Canada and Other Matters of Opinion (32 page)

It’s not Mr. Williams’s quarrel with Stephen Harper that’s at question. It’s hauling into that quarrel all the rhetoric of “disloyalty” to Newfoundland, stirring the jingoistic fevers and characterizing those on the other side as unworthy. Newfoundlanders have been lucky in past decades that, when we had strong premiers, we had strong ministers in Ottawa.

Danny Williams has reached such supremacy, however, that he has effectively become the only voice in Newfoundland politics. Mr. Hearn is gone. John Crosbie is in honorific heaven. And now there’s only Danny. That’s bad for us. It’s bad for him, too, should he care to think about it.

He should look over history’s shoulder and take in what happened to Joey Smallwood, a great premier who subtracted from his own legacy by succumbing to the vanity of power, the great, corrosive self-flattery of believing that being in charge is the same thing as always being right.

It’s uplifting to learn that Madonna is on a five-day pilgrimage (if that’s quite the right word) to Israel to deepen her understanding and commitment to Kabbalah.

My understanding of that ancient and esoteric discipline is not much greater than that of another of its accessorized devotees, the spiritualist Britney Spears. Britney, incidentally, in imitation or homage to Madonna has gone all mystic, too.

For those who can’t afford a stretch limo to the House of Wisdom, and therefore have to travel a thornier path to this great subject, let me recommend the book of books on the subject:
Kabbalah
, by the last century’s greatest scholar of that tradition, Gershom Scholem. Scholem has been described as the very “master-spirit” of this difficult and subtle field.
Kabbalah
and his other books are triumphs of faithful scholarship. I don’t know if Mr. Scholem did any videos.

Scholem is a monument to the ardours and austerities of the highest intellectualism, a very type of the idea of patient and courageous intellect. George Steiner has written a one-sentence cameo of Scholem that catches that temperament very well. I’ve quoted it in
The Globe
’s pages before: “That Voltairian mien, the needling eyes, the bat’s ears ever alert, the lips given to sardonic display, composed a mask of reason …”

Scholem’s study was his life’s whole work. I cannot say whether our two celebrity exegetes are out to surpass Scholem or merely surf in his monumental wake. Nonetheless, when the minds and vocal cords that gave us, respectively, “Like a Virgin” and “Hit Me Baby One More Time” unite in any one enterprise, the world has reason to quiver in expectation.

Madonna’s path into mysticism has led—somewhat by analogy to Prince, who wore for a long and fruitful interlude the luggage sticker “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”—to her taking a new name. Madonna is now Esther. Britney is still Britney, though. However, should the pop princess pupate namewise, now that it’s available, maybe she’ll take “Madonna.” That way, there’ll always be a Madonna even though Madonna is Esther. This mysticism is tricky stuff.

Britney is, I think, more of a “sampler” than Madonna. Her last big religious flip was the quickie wedding—or wedding quickie, the relevant divines have yet to rule on the distinction—in a Las Vegas house of worship. The famous
eight-hour marriage with the appropriate Las Vegas vow “till death or a hangover do us part.” From which we may take it that young Ms. Spears is a daring eclectic. Anyone who seeks to absorb the sacramental in the satin chamber of an Elvis chapel on the Vegas Strip, in earshot of Wayne Newton and Céline Dion cauterizing the eardrums of the supper-club crowd, has bowels of brass.

I find from a story in the
Daily Telegraph
about the pilgrimage that Madonna has taken to wearing “a red thread on her wrist to ward off the evil eye.” Considering some of the videos Madonna has appeared in, she could mummify herself in red thread and some eyes, evil or otherwise, would still be glaring.

Britney is not slacking off on the insignia, either. She’s been spotted with her crimson bracelet, but a red thread worn anywhere on Britney, apart from its mystical potency, probably also counts as a wardrobe surplus.

Madonna is reportedly very irritated that her newfound adhesion to this profound and complex tradition is regarded by some “as a celebrity fad.” The jaundice of petty minds, say I. I’m sure there were days that Thomas Aquinas emerged from the scriptorium to jeers of “modish monk.”

Madonna has left herself a little open to the same charge. Over the long arc of her spiritual odyssey, she has shed personas so frequently that it’s difficult to keep the file current. I know there was a yogic period, and of course her incubation as the Material Girl is a station of everyone’s
cross. But for the life of me, I can’t remember whether her marriage to Sean Penn was in her Sex Crusade phase, or her Under the Moon of the Conic Bra period.

Any surly consideration that it’s mere faddism, Kabbalah-lite, vanish into pixie dust when we learn she’s with a posse of fellow seekers. There are two thousand other novitiates from the Los Angeles-based Kabbalah Center with her. When was the last time two thousand Californians and a sprinkle of celebrities got caught up in anything trendy? “There are energy vortexes,” intones one of their guides, places people “can go and recharge [themselves] with positive energy.” Verily, a Ninth Beatitude.

If you can spot a hint of vaporous trendiness in that clotted nugget, I’m Dr. Phil.

It is not often that lectures on the finer points of theology and philosophy, delivered from so retired a venue as the University of Regensburg, turn the world, or at least a good part of it, on its ear. But it must be said as well that not every lecturer is the Bishop of Rome.

Pope Benedict XVI’s lecture may be fairly characterized as both subtle and erudite, a typically scholarly exposition from a man who was a scholar before he was a Pope. A few words of that lecture, however, and the consideration
that it was the Pope who spoke them made it one of the most explosive addresses of our time.

Most of the Pope’s address was a nuanced exploration of the relations between reason and faith. A good sense of the tone and nature of his talk, which is readily available in full on the Internet, may be taken from this sentence, which contains, as I see it, its central thesis: “Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?”

Hardly a red-flag item, even for the most excitable bull.

It was the few words of that address cited by His Holiness to assist in the illustration of his elegant argument, a quotation from a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor, that ignited, or at least has been the occasion for igniting, a great storm across parts of the Muslim world. The quotation and the words leading to it are these: “He addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’”

That one-sentence quotation of an ancient emperor, within an otherwise quiescent address, has set off a fury of anger and outrage. Churches have been attacked in the West Bank, there have been demonstrations elsewhere, and the Pope has been reviled by some Muslims as another Hitler or Mussolini.

Following the tumultuous response, Pope Benedict has invited Muslim envoys for talks, and has twice expressed his regret for the reaction to his lecture, but—and this is not the same thing—he has not apologized for his talk. Nor should he.

The fury in the Muslim world following the Pope’s talk seems similar in two respects to the greater fury that followed the publication of those now-famous Danish cartoons. The first similarity is that the volume and spread of outraged response gives every evidence of having been mobilized or concerted. That there is here, in other words, a “determination” to display outrage, less as evidence of a genuinely wounded religious sensibility, than as an act of political leverage against the West.

Not that I question some Muslims may well have taken deep offence at the Pope’s words, but the offence taken has been magnified, and perhaps manipulated, for secondary motives.

The second point uniting these episodes, the point I think the more consequential, is the expectation from some Muslim authorities that their sensibilities and beliefs are owed,
as of right
, a singular respect and immunity from all negative comment and remark. It is more than curious that those who do not believe in Islam should be expected, by some believers, to uphold the same codes of respect toward it as those who do.

There attends this expectation, which is sometimes phrased as an actual demand, a further one: that, should
“offence” be taken, whatever violence does ensue—be it rioting, the burning of churches or death threats—must be laid at the door of the parties who “insult” Islam, rather than those who have undertaken the actual violence in response.

These considerations are troubling. First, because the respect and privilege claimed by some Muslims from societies that are not Muslim is not afforded religions other than their own in societies that are Muslim. There is a magnificent mosque in Rome close to the Vatican. Do I need to say there is no basilica in Mecca? One religion should not claim rights it will not afford to all others. In too many Muslim countries, Christianity is institutionally—and this is a very kind word—disadvantaged.

Secondly, the rhetorical violence visited on Christianity and Judaism (“apes,” “pigs,” “crusaders,” “infidels”) by various Muslim spokespeople is both fervid and frequent, and in some of its expression utterly eclipses in its ferocity and deliberateness, either the bywords of the Pope here, or the famous cartoons.

Tolerance, like its elder, respect, is very much a current that flows equally between two parties. I cannot see how burning churches—as happened in the West Bank—or crude attacks upon, and threats against, the Pope, provide any foundation to calls for “greater sensitivity toward Islam.”

There are precious things in the West, too, two of which are freedom of speech and critical analysis. Storms of outrage, and almost predictable violence after every
perceived slight, leaves me feeling that the cardinal values of the West will wait a long time for a portion of that respect that parts of the Muslim world insist upon, immediately and in full, as their due.

Hollywood is an inverted religion. Like most, this week I watched bits and pieces of that great orgy of idolatry and self-worship, the Academy Awards. What we call superstars are the gods and goddesses of our decadent time. Their church: fame, luxury and immense, obscene wealth.

Al Gore was called in as the pastor of a more austere calling, environmentalism.
An Inconvenient Truth
was given an Oscar to show that Hollywood can take a spell from narcissism and ally itself with something a little more substantial than surgically crafted cleavage and insane self-obsession. Al Gore is Hollywood’s carbon pope. We may not need popes much longer.

The awards were barely over when one of the titans of big film, no less than James Cameron, he of the bloated budgets and blockbusters
Terminator
and
Titanic
, two milestones in the history of Western art, announces that he’s about to release a documentary that will expose the last two thousand years of Christianity as a feeble sham, explode the central mystery of the Christian faith,
the Resurrection, and while he’s at it, prove even beyond the diligence of Dan Brown—book sales be upon him—that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, died a natural death and was buried with Mary to boot. So much for the Incarnation.