask on the way.   From behind that mask, he stalks teenage girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her debut role).   He kills a number of her friends, one of whom calls Laurie at the home where she is babysitting on Halloween night just before Michael gets her.   She, rather foolishly, heads over there and comes face-to-mask with Michael.   In the confrontation, she manages to pull his mask off, but would undoubtedly have been killed then and there, had Dr. Loomis not entered at that moment and emptied his revolver into Michael, knocking him from the hall to the bedroom, out the picture window, and over the balcony to the ground below.   Laurie turns to the psychiatrist and asks “was that the Bogeyman?”   “As a matter of fact, it was” he answers, finding confirmation when he steps out onto the balcony, looks down, and finds that Michael has disappeared.

 

To John Carpenter, the Bogeyman was the one in the mask.   Does this tell us anything about the multitude of dolts today, cowering away in fear behind their masks, hoping that they will save them from the Bogeyman?

(1)   In case this sort of thing interests anyone, Donald Pleasence is the one-person connection between Michael Myers the character and Mike Myers the actor.   Long before taking on the role of Dr. Samuel Loomis, which he would continue to portray in the Halloween franchise through several sequels, he was one of the actors to portray James Bond’s archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (who, prior to this Christopher Walz’s performance in SPECTRE and the upcoming No Time To Die, had never been portrayed by the same actor twice), and the first to portray him as anything other than a shadow, seen only from behind, stroking a cat.   Pleasence’s version of the character, from 1967’s You Only Live Twice, is the direct basis of the look of Mike Myer’s character Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers trilogy.

A Lesson From Leroux

 

Gaston Leroux, after pursuing a career in journalism, which involved everything from theatrical criticism to international correspondence, turned to writing fiction in the early 1900s. In his native France, he is remembered as an author of detective fiction, as being more-or-less the French equivalent of his English contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. His first detective novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908), featured his amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille, who, as is often the case with fictional detectives, had a number of biographical similarities to his creator. In this novel, Rouletabille solved the mystery of how a scientist’s daughter ended up beaten unconscious in a room in her father’s castle that was locked from the inside. (1) 

Outside of France, however, he is best known as the author of one of the classics of Gothic horror, ranking right up there with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Drawing upon the many rumours surrounding the Palais Garnier opera house that had been completed in his childhood, an actual incident featuring a falling chandelier that took place there in 1896, and the entire spectrum of his journalistic experiences, he created the famous story that features a deformed and criminally insane polymath with the mononym Erik, who lives on the lake in the basement of the opera house – this lake actually exists – pretending to be a ghost to terrorize the cast of the opera and extort money from its managers, and an angel in order to transform a chorus girl into a diva. The Phantom of the Opera was, as was customary at that time, originally serialized, before being bound and published in French in 1910. The first English translation appeared the following year. 

The story has been re-told many times ever since. The first movie version – and by far the most faithful to Leroux’s novel – was a silent film that appeared in 1925, featuring Lon Chaney Sr., the legendary “Man of a Thousand Faces”, as Erik. There have been many more. It has also been adapted for stage more than once, the most well-known version being, of course, the musical that debuted in 1986, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, originally starring Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Lloyd Webber’s wife-at-the-time, Sarah Brightman as Christine Daaé, the chorus girl turned diva soprano, and is now the longest running musical on Broadway, and the second longest in London’s West End. (2) It was in this version that I first became familiar with the story when a production of the musical came to Winnipeg’s Centennial Concert Hall in 1993 and I went to see it with my high school friends Cynthia and Tamara, although I read Leroux’s novel shortly thereafter. 

My title may, in fact, be slightly misleading, as the lesson I wish to draw from the story is, in fact, best illustrated in Lloyd Webber’s adaptation, which presents the most sympathetic version of Leroux’s Erik.

Unlike motion picture adaptations other than the 1925 original, Lloyd Webber followed Leroux in making Erik’s hideously deformed face something he was born with, rather than the result of acid being thrown in his face, as in the 1943 remake starring Claude Rains and many subsequent versions or a deal with the devil, as in the unfortunate 1989 version starring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund. Consequently, he has had to wear a mask for any social interaction all of his life. Even more so in the musical than in Leroux’s novel, although it can be found there as well, this is offered as a partial explanation of his cruel and sadistic behaviour. Granted, the mask requirement was only one part of the whole situation of society having rejected him in disgust at his appearance, but consider how he is made to express it in one notable scene towards the end of the musical. He has just abducted Christine from the stage of the opera in the middle of a production of his own “Don Juan Triumphant”. Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny and his rival for Christine’s affections, is hot on his trail, but for a brief time he has Christine alone with him again in his lair. The following interaction takes place. 

Christine: Have you gorged yourself at last in your lust for blood? Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh? 

The Phantom: That fate that condemned me to wallow in blood, has also denied me the joys of the flesh. This face, the infection, which poisons our love. This face which earned a mother’s fear and loathing, a mask my first unfeeling scrap of clothing. 

The words which Lloyd Webber et al., place in the mouth of the Phantom here, echo those which Leroux had placed in the mouth of Erik at a much earlier point in the story in his novel. In chapter XII,  Christine and Raoul have escaped to the roof of the opera, where Christine tells Raoul about her experiences with Erik in his subterranean home the first time he had spirited her away.  After she had snatched away his mask, Erik had entered into a spiel of self-pity, which ended with: 

Why did you want to see me? Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me! ... When my own father never saw me and when my mother, so as not to see me, made me a present of my first mask! 

Returning to Lloyd Webber’s version, Christine at this point treats his self-pity with scorn, informing him that “this haunted face holds no horror for me now, it’s in your soul that the true distortion lies”, at which point the scene shifts gears with the arrival of Raoul. What I wish to draw your attention to, however, is the sharp contrast between the way Erik talks about his fated and trademark mask in the above quoted lines, and the way all of the other characters talk about their masks in an earlier scene in which everyone appears masked. 

The scene is the first in the second Act, and is based upon chapter IX in Leroux’s novel. In the musical it is set six months after the events of the first Act. The Phantom has not been heard from in the meantime, and the Opera is hosting a gala event in the form of a masquerade ball to kick off their return to production. The entire cast joins in on a number entitled “Masquerade”, the chorus of which goes:

Masquerade! Paper faces on parade. 

Masquerade! Hide your face so the world will never find you. 

Masquerade! Every face a different shade. 

Masquerade! Look around, there’s another mask behind you. 

Everybody at this ball is having a grand old time and enjoying the fun of their self-chosen masks. At least until Erik shows up dressed as Edgar Allan Poe’s Red Death. (3) 

Now let us consider what lesson we might draw from this striking contrast. Masks can be a source of great fun and enjoyment when they are voluntarily put on in circumstances like that of a masquerade ball. Yet they can be a source of incredible trauma if they are forced upon a person, especially in childhood. 

There are a lot of people today who are in need of this lesson. This month will end, as October always ends, on the eve of All Saints Day, for which reason the last day of October is known as All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween for short. It is traditionally a day in which people voluntarily put on costumes, including masks, for purposes of fun. Kids traditionally dress up in their costumes and go from house to house, ringing the doorbell or knocking, and saying “trick or treat” when the door opens. The person in the house then either gives them candy – or, if they are a health nut, something more nutritious – or risks having a trick pulled on him. This year, a bunch of adult party-poopers, who have been acting like paranoid lunatics since March, all because a virus that poses next to no threat to anybody under sixty-five and without multiple pre-existing medical conditions, has been spreading around the world, have demanded that Halloween and trick-or-treating be cancelled for this year. It is not “safe” they say. 

These same people, who give every impression of having had their brains sucked out by a zombie, are responsible for the fact that the kids who are being forbidden the fun mask-wearing experience of Halloween this year, have been forced to wear masks every day in school since it resumed last month. They are often required to wear them even when outside at recess – assuming the school allows them out at recess. 

 As Christian fantasy novelist and Chalcedon Foundation editor Lee Duigon put it a few weeks ago, “Good grief, they’ve made school even worse than it has always been.” 

Am I saying that all of these kids forced to wear masks all day, every day, are going to end up hiding out in the basements of theatres, dropping chandeliers on people, abducting beautiful singers, murdering people with nooses, and threatening to blow up their cities (4)? 

Perhaps not, but they are likely to be incredibly traumatized by it. This mandatory mask policy at schools amounts to one gigantic case of child abuse. 

Everybody who is in favour of it deserves to be horsewhipped. 

(1) There is an entire subgenre of mystery fiction featuring just this sort of dilemma. It is called the “locked-room mystery” subgenre. Edgar Allan Poe is usually regarded as the founder of the subgenre. The acknowledged master of it, John Dickson Carr, considered Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room to be his favourite. An early and excellent example, and my personal favourite, is Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. 

(2) Lloyd Webber also composed a sequel musical entitled Love Never Dies which opened in 2010. He had started working on it years earlier with journalist-novelist Frederick Forsyth. Forsyth had developed their ideas into The Phantom of Manhattan, a 1999 novel which, like Love Never Dies, is a sequel, not so much to Leroux’s novel, the ending of which hardly leaves room for a follow up, as to Lloyd Webber’s adaptation. While Love Never Dies and The Phantom of Manhattan are versions of the same story, the genesis of both is such that it would be a gross oversimplification to say the former is an adaptation of the latter. 

(3) The Red Death is a character from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842). The parallel Leroux originally intended by having Erik show up in this costume is that in both stories the character was a very unwanted party-crasher at a similar event. Considering the nature of the lesson I have been drawing from Leroux’s story, it will be worth our while to briefly summarize Poe’s story here. The Red Death, in Poe’s story, is a plague which Prince Prospero, the main character, attempts to avoid, by putting himself and all of his friends in lockdown behind the castle walls of his abbey. After six months – the ironic parallels just continue to pile up – he throws a masquerade ball, much like the one in Leroux’s novel. He takes his guests through seven rooms, each decorated in a different colour, the final room of which is all in black, with blood-red illumination. When the spooky clock in the room chimes midnight, Prospero and his guests notice someone dressed in a blood red shroud, with a skull for a face. Angry that someone would show up dressed as the very plague he had been hiding from, he corners the man with a dagger but drops dead when the man turns to look at him. When all of his guests then mob the Red Death and force him to remove his mask, there is nothing beneath, for it was the actual plague personified. Their attempts to lock themselves away from him had failed completely. 

(4) This part of the story was really watered down by Lloyd Webber. In his version, the Phantom offers Christine the choice of staying with him or seeing Raoul, whom he had trapped in his Punjab lasso, die. In Leroux’s novel, Raoul and his guide the Persian, a character eliminated from most adaptations except the first, get themselves trapped in Erik’s torture chamber. Christine is a given a choice – signal that she is willing to live with him forever by turning a switch shaped like a scorpion on his mantelpiece, or signal her rejecting him by turning the switch shaped like a grasshopper The grasshopper switch would have detonated a cache of gunpowder beneath the torture chamber large enough to blow up the opera house and much of the surrounding section of Paris.

The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode III

Reaction Man Defeats the Diabolical Designs of Diaper-Face

In their dens at home, Justice Bob Baddecision of the Ontario Inferior Court and Don Alfredo Fettucine of the Fettucine Crime Syndicate turned on their computers and opened a popular teleconferencing app. They had been told to be ready at 6:66 pm for a very important online meeting. They had been given special clocks for the purpose, as regular clocks don’t register a 6:66.

 At that precise moment a burst of flame appeared on their screens which began to emit a smell of sulfur into the air. The flame coalesced into the image of a man with a goatee and ponytail, and the stumps of horns on his forehead. 

“Hi Lucy” they exclaimed. 

 “Greetings my closest friends” said Lucifer, or Lucy, as the gender-confused devil preferred to be called. “I have called this very important meeting tonight to introduce you to my latest scheme.” (1)

 Lucy rubbed his hands together and began to cackle. 

 “As you are aware, some of my recent plans have suffered unfortunate setbacks. Four years ago, my favourite daughter from the Sisters of the Night coven was set to take control of the most powerful army on the face of the earth, and launch the Battle of Armageddon. My plan was foiled, however, by the rise of Donald the Orange, who has been doing the exact opposite of what I wanted, reducing his country’s military presence around the globe, putting out the fires of ethnic conflict that I have been stoking for over a century in both the Balkans and the Middle East, and even going to North Korea to negotiate peace with Kim. I have since unleashed my mutant-demon squad on Donald the Orange in the hopes of getting revenge.” (2) 

“More recently, working through my faithful minions, the Woke Millennial and his Aunty Fa, I unleashed an army of Marxist zombies on the campus of Aberhart Manning University in Brown Moose, Alberta. My scheme went awry, however, due to the interloping of that annoying superhero, Reaction Man.” (3) 

“This time, however, my plot is foolproof. Allow me to introduce you to my new minion Diaper-Face.”

Lucy stepped aside and a new face filled the screen. Or rather, what would have been a face, if a large diaper were not permanently obscuring most of it, leaving only the eyes visible. Diaper-Face said something, but neither Justice Baddecision nor Don Fettuccine could make out what it was due to the combination of his accent and his voice being muffled by the diaper. 

“Ummmm” they both said. 

 “My apologies”, Lucy said, stepping back into the screen. “What Diaper-Face was trying to say was ‘hello’”. 

The judge and the mafia boss both greeted Diaper-Face in return. 

“Diaper-Face used to be a research scientist in a virology lab in China”, Lucy said. “He was performing an experiment one day when an accident occurred and every virus in the lab escaped and infected him simultaneously. He instantly came down with the biggest attack of the sneezes the world has ever seen. You could even call it a sneeze seizure. He left the lab, intending to go to the nearest hospital, but the sneezing attack disoriented him. He ended up going into the glue factory next door instead and let out a particularly violent sneeze that knocked over a vial of the stickiest, most permanent, adhesive ever invented by man, which spilled onto his face. Not knowing what it was, he grabbed a diaper that was for some reason sitting there, and tried to wipe his face off. Instead, the diaper became permanently attached. The experience has driven him mad. He now has no desire except to see the entire world in the same predicament, with diapers permanently attached to everyone else’s face. He called upon me, and I granted him powers in exchange for his soul. With the combination of the powers I have given him, and his own in-depth understanding of virology, it should be a cinch for him to frighten the world into forcing everyone to wear diapers on their faces. The diapers will be specially consecrated in a Black Mass ceremony so that everyone who wears them will be pledging their loyalty to me.” 

“Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha” 

“Diaper-Face is my greatest creation yet! He truly is my left hand.” 

“Don’t you mean right hand?” Don Alfredo asked. 

“No, Steve Earle’s mama was right when she told him back in the General Store that that is the pistol.”

“Left hand sounds funny” said Justice Baddecision. 

“Just think of what people used to use their left hand for”, Lucy said. “Through Diaper-Face, that is what I intend to do to the world.” 

Unbeknownst to Lucy and his colleagues, their conversation had been intercepted and recorded, and the recording transmitted to an obscure monastery in the Carpathian Mountains. 

A short time thereafter, Lucy unleashed Diaper-Face. Through the combination of his expertise in virology and the powers the devil had given him in exchange for his soul, he had created two viruses. One of these he called the Viral Bogeyman, although the world was soon to know it by a different name. It produced a respiratory disease that was severe-to-fatal among a small minority, although most infected experienced only mild symptoms. It was the other virus that was the more deadly of the two, for it infected the mind rather than the body, causing people to perceive the first virus as being something other than it was, something on the same level as the Black Death or worse. This virus spread around the globe much more quickly than the first, and infected a lot more people. The symptoms of the infected were that they curled up in the fetal position, sucking their thumbs, and calling upon their government to take away all of their neighbours’ rights and freedoms while they waited for Big Pharma to produce a magic needle that would save them from the Viral Bogeyman. While they waited for the magic needle, they put their trust in a magic diaper, wearing it all times and in all places, even when sitting alone in their own cars, to ward off the Viral Bogeyman. 

Those who were fortunate enough not to be infected by Diaper-Face’s mind virus, looked around in dismay and astonishment, at the foolishness of all those around them who were. Among these were the Right Reverend John Keble Waterland, Bishop of Paleo-Middlesex and his good friend “Eddy” Johnson. Bishop Waterland and Eddy would have tea about once a week, and these days much of the conversation revolved around the craziness of everyone around him. Bishop Waterland would shake his head as he recounted the latest silliness of the Right Reverend Barty Battyblabber, Bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Neo-Soho. Most recently, Bishop Barty had taken to wearing no less than ten magic diapers on his face at any given time. (4) 

“He looks absolutely ridiculous”, Bishop Waterland told Eddy, “but he says that he would rather be safe than sorry. At least I think that is what he was saying. It is almost impossible to make out a word he says under all those layers.” 

The phone rang, and Bishop Waterland answered it. 

“Hello? Oh, alve-say Brother Whippet. I think this is the first time we have spoken since you returned to Romania. How are things over there? Why yes, as a matter of fact he is here.” 

Bishop Waterland handed the phone over to Eddy. 

Eddy took the phone and was soon in intense conversation with the member of the ancient and sacred Order of St. Michael of Marshmallow who had come to Canada and knighted him after he had received the power to turn back the clock on the anniversary of the Reaction of Thermidor, turning him into Reaction Man. It had been Brother Whippet’s superior, Brother Moonpie, who had received the transmission of the recording of Lucy’s conversation. (5) The Marshmallow Monks, having put together what had happened, urged Eddy to find Diaper-Face and defeat him. 

Eddy, after he had finished talking with Brother Whippet, handed the phone back to Bishop Waterland, explained the situation, for the Bishop knew his secret, then changed into his Reaction Man costume and set out to track down Diaper-Face. 

Reaction Man found Diaper-Face standing on a high balcony, surveying the streets below where every visible person was wearing a diaper on his face. Diaper Face was laughing and gloating over his success. 

“I’ve found you at last, Diaper-Face” said Reaction Man. “It is time to set all these people free from the bondage they are under due to the spell of your evil mind virus.” 

 In response Diaper-Face said “Good luck with that, Reaction Man. You can never defeat Lucy and me. All the people of the world will be living in slavery to the irrational fear that my mind virus has planted in their rotting brains for the rest of their lives.” 

Of course, since he said all of this in Chinese and from behind his glued-on diaper, Eddy couldn’t make out a word of that. 

“What did you say?” 

 Diaper-Face repeated himself, but was still indecipherable. 

“Pardon me, could you say that one more time?” 

 Diaper-Face gave his super-villain boast in heavily muffled Chinese again, but, of course, to no avail.

“Well, I still don’t know what you’re talking about, but I guess it doesn’t matter. It is my duty to defeat you and that is exactly what I am going to do.” 

 Reaction Man pointed at Diaper-Face and used his power to turn the clock back. The super-adhesive holding the diaper onto Diaper-Face’s face dissolved and the diaper fell to the ground. 

“My diaper! My beautiful diaper!” Diaper-Face screamed, this time in English. 

“Finally you said something that makes sense”, Reaction Man said, “although I beg to differ. That diaper was as ugly as sin.” 

“You don’t understand. All the power that Lucy gave me was contained in that diaper. Without it, the spell will be broken.” 

 Diaper-Face lunged for the diaper, but Reaction Man was faster. He grabbed the horrid thing and threw it into an incinerator that for some odd but convenient reason was located there on the balcony. As the diaper hit the flame, it burst into a cloud of brimstone. 

 All around the world, people woke up from the paranoia that the mind virus had induced, realized how foolish they all looked wearing diapers on their faces, threw them in the garbage in disgust, and resumed living their lives, no longer bound by fear of the Viral Bogeyman.

(1) Lucy the gender-confused devil and Justice Bob Baddecision first appear in Lucy’s Day in Court. Don Alfredo Fettucine first appears in Justice for Minnie? 

(2) See The Witches’ Sabbat and Brother Moonpie and the Devil’s Apocalypse. 

(3) See The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode II – Reaction Man Versus the Marxist Zombie Army (4) Bishops John Keble Waterland and Barty Battyblabber first appear in Bishop Bartholomew B. Battyblabber and His Big Bad Bash. 

(5) As told in The Adventures of Reaction Man: Episode I – The Origin.

Who Is Their Intended Demographic?

 

Have you ever seen an advertisement for a product that left you wondering who on earth the company had in mind as its prospective market base?

At some point over the last year, I think, perhaps, as far back as last Christmas, I was amused to see a television commercial that raised this very question. It was for Maple Leaf Foods, and was promoting a product line labelled 50/50. The products so labelled are hamburgers and sausages that are half meat, and half a plant-based substitute. 

This is not intended as a commentary on the products themselves. I have not tried them and, for all I know, they could be the best tasting, greatest and most nutritious items on the market today. 

I could not watch that commercial, however, without trying to picture what the brainstorming session that gave birth to these might have looked like. I imagined a meeting of marketing executives, fresh out of college and with no experience of real life and real people. They were sitting around a table and one of them made the following pitch: 

“As you all know, a number of products have appeared in recent years, that resemble meat products but which are derived entirely from plants. There are people out there, who are known as vegetarians and vegans, who buy and eat these products. There are other people, who are proud and loud meat-eaters, who buy regular beef hamburgers and pork sausages. Now here is my proposal. Let’s develop a product that we can sell to both groups at the same time and capture both markets.” 

At the risk of ruining a good joke by explaining it, the reason the above imagined scenario is so hilarious is that a half-and-half meat and vegetable product, rather than appeal to both vegetarians/vegans and proud carnivores simultaneously, would appeal to neither and probably be offensive to both. 

Vegetarians, for varying reasons – a health condition that requires it, the mistaken notion that it is healthier in general, or some sort of perverse moral hang-up against the eating of animal flesh – do not eat meat. A burger or sausage that is half meat would be as much against their diet as one that is fully meat. Needless to say this goes double for the vegans, those vegetarians with extra large carrots stuck up their butts who think they are morally superior, not only to normal people, but to other vegetarians, because they won’t even eat dairy products or eggs. 

As for the proud carnivores – the kind of people who like their meat, who make sure that you know they like their meat, and who generally hold the people discussed in the preceding paragraph in contempt – can you really see them embracing a meat product that is half plant-substitute? They wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. 

There are, of course, plenty of people – the majority, I am sure – who base their food choices on personal taste, rather than some food ideology. While such people would not have the kind of natural aversion to a meat product that is half plant-based substitute that the previous groups would have, it is difficult to see why they would be particularly attracted to these products either. People who like both meat and vegetables, tend to prefer meat as meat, and vegetables as vegetables, or some combination of both that is its own thing, over vegetables disguised to look like meat or meat diluted by vegetables. 

Of course, the fact that these products continue to be available indicates that somebody is buying them and in large enough quantities to make them profitable to produce and sell. That is all that really matters as far as the company is concerned, but the question of who exactly that somebody is remains a very interesting one. 

This was not the first time the question of who they expect to buy this has popped into my head during a commercial. Usually, however, it is has something to do with the product being extremely redundant or a poorly conceived sales pitch that seems more likely to have the opposite of its intended effect. This one stood out because it had the appearance of having been thought up in an amusing scenario like the one imagined above. Since we all need a good laugh after the bad joke which was Captain Airhead’s proposals in the Throne Speech earlier this week for burdening us all with more socialism, censorship, rules, and government debt, I figured I would share that with you rather than dissecting said proposals.

The White Inferiority Complex

 

For decades, hurling the epithet “racist” was the liberal’s go-to method of acknowledging anyone who disagreed with him from a standpoint somewhere to his right. In this same period this method served its purpose of discouraging disagreement with progressive liberalism well. Those who belonged to the mainstream of whatever was considered to be conservatism at the time, which was generally what had been considered liberalism a decade or so earlier, were, for some reason that has never really been explained, particularly sensitive to this accusation, and every time the liberal used this dreaded word they would rush to be the first to throw whoever was on the receiving end of the accusation under the bus. 

Eventually, however, this word lost most of its bite. It had simply been used too often and against too many people. When everyone is a racist, nobody is a racist, and people stop caring when you call somebody a racist. While it made something of a comeback this year, when used with the modifier “systemic”, for a few years now it has been largely replaced in liberal usage with “white supremacist.”

By trading the worn out “racist” for the fresh “white supremacist”, liberals exchanged an insult that had lost most of its meaning through overuse for one that was more powerful than the original had ever been, but in doing so they made themselves look absurd. For one thing white supremacist has a much narrower range of meaning than racist, with connotations of ideology, zeal, commitment, and activism that the word racist does not. There are very few actual white supremacists left and when liberals try to use this expression in the way they used to use racist they invite ridicule upon themselves. 

There is another aspect to the absurdity of the charge of white supremacism being flung around like so much monkey excrement. It is quite evident to anybody with open eyes that if any sort of bad racial thought presently infests the minds of the white people of Western Civilization it is not a sense of superiority over others, much less a feeling of supremacy over others, but rather a sort of inferiority complex. 

What other explanation can there be for the fact that even though the United States, after its Supreme Court abolished all de jure discrimination against blacks, established de jure discrimination against whites in 1964, and Canada, the United Kingdom, and all other Western countries decided to follow this foolish American precedent, and for over a generation anti-white discrimination has been the only established racism in Western Civilization, nevertheless white people have been willing to affirm the proposition that Western countries are “white supremacist” and that they therefore enjoy “privilege” on the basis of their skin colour? 

How else do we explain all the white people who are enthusiastic supporters of Black Lives Matter? BLM, despite the organization’s innocuous if also truistic and banal name, is not about a positive agenda of promoting the security and well-being of black people. Abortion rates have been disproportionately high among black people for decades, but BLM couldn’t care less about all the black lives lost to abortion. They are, in fact, allied to the pro-abortion, feminist cause. Nor does BLM care about all the black lives taken by black perpetrators of violent crime. Blacks are overrepresented among both the perpetrators and the victims of violent crime in general, which has been the case for as long as statistics have been kept about this sort of thing and shows no sign of ceasing to be the case any time soon, and this overrepresentation is even larger for homicide. The inevitable and natural corollary of this is that blacks are also overrepresented among crime suspects, arrests, convictions, and incarcerations. The black lives lost to black crime are not black lives that matter to BLM. BLM cares only about blaming the overrepresentation of blacks among suspects, arrests, etc., on the racism of white police. For this is what BLM is truly about – spreading hatred of police officers, Western Civilization in general but with a focus on the United States, and especially of white people. 

It makes about as much sense, therefore, for white people to support BLM as it would for black people to go around wearing white robes with pointy hoods. Yet this year, in which BLM has, ahem, removed its mask and revealed its true colours like never before, it would have been difficult not to notice the prominent participation of whites in the record-breaking wave of race riots and the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoist assault on historical monuments and statues. That is even without taking into account the lionizers of BLM and its cause among white newspaper and television commentators, white university professors, white clergymen, white corporate executives, white celebrities, and white politicians. 

There is a name for this sort of inferiority complex. It is called liberalism. While there are many different liberalisms with many different meanings, the one that I have in mind here is that of the liberal whom Robert Frost defined as “a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Although I must say that when the poet penned that worthy diagnosis it probably never occurred to him that the disease would progress to the point where those infected actively take up arms against their own side. 

This, however, is the stage of the condition in which we find ourselves today and it may very well prove to be the terminal stage. 

Today, whether they seriously believe it to be true or not, a sizeable portion of whites are willing to affirm that racism is a moral offence for which light-skinned people of European ancestry bear a unique guilt, that they are guilty of it even if they are not conscious of having thought a racist thought, said a racist word, or committed a racist act, that this unconscious racism supposedly built into the very fabric of society is worse than the overt racial hatred that is often directed against whites by blacks and others with an anti-white axe to grind, and that it is their moral duty, therefore, to express contrition or shame whenever any non-white person chooses to take offence at something they have said or done or merely the fact that they are living and breathing, and to ignore or excuse explicit expressions of racial animus directed against them, even when these are violent in tone. 

Western liberalism has clearly undergone a mutation from when its humanitarian and universalist ideals merely generated a blindness to the legitimate particular interests of Western nations and peoples. It now actively opposes those interests. 

Think about the implications of the ubiquitous calls to end “systemic racism.” Many, perhaps most, white people have been jumping on board this bandwagon. Perhaps they do not understand that “systemic racism” is a technical term, from neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory, and that it designates this idea of an embedded racism which all white people and only white people are guilty of whether they are conscious of racist thought and actions or not. Perhaps they think it means institutional policies and practices that explicitly discriminate on racial grounds. If the latter is what they think, however, then they are mistaken if they think that racism of this sort, other than the kind that is directed against them, exists in Western countries today. This crusade against “systemic racism” in the Critical Race Theory sense of the term can only have the result, if successful, of making the explicit discrimination against white people that has been institutionalized in all Western countries since the ‘60’s and ‘70s of the last century, worse. 

There is a far worse manifestation of this mutant strain of the liberalism virus. Taken together, a number of liberal policies that have been in place in most if not all Western countries for over four decades, constitute an existential threat to white people. One of these policies is the use of large scale immigration from non-Western countries to offset the declining fertility that has been produced by, among other factors, the anti-natalism of social liberalism’s pro-contraception, pro-abortion, views. The result of this policy having been in place for decades has been the massive demographic transformation of Western societies to the point where in several countries that in living memory were almost entirely white, whites are on the verge of dropping to minority status. When you add to this the introduction in the same time frame of the aforementioned anti-white institutional discrimination, and the vilification of whites in the news media, popular education, and the revisionist educational curriculum, what you end up with is a recipe for a sort of self-inflicted genocide. Indeed, for decades now, Critical Race Theorists such as the late Noel Ignatiev have couched their anti-white ideas in explicitly genocidal language such as “the abolition of the white race”. When called out over this they have defended their rhetoric by saying that the “white race” they are talking about is a social construct, but their arguments have a rather hollow ring to them when we consider that these people would be the first to cry genocide if the same language were used about any other race and that the activist movement that has been built upon the foundation of their theory has translated such rhetoric into even cruder terms and actions that are not so easily explained away. These same people insist that “it is okay to be white” is a dangerous and offensive racist slogan. 

Yet despite all of this, liberalism has been largely successful at convincing a large segment of the white population to regard anyone who dares to speak out against this suicidal combination of policies as being a bigger and more real threat than that combination itself. Indeed, there are several liberal organizations in North America that do nothing else except identify those who speak out against white liberalism’s racial suicide pact and wage a campaign of character assassination against them. 

Liberalism is usually wrong about everything and it is certainly wrong about this. The West does not have a “white supremacist” problem in this day and age. What it is suffering from is rather that many, perhaps most, white people have become infected with a sick-minded racial inferiority complex in which they regard their skin colour as a badge of racial guilt which can only be atoned for through racial suicide. You will be waiting a long time, however, for liberals to acknowledge this. That would mean admitting that liberalism is the problem. Liberals would sooner demonize all those who share their own skin colour than admit that liberalism could be wrong.

The Bread of Life

 

The institution of the Eucharist is recorded in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. It took place towards the end of the Last Supper, the final Passover meal that Jesus ate with His Apostles before His betrayal, arrest, trial, and Crucifixion. The account of the institution is brief in each of these Gospels. Here is how St. Matthew tells it: 

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom. (Matt. 26:26-29) 

Interestingly, the fourth Evangelist, who provides the longest account by far of the Last Supper – all of chapters thirteen and fourteen take place at the table, and a conversation which began there and continued as they went on their way to the Garden of Gethsemane occupies the next three chapters - omits any mention of the institution. Paradoxically, however, it is St. John who provides the fullest doctrine of the Eucharist earlier in his Gospel when He provides us with the Lord’s discourse on the bread of life in the aftermath of the feeding of the five thousand in the sixth chapter. There are those, of course, who would deny any connection between what the Lord has to say about eating His flesh and drinking His blood in that chapter and the Eucharist, but these merely illustrate the old saying that there is none so blind as he who refuses to see. To agree with them requires believing that on two separate occasions Jesus made reference to His flesh and blood as food and drink but meant something completely different by it each time. This is possible, perhaps, but hardly likely. While words can have different meanings in different contexts, this whole elaborate image of eating flesh and drinking blood, does not lend itself well to multiple uses. 

At the beginning of the sixth chapter of his Gospel, in introducing the account of the feeding of the five thousand, St. John notes that the Passover was approaching. While one wants to be wary of reading too much into details such as this, the fact of the matter is that an understanding of the Passover and how it relates to the significance of Jesus’s death is absolutely essential to making any sense out of the Eucharist. The orthodox Fathers were right and the Gnostic heretics very wrong indeed about the ongoing importance of the Old Testament for the Church under the New Covenant. 

The original Passover comes from the book of Exodus and from the central event that gave that book its title. The children of Israel, who had moved to Egypt in Joseph’s time, had grown to nationhood there but had been subjected to slavery. God, hearing the cries of the Israelites, had raised up Moses and sent him to speak to Pharaoh on His behalf to demand the release of His people. God sent a series of judgements of increasing intensity upon Egypt but each time Pharaoh hardened his heart and refused to let Israel go. Then, in one final judgement, He slew the firstborn of every household in Egypt, from Pharaoh’s down, prompting Pharaoh to not just let Israel go but to actively drive them out. The Israelites were instructed, on the night in which this was to take place, to take a lamb per every one or two households, depending upon their size, kill the lamb before the assembly of Israel, mark the sides and lintel of the door of their homes with the blood, and eat the flesh of the lamb. Those whose houses were so marked by the blood would be spared from the judgement on Egypt. The Israelites were commanded to repeat this on the anniversary of the event, the Ides of Nisan, perpetually. 

The Israelites, celebrating the Passover every year, looked back to how God had delivered them from bondage in Egypt. The Passover, however, and the deliverance it commemorates, also looked forward to the greater act of deliverance that would inaugurate the New Covenant promised in the Old. Just as the physical bondage of the Israelites in Egypt depicts the spiritual bondage to sin which has held the human race captive since the Fall, so the killing of the lamb depicts the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who offered Himself up as the one, true, and final sacrifice that would effectively remove man’s sin as a barrier between man and God. St. Paul, who in his epistle to the Hebrews explains how all Old Testament sacrifices are types of Christ and how Christ is the final sacrifice that once and for all accomplished what all previous sacrifices could only illustrate, spells this out in his first epistle to the Church in Corinth when he writes “For even Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7). 

This context is essential to understanding what the Lord was saying when He instituted the Eucharist, and in that context His words make perfect sense. After the lamb of the Old Passover was slain, and the protection of its blood was applied to the door of the home, the flesh of the lamb became the meal which the family ate. The Passover was not complete without the eating of the lamb. In the Eucharist, God offers the flesh and the blood of the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world” as food and drink, in a way that unites all the different sacrifices and offerings of the book of Leviticus. Read through the book of Leviticus and you will see what I mean. Apart from the various sacrifices and burnt offerings in which an animal was killed, there were grain offerings or oblations – called “meat offerings” in the Authorized Bible – of flour and oil, or of unleavened cakes made of the same, and drink offerings or libations of wine. Through the bread and wine of the Eucharist, corresponding to the oblations and libations of Leviticus, the flesh – and even the blood, which, of course, was never consumed in the Old Testament – of the one true Sacrifice become the food and drink which nourishes the souls and spirits of the faithful in perpetuity. 

When considering how the temporal shadows of the Old Testament depict the eternal verities revealed in the New – how anybody can read the eighth through the tenth chapters of Hebrews without recognizing that St. Paul was a Christian Platonist is beyond me – the differences are often as striking and significant as the correlations. We have noted one such difference already – that there was no drinking of the blood along with the eating of the flesh in the Old Testament, and, indeed, there was a strict prohibition of the consumption of blood which was the only dietary restriction to be carried over into the Church by the decree of the Apostolic Council at Jerusalem after the conversion of the Gentiles. The offering of the blood of Christ as drink through the wine of the Eucharist stands out, therefore, as the sole Scriptural exception to this rule. This, of course, corresponds to the most obvious way in which Christ’s one final and true sacrifice is the sole exception to the Scriptural prohibition on human sacrifice. 

There is only one example in the Old Testament of God commanding a human sacrifice. (1) That can be found in the twenty-second chapter of Genesis and is the familiar story in which Abraham is commanded to take his promised heir, Isaac, to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him. Abraham obeys the command, but is stopped from killing his son at the last minute by a voice speaking from heaven. This had been a test of Abraham’s faith, a test which he passed and was rewarded with a magnification of the promises of blessing which he had previously received in earlier chapters. Multiple allusions to Christ are evident in this chapter. Abraham, in answer to an inquiry from Isaac, expresses his faith and speaks prophetically when he says “God will provide Himself a lamb.” It is a ram, not a lamb, that is sacrificed later in the chapter, for the ultimate fulfilment of the prophecy awaited the coming of Christ, the Agnus Dei. In the repeated praise of Abraham because “thou hast done this thing, and not withheld thy son, thine only son” there is a hint of exactly how God would ultimately “provide Himself a lamb.” It is, of course, in the coming of Christ, that the promise that all the nations of the world would be blessed through Abraham is finally fulfilled. 

Elsewhere in the Old Testament human sacrifice is strictly prohibited. The Israelites are forbidden from practicing it in the Mosaic Law and are told that this is one of the abominations that is bringing divine judgement upon the nations that preceded them in Canaan. The apostasy that later brings the judgements of the Assyrian destruction of the Northern Kingdom and the Babylonian Captivity upon Israel involves their lapsing into pagan idolatry including human sacrifice. 

To understand why Christ’s sacrifice was acceptable and, indeed, the only truly efficacious sacrifice, when all other human sacrifice was condemned as abominable, it is helpful to observe the reversal of direction that occurs in the New Testament. Sacrifices in the Old Testament were called offerings. Whether the offering consisted of animals – lambs, rams, doves, etc. – flour and oil, or wine – it was something that the faithful brought to God. This was the ancient concept of a sacrifice. It was dutifully brought to the altar by the faithful as a tribute owed and dutifully offered up to the deity by the priest. The direction was always upward.  

While the sacrifice of Christ does fit this pattern when the participants are correctly identified, as we shall see momentarily, the New Testament sets it in the context of the Gospel where the overall direction runs the other way. Repeatedly in the New Testament Jesus Christ is depicted as God’s gift to mankind. The most beloved words in all of Scripture are “For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” While the Incarnation as a whole is what is meant by the giving of God’s Son, that there is a focus on His death as the atoning sacrifice is evident from the verse that immediately precedes the one just quoted. 

In the old sense of the word sacrifice, a tribute which man offers to God, human sacrifice was an abomination. God repeatedly rejected even the sacrifices He Himself had ordained if they were offered in a wrong spirit, and He regarded the ritual slaying of other human beings as a crime crying out for His wrath and judgement. Christ’s death, insofar as it was an act for which other human beings were responsible, whether it be the disciple that betrayed Him, the religious leaders that conspired against Him, the Sanhedrin that unjustly condemned Him, the mob that howled for His Crucifixion, the Roman magistrate who knowing Him to be innocent signed His death warrant to appease said mob, or the soldiers who cruelly beat and crucified Him, was most certainly a crime. When God accepted it as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, it was not as an offering from the hand of other men. The Victim Himself was the High Priest Who offered Himself on behalf of the sinful world, by knowingly and meekly submitting to this injustice. Indeed, since Jesus Christ was God as well as Man, He was simultaneously the Priest, Victim and the Recipient of the offering. 

This is why Christ’s sacrifice accomplished what no other sacrifice could do. Sinful man, bringing his tributes to God, had nothing to offer Him which could atone for his trespasses and rebellion. Only God Himself, Incarnate in the Person of Jesus Christ, could make such an offering and that offering was Himself. While Christ in His Crucifixion offered Himself up to God as the true sacrifice which took away the sins of the world, His having come into the world to do so was itself a gift in the other direction, from God, in His infinite goodness, mercy, and grace, to sinful man. 

This same reversal of direction can be seen in the Eucharist. In the Old Testament the grain offering was brought to the altar, a portion was burned, and the rest became bread reserved for the priests. The drink offering was poured out in its entirety upon the altar. Under the New Covenant, the bread and wine are consecrated at the altar, and then distributed among clergy and laity alike, as the means whereby the whole Church partakes of the Body and Blood of the true Paschal sacrifice, Jesus Christ. 

It seems incredible that anybody at all familiar with the Old Testament and the book of Hebrews could make the mistake of disconnecting Jesus’ discussion of Himself as the Bread of Life with its vivid imagery of eating His flesh and drinking His blood in the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel from the Eucharist and interpreting these references as meaning nothing more than the reception of the verbal communication of the Gospel message. It is not surprising, however, that those who do make this mistake are the same people who think that going to Church is an academic exercise in which the important and essential part is hearing a lecture, and everything else is just cosmetic trimmings, the less of which there are the better. Such people belong to the class of Protestant that we have had cause to consider in the context of other issues recently, who see their Protestantism as a rejection of the Catholic and not just the Roman. This kind of Protestantism always swings the pendulum too far in the opposite direction of Rome. Whereas the early Reformers, who merely rejected the Roman and not the Catholic, rightly took exception to the papacy’s claim that Christ’s sacrifice, clearly stated by St. Paul to have been offered up once and for all, is re-offered on the Eucharistic altar, this other kind of Protestant goes to the extreme of rejecting the Scriptural and Catholic doctrine that the faithful are fed in perpetuity by that Sacrifice through the Sacrament. Whereas Dr. Luther and the other Reformers rejected the papacy’s explanation, derived from Aristotelian philosophy, of the Sacramental Presence of Christ because it went too far and asserted the post-consecration absence of the bread and wine, this other kind of Protestant tends to reject the Sacramental Presence altogether, or to explain in in some way that is just as nonsensical as transubstantiation. 

What is truly puzzling is that in this present crisis in which Satan, through his demon-possessed minions among bureaucratic practitioners of the modern-day witchcraft of medical science, successfully shut down the Churches around the world back at the beginning of Lent and has kept them closed for months, allowing them to re-open only if they met insane and anti-Christian requirements such as restricting their numbers, which translates into the thoroughly unchristian practice of turning people away from Church, or admitting people only if they agree to wear the devil’s diaper on their face, the strongest opposition to all of this nonsense has come mostly from the kind of Protestant who believes the Bread of Life is communicated only verbally, and who thus logically ought to have the least objection to being forced to do everything online. 

Surely it is time for those with the Apostolic ministry who recognize that it is through the Eucharist that the Bread of Life is communicated to the faithful to speak out against this Satanic oppression. 

(1) However we understand Jephthah to have fulfilled his rash vow in the book of Judges, there is certainly no command from God that he sacrifice his daughter in the text.