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Monday, April 04, 2005

Pope Death as Narrative Prompt

Like many comparably raging atheistical veggie commie faggot types I know I grew up as a more than mildly Catholic kid. I attended a Catholic school for a couple of years -- Saint Ignatz in Louisville, Kentucky. There, among other things, a linebacker of a nun rather inevitably monikered Mary-Margaret if I remember correctly swatted at my left hand every time I wrote with it, and there I was Confirmed Joseph (technicolor dreamcoat, y'all), before the family moved into a benighted Southern Indiana pastureland that was then painstakingly evolving into a Louisvillian suburb. I went to high school among Hoosiers, in a town called, this is no lie, Floyds Knobs. And for several years I still went Wednesday nights to CCD...

But it has been a long time indeed since Catholicism has exerted much in the way of gravity over my personal planetoid of narrative self, and most of the relevant scar tissue, even, has been long superceded by surreally bad subsequent break-ups and graduate school.

For me, the only Pope(-Emperor) who really matters remains alive and well in any case. Still, All Pope, All the Time, has prompted emotional responsivenesses in me I wouldn't have expected.

I find myself literally nauseous with rage hearing audio clips of the smug Frat Boy King assimilating his own self-righteous imperializing fundamentalist faux-piety to the Pope's -- when certainly John Paul II utterly abominated the gleefully murderous warmongering Texacutioneering, know-nothing anti-intellectualism, and endless accumulation elevated to a Way of Life incarnated so perfectly in the impossibly hateful Bush.

I cannot forgive the Pope's technophobic bioconservatism, his authoritarianism, his homophobia, his indifference to even the most basic commonsense science in the face of the AIDS pandemic, his practical apologias for child sexual abuse, or above all his rampaging misogyny. All of this, taken together, seems to me likely to constitute a damagingly retrograde legacy that will utimately judge him more harshly than well.

And that is relatively amazing given how promising and important his pacifism and antimaterialism were in an era of militarist and market fundamentalist metanationalism, how powerful his unprecedented outreach to other global faiths, and how undeniable his role (incomparably more significant than that of credit-grabbing crap canonized conservative Ronnie Reagan) in definitively disloging authoritarianism in Europe at the close of the Cold War.

3 comments:

Dale Carrico said...

I would have thought my use of the term "canonization" would have made my reference quite clear.

I eagerly agree with you that it is a good thing President Reagan's son advocates more funding for stem-cell research along with most even marginally sensible people.

And: as far as I'm concerned there is nothing the least bit offensive about a righteous disparagement of the bload-soaked mean-spirited Administration of Ronald Reagan. Clearly, ymmv.

Doctor Logic said...

I think that the John Paul II's role in the demise of communism has been greatly overstated. Only Reagan's role has been hyped more. Though Mikhail Gorbachev himself once said that the fall of communism would have been impossible were it not for the Pope, I think that it is Gorbachev himself who deserves 90% of the credit.

I remember remarking at the time that the fall of communism was due to one man's change of heart.

Dale Carrico said...

I absolutely agree with you about the monumentality of Gorbachev here.