Saturday
The big news this week? Flannery O'Connor. Not really, of course, but Dappled Things ran a great essay about O'Connor's influence on Bruce Springsteen. Excerpt:
Springsteen began reading O'Connor's stories in his late twenties, which was at same the time he was working on Darkness on the Edge of Town, released in 1978. In his review of Darkness in Rolling Stone, Paul Nelson writes, “Many of the characters in the songs on Bruce Springsteen's new album appear to be trapped in a state of desperation so intense that they must either break through to something better (or at least into something ambiguous) or break down into madness, murder or worse.” In the words of O'Connor, “Either one is serious about salvation or one is not.”
Springsteen wrote over seventy songs for the Darkness album, and many of those songs appeared on his next album, The River. Of course, one wonders whether Springsteen pulled the album title directly from O'Connor's story of the same name. It seems a safe bet, especially since he also penned a song during that same period entitled “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
I've always enjoyed Springsteen, though his politics has made him difficult to stomach. This kind of information helps me forgive his politics. He's coming out with a new album shortly. I'll have to give it a fair hearing.
Number Two
Finishing number two this week in significant essays? This piece, appearing, of all places, at Business Insider: Time To Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right On Birth Control.
It's a great piece, definitely one of the best I've seen in awhile. It merits reading and forwarding. It deserves lots of blog links. Please spread it around. Excerpts:
Today's injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae. He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:
General lowering of moral standards
A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
Government coercion in reproductive matters.
Does that sound familiar?
Because it sure sounds like what's been happening for the past 40 years.
As George Akerloff wrote in Slate over a decade ago,
By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father. . . .
How else are we doing since this great sexual revolution? Kim Kardashian's marriage lasted 72 days. Illegitimacy: way up. In 1960, 5.3% of all births in America were to unmarried women. By 2010, it was 40.8% [PDF]. In 1960 married families made up almost three-quarters of all households; but by the census of 2010 they accounted for just 48 percent of them. Cohabitation has increased tenfold since 1960.
And if you don't think women are being reduced to objects to satisfy men, welcome to the internet.
I had to read Humanae Vitae during my second year at law school. I was a Lutheran and not remotely interested in becoming Catholic. I read the encyclical because I was serious about getting good grades, and it was going to be on the test. As I read it, my jaw nearly hit the floor. It might have been the most intellectually-shocking moment of my life, reading words from nearly 25 years earlier that predicted with unnerving precision the societal breakdown that I was living through.
I've never seen a decent rebuttal to Humanae Vitae that society itself didn't refute within five years. The rebuttal nowadays, of course, is simply to ignore it and drive over it like 40-year-old road kill. The Obama administration's abomination is just the most-recent manifestation of this response.
