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From Under The Rubble
December 10, 2012
Les Faux Femmes
by Christopher Manion
fitzgerald griffin foundation
FRONT ROYAL, VA —
“Michelle Obama to receive a Grammy!”
“Hillary in 2016!”
“Michelle a favorite for Illinois Senate Race!”
It never ends. It’s amazing how these anti-family heroines can sashay down the Capital’s Catwalks, pretending that they “earned it” — when in fact they rose to fame not on their competence (dubious at best) but clinging to their husbands’ coattails. They would be unknown zeroes if they hadn’t married those two fake heroes — personifying what George Orwell calls an ”inconvenient fact.”
It is convenient indeed, and quite appropriate, to call Hillary and Michelle the “Doublethink Duo,” bearing in mind Orwell’s definition:
Doublethink is… The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed…
Of course, our dismal Doublethink Duo are lightweights — but they can’t help believing the paparazzi. Judge Judy could make mincemeat of 'em in one six-minute segment between Vioxx commercials. But their faux message is sustained by the fawning feminists who flock to any symbol that will affirm their haunting sense of alienation and angst, and deliver them from the jaws of masculine evil.
Hillary and Michelle treat the natural family like antimatter, and yet they are stuck with it. Where would they be without their men? And yet, for all that, Hillary's husband is a fake, and Barack's father was a no-show. For all the world to see, their careers careen like real-life versions of "Survivor." These two know can handle things without real men around. With that illusion they connect with the countless American women who are avoiding children (but not sex) like the plague, or who are raising children on their own, or wish they were — women who know that “the government will fight for them,” in Al Gore’s memorable phrase, because their husbands, boyfriends, or ex’s, won’t.
The Real War On Women
To this growing number of American women, life (especially the unborn kind) is a looming threat. You can’t go it alone and the traditional alternative is unthinkable. A family? Let’s face it, you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, or a "Father Knows Best" out of the "Me Generation.” After all, we were raised on mantras like “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” — and then we turned fifty. So whom do we trust? Swallow hard: the government, that’s whom. A good man is hard to find — and who wants real men around anyway, when we have such a fine, caring bureaucracy so willing to help?
"Instead of just defeating abortion opponents last month, they’ll be using them as a punching bag for years, as they push for universal, free abortion and contraception worldwide in the name of “family planning” — only it’s Hillary and Michelle who are doing the planning, and the plan is to destroy the family. "
Well, politics is war by another means, which means that you go to war with the family you've got. Hillary and Michelle, twin suns who married into dysfunctional family trees, want to take the global village by storm — or by tsunami — while they take the traditional family to divorce court. They'll turn the tables on the "battered-wife syndrome." Instead of just defeating abortion opponents last month, they’ll be using them as a punching bag for years, as they push for universal, free abortion and contraception worldwide in the name of “family planning” — only it’s Hillary and Michelle who are doing the planning, and the plan is to destroy the family. Doublethink “systematically undermines the solidarity of the family all the while appealing to the sentiment of family,” Orwell writes. They concur.
Meanwhile, the government silently slips into the role of the absentee father, providing everything that the real ones — you know, those stingy, undependable cads — have denied them: school breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, sex ed, Obamaphones, food stamps, and HillaryCare (dusted off as Obamacare)…. With the duo, all roads lead to Washington, your home away from home. “Government: We care like your daddy never did.”
Doublethink kills. It promises women independence as it makes them serfs. It “helps families stay together” while it eliminates their offspring. It makes women a caricature as it debases their nature. It makes heroines out of the likes of Sandra Fluke, the middle-aged Georgetown law student who soared to fame demanding a taxpayer-supported sex life. But even Ted Cruz, the new (and immediately presidential) conservative senator from Texas, got the message: “Listen, my wife and I have two little girls. I am thrilled we don't have seventeen,” he said last week, in an attempt to brush aside the “war on women” theme as a gross canard cut out of whole cloth.
Which it is, of course. But the Doublethink is as contagious as it is tempting, and it presents pro-family advocates with — to mix metaphors — a steep mountain to climb, and a slippery slope at that. Which the recent elections proved beyond any reasonable doubt.
In the meantime, Hillary, with Grammy-winning Michelle singing backup, will continue to insist that it takes a village, even though their vapid lives prove only that it takes a husband. And yet, exit polls revealed that married women voted against Obama by a wide margin.
Doublethink rules.
A Labor Of Love And Truth
“All men by nature desire to know,” Aristotle says at the outset of the Metaphysics. Thinking is natural, a reflection of the fact that we were created in the image and likeness of God. No man has personified that desire more than Father James V. Schall, S.J., who gave his last lecture in political theory at Georgetown on December 7, the Vigil of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
Can anything good come out of Georgetown? Father Schall hopes so, and he has taught packed classrooms well into his eighties inspired by that supernatural virtue. “We always return to Plato,” he says — and Plato taught that the teacher must love his students as much as he loves the truth. Father Schall has loved his students and they have loved him back; he has just taught Aristotle’s Ethics for the 35th time, he says, wryly noting C.S. Lewis’s observation that, “if you haven’t read a book twice, you haven’t read it at all…. “And of course, some books aren’t worth reading at all,” he continues with a wry smile.
Father Schall is an original thinker in that he constantly returns to the origins. And he goes there often. Thomas Merton’s biographer told me at Gethsemane forty years ago that the hermitage that the abbot gave to Fr. Louis’s (Merton’s religious name) was stacked with hundreds of little slips of paper. “Every time he scratched his head, he wrote down something,” he marveled. Well, every time that Father Schall scratches his head, he writes a book. He has written dozens, and they are all worth reading.
Father Schall’s life’s work has been grounded in the truth. “The worst thing that can happen to a young philosopher is that he give his soul to an unworthy professor,” he wrote last semester, quoting Yves Simon. “This sentence is one that every professor should write out by hand and place on his desk. And what is it to be a ‘worthy’ professor? Certainly, it is not necessary to be famous. Fame, in fact, may be an impediment, something sought for its own sake and not for what justifies praise.
Does that go for politicians too, Father? But I digress.
“And what,” he continues, “does justify the praise of fame? Only that truth be sought and shown to be grounded in what is.” The world is too much with us, and alas, Georgetown is not an exception. “Truth is not a popular topic in academia today, though there is nothing for which our souls more long.”
"Father Schall writes from the heart of Washington, where the light of truth hits a stop sign somewhere around the Beltway."
Father Schall writes from the heart of Washington, where the light of truth hits a stop sign somewhere around the Beltway. “The likelihood of tyranny arising from democracy itself, though familiar to Plato and Aristotle, is rarely mentioned,” he continues. Curiously, Orwell writes that Doublethink “believes that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.”
Generations of Georgetown students are grateful for this guardian of truth who is a worthy professor indeed. Ad multos annos.
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From Under the Rubble is copyright © 2012 by Christopher Manion. All rights reserved.
Christopher Manion, Ph.D., served as a staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years. He has taught in the departments of politics, religion, and international relations at Boston University, the Catholic University of America, and Christendom College, and is the director of the Campaign for Humanae Vitae, a project of the Bellarmine Forum. He is a Knight of Malta.
See a complete biographical sketch.
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