Month: October 2009

Melanie McDonagh doesn’t want to hear that old dreary stuff about the Catholic church, thanks all the same.

The old gibe, that anti-Catholicism is the antisemitism of the left, looked like being given a new lease of life.

Is that an old jibe? (I don’t get out much.) Well if so it’s a very stupid one. Leftish anti-Catholicism is about real actions and commands by the Catholic church and its clergy. It’s substantive – it’s about something. What is anti-semitism ‘about’? Catholicism has a lot of substance to get to grips with. It has a hierarchy, and a state, and a long history of official actions and institutions (the inquisition, the index, wars, corruption – little things like that). It gives us its official thoughts at frequent intervals. It applies pressure to governments and politicians. It is an institution. It has power. It runs schools and orphanages and charities, and it doesn’t always run them well, or kindly. Is any of that true of ‘semitism’? No. Some of it (though not much) applies to Judaism, but ‘semitism,’ no. So McDonagh’s ‘old gibe’ is not worth much.

What’s to say about Africa and Aids? Except that if the pope were as omnipotent as people make out, he’d be able to make individuals subscribe to the whole package of Catholic teaching on sexuality, on fidelity within marriage and chastity, not just condoms. I’ve never quite been able to believe in Catholics – Africans or otherwise – who are so scrupulous that they couldn’t possibly use condoms, but will resort to prostitutes.

But that doesn’t explain why the pope is trying to get people to obey his instructions not to use condoms. And it ignores the obvious fact that men don’t want to use condoms anyway and the ‘church teaching’ provides a handy excuse. Has McDonagh never heard the term bareback? If not she should pay more attention, if she’s going to write about the church and condoms. And she doesn’t explain why a slow nasty death is the appropriate punishment for people who don’t ‘subscribe to the whole package of Catholic teaching on sexuality.’ And she doesn’t explain why people – mostly women – who don’t have sex with anyone but their husbands should be punished for their husbands’ sex lives combined with refusal to use condoms; nor does she explain why children should be included in the punishment. She explains pretty much nothing – she just makes a smug crack and lets it go at that.

Woof.

Allow me to make a banal observation: it can be very hard to know how one is coming across, just as it can be very hard to know what other people mean by how they are coming across. It’s all just very difficult! Which is just as well, in some ways – we don’t want to be totally transparent – we don’t want our every gesture and intonation to be unambiguous and indisputable, like 2+2=4. We want a little flexibility, some shading, some room to maneuver – some doubt.

But in other ways it can be tiresome. We may misunderstand other people, and they may misunderstand us, and that’s not always helpful. I’ve just read the Zoë Heller novel The Believers; one of the main characters is a woman who started out in her youth being interestingly and amusingly irascible, so that people would say ‘get Audrey in here to talk to that jerk, she’ll soon sort him out’; but forty years later it dawned on her that what is charming in a young woman is repellent in an old one. That realization wasn’t as poignant or whatever it was supposed to be as it could have been because Audrey is so exaggerated – she is always bad-tempered and rude and just plain unpleasant, she is always on one note and not particularly amusing on that one note. But still – she does stand for something. One can think one is simply being forthright and clear, and then discover that to other people one is being mean and a bully and much too aggressive.

Especially, of course, if one is a woman. It’s a very familiar trope of second-wave feminism that what is seen as leadership and decisiveness in a man will be seen as aggression or ball-breaking in a woman. But that doesn’t mean no woman can possibly be too aggressive. It may however mean that a woman who thinks she is more indignant than aggressive will be surprised to be told otherwise.

This becomes all the more complicated when what the woman is irritable, or indignant, or aggressive about is itself something to do with her being a woman – when she reacts with hostility to a sexist jibe, for example. It may be that she reacts with hostility to sexist jibes on principle, as well as out of actual hostility. She may think that sexist jibes shouldn’t just be ignored or laughed off or brushed aside. We talked about this last month, but of course new occasions are always arising. So…women are kind of stuck, frankly. Damned if they do damned if they don’t. Stuck with sexist jibes if they don’t, seen as aggressive if they do.

Well no, that’s not entirely true. One can be skilled at calibrating one’s response, one can be firm but fair, and so on. But…sometimes one just wants to bark when yet another sexist taunt comes along. So one does. Woof.

It was embarrassing to be an American during the Bush era, but what’s up with those zany people in Italy? Why do they vote for Berlusconi? Don’t they think owning most of the country’s mass media is power enough? And then…he’s such a…

The Italian Prime Minister has called President Obama “tanned” again — but this time he did not miss the opportunity to joke about the First Lady’s skin colour as well. After his return from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Mr Berlusconi told a rally of conservative supporters that he was bringing greetings from someone in the United States. “What’s his name? Some tanned guy. Ah, Barack Obama,” he said. He then added: “You won’t believe it, but the two of them sunbathe together, because the wife is also tanned.”

Gee – what a funny joke. I can’t wait for his next tour of Africa.